Category Archive

On Wednesday, University of California president Mark Yudof posted a link on his Facebook page. The link was to a Wall Street Journal editorial that weirdly lays the blame for California’s higher education funding crisis on a single cause — excessive state spending due to an overly generous government pension policy.

(This editorial is deeply flawed — plenty of states that don’t share California’s pension setups are raising tuition and cutting higher ed spending right now, and California is an extreme case for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with pensions. To the extent that pension policy is an issue in the state, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. But that’s not my primary point here.)

Anyway, Yudof posted this link with a comment: “In case you missed it, WSJ calls it right. The causes for CA’s fiscal crisis lie with lawmakers, not the university!”

Yudof’s note received a number of replies, but my favorite was this one:

Are you trying to tell me we SHOULDN’T occupy everything?

There’s been a fair amount of “after March 4, what next?” talk around the internets this last few days, with the most common answer being “all sorts of stuff.” But some specific proposals are beginning to emerge.

One, out of UC Irvine, is a proposal for a new national day of coordinated action on May 4, the fortieth anniversary of the Kent State killings. (On May 4, 1970 National Guard troops on that Ohio campus fired on a crowd of student antiwar protesters at a distance of more than a hundred yards, killing two protesters and two passers-by. All four of the dead were Kent State students.)

Noting that broadly conceived days of action have brought in more previously uninvolved students than more narrowly targeted protests, the Irvine activists call for students nationwide to “hold funeral processions and silent marches this day; tell everyone to dress in black.”

One thought for Irvine activists and others to bear in mind while planning and promoting such an action — on the night of May 14, 1970, just ten days after Kent State, local and state police in Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on a dormitory building on the Jackson State campus, killing two students and injuring twelve.

The Kent State killings are far better known than those at Jackson State, but both are part of American student history, and our national amnesia about Jackson State is deeply problematic. Any commemoration of the one should make note of the other.

Idaho was one of the dozen-plus states that did not, as far as I’ve been able to determine, participate in the March 4 Day of Action for education, but its students have not been silent.

On February 25, some two hundred students at Idaho State University in Pocatello staged an on-campus protest against state budget cuts and tuition hikes, and yesterday several dozen ISU students made the 250-mile drive to the state capitol in Boise to rally and lobby legislators directly.

Eight members of the ISU student government joined the group in Boise, including the student government president. Next up for the Idaho students’ agenda is building their campaign into a statewide movement — students from two other public universities in the state participated yesterday, and the ISU folks are hoping to build on that in the future.

The Washington Post on student loan reform, this morning:

“Democratic leaders met for a second day Wednesday with administration officials … one participant said a consensus appeared to be emerging that it would be unwise to risk the health-care bill by including the education measure.”

The Washington Post on student loan reform, this afternoon:

“Senate Democrats said Thursday that they are inclined to add an overhaul of the nation’s student loan program to the final health-care bill.”

What happened in between? This. A huge coordinated student lobbying campaign, launched by phone and email by groups like Campus Progress, Rock the Vote, and the United States Student Association.

Click those links to find out more about how to get involved, and read this and this for more background.

Tuition policy for professional schools in the University of California currently requires that fee increases raise tuition no higher than those at similar public universities’ programs. The UC Regents have the power to grant exceptions to this policy, like they did last November when they raised fees at 44 programs, 24 of them to levels above the permitted averages.

But now the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Regents are thinking about going further, much further, with an astoundingly ill-considered plan.

Currently the professional school tuition policy requires that any proposed increase conform to “the total tuition and/or fees charged by comparable degree programs at other comparable public institutions.” But according to the Chronicle, the Regents are going to be voting later this month on a proposal to drop the word “public” from that passage.

Yes, you read that right.

The UC Regents want to use private universities as their benchmark for student fees.

It’s mind-boggling. It really is. Tens of thousands of California students are taking to the streets to oppose fee increases and cuts to public support for the university. The Regents are desperately trying to make the case that it’s the state legislature, not the university itself, that’s the students’ real enemy. The concept of the privatization of public higher education is just beginning to gain traction with critics of the university’s current direction.

And now the Regents want to take the word “public” out of their tuition policies?

Really? Really?

Wow.