In his State of the State address yesterday, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed a constitutional amendment that would dramatically raise state funding for public higher education and impose a restrictive cap on state prison spending.

The proposal, which would bring the University of California and the California State University system billions of dollars in guaranteed new funds each year, has left observers of California politics scrambling to grasp its implications and assess its chances of passage.

Yesterday afternoon the governor’s office released a detailed draft proposal for the amendment. Here are some of its key points:

• Beginning in the 2011-12 budget year, all reductions in state prison spending would be set aside for support of higher education.
• Starting in 2014-15, prison spending would be capped at 7% of the state budget, and higher education spending would receive a guaranteed minimum of 10%.
• All of that funding would go to the UC and CSU systems — the state’s community colleges already have a separate constitutional budget set-aside in place.
• The state government is “prohibited from … utilizing early release of prisoners” to meet the savings mandates, which the proposal anticipates the use of prison privatization to achieve.
• The provisions of the amendment could be suspended if the governor declared a state of emergency in California as provided by state law, or by a two-thirds vote of the state legislature.

As I noted yesterday, the governor’s chief of staff has cited last semester’s massive wave of student protest as the “tipping point” that led Schwarzenegger to embrace this new model of higher education funding. Whatever the ultimate prospects of this constitutional amendment, the political contours of California students’ fight for higher education have been dramatically altered by yesterday’s events.

In his final State of the State address this morning, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said the state “can no longer afford to cut higher education,” and proposed a constitutional amendment ensuring that more state funding will go to universities than to prisons.

Currently, eleven percent of California’s state spending goes to its prison system, while only seven and a half percent goes to public colleges and universities. Schwarzenegger pledged to send the state legislature “a constitutional amendment so that never again do we spend a greater percentage of our money on prisons than on higher education.”

Schwarzenegger didn’t specify what form that amendment would take, but according to a report in the Sacramento Bee, it would set spending on public higher ed at a minimum of ten percent of the state budget, and funding for prisons at a maximum of seven percent.

More to come…

Update | As @spamfriedrice notes on Twitter, Schwarzenegger is looking to cut prison funding through privatization, not reducing the prison population. Lots of angles to this story, and I’ll have much more to say soon.

Second Update | The New York Times quotes Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff as calling last semester’s student protests “the tipping point” that led the governor to head off what the Times calls a looming “dismantling of the most famous public university system in the nation.”

The political ground in California just shifted dramatically, and students shifted it.

Thursday Update | There’s a lot that remains to be unpacked about Schwarzenegger’s new position on prisons vs education. Whether a lame-duck governor has any chance of pushing this kind of a constitutional amendment through is an obvious question, as is the exact nature of his prison proposal. But one thing is clear.

California’s spending on UC and Cal State currently stands at 7.5% of the state budget. Schwarzenegger has now said that he opposes any further cuts to that funding, and that he’ll fight for a constitutional amendment that would raise it to 10%. That would be a one-third increase — a bump of 33% — and it would, as Schwarzenegger noted yesterday, restore the state’s public higher ed funding to levels last seen thirty years ago.

The Republican governor of the largest state in the union — the home of the country’s most prestigious university system — has said that it’s time to make public higher education public again.

Second Thursday Update | I’ve taken a look at the details of the Schwarzenegger proposal in a new post.

Students in Oregon are stumping for the passage of two ballot measures that would bring millions of dollars of funding to the state’s struggling public colleges and universities.

The referenda, Measures 66 and 67, will be the only items on the ballot on January 26th. Sixty-six would raise income taxes on the wealthy, sixty-seven would increase the minimum corporate tax, and together, they’d bring in more than seven hundred million dollars a year in new state revenue.

Students in Oregon just concluded a major voter registration drive in advance of the election, a drive that was capped off yesterday with supportive visits to three campuses by new Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown.

Now, with three weeks to go before election day, the campaign turns to voter education and GOTV. A poll released last week by supporters of the measures showed each leading with a small majority, but in a special election like this one, turnout is likely to be crucial.

With state budgets in crisis across the country, this referendum will be closely watched in other capitals. We’ll have more on the students’ campaign in the weeks to come.

Random fun fact: Brown, who was elected Secretary of State last November by a 51-46 margin, is the highest-ranking openly bisexual politician in the United States.

I only just got the chance to crack last week’s New Yorker, which has a big article on the University of California financial crisis and the escalating wave of protest at UC Berkeley. There’s a lot to the story, and I’m sure I’ll circle back around to it again, but for now I just want to highlight one quote.

Early in the fall semester Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, told the magazine that students “can occupy any [campus] space they like, that’s fine. Unless they damage a building, in which case they’re breaking the law, and I’d send in the police.”

That was then.

Since Birgenau made that statement, Birgeneau has sent in the police to arrest protesting students three times. On November 20, he sent cops to arrest more than forty students who were occupying Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, though the occupiers had engaged in no property damage or physical violence. On December 11, he directed the police to roust a second occupation of Wheeler, this time while the students — who had kept the doors to the building open for nearly four days — slept. Sixty-six people were arrested in that incident.

It wasn’t until that night — after more than a hundred students demonstrating peacefully had been arrested — that the semester’s first significant incident of property damage took place at Berkeley.

Nice work, chancellor. You’ve managed to create the university you feared.

On New Year’s Eve I posted a list of this site’s sixth through tenth most-read posts of the last year. That list was dominated by the fall’s University of California protests, though a New York City building takeover and Austria’s wave of activism made the cut as well.

California takes the top spot on today’s lineup of the site’s top five posts of 2009, but otherwise this list is a lot more eclectic:

5. Sotomayor’s Student Free Speech Ruling: The Nitty Gritty

Two years before Barack Obama picked Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, the future justice sat on a panel that heard the case of a high school student who was punished by her school for blogging about the school’s administration. I’d written about the case before I’d ever heard of Sotomayor, and when word leaked that she’d been shortlisted for the Court, I revisited it, concluding that though her vote wasn’t one I agreed with, it wasn’t as bad as some observers were making out.

I wrote about Sotomayor four more times after her nomination, by the way, discussing her “wise latina” comment, her relationship with MeChA and La Raza, and her years as a student activist at Princeton.

4. New Google Map of American Student Activism

In late November, inspired by similar maps created by European student activists, I set up a Google Map of American student activism in the 2009-10 academic year. When The Nation ran a very nice blogpost about the map a few days later, traffic and attention really began to spike. Expect a lot more action on that project in the coming months.

3. Kentucky School Bars Gay Students From Bathrooms?

Back in May I got word of a weird situation in of Kentucky — according to media reports, a high school had barred gay and lesbian students from leaving class to use school bathrooms. I wrote up the story, including coverage of a protest against the rule that students had staged, and linked to my post on Twitter, where it got a lot of attention. (I kept digging for more info after posting, by the way, and eventually discovered that the ban on bathroom use was limited to specific students who’d had disciplinary issues in the past.)

2. Why Julea Ward Was Expelled from EMU

This was another story that went viral in an unexpected way. Julea Ward, a counseling grad student at Eastern Michigan University, was dropped from her program in March 2009 for refusing to treat a gay client who was having relationship trouble. Ward sued the university, and her case became a cause celebre in the right-wing blogosphere. I went back to the court documents and transcripts to reconstruct what had actually happened, and published an analysis of the case that explained (and endorsed) the school’s decision. My post wound up getting a bunch of links and critical comments from conservative sites, and it still garners a fair amount of traffic from Google searches.

1. Student Occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall is Fifth in Two Days at UC

I wrote a lot of posts about California in the fall of 2009, a lot of posts about Berkeley, and a lot of posts about the several occupations of Wheeler Hall. But this post, liveblogging the first Wheeler occupation on November 20, attracted nearly twice as many hits as any other.

There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest — which I’ll discuss more in an upcoming piece — was the effectiveness with which the Wheeler protesters used Twitter. Their @ucbprotest feed, which went from a few dozen followers to more than a thousand that day, was a source of solid real-time information on the situation inside and outside Wheeler, the protesters’ motivations and demands, and the larger crisis in the UC system. That feed gave me a lot of the data I passed on to my readers that day, and made Twitter a hub for news and analysis of the UC crisis on a level that it hadn’t been before. It offered a powerful model for student organizing online, one that I expect to see duplicated and improved upon in 2010.