Hurricane Sandy, Climate Change and Presidential Politics: 2016 Starts Now

October 31, 2012 in Politics | by | 3 comments

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, same-sex marriage was a loser. Whatever his own views, he knew supporting marriage equality would hurt him in the general election, and wouldn’t help him in the primaries. And so he — like Hillary Clinton, and like every previous serious contender for either party’s presidential nomination — declined to do so.

With Obama’s victory in 2008 the Democratic calculus changed. Presidential hopefuls knew that Obama would be the nominee in 2012, and set their eyes on 2016. And it didn’t take a psychic to see that given long-term polling trends no Democrat could win the party nomination in 2016 without supporting marriage equality.

And so the party’s most ambitious politicians, particularly those outside the Obama administration, started getting their ducks in a row. Both New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley made marriage equality a priority during their current terms of office, with Cuomo presiding over the passage of a same-sex marriage bill last year and O’Malley pushing hard on next week’s statewide referendum.

This week Andrew Cuomo is laying down a similar marker on a very different issue.

At his morning Hurricane Sandy press conference yesterday, Cuomo used blunt language: “We have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns,” he said, but “old infrastructure and old systems. That’s not a good combination.” We as a country cannot, he said, keep pretending to be shocked when “once in a century” storms come along every couple of years.

At this morning’s press conference, Cuomo was even blunter. “Part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it’s a reality that we are vulnerable,” he said. “We need to anticipate more of these extreme weather type situations, and we need to take that into consideration in modifying our infrastructure and our built environment.”

The evidence for anthropogenic global warming continues to grow, and there’s every reason to believe that Sandy won’t be the last or the biggest American weather disaster of the coming presidential cycle. With every mammoth storm and record-breaking heat wave the character of the political conversation will shift.

Smart Republicans understand that their party’s position on same-sex marriage is becoming a drag on their electoral prospects, and dread the cycle of soundbites that will dog them on gay rights issues in elections to come. If we keep having weather like we’ve been having, they may wind up in a similar box on climate issues — and sooner than most observers imagine.

But there is, of course, a huge difference between climate and marriage equality: Marriage equality is free. Same-sex marriage is an incredibly straightforward question. You support it or you don’t. You implement it or you don’t. There’s virtually no accompanying policy wrangling, and no budgetary impact. Given this, Cuomo’s approach is particularly noteworthy, and it points to an aspect of the climate change debate that’s received very little political attention so far.

Once you accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the policy debate breaks down into two large questions: How do we stop it, and what do we do about what we can’t stop? The former is the one that’s most consumed policymakers and liberal advocacy groups so far, but the latter is where Cuomo put his emphasis, and with good reason.

The political debate over whether climate change is real isn’t going to disappear anytime soon (just like the same-sex marriage will persist long after it becomes a national liability for Republicans). But even while that debate is ongoing, practical questions will come to the forefront.

You don’t need to “believe in climate change” to see that we’re getting weather we didn’t used to get, and with every new datapoint the case that it’s a series of flukes will be harder to make. While policymakers battle over carbon policy and geoengineering, local issues will demand attention, and won’t wait.

And this offers an opportunity for a Democratic presidential candidate, particularly one currently sitting in a governor’s mansion. “Infrastructure” is a word Cuomo used repeatedly yesterday, and it’s a word you’re going to be hearing a lot more from Democrats in the years to come.

An Extraordinary Display of Student Power at One of the Nation’s Oldest HBCUs

October 26, 2012 in Access, Campus Protests, Dorms, Governance, Student Power | by | 1 comment

On Wednesday, students at Wilberforce University, a small historically black college just outside of Dayton Ohio, gave a demonstration of what student power can mean.

Fed up with the college’s failure to address its longstanding problems, than three hundred of the school’s five hundred enrolled students marched on Wilberforce’s administrative offices to request transfer applications. Some 337 the demonstrators — two thirds of the college’s student body — are said to be prepared to request transfer to nearby Central State University next fall if their demands aren’t met.

The students’ complaints include high tuition, reductions in student services, and unchecked mold in one dormitory.

Founded in 1856, Wilberforce is the oldest private historically black college in the United States. (Many of its earliest students were escaped slaves.) But the college has struggled in recent years, amid charges of mismanagement leveled against top administrators — enrollment has fallen by half in the last seven years, and the institution is tens of millions of dollars in debt.

WU student government president Brandon Harvey, who organized Wednesday’s protest, considers the threat to withdraw a last-ditch effort to save the university. “Academic life, spiritual life and social life are at an all-time low,” he told the Dayton News. “I’m afraid when I come back three to five years from now, Wilberforce University will not be alive.”

Wilberforce president Patricia Lofton Hardaway held a press conference in response to the protest, but made no specific pledges for reform. Students plan to demonstrate again next week when the college’s board of trustees meets at an off-campus location.

Apocalypse Now for California Public Higher Ed?

October 26, 2012 in Access, Administration, Class, Community Colleges, Politics, The Corporate University, Tuition and Fees | by | 1 comment

Most observers of the American university are intimately familiar with the long-term decline and recent degradation of public higher education in California (if you need a refresher, check out Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal’s excellent overview in the new Dissent magazine). Unless you’re inside CA, however, you may have missed word of the time bomb that’s set to explode there in just eleven days.

California’s government is hobbled by its ballot proposition process, a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time system by which any state law or constitutional amendment may be put to a statewide popular vote. Though the idea has an undeniable good-government appeal, in practice it rewards Californians with deep pockets and a knack for writing misleading referendum questions — as when a 1964 initiative sponsored by movie theater owners actually banned cable television in the state.

In the last forty years various initiatives have mandated spending on certain budget lines while placing various limits on the state legislature’s ability to raise revenue, squeezing funding for non-mandatory spending and exacerbating the state’s already profound budget problems. This quagmire is one, though certainly not the only, contributing factor behind the defunding of public higher education in the state.

Enter Proposition 30.

Proposition 30 is an attempt to address the state’s education funding gap through two temporary tax increases — a four-year, 0.25% hike in sales taxes and a seven-year bump in income taxes for Californians with annual incomes above $250,000. Revenues raised by the new taxes would be dedicated to public education.

The current California state budget assumes passage of Proposition 30, with various cuts built in should the proposition fail. Though most of the cuts would fall on K-12 education, another $838 million would be shared by the the state’s public colleges and universities, which have already seen $2.5 billion in cuts — and a series of staggeringly high tuition increases — in the last four years.

What does this mean in practice? At the University of California it would mean a 20% tuition hike, in a system where tuition already tops $12,000 a year. At Cal State it would likely mean a 5% tuition hike, the cancellation of a planned tuition rebate, and a reduction of enrollment by some twenty thousand students. Community colleges, which have already turned away half a million students over the last three years, would slash enrollment by another 180,000.

So how is Proposition 30 doing? Not well at all. Support currently stands at 46%, down from 55% a month ago. Voters are skeptical of state government and confused by another similar proposition (if both pass, the one that gets the most votes will go into effect, but significant numbers of voters are planning to vote only for the one they prefer). Additionally, the Los Angeles Times yesterday described Governor Jerry Brown’s campaigning on behalf of Prop 30 so far as “lackluster.”

And if you want to know more about how the state got into this mess, take a look at yesterday’s public statement from UC President Mark Yudof on Proposition 30. “Public higher education in California has been battered by declining State support,” he wrote, and the UC Regents have predicted that without Prop 30, “the ability of the University of California to ensure the high-quality education that Californians have come to expect will be jeopardized.” In that light, he continued, he wanted to make it absolutely “clear that it is neither my official place, nor my personal predilection, to suggest how others should vote.”

Bold words, strong words, from the head of the greatest public higher education system the world has ever known:

“It is neither my official place, nor my personal predilection, to suggest how others should vote.”

This, as TS Eliot wrote, is the way the world ends.

Why Hiking Tuition While Raising Financial Aid Doesn’t Work for Students

October 25, 2012 in Access, Financial Aid, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

Increases in public college tuition are often linked with, and justified by, corresponding increases in financial aid. In this setup, raising tuition is portrayed as a cost-shifting measure — charging more for those who can afford it to keep costs down for those who can’t. But that’s not how it works out in practice, for several reasons.

First, financial aid increases rarely match tuition hikes, and if you think about it for even a moment, it’s easy to see why. Tuition hikes carry high political costs, and financial aid increases bring less political benefits. If the only reason to raise tuition was to improve financial aid, most politicians wouldn’t bother. You raise tuition to raise revenue, and a revenue-neutral tuition increase isn’t likely to be a political winner.

Second, it’s a lot easier to cut financial aid than to raise tuition, which means that a tuition-for-financial-aid deal often exchanges a short-term benefit for a long-term burden.

And finally, as the Chronicle noted a few weeks back, many prospective students are far more aware of tuition prices than the often complex financial aid options available to them. The higher your tuition, the fewer applicants you’ll get, particularly among the most in-need and at-risk student communities.

Just for the Record…

October 24, 2012 in Faculty, Gender, Politics | by | 7 comments

Earlier today CNN ran a story (Update: since removed!) about new research suggesting that women’s political views are shaped by their menstrual cycles. I’m not going to rehash everything that’s wrong with the piece, beyond what I’ve already tweeted, but I did want to point out one thing.

The study, “The Fluctuating Female Vote: Politics, Religion, and the Ovulatory Cycle,” which is to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, has three authors —Kristina Durante, Ashley Arsena, and Vladas Griskevicius.

Thought you might find that illuminating.

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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