Category Archive

I’ll have a full post up on this later — after I teach — but for now check out this comment and the photos and brief writeup here.

Short version: UC Irvine not only detained students for chalking during a demo designed to make the point that students shouldn’t be detained for chalking, they sent infamous campus police officer Jared Kemper, who drew his weapon on student protesters last week, to do it.

Tuesday Update | As noted below, the current assault on British higher education is being led by a coalition government of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The Conservative Party’s national headquarters were stormed and trashed in a huge student march two weeks ago, but according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper it’s the Lib Dems who are worried this time around.

The last march was a London-only event, but tomorrow’s protests are taking place in cities and towns around Britain, and demonstrators are expected to target the district offices of Liberal Democratic members of parliament. As (again) noted below, the Lib Dems promised during the campaign to roll back tuition fees, only to reverse course when they gained power.

For a thorough but utterly readable introduction to the current crisis in British higher education, by the way, you could do a lot worse than reading this.

Original Post | More than fifty thousand students marched in London two weeks ago in protest against the British government’s unprecedented plans for massive higher aid cuts and a possible tripling of tuition fees. These protests, which saw thousands storm the national headquarters of the country’s governing Conservative Party, marked the first major public demonstration in opposition to cutbacks which are likely to touch every corner of British life.

Britain’s higher education system, home of some of the world’s most prestigious universities, was entirely tuition-free until the late 1990s, but government support has been falling, and tuition rising, since. Under the government’s new plan, annual tuition could rise as high as $15,000 a year.

Adding insult to injury, the new government’s junior partner is the Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Nick Clegg — Britain’s new deputy Prime Minister — campaigned on a platform of eliminating tuition fees entirely. The Lib Dems took 23% of the vote in this year’s parliamentary elections, and they are a crucial component of the governing coalition.

Coordinated protests are planned at more than twenty cities across the UK on Wednesday — you can find details, and links to protest organizers’ websites, here.

Not every campus is waiting for Wednesday, however — students have already staged occupations at two universities. The Brunei Gallery at the School of African and Oriental Studies at the University of London has been under occupation since this morning, with a website/blog here. Some sixty students are also occupying a lecture hall at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) this week introduced the Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act of 2010, a proposed federal law that would require American colleges and universities to enact rules against the harassment of their students by students, faculty, or staff. The bill is named for a gay Rutgers student who killed himself this September following a campaign of online harassment by his dorm roommate.

The Clementi bill would mandate that all higher education institutions receiving federal funds create policies for the reporting, adjudication, and punishments of acts of harassment, as well as anti-harassment programs on campus. It specifically targets harassment “based on a student’s actual or perceived race, color, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion” and gives specific attention to internet-based harassment.

In addition, the bill would authorize the Secretary of Education to award grants to institutions in support of anti-harassment campaigns on campus.

The text of the bill can be found here, on Senator Lautenberg’s website.

The regents of the University of California approved an eight percent hike in undergraduate student fees yesterday, as expected. The tally was 10-5, with student regent Jesse Cheng and California’s Lieutenant Governor among those voting in opposition.

Yesterday’s hike is the fourth in three years at the university, and it brings total fees to more than $12,000 — a 224% increase over the last decade. Just one regent voted in opposition to last year’s fee increase.

Also on the regents’ agenda yesterday were the approval of a number of new administrative hires. One of those, a vice chancellor at UC Davis, is slated to receive an annual salary of $370,000 — a $142,600 increase over that of his or her immediate predecessor in the position. In addition, this hire will receive a signing bonus of some $111,000.

Update | One more thing I forgot to mention — the regents also formally changed the name of UC’s primary “fee” to “tuition,” abandoning the longstanding but increasingly preposterous fiction that UC is tuition-free.

A few moments ago, I replied to a commenter on my Huffington Post piece about yesterday’s incident in which a University of California police officer pointed a gun at a group of student protesters with the following:

Ultimately the issue here isn’t this one officer’s actions. That wasn’t the focus of my essay, and it’s not the focus of my concern. The issue is the University of California’s systematic undermining and marginalizing of legitimate student protest, and the radicalizing effects that this strategy has had on activists and campus police alike.

Yesterday five UC students were threatened with arrest for chalking on their campus. Today several UC students were cited for putting up posters that included an image of the officer who drew his gun yesterday. Is this a sane way for a university to behave? Is this an approach to legitimate student protest that makes any sense at all?

I say it’s not. I say it’s dangerous.

Once again, as I have so many times in the last twenty-four hours, I find myself saying something I can’t believe I have to say: Chalking your campus to announce an upcoming event is a legitimate form of expression. Putting up caustic satirical posters criticizing university policies is not a crime.