Saturday, January 8th, 2011 from
1:00-5:00 pm at
Loyola Law School (Merrifield Hall, 919 Albany St, 3 blocks NW of the Marriott).
While thousands of people will be meeting at the MLA convention, we will be discussing strategies for making higher education more just. Speakers will be presenting short papers on topics such as the death of tenure, the corporatization of the university, the possibilities of unionization, direct social action, the use and abuse of graduate students, organizing contingent faculty, and taking back shared governance.
Schedule
1:00-1:45: Remaking the University of California
Chris Newfield, Joshua Clover
1:45-2:30: Defending the Humanities and Shared Governance
Cary Nelson, Jeffrey Williams, Michelle Masse
2:30-3:15: Organizing Labor and the Academic Class War
Maria Maisto, Joe Berry
3:15-4:00: Graduate Students and Precarious Labor
Annie McClanahan, Jasper Bernes, Stephanie Seawell, Kerry Pimblott
4:00-4:30: Quality, Access, and Affordability
Murray Sperber and Bob Samuels
4:30-4:55: Open Discussion on Strategies for Changing Higher Education
A $10 donation will be suggested but not required. You do not have to be a member of the MLA to attend.
Showing posts with label faculty responses to budget crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faculty responses to budget crisis. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Saving UCSB Requests Real-Time Budget Information, Administrative Statements
December 12, 2009
THIS MEMORANDUM HAS BEEN APPROVED BY SAVING UCSB
To: Chancellor Yang
Executive Vice-Chancellor Lucas
Deans Marshall, Oliver, and Wiltzius
Joel Michaelsen, Academic Senate
From: Saving UCSB
Re: Updates
The faculty’s need of, and right to, “real-time” updates on our downward trajectory and the efforts our campus is making to halt it have been affirmed recently in a number of venues and conversations. But we had to learn from a blog that, on Dec. 7—just when classes were ending--the CA State Assembly had begun hearings on the viability of the UC Master Plan. The pipeline is still clogged—exactly where, we do not know, but we hope you will explain to us how best we can learn of such developments in time to respond appropriately. We further request the following updates and actions from you:
1. We would like to know about UCSB’s involvement in the Hearings. Also we would like to know anything you can tell us about why and how they were initiated.
2. We ask that you immediately convey to the Hearing conveners and the legislature at large your wholehearted support of the Master Plan and belief in its continuing relevance. Our students more than ever need to know the languages of the world, understand different cultures, and develop their creativity. If our state is in difficulty because of the Master Plan, that’s because it has been ignored for twenty years, not because it is obsolete.
3. In a recent interview, Yudof claimed that UC had to raise fees because it had to pay the salaries of humanities and social science professors. His remarks went something like this:
“Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. . . Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care?-so we have this core problem, who’s gonna pay the salary of the English Department? We have to have it. Who’s gonna pay for it, and Sociology, and the humanities, and that’s where we’re running into trouble.” [1]
As you know, the Humanities and Social Sciences are not the reason the Regents are raising fees. We ask that you immediately clarify the budgetary realities with UCOP and the state legislature.
4. Similarly, with respect to the article “The Bonfire of the Humanities": it makes mistakes, but we are curious about the merits of its main point: that UC is abandoning the principle of enrollment-based distributions of resources, with the implication that students’ wishes about what they study are no longer important and the “tuition dollar” may soon become a meaningless measure. This seems like a pretty indirect way to affirm market values. Please explain to us your position(s) on this issue, and immediately impress upon UCOP and the legislature the financial contributions made by the Humanities and Social Sciences to the University. They are the product two-thirds of our students want to buy.
5. We also ask that you immediately defend, in the strongest possible terms, pure research science (no strings attached!) If we do not defeat shortsighted notions of what is and is not profitable, it will not be long before the sciences, too, are told their work is valueless unless the probability of its future profitability can be demonstrated up front. Pure science is in the end responsible for much more innovation and economic opportunity than is research directed by special interests or considerations of utility. We ask that you maintain this point with UCOP and the State Assembly. There is plenty of research to prove it.
6. To your knowledge, how many of our faculty are currently on the market and/or being recruited? How many resigned last year to take positions elsewhere, and how many retired? How do these figures compare with the situation two years ago?
7. We ask that the Administrative Support Reconfiguration Plans for the Sciences and Social Sciences Divisions be released immediately to all Senate faculty.
Thank you very much in advance for your response(s) to these requests.
NOTES
[1] Aranye Fradenburg requested the Administration’s views on this on Dec. 9.
THIS MEMORANDUM HAS BEEN APPROVED BY SAVING UCSB
To: Chancellor Yang
Executive Vice-Chancellor Lucas
Deans Marshall, Oliver, and Wiltzius
Joel Michaelsen, Academic Senate
From: Saving UCSB
Re: Updates
The faculty’s need of, and right to, “real-time” updates on our downward trajectory and the efforts our campus is making to halt it have been affirmed recently in a number of venues and conversations. But we had to learn from a blog that, on Dec. 7—just when classes were ending--the CA State Assembly had begun hearings on the viability of the UC Master Plan. The pipeline is still clogged—exactly where, we do not know, but we hope you will explain to us how best we can learn of such developments in time to respond appropriately. We further request the following updates and actions from you:
1. We would like to know about UCSB’s involvement in the Hearings. Also we would like to know anything you can tell us about why and how they were initiated.
2. We ask that you immediately convey to the Hearing conveners and the legislature at large your wholehearted support of the Master Plan and belief in its continuing relevance. Our students more than ever need to know the languages of the world, understand different cultures, and develop their creativity. If our state is in difficulty because of the Master Plan, that’s because it has been ignored for twenty years, not because it is obsolete.
3. In a recent interview, Yudof claimed that UC had to raise fees because it had to pay the salaries of humanities and social science professors. His remarks went something like this:
“Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. . . Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care?-so we have this core problem, who’s gonna pay the salary of the English Department? We have to have it. Who’s gonna pay for it, and Sociology, and the humanities, and that’s where we’re running into trouble.” [1]
As you know, the Humanities and Social Sciences are not the reason the Regents are raising fees. We ask that you immediately clarify the budgetary realities with UCOP and the state legislature.
4. Similarly, with respect to the article “The Bonfire of the Humanities": it makes mistakes, but we are curious about the merits of its main point: that UC is abandoning the principle of enrollment-based distributions of resources, with the implication that students’ wishes about what they study are no longer important and the “tuition dollar” may soon become a meaningless measure. This seems like a pretty indirect way to affirm market values. Please explain to us your position(s) on this issue, and immediately impress upon UCOP and the legislature the financial contributions made by the Humanities and Social Sciences to the University. They are the product two-thirds of our students want to buy.
5. We also ask that you immediately defend, in the strongest possible terms, pure research science (no strings attached!) If we do not defeat shortsighted notions of what is and is not profitable, it will not be long before the sciences, too, are told their work is valueless unless the probability of its future profitability can be demonstrated up front. Pure science is in the end responsible for much more innovation and economic opportunity than is research directed by special interests or considerations of utility. We ask that you maintain this point with UCOP and the State Assembly. There is plenty of research to prove it.
6. To your knowledge, how many of our faculty are currently on the market and/or being recruited? How many resigned last year to take positions elsewhere, and how many retired? How do these figures compare with the situation two years ago?
7. We ask that the Administrative Support Reconfiguration Plans for the Sciences and Social Sciences Divisions be released immediately to all Senate faculty.
Thank you very much in advance for your response(s) to these requests.
NOTES
[1]
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Student Eyewitness Accounts of UC Protests
From Los Angeles
Thursday November 19, 2009
Approximately 2:30pm – 5:30pm
University of California, Los Angeles
Covel Commons Parking Garage
From Los Angeles
At approximately 2pm on Thursday November 19, I joined a group of students moving from the protest rally in the courtyard of Covel Commons (which convened at noon), to peacefully protest the decision of the UC Regents by blocking the parking garage exits around the back. I was incredibly impressed by how organized the students were, as we were lead by a few student leaders with a megaphone who dispersed us to the various exits and instructed us to gather at the exit and to remain sitting at all times, in order to prevent any misunderstandings about that fact that this was a peaceful protest. I sat with these students singing protest songs and chanting for about an hour and a half, while many police officers formed a line behind a barricade at the exit behind us. At no point did the protestors get violent or aggressive, nor did the size of the crowd seem unmanageable. The student leaders with the megaphone continued to direct the protestors to stay seated and to show that this was a peaceful protest. As the police officers continued to line up behind us, the student leaders began announcing to the protestors that the police were not our enemies but our “brothers,” and not to direct any aggression towards them.
After about one hour, we had received a report from a number of students coming down the hill that that police officers were using pepper spray on another group of protestors up the hill from us (at the other garage exit), and that they were threatening to arrest us. At this point a significant group of students quickly stood up and left out of fear of being physically harmed or arrested, while a number of other students took their places. At this point, the student leaders with the megaphone announced that if the police began arresting us, we would first be given a warning at which point we had the option to leave, and that if we were told that we were under arrest, we were not to resist, but to calmly place both wrists in front of us. This announcement was made at least twice, emphasizing not to resist arrest, but to calmly place our wrists in front of us. One other student announced that if we were arrested, they would probably let us off that same day, but they could not guarantee anything.
After sitting a bit longer at this exit, I got up to get some water and join some friends in the courtyard at Covel Commons. When I arrived at the courtyard there was a large group of students surrounding a van and gathered in the courtyard, all standing peacefully, many chanting, many having conversations with each other. I was told by one of my friends that they had just been pepper sprayed a few minutes earlier. After going into the store in the courtyard to purchase some water, I came out to witness a female regent being escorted by police officers from the van into the building. While the protestors gathered around and followed the police officers and regent, chanting “shame on you” and other such chants. As the police quickly escorted the woman into the building, the protestors did not display any violent or threatening behavior, with the exception of one apple core I witnessed being thrown by someone in the crowd towards the police officers (but did not hit anyone).
After remaining in the courtyard for a while longer, I returned to the parking garage exit where I was initially sitting earlier and stood across from those sitting at the exit on the lawn (just a few feet away from the parking garage exit) behind a set of barricades. My friends (fellow graduate students) and I stood there for a long time (until approximately 4:30 pm) with our placards, and chanted with the students still sitting peacefully at the garage exit. Just as when I had left that area, all the protestors remained seated, displaying dissent by singing and chanting, while maintaining a peaceful atmosphere. After some time, however, I heard a number of taser guns being turned on, and saw the line of police officers advancing towards the student who were seated. I heard a student next to me say that the police were now threatening to use rubber bullets if the students did not move. Suddenly, many of the students in the exit stood up as I heard screaming and panicked yelling. I heard a number of students scream that the students were being tased. I heard the buzz of the taser guns, and I witnessed one student getting tased through the panicked crowd of students. The student I saw being tased was closest to the line of police officers and was sitting down when he began being tased, I saw that he was wearing an orange shirt and his arms were flailing as he was lying on the ground. I also witnessed a female police officer kick a male student in his side as he was seated. At no point did I see any students act violently or give cause for such an aggressive response, these students were being attacked by police officers as they were sitting down because they would not move. The scene was truly horrifying, and I was in complete shock at what I was seeing. I heard many of the students pleading with the officers to stop, yelling that this was a peaceful protest, and chanting, “We are students, Not enemies!” I saw many of the students crying and holding each other, many were my own students that I had had in previous classes that I taught. I remember hearing one of my own former female students yelling, “Can’t you understand, all we want is an education, put away your weapons!!” As the police officers pushed forward to clear the exit of the garage, they maintained their line facing the gathering of students who were now all standing up. I joined the protestors facing the line of police officers, as we chanted “We are students, not criminals!” and “We live here, you go home!” Many of the students moved nearby to the sidewalk of the road with their signs, as cars honked in support of the demonstration. At this point there seemed to be more police officers than students. The police officers continued to advance forward, pushing the protestors backwards down the hill. I witnessed one female student fall to the floor from the force of the police officers advancing, prompting students to yell back at the police to stop the pushing. As it began getting dark, I finally left the scene to go home, while many students remained there and continued to chant. The line of police officers also remained there and continued to advance down the hill, pushing the protestors, even though the garage exit was no longer blocked and all the regents had left.
From Los Angeles
On my way back from the protest, a bit before 3pm, I was walking down the road at the same moment that the UC regents' vans emerged from the underground parking lot under Covel Commons. A few students shouted, There are the regents! and a number of us (perhaps fifteen, there weren't many people there at that moment) began to shout, Shame on you! at the regents in the vans. There were students sitting peacefully in the middle of the road, and some police approached them and moved some of them out of the way at the same time, I believe, that the vans moved around them, because I had been standing behind the vans, and I remember the vans were not stuck there very long. After the vans drove down the road, the police were trying to move more people, a student called for everyone to sit, and then the next thing I know is I hear this clicking sound over and over again right in front of me, and I see that there are police officers standing over students, a bunch of students are screaming, and the clicking goes on. I hear a girl scream, He can't stand up, and the police officer say, Get up. I see a guy (the young black man from the photos) trying to stand up, a number of other people are helping him up, he is shaky and his legs are clearly weak because he has to lean on other students to get up. There is also a small Asian girl who is sobbing, and a student screams, This girl was tasered and this guy was tasered too! and a bunch of students standing around are shocked, upset, a couple people are crying, and the police begin retreating backwards, still facing the students, up the hill. Then a student jumps in the middle of the road and begins screaming some kind of chant, and a bunch of other people, angry, respond.
The young black student who was tased from the images was holding his right hand over his heart and sobbing, and then holding the Asian girl who was also crying. The guy seemed very shaky, and I went over to them and asked the guy (I believe his name, from the caption of those photos, is Rusty/Rustin O'Neill) where he had been tasered, and he said a bunch of times, maybe four or five times or more, over his heart, which still hurt. A CNN article mentions a training bulletin from the taser company that explicitly states that tasing on the chest is prohibited, and officers who do it will be in risk of a lawsuit, given the danger of doing such a thing and on the grounds of excessive force. I looked at the girl's arms and they were all red and there were almost welts rising from the officer's manhandling of her. She said she received one taser shock on her left arm, around the elbow crook. The friend I was standing with had videotaped the whole thing on his camera and gave the two of them his information, and I suggested they both go to the hospital. Shortly after this, a police car drove up the road, and, seeing the bunch of students in the road, put on his lights and said, over the intercom, to get out of the road. At this point however, students were so irate and so shocked by the brutality they just witnessed that there was a kind of reckless tension in the air-- they sat down and shouted at the police car in anger. The police car retreated down the road the way it had arrived.
From Berkeley
Hi,
I understand that you are each undertaking reviews of the police action on UC Berkeley's campus on Friday. I write to you as a witness. At around 1:30 pm on Friday, I was among the students at the Southwest corner of Wheeler Hall. The police (including Ryobi, Wong, and Parnelle of UCPD and Jackson of Berkeley PD) engaged us in a tense standoff.
Officer Jackson introduced himself and shook hands with the student next to me. He said that we should all get to know each other "in case we have to get intimate later." At the point he smiled menacingly and tapped his baton.
The police told us to move backward. They did not say that we were illegally assembled. They merely said, "Move." We refused to move. All present were non-violent. I very consciously kept my hands down at my sides, even as the officers I named above approached us with their batons ready.
They began to jab at us and then to strike us with their batons. We did not fight them. We moved neither toward them nor away. To my right was a student being brutally beaten by officer Parnelle. To my left, a student beaten by officer Jackson. Officer Wong repeatedly struck me with his baton. Another officer, whose name I did not catch, grabbed the others by their collars and pulled them away from us.
We did not follow them nor strike out at them. We clearly posed them no threat.
Thank you very much for your work in both of your investigations. I will be filing a complaint with UCPD against Officer Wong. If there is anything else I can do to aid your investigations, please let me know.
From Berkeley
My name is Tony Bezsylko. I am a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley, a member of UAW Local 2865 and a member of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee.
I have been involved in the political actions on campus this term, including Friday's action. My reasons for being involved in these actions all have to do with my concern for public education, and my reasons for directing these actions towards UC administration have to do with the fact that the administration is not aligning themselves strongly enough with interests of public education. The short of it is that we, and I think that I safely speak for all of us, want you and the rest of UC administration helping us to organize a movement to save public education. We want you at the rallies, we want you on the picket lines, we want you walking with us at the marches. I, however, do not write to you now about these matters. I write to you now to tell you about the nature of the police's response, as well as your response, to Friday's action.
On Friday I was a victim of and a witness to countless acts of police brutality. Those of us outside of Wheeler Hall were upset, but we were completely committed to a peaceful protest (saying so much explicitly in our chants and implicitly by sitting down on the line). The police, and you, were completely oblivious to the commitment of everyone involved, including those inside Wheeler, to a peaceful action. The occupation, though indeed aggressive, was an act of civil, nonviolent disobedience.
Now I understand that it was a chaotic situation, and I understand that the police involved were nervous and frightened. But their actions were grossly disproportionate in degree of aggression compared to that of our actions.
The worst incident I experienced was on the southeast side of Wheeler Hall. We were holding our line, locked in arms, in some places a few people deep. There were extremely thin parts of our line where police could have stepped through very easily by gently moving us aside. They chose not to do this. They chose to barrel their way through one of the thicker parts of the line using batons against stationary, unarmed students. Once this happened there was panic everywhere. I, and everyone around me, was all of a sudden being struck in the back and being attacked from the front by police. I saw one protester on the ground beaten by two police officers. Some folks standing right next to him pulled him up so he could run away before sustaining any more injuries.
I could go on for many paragraphs detailing what I saw and what trusted friends told me they saw. If you have not seen the video footage of some of these incidents, I encourage you to watch it. These actions by the police in response to a peaceful protest were extremely ugly. And not only was your approval of these actions equally ugly, so was your post-protest statement that the "wheeler hall protest ended peacefully" and that "a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers." We are very grateful that all of the occupiers were not hurt, but it is a straightforward lie to say that the day's action ended peacefully. My account in the paragraph above shows this much. That account also refutes the second quote from your email. It was not a "a few members of our campus community" who were physically harmed. It was quite likely somewhere around 100 members of our campus community who were physically harmed by police, and, really, by you and your decisions about how to handle the situation. Lastly, my account also refutes your characterization of what happened as finding oneself "in conflict with law enforcement officers." Conflict can of course mean any number of things. The kind of conflict that was taking place was violent conflict involving physical harm.
I demand that you immediately issue a new statement about these extremely important issues. Trying to brush them under the rug as you are doing is not going to do anything but deepen the rift between UC administration and the rest of the university, including faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff. Acknowledgment is the first step to dealing with every conflict. This is something that you have failed to pay attention to in both your dealings with Friday's action as well as with the current crisis in public education.
Sincerely,
Tony Bezsylko
From Berkeley
I am writing in regards to my experience Friday November 20th as a student observer outside Wheeler Hall. I was horrified as I watched the police using excessive force on students. One particular incident I observed at very close proximity occurred on the East side of Wheeler Hall around 5:00 pm.
I had been present since about 11:00 am on the West side of the building-standing along with fellow graduate students and many undergraduates who I teach as a Graduate Student Instructor. I did not observe any acts of student aggression- we spent many hours standing, chanting and signing, keeping each other dry from the rain, and sharing food and coffee.
Around 5:00 I moved locations to the east side of Wheeler. I soon learned that a colleague in my doctoral program had been knocked to the ground and dragged by an officer, completely unprovoked. I stood next to her listening to the story when officers in riot gear began to head towards us. Although there were many open areas for the new police shift to enter, they chose to enter directly through the crowd of students. Without any warning or explanation, a group of police dressed in full riot gear, flaunting batons and rubber bullet guns, headed straight at where I was standing. Things became a violent blur as I heard students screaming and I saw the student next to me hit by an officer with a baton. I ran from the scene as soon as I could get out, terrified that my friends had been attacked or hurt. Soon after, I left campus, literally shaking from anxiety. It was one of the most violet moments of my life.
As a student and graduate student teacher I was deeply concerned for the safety of those around me- as the police presence only heightened any threat to student safety on campus and by no means provided protection or peace for us. I truly hope that the university administration takes these unprovoked acts of violence performed on students by officers seriously, and respond differently in the future to non-violent demonstrations on campus. Thank you for your time and attention.
From Berkeley
I am a third year student at UCB, and I was actively present in the solidarity protests around Wheeler Hall on Friday. I spent most of my time predominantly on the North East side of Wheeler. I witnessed and was the victim of the excessive use of force by both UCPD and Berkeley PD. At about 5 o¹clock I was in the front row of a large mass of arm-linked students standing in solidarity with the occupation. The cops repeatedly looked at me and other students and warned us not to move forward otherwise we would be beaten by the batons. So we did not move. Regardless however, a little later on the cops did choose to beat in the process of putting up another barricade between us and public space. They started to hit students. Since I was in the front, I took a huge brunt of the blows- to my arms, ribs, belly, and hands. I was pushed to the ground as students were falling on top of me. I covered my head. Cops were continuing to hit students over me. They would not stop. Eventually a student managed to help pull me up at which time I retreated a bit and let other students move forward. The hitting continued. I also witnessed another injury occur earlier on while blocking a truck bringing barricades to the NE side of Wheeler. Students linked arms around the truck. A cop tried to break through the arms of two people. A girl started screaming that the cop was crushing her fingers or hand. In the same confrontation, about 7 cops broke through solidarity lines outside the yellow caution lines and dragged some students into the 똠op¹ area and started to beat them while they were on the ground defenseless. What I witnessed on Friday was nonviolent students standing in solidarity (on supposedly public space) and in turn being abused and violated by cops from both UCPD and Berkeley PD. This certainly was not the appropriate application of force as the students were always non-violent. Claims that cops and barricades were necessary to control the crowd and discourage violence are inadequate and do not fully acknowledge the Manichean violence upon students taken by the police forces. This is unacceptable, and should be publicly acknowledged and interrogated and exposed for what they really were.
Thursday November 19, 2009
Approximately 2:30pm – 5:30pm
University of California, Los Angeles
Covel Commons Parking Garage
From Los Angeles
At approximately 2pm on Thursday November 19, I joined a group of students moving from the protest rally in the courtyard of Covel Commons (which convened at noon), to peacefully protest the decision of the UC Regents by blocking the parking garage exits around the back. I was incredibly impressed by how organized the students were, as we were lead by a few student leaders with a megaphone who dispersed us to the various exits and instructed us to gather at the exit and to remain sitting at all times, in order to prevent any misunderstandings about that fact that this was a peaceful protest. I sat with these students singing protest songs and chanting for about an hour and a half, while many police officers formed a line behind a barricade at the exit behind us. At no point did the protestors get violent or aggressive, nor did the size of the crowd seem unmanageable. The student leaders with the megaphone continued to direct the protestors to stay seated and to show that this was a peaceful protest. As the police officers continued to line up behind us, the student leaders began announcing to the protestors that the police were not our enemies but our “brothers,” and not to direct any aggression towards them.
After about one hour, we had received a report from a number of students coming down the hill that that police officers were using pepper spray on another group of protestors up the hill from us (at the other garage exit), and that they were threatening to arrest us. At this point a significant group of students quickly stood up and left out of fear of being physically harmed or arrested, while a number of other students took their places. At this point, the student leaders with the megaphone announced that if the police began arresting us, we would first be given a warning at which point we had the option to leave, and that if we were told that we were under arrest, we were not to resist, but to calmly place both wrists in front of us. This announcement was made at least twice, emphasizing not to resist arrest, but to calmly place our wrists in front of us. One other student announced that if we were arrested, they would probably let us off that same day, but they could not guarantee anything.
After sitting a bit longer at this exit, I got up to get some water and join some friends in the courtyard at Covel Commons. When I arrived at the courtyard there was a large group of students surrounding a van and gathered in the courtyard, all standing peacefully, many chanting, many having conversations with each other. I was told by one of my friends that they had just been pepper sprayed a few minutes earlier. After going into the store in the courtyard to purchase some water, I came out to witness a female regent being escorted by police officers from the van into the building. While the protestors gathered around and followed the police officers and regent, chanting “shame on you” and other such chants. As the police quickly escorted the woman into the building, the protestors did not display any violent or threatening behavior, with the exception of one apple core I witnessed being thrown by someone in the crowd towards the police officers (but did not hit anyone).
After remaining in the courtyard for a while longer, I returned to the parking garage exit where I was initially sitting earlier and stood across from those sitting at the exit on the lawn (just a few feet away from the parking garage exit) behind a set of barricades. My friends (fellow graduate students) and I stood there for a long time (until approximately 4:30 pm) with our placards, and chanted with the students still sitting peacefully at the garage exit. Just as when I had left that area, all the protestors remained seated, displaying dissent by singing and chanting, while maintaining a peaceful atmosphere. After some time, however, I heard a number of taser guns being turned on, and saw the line of police officers advancing towards the student who were seated. I heard a student next to me say that the police were now threatening to use rubber bullets if the students did not move. Suddenly, many of the students in the exit stood up as I heard screaming and panicked yelling. I heard a number of students scream that the students were being tased. I heard the buzz of the taser guns, and I witnessed one student getting tased through the panicked crowd of students. The student I saw being tased was closest to the line of police officers and was sitting down when he began being tased, I saw that he was wearing an orange shirt and his arms were flailing as he was lying on the ground. I also witnessed a female police officer kick a male student in his side as he was seated. At no point did I see any students act violently or give cause for such an aggressive response, these students were being attacked by police officers as they were sitting down because they would not move. The scene was truly horrifying, and I was in complete shock at what I was seeing. I heard many of the students pleading with the officers to stop, yelling that this was a peaceful protest, and chanting, “We are students, Not enemies!” I saw many of the students crying and holding each other, many were my own students that I had had in previous classes that I taught. I remember hearing one of my own former female students yelling, “Can’t you understand, all we want is an education, put away your weapons!!” As the police officers pushed forward to clear the exit of the garage, they maintained their line facing the gathering of students who were now all standing up. I joined the protestors facing the line of police officers, as we chanted “We are students, not criminals!” and “We live here, you go home!” Many of the students moved nearby to the sidewalk of the road with their signs, as cars honked in support of the demonstration. At this point there seemed to be more police officers than students. The police officers continued to advance forward, pushing the protestors backwards down the hill. I witnessed one female student fall to the floor from the force of the police officers advancing, prompting students to yell back at the police to stop the pushing. As it began getting dark, I finally left the scene to go home, while many students remained there and continued to chant. The line of police officers also remained there and continued to advance down the hill, pushing the protestors, even though the garage exit was no longer blocked and all the regents had left.
From Los Angeles
On my way back from the protest, a bit before 3pm, I was walking down the road at the same moment that the UC regents' vans emerged from the underground parking lot under Covel Commons. A few students shouted, There are the regents! and a number of us (perhaps fifteen, there weren't many people there at that moment) began to shout, Shame on you! at the regents in the vans. There were students sitting peacefully in the middle of the road, and some police approached them and moved some of them out of the way at the same time, I believe, that the vans moved around them, because I had been standing behind the vans, and I remember the vans were not stuck there very long. After the vans drove down the road, the police were trying to move more people, a student called for everyone to sit, and then the next thing I know is I hear this clicking sound over and over again right in front of me, and I see that there are police officers standing over students, a bunch of students are screaming, and the clicking goes on. I hear a girl scream, He can't stand up, and the police officer say, Get up. I see a guy (the young black man from the photos) trying to stand up, a number of other people are helping him up, he is shaky and his legs are clearly weak because he has to lean on other students to get up. There is also a small Asian girl who is sobbing, and a student screams, This girl was tasered and this guy was tasered too! and a bunch of students standing around are shocked, upset, a couple people are crying, and the police begin retreating backwards, still facing the students, up the hill. Then a student jumps in the middle of the road and begins screaming some kind of chant, and a bunch of other people, angry, respond.
The young black student who was tased from the images was holding his right hand over his heart and sobbing, and then holding the Asian girl who was also crying. The guy seemed very shaky, and I went over to them and asked the guy (I believe his name, from the caption of those photos, is Rusty/Rustin O'Neill) where he had been tasered, and he said a bunch of times, maybe four or five times or more, over his heart, which still hurt. A CNN article mentions a training bulletin from the taser company that explicitly states that tasing on the chest is prohibited, and officers who do it will be in risk of a lawsuit, given the danger of doing such a thing and on the grounds of excessive force. I looked at the girl's arms and they were all red and there were almost welts rising from the officer's manhandling of her. She said she received one taser shock on her left arm, around the elbow crook. The friend I was standing with had videotaped the whole thing on his camera and gave the two of them his information, and I suggested they both go to the hospital. Shortly after this, a police car drove up the road, and, seeing the bunch of students in the road, put on his lights and said, over the intercom, to get out of the road. At this point however, students were so irate and so shocked by the brutality they just witnessed that there was a kind of reckless tension in the air-- they sat down and shouted at the police car in anger. The police car retreated down the road the way it had arrived.
From Berkeley
Hi,
I understand that you are each undertaking reviews of the police action on UC Berkeley's campus on Friday. I write to you as a witness. At around 1:30 pm on Friday, I was among the students at the Southwest corner of Wheeler Hall. The police (including Ryobi, Wong, and Parnelle of UCPD and Jackson of Berkeley PD) engaged us in a tense standoff.
Officer Jackson introduced himself and shook hands with the student next to me. He said that we should all get to know each other "in case we have to get intimate later." At the point he smiled menacingly and tapped his baton.
The police told us to move backward. They did not say that we were illegally assembled. They merely said, "Move." We refused to move. All present were non-violent. I very consciously kept my hands down at my sides, even as the officers I named above approached us with their batons ready.
They began to jab at us and then to strike us with their batons. We did not fight them. We moved neither toward them nor away. To my right was a student being brutally beaten by officer Parnelle. To my left, a student beaten by officer Jackson. Officer Wong repeatedly struck me with his baton. Another officer, whose name I did not catch, grabbed the others by their collars and pulled them away from us.
We did not follow them nor strike out at them. We clearly posed them no threat.
Thank you very much for your work in both of your investigations. I will be filing a complaint with UCPD against Officer Wong. If there is anything else I can do to aid your investigations, please let me know.
From Berkeley
My name is Tony Bezsylko. I am a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley, a member of UAW Local 2865 and a member of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee.
I have been involved in the political actions on campus this term, including Friday's action. My reasons for being involved in these actions all have to do with my concern for public education, and my reasons for directing these actions towards UC administration have to do with the fact that the administration is not aligning themselves strongly enough with interests of public education. The short of it is that we, and I think that I safely speak for all of us, want you and the rest of UC administration helping us to organize a movement to save public education. We want you at the rallies, we want you on the picket lines, we want you walking with us at the marches. I, however, do not write to you now about these matters. I write to you now to tell you about the nature of the police's response, as well as your response, to Friday's action.
On Friday I was a victim of and a witness to countless acts of police brutality. Those of us outside of Wheeler Hall were upset, but we were completely committed to a peaceful protest (saying so much explicitly in our chants and implicitly by sitting down on the line). The police, and you, were completely oblivious to the commitment of everyone involved, including those inside Wheeler, to a peaceful action. The occupation, though indeed aggressive, was an act of civil, nonviolent disobedience.
Now I understand that it was a chaotic situation, and I understand that the police involved were nervous and frightened. But their actions were grossly disproportionate in degree of aggression compared to that of our actions.
The worst incident I experienced was on the southeast side of Wheeler Hall. We were holding our line, locked in arms, in some places a few people deep. There were extremely thin parts of our line where police could have stepped through very easily by gently moving us aside. They chose not to do this. They chose to barrel their way through one of the thicker parts of the line using batons against stationary, unarmed students. Once this happened there was panic everywhere. I, and everyone around me, was all of a sudden being struck in the back and being attacked from the front by police. I saw one protester on the ground beaten by two police officers. Some folks standing right next to him pulled him up so he could run away before sustaining any more injuries.
I could go on for many paragraphs detailing what I saw and what trusted friends told me they saw. If you have not seen the video footage of some of these incidents, I encourage you to watch it. These actions by the police in response to a peaceful protest were extremely ugly. And not only was your approval of these actions equally ugly, so was your post-protest statement that the "wheeler hall protest ended peacefully" and that "a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers." We are very grateful that all of the occupiers were not hurt, but it is a straightforward lie to say that the day's action ended peacefully. My account in the paragraph above shows this much. That account also refutes the second quote from your email. It was not a "a few members of our campus community" who were physically harmed. It was quite likely somewhere around 100 members of our campus community who were physically harmed by police, and, really, by you and your decisions about how to handle the situation. Lastly, my account also refutes your characterization of what happened as finding oneself "in conflict with law enforcement officers." Conflict can of course mean any number of things. The kind of conflict that was taking place was violent conflict involving physical harm.
I demand that you immediately issue a new statement about these extremely important issues. Trying to brush them under the rug as you are doing is not going to do anything but deepen the rift between UC administration and the rest of the university, including faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff. Acknowledgment is the first step to dealing with every conflict. This is something that you have failed to pay attention to in both your dealings with Friday's action as well as with the current crisis in public education.
Sincerely,
Tony Bezsylko
From Berkeley
I am writing in regards to my experience Friday November 20th as a student observer outside Wheeler Hall. I was horrified as I watched the police using excessive force on students. One particular incident I observed at very close proximity occurred on the East side of Wheeler Hall around 5:00 pm.
I had been present since about 11:00 am on the West side of the building-standing along with fellow graduate students and many undergraduates who I teach as a Graduate Student Instructor. I did not observe any acts of student aggression- we spent many hours standing, chanting and signing, keeping each other dry from the rain, and sharing food and coffee.
Around 5:00 I moved locations to the east side of Wheeler. I soon learned that a colleague in my doctoral program had been knocked to the ground and dragged by an officer, completely unprovoked. I stood next to her listening to the story when officers in riot gear began to head towards us. Although there were many open areas for the new police shift to enter, they chose to enter directly through the crowd of students. Without any warning or explanation, a group of police dressed in full riot gear, flaunting batons and rubber bullet guns, headed straight at where I was standing. Things became a violent blur as I heard students screaming and I saw the student next to me hit by an officer with a baton. I ran from the scene as soon as I could get out, terrified that my friends had been attacked or hurt. Soon after, I left campus, literally shaking from anxiety. It was one of the most violet moments of my life.
As a student and graduate student teacher I was deeply concerned for the safety of those around me- as the police presence only heightened any threat to student safety on campus and by no means provided protection or peace for us. I truly hope that the university administration takes these unprovoked acts of violence performed on students by officers seriously, and respond differently in the future to non-violent demonstrations on campus. Thank you for your time and attention.
From Berkeley
I am a third year student at UCB, and I was actively present in the solidarity protests around Wheeler Hall on Friday. I spent most of my time predominantly on the North East side of Wheeler. I witnessed and was the victim of the excessive use of force by both UCPD and Berkeley PD. At about 5 o¹clock I was in the front row of a large mass of arm-linked students standing in solidarity with the occupation. The cops repeatedly looked at me and other students and warned us not to move forward otherwise we would be beaten by the batons. So we did not move. Regardless however, a little later on the cops did choose to beat in the process of putting up another barricade between us and public space. They started to hit students. Since I was in the front, I took a huge brunt of the blows- to my arms, ribs, belly, and hands. I was pushed to the ground as students were falling on top of me. I covered my head. Cops were continuing to hit students over me. They would not stop. Eventually a student managed to help pull me up at which time I retreated a bit and let other students move forward. The hitting continued. I also witnessed another injury occur earlier on while blocking a truck bringing barricades to the NE side of Wheeler. Students linked arms around the truck. A cop tried to break through the arms of two people. A girl started screaming that the cop was crushing her fingers or hand. In the same confrontation, about 7 cops broke through solidarity lines outside the yellow caution lines and dragged some students into the 똠op¹ area and started to beat them while they were on the ground defenseless. What I witnessed on Friday was nonviolent students standing in solidarity (on supposedly public space) and in turn being abused and violated by cops from both UCPD and Berkeley PD. This certainly was not the appropriate application of force as the students were always non-violent. Claims that cops and barricades were necessary to control the crowd and discourage violence are inadequate and do not fully acknowledge the Manichean violence upon students taken by the police forces. This is unacceptable, and should be publicly acknowledged and interrogated and exposed for what they really were.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Santa Cruz Divisional Senate Passes Resolution on Fiscal Transparency
TO: Academic Senate, Santa Cruz Division
FROM: Norma Klahn, Secretary
DATE: October 30, 2009
RE: Report of Divisional Actions of Academic Senate, October 28, 2009
The following actions were taken by the Academic Senate Santa Cruz Division at its meeting on October 28, 2009.
The following resolution was referred by voice vote to the Committee on Planning and Budget (CPB), with a request that the revised resolution be reviewed by the Committee on Rules, Jurisdiction and Elections and presented at the next Academic Senate meeting.
C. AS/SCP/1612
To UCOP re: Fiscal Transparency: Whereas the current fiscal crisis facing the UC system is having and will continue to have profound effects on all research and teaching functions in which faculty are engaged; and whereas faculty are therefore duty-bound to fully understand the nature of this crisis and to analyze the full range of possible strategies for coping with the fiscal crisis; we the members of the Academic Senate of UCSC therefore request from UCOP complete budgetary transparency, including full details of all budget categories, definitions of the nature of any legal restrictions on how these categories of funds can be expended, and detailed alternative scenarios for addressing the fiscal crisis.
The following resolution passed by voice vote.
D. AS/SCP/1612
Sense of the Senate re: Good-Faith Negotiations: Whereas the UCSC faculty are formally represented by the Santa Cruz Faculty Association as their bargaining agent; therefore be it resolved that it is the sense of the UCSC Academic Senate that the UCSC administration and the Santa Cruz Faculty Association should continue to bargain in good faith on furlough policy options, possible strategies for coping with the fiscal crisis, and all other issues that may properly fall within the scope of collective bargaining.
The following resolution passed by voice vote.
Whereas UC fee increases compromise the public mission of the University, be it resolved that the Senate opposes any further fee increase and urges the UCSC Administration and UCOP to advocate accordingly to the UC Regents.
The following resolution passed by voice vote.
Be it resolved that the UCSC Senate opposes reductions in pay for workers whose full time salary is $40,000 or less.
--
Academic Senate
Santa Cruz Division
125 Kerr Hall
UC Santa Cruz
(831) 459-2086
(831) 459-5469 (FAX)
Website: www://senate.ucsc.edu
FROM: Norma Klahn, Secretary
DATE: October 30, 2009
RE: Report of Divisional Actions of Academic Senate, October 28, 2009
The following actions were taken by the Academic Senate Santa Cruz Division at its meeting on October 28, 2009.
The following resolution was referred by voice vote to the Committee on Planning and Budget (CPB), with a request that the revised resolution be reviewed by the Committee on Rules, Jurisdiction and Elections and presented at the next Academic Senate meeting.
C. AS/SCP/1612
To UCOP re: Fiscal Transparency: Whereas the current fiscal crisis facing the UC system is having and will continue to have profound effects on all research and teaching functions in which faculty are engaged; and whereas faculty are therefore duty-bound to fully understand the nature of this crisis and to analyze the full range of possible strategies for coping with the fiscal crisis; we the members of the Academic Senate of UCSC therefore request from UCOP complete budgetary transparency, including full details of all budget categories, definitions of the nature of any legal restrictions on how these categories of funds can be expended, and detailed alternative scenarios for addressing the fiscal crisis.
The following resolution passed by voice vote.
D. AS/SCP/1612
Sense of the Senate re: Good-Faith Negotiations: Whereas the UCSC faculty are formally represented by the Santa Cruz Faculty Association as their bargaining agent; therefore be it resolved that it is the sense of the UCSC Academic Senate that the UCSC administration and the Santa Cruz Faculty Association should continue to bargain in good faith on furlough policy options, possible strategies for coping with the fiscal crisis, and all other issues that may properly fall within the scope of collective bargaining.
The following resolution passed by voice vote.
Whereas UC fee increases compromise the public mission of the University, be it resolved that the Senate opposes any further fee increase and urges the UCSC Administration and UCOP to advocate accordingly to the UC Regents.
The following resolution passed by voice vote.
Be it resolved that the UCSC Senate opposes reductions in pay for workers whose full time salary is $40,000 or less.
--
Academic Senate
Santa Cruz Division
125 Kerr Hall
UC Santa Cruz
(831) 459-2086
(831) 459-5469 (FAX)
Website: www://senate.ucsc.edu
Friday, October 30, 2009
San Diego Divisional Senate Opposes Unprecedented Fee Increases
Sense of the UCSD Senate - San Diego Division
LET IT BE RESOLVED, that the Academic Senate, San Diego Division, expresses its alarm at the unprecedented student fee increases scheduled for this year and next at a time when California families and households are facing the highest unemployment rate in over 60 years and grievous losses in their savings; and, be it further
RESOLVED, that the Academic Senate, San Diego Division, is especially troubled by the prospect that the fee increase may become permanent and may lead to further increases; and, be it finally
RESOLVED, that the Academic Senate, San Diego Division, states its concern that such increases will have a devastating effect on the access of California students to UCSD and drastically reduce the presence of historically underrepresented groups on this campus.
LET IT BE RESOLVED, that the Academic Senate, San Diego Division, expresses its alarm at the unprecedented student fee increases scheduled for this year and next at a time when California families and households are facing the highest unemployment rate in over 60 years and grievous losses in their savings; and, be it further
RESOLVED, that the Academic Senate, San Diego Division, is especially troubled by the prospect that the fee increase may become permanent and may lead to further increases; and, be it finally
RESOLVED, that the Academic Senate, San Diego Division, states its concern that such increases will have a devastating effect on the access of California students to UCSD and drastically reduce the presence of historically underrepresented groups on this campus.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Prof William Warner Statement to UCOF at UCSB
Rules by which a Great University may be Reduced to a Mediocre One
Rule 1: Raise tuition so thousands of meritorious students of modest means are kept out of the university; those who still come will need to work so many hours that they won’t be able to perform at the highest level. In order to weaken your ties with the citizens of California, increase the number of those out-of-state students and foreign students who can pay full freight. The thousands of rejection letters with which you have to shower the state’s high school seniors will counter their belief that this is a public university that belongs to them.
Rule 2: Use the budget crisis to lower graduate funding; in addition to realizing immediate savings, this measure will encourage expensive graduate faculty to seek employment elsewhere.
3: Use the opportunity of a state budget-crisis to administer a sudden one-time 8-10% salary cut to your senior faculty; this will make it easier for other universities to hire away your most nationally renowned, and expensive, faculty. Then, it should be increasingly difficult to hire the best junior faculty. But if some do get hired, and their achievements begin to make them expensive, you can always call another furlough. With the high cost of housing in California, this measure should clear the system of any younger faculty who can go elsewhere.
4: Encourage senior staff to seek early retirement, so those who know how to implement university policy are gone, and don’t refill these positions.
5: Keep creative administrators busy reeling from one budget crisis to another; this will discourage them from dreaming up expensive initiatives inconsistent with the modest new goals of the university.
6: Cut costs by decreasing the number of faculty and lecturers in the university; then move the teaching of those who remain onto computer screens so they can teach the way the University of Phoenix does. This will discourage students from attempting expensive direct contact with their teachers.
7: Above all, discourage senior university officials from defending what the university is; prevent them from making the university’s case to the public; and don’t allow the state budget crisis to pass without appointing a commission to recommend these rules.
8: Finally, remember there may be setbacks: some administrators and faculty may continue to harbor delusive aspirations to greatness, but don’t worry. Because a university is a complex and interdependent network for producing and transmitting knowledge, by destroying one area of expensive excellence, you will compromise many others; so once downward momentum has been achieved, the university’s inexorable movement into cheap mediocrity is assured.
Rule 1: Raise tuition so thousands of meritorious students of modest means are kept out of the university; those who still come will need to work so many hours that they won’t be able to perform at the highest level. In order to weaken your ties with the citizens of California, increase the number of those out-of-state students and foreign students who can pay full freight. The thousands of rejection letters with which you have to shower the state’s high school seniors will counter their belief that this is a public university that belongs to them.
Rule 2: Use the budget crisis to lower graduate funding; in addition to realizing immediate savings, this measure will encourage expensive graduate faculty to seek employment elsewhere.
3: Use the opportunity of a state budget-crisis to administer a sudden one-time 8-10% salary cut to your senior faculty; this will make it easier for other universities to hire away your most nationally renowned, and expensive, faculty. Then, it should be increasingly difficult to hire the best junior faculty. But if some do get hired, and their achievements begin to make them expensive, you can always call another furlough. With the high cost of housing in California, this measure should clear the system of any younger faculty who can go elsewhere.
4: Encourage senior staff to seek early retirement, so those who know how to implement university policy are gone, and don’t refill these positions.
5: Keep creative administrators busy reeling from one budget crisis to another; this will discourage them from dreaming up expensive initiatives inconsistent with the modest new goals of the university.
6: Cut costs by decreasing the number of faculty and lecturers in the university; then move the teaching of those who remain onto computer screens so they can teach the way the University of Phoenix does. This will discourage students from attempting expensive direct contact with their teachers.
7: Above all, discourage senior university officials from defending what the university is; prevent them from making the university’s case to the public; and don’t allow the state budget crisis to pass without appointing a commission to recommend these rules.
8: Finally, remember there may be setbacks: some administrators and faculty may continue to harbor delusive aspirations to greatness, but don’t worry. Because a university is a complex and interdependent network for producing and transmitting knowledge, by destroying one area of expensive excellence, you will compromise many others; so once downward momentum has been achieved, the university’s inexorable movement into cheap mediocrity is assured.
Prof Elisabeth Weber Statement to UCOF at UCSB
My name is Elisabeth Weber. I am speaking as chair of a department in which we teach German, Russian and Hebrew languages and literatures, and as chair of the program of Comparative Literature.
The German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig once said: as many languages someone speaks, as many times he or she is a human being.
According to an analysis by UCSC Professor Bob Meister on where student tuition money actually goes, it is not towards instruction, but instead towards insuring UC bonds. The UCOP and the Regents therefore seem to understand only one language: the language of Wall Street.
The cuts to the foreign language and literature programs have been brutal throughout UCSB and other campuses. This in spite of the fact that, to name just two examples, UCSB’s German and Russian language programs’ high enrollments are the envy of much wealthier universities.
We keep hearing that the UC is the world’s premier public university, but if the past and current budgetary priorities continue, UC students will soon no longer speak the languages of the world. During a time of increasing globalization, UC is drastically reducing its foreign language instruction.
In the foreign language and literature departments, and of course in Comparative Literature, we not only teach our students to be conversant in other languages. We also teach them to see and feel through the eyes and experiences of people laughing, crying, loving, revolting in remote regions of the world, in short, to discover other peoples’ sensibilities.
Don’t misunderstand me: I am not appealing to your humanist souls. I am actually addressing your Wall Street minds: One makes better deals with people whose language and sensibilities one understands. President Obama realizes that: He greeted the Arab speaking peoples in their language. But a greeting isn’t enough. This country is engaged in two wars with peoples whose languages and cultural sensibilities only very few Americans understand.
The UC should show the way of, indeed, the future. The fact that the UC Commission on the future has only one professor of foreign languages and literatures on board doesn’t bode well for that future.
The future is a global one in which our students and their children can only succeed if their minds and senses have been opened to the cultural sensibilities of other peoples. In that regard, the decimation of the UC foreign language and literature programs is unconscionable.
The German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig once said: as many languages someone speaks, as many times he or she is a human being.
According to an analysis by UCSC Professor Bob Meister on where student tuition money actually goes, it is not towards instruction, but instead towards insuring UC bonds. The UCOP and the Regents therefore seem to understand only one language: the language of Wall Street.
The cuts to the foreign language and literature programs have been brutal throughout UCSB and other campuses. This in spite of the fact that, to name just two examples, UCSB’s German and Russian language programs’ high enrollments are the envy of much wealthier universities.
We keep hearing that the UC is the world’s premier public university, but if the past and current budgetary priorities continue, UC students will soon no longer speak the languages of the world. During a time of increasing globalization, UC is drastically reducing its foreign language instruction.
In the foreign language and literature departments, and of course in Comparative Literature, we not only teach our students to be conversant in other languages. We also teach them to see and feel through the eyes and experiences of people laughing, crying, loving, revolting in remote regions of the world, in short, to discover other peoples’ sensibilities.
Don’t misunderstand me: I am not appealing to your humanist souls. I am actually addressing your Wall Street minds: One makes better deals with people whose language and sensibilities one understands. President Obama realizes that: He greeted the Arab speaking peoples in their language. But a greeting isn’t enough. This country is engaged in two wars with peoples whose languages and cultural sensibilities only very few Americans understand.
The UC should show the way of, indeed, the future. The fact that the UC Commission on the future has only one professor of foreign languages and literatures on board doesn’t bode well for that future.
The future is a global one in which our students and their children can only succeed if their minds and senses have been opened to the cultural sensibilities of other peoples. In that regard, the decimation of the UC foreign language and literature programs is unconscionable.
Prof Mark Srednicki Statement to UCOF at UCSB
Remarks to the Gould Commission, Forum at UCSB, October 22, 2009
I’m Mark Srednicki, Chair of the Physics Department here. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
I have three points to make.
First, you represent the Commission on the Future of UC, but we cannot look to the future without first understanding the past.
Sadly, the past few years at UC have been characterized by a stunning failure of leadership at the highest levels. We have seen draconian funding cuts that threaten irrevocable harm to this, the world’s greatest public university.
The University of California has historically provided a vital economic sparkplug to our state, and its graduates have historically paid for their educations many times over through state taxes on the extra earnings that their UC educations enable. Yet now, this key component of our economic engine is on the verge of sputtering and stalling out.
Our President, Mark Yudof, makes unfortunate remarks that have led to his censure by the Academic Senate on this campus. The Chair of the Board of Regents, Russell Gould, and the Vice Chair, Sherry Lansing, have been conspicuously silent in the public media, as have all the other Regents. Who will make the case for UC if our leaders will not? These people have failed in their historic mission to preserve, protect, and defend this institution, and they must be held accountable for their failure before any future plans can be made.
My second point is this. Strong leadership at UC is needed because, in this state, the will of the people is continually thwarted. This is because, in California, we do not have democracy. Instead, we have Minority Rule.
This must change. We must join the rest of the civilized world and take up governance of our affairs by Majority Rule.
A ballot initiative restoring Majority Rule to California is being prepared for the November 2010 election. The initiative is 14 words long; I have copies. I call upon the Commission as a whole, and each member individually, to declare public support for the Majority Rule initiative. For those here, I call upon you to do it today.
Third and finally, this Commission cannot allow itself to be used as an instrument for the dismantling of the world’s greatest public university. You must go beyond your narrow charges and boldly confront the true sources of the crisis at UC, namely, failure of leadership by the Regents and the President, and our current undemocratic system of government. Any radical altering or restructuring of the historically highly successful UC system would gravely endanger the future progress and prosperity of this great State, and you must say so loudly and clearly.
Thank you.
Mark Srednicki
Chair of Physics
UC Santa Barbara
mark@physics.ucsb.edu
Majority Rule Initiative
“All legislative actions on revenue and budget
must be determined by a majority vote.”
http://www.camajorityrule.com
I’m Mark Srednicki, Chair of the Physics Department here. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
I have three points to make.
First, you represent the Commission on the Future of UC, but we cannot look to the future without first understanding the past.
Sadly, the past few years at UC have been characterized by a stunning failure of leadership at the highest levels. We have seen draconian funding cuts that threaten irrevocable harm to this, the world’s greatest public university.
The University of California has historically provided a vital economic sparkplug to our state, and its graduates have historically paid for their educations many times over through state taxes on the extra earnings that their UC educations enable. Yet now, this key component of our economic engine is on the verge of sputtering and stalling out.
Our President, Mark Yudof, makes unfortunate remarks that have led to his censure by the Academic Senate on this campus. The Chair of the Board of Regents, Russell Gould, and the Vice Chair, Sherry Lansing, have been conspicuously silent in the public media, as have all the other Regents. Who will make the case for UC if our leaders will not? These people have failed in their historic mission to preserve, protect, and defend this institution, and they must be held accountable for their failure before any future plans can be made.
My second point is this. Strong leadership at UC is needed because, in this state, the will of the people is continually thwarted. This is because, in California, we do not have democracy. Instead, we have Minority Rule.
This must change. We must join the rest of the civilized world and take up governance of our affairs by Majority Rule.
A ballot initiative restoring Majority Rule to California is being prepared for the November 2010 election. The initiative is 14 words long; I have copies. I call upon the Commission as a whole, and each member individually, to declare public support for the Majority Rule initiative. For those here, I call upon you to do it today.
Third and finally, this Commission cannot allow itself to be used as an instrument for the dismantling of the world’s greatest public university. You must go beyond your narrow charges and boldly confront the true sources of the crisis at UC, namely, failure of leadership by the Regents and the President, and our current undemocratic system of government. Any radical altering or restructuring of the historically highly successful UC system would gravely endanger the future progress and prosperity of this great State, and you must say so loudly and clearly.
Thank you.
Mark Srednicki
Chair of Physics
UC Santa Barbara
mark@physics.ucsb.edu
Majority Rule Initiative
“All legislative actions on revenue and budget
must be determined by a majority vote.”
http://www.camajorityrule.com
Friday, October 23, 2009
Prof Claudio Fogu Statement to UCOF at UCSB
Comments for Gould Commission meeting 10 / 22 / 2009
Dear members of the Commission on the Future:
Let me begin by echoing some of the sentiments expressed by my predecessors regarding our state of ‘crisis’: it has been made abundantly clear to you that this crisis is not one of ‘finances’ but one of ‘confidence’ by students, faculty and staff in our Regents and President Yudof…and, I am sorry to add, at the moment, also in you as a commission reflecting the causes of this discontent.
Look at your composition: one sole humanist, compared to scores of professional faculty and administrators; no gender balance; no ‘campus-by-campus’ representation. Look at your stated mission: to come up, supposedly in three months, with “ways to maintain and even expand our substantial contributions” to the State of California, and to address through separate commissions the questions of: a) diminishing resources, b) educational delivery models, c) size and shape of the university, and d) finding alternative revenue streams…
Expand the contribution of UC to the state of California? Are you kidding? Making 24,600 $ out of each UC graduate—as you have heard / will soon hear from Prof. Nelson—is not enough for the State of California?
Then, to focus on ‘size and shape’ or ‘education delivery models’, divorcing these questions from reaffirming and discussing the guiding principles of this university? Is this not a foregone conclusion that will drive your thinking towards the ideas that have been already circulated publicly of separating functions among campuses, introducing distance learning techniques to maximize technologically-driven solutions etc.?
Similarly, to accept the premise of a diminishing public investment in the university as an incontrovertible and accepted fact, rather than a historical trend that is reversible? Does this not set you up as involuntary accomplices of a relentless process of corporatization that has been going on since the 1980s and has led us right into this crisis of confidence, this break down of collective support and understanding of the ‘cultural’ and not only material values of a public university system like this one?
Finally three months of tenure? What’s the hurry?... Oh yes of course, it is called ‘shock doctrine’: use a budget crisis to declare an emergency situation, give the man in charge emergency powers, and proceed with the overhaul of the system after the false pretenses of responding to the crisis. In the process, trump over all principles of shared governance, divide faculty from students, and faculty internally between wining-humanities radicals like myself and serious good citizens in the sciences. We have seen this script many times in history, and some of us have learnt its lessons, so we are here to tell you not to accept to be part of this design, but to redefine instead your mission, and gain legitimacy in the eyes of the university community by transforming yourself into a model of true shared-governance.
Let me thus end with some ideas on who to implement these two preliminary goals:
First, Redefine your mission by embracing publicly the California Master Plan as the principal guideline of your task. This will make you de facto the much needed conduit of communication not only between a very out of touch Board of Regents and President and an ever more unified UC Community around the goal of restoring the guiding principles of the Master Plan, but also between our internal discussions and a larger political arena in which gubernatorial candidates need to be made aware of our conversation, and need to be held accountable early on for declaring their views on what they will do to restore public funding and confidence in our university system.
Second, use this tour of Forums across California to send a strong message to the Regents before they commit another financial crime at their next meeting: a fee hike of unprecedented proportions that will send the final signal to legislators and perspective new governors that there is no need for their becoming advocates of public financing of higher education, because they can count on Regents to solve the problem by shifting the burden on the students.
Third, take stock of the history of mismanagement and progressive corporatization of this public university system and make your primary task to rethink its political structure and administration. Reorient your and trhe public view of UC students as ‘customers’ to be milked for all they are worth, towards an understanding of them as the principal ‘shareholders’ of this university, compared to the State’s investment that represents only 16% of the University’s budget. Reorient your and the public towards redefining role and composition of the Board of Regents away from their voluntary or involuntary position as hostages of a State government that they themselves call “an unreliable partner of the university.” Have the courage, that is, to discuss, for example, how to ensure that the Regents be no longer so distant from the sahred values of the university community they should respond to, by making for example half of the Board of Regents ‘elected’ from the ranks of UC faculty, systemwide. Above all make the office of Regents respondent to a ‘compact with the students’ that ties the university to a certain amount of investment in their education, rather than a ‘compact’ with the State, that is not only worth less than the ink on the page it was written on, but, as we have seen, is only an instrument of blackmail.
Fourth and last, give a strong signal to the Regents and to the State of California that you yourselves have come to refuse the logic of a ‘state of emergence’ when dealing with the ‘future’ of this institution, and make a resolution among yourselves that at the end of this consultation tour you will make yourself truly ‘part of the solution’ by requesting that the Regents reject the proposed fee hike at their November meeting and bringing to their attention the many alternative proposals that have been made by many prominent UC faculty members over the past few weeks and months, by prolonging your tenure to at least the full academic year 2009-2010, and by opening up membership in this commission to representatives elected by each academic senate that will function as transmission a chain to and fro their campus community.
I wish you a good listening day and a productive tour of our campuses.
Dear members of the Commission on the Future:
Let me begin by echoing some of the sentiments expressed by my predecessors regarding our state of ‘crisis’: it has been made abundantly clear to you that this crisis is not one of ‘finances’ but one of ‘confidence’ by students, faculty and staff in our Regents and President Yudof…and, I am sorry to add, at the moment, also in you as a commission reflecting the causes of this discontent.
Look at your composition: one sole humanist, compared to scores of professional faculty and administrators; no gender balance; no ‘campus-by-campus’ representation. Look at your stated mission: to come up, supposedly in three months, with “ways to maintain and even expand our substantial contributions” to the State of California, and to address through separate commissions the questions of: a) diminishing resources, b) educational delivery models, c) size and shape of the university, and d) finding alternative revenue streams…
Expand the contribution of UC to the state of California? Are you kidding? Making 24,600 $ out of each UC graduate—as you have heard / will soon hear from Prof. Nelson—is not enough for the State of California?
Then, to focus on ‘size and shape’ or ‘education delivery models’, divorcing these questions from reaffirming and discussing the guiding principles of this university? Is this not a foregone conclusion that will drive your thinking towards the ideas that have been already circulated publicly of separating functions among campuses, introducing distance learning techniques to maximize technologically-driven solutions etc.?
Similarly, to accept the premise of a diminishing public investment in the university as an incontrovertible and accepted fact, rather than a historical trend that is reversible? Does this not set you up as involuntary accomplices of a relentless process of corporatization that has been going on since the 1980s and has led us right into this crisis of confidence, this break down of collective support and understanding of the ‘cultural’ and not only material values of a public university system like this one?
Finally three months of tenure? What’s the hurry?... Oh yes of course, it is called ‘shock doctrine’: use a budget crisis to declare an emergency situation, give the man in charge emergency powers, and proceed with the overhaul of the system after the false pretenses of responding to the crisis. In the process, trump over all principles of shared governance, divide faculty from students, and faculty internally between wining-humanities radicals like myself and serious good citizens in the sciences. We have seen this script many times in history, and some of us have learnt its lessons, so we are here to tell you not to accept to be part of this design, but to redefine instead your mission, and gain legitimacy in the eyes of the university community by transforming yourself into a model of true shared-governance.
Let me thus end with some ideas on who to implement these two preliminary goals:
First, Redefine your mission by embracing publicly the California Master Plan as the principal guideline of your task. This will make you de facto the much needed conduit of communication not only between a very out of touch Board of Regents and President and an ever more unified UC Community around the goal of restoring the guiding principles of the Master Plan, but also between our internal discussions and a larger political arena in which gubernatorial candidates need to be made aware of our conversation, and need to be held accountable early on for declaring their views on what they will do to restore public funding and confidence in our university system.
Second, use this tour of Forums across California to send a strong message to the Regents before they commit another financial crime at their next meeting: a fee hike of unprecedented proportions that will send the final signal to legislators and perspective new governors that there is no need for their becoming advocates of public financing of higher education, because they can count on Regents to solve the problem by shifting the burden on the students.
Third, take stock of the history of mismanagement and progressive corporatization of this public university system and make your primary task to rethink its political structure and administration. Reorient your and trhe public view of UC students as ‘customers’ to be milked for all they are worth, towards an understanding of them as the principal ‘shareholders’ of this university, compared to the State’s investment that represents only 16% of the University’s budget. Reorient your and the public towards redefining role and composition of the Board of Regents away from their voluntary or involuntary position as hostages of a State government that they themselves call “an unreliable partner of the university.” Have the courage, that is, to discuss, for example, how to ensure that the Regents be no longer so distant from the sahred values of the university community they should respond to, by making for example half of the Board of Regents ‘elected’ from the ranks of UC faculty, systemwide. Above all make the office of Regents respondent to a ‘compact with the students’ that ties the university to a certain amount of investment in their education, rather than a ‘compact’ with the State, that is not only worth less than the ink on the page it was written on, but, as we have seen, is only an instrument of blackmail.
Fourth and last, give a strong signal to the Regents and to the State of California that you yourselves have come to refuse the logic of a ‘state of emergence’ when dealing with the ‘future’ of this institution, and make a resolution among yourselves that at the end of this consultation tour you will make yourself truly ‘part of the solution’ by requesting that the Regents reject the proposed fee hike at their November meeting and bringing to their attention the many alternative proposals that have been made by many prominent UC faculty members over the past few weeks and months, by prolonging your tenure to at least the full academic year 2009-2010, and by opening up membership in this commission to representatives elected by each academic senate that will function as transmission a chain to and fro their campus community.
I wish you a good listening day and a productive tour of our campuses.
Profs Sharon Farmer and Jack Sutton to UCOF at UCSB
Graduate Council Responses to Questions Posed to the UC Commission on the Future
Sharon Farmer, Professor of History, UCSB; Jack Sutton, Professor of Sociology, UCSB
As chair and vice-chair of the UCSB Graduate Council Jack Sutton and I have given careful consideration to the full text of the charge documents that have been sent to the commission on the future. Our comments fall into two categories – the need to take a proactive stance in defending the university, and the urgent necessity of remaining faithful to our teaching and research mission. I will speak to the first issue, and Jack Sutton, the chair of the council, will speak to the second.
1) It is an underlying assumption of the questions that have been posed to the commission that "declining state revenues" are a given. This is a false assumption. Declining state revenues for the University of California have resulted from the political decisions of a governor who believes that private education should replace public education. The last president of the university acquiesced to that vision and the current president embraces that vision. The commission on the future needs to say NO to the vision of privatization, and it needs to pressure the regents and the president to do the same. As recently as April, 2009 a poll of California voters indicated that they opposed cuts in public funding to higher education by a ratio of 2 to 1.
2) A second underlying assumption of the charge to the commission is that we need to prepare for declining demand for the educational services that the UC provides, especially to undergraduates. This too is a false assumption. While the proportion of young adults to older adults will decline over the next 20 years, the raw numbers of high school graduates will continue to grow – by 26%. As an aging population leaves the workforce it will continue to depend on the services and leadership of these young adults, who must be trained to provide the services and leadership.
3) The subcommittee on funding strategies has been asked, : "What are the ways to improve
the University's chances of obtaining state funds." We need a president and regents who understand that public education serves the public good IN WAYS THAT PRIVATE EDUCATION CANNOT. We need a president and regents who are willing to pressure the legislators and the governor to provide the public funding that we need. We need to join the majority of voters in their state in advocating for a severance tax on oil extraction: In the US today we are the only state that does not charge such a tax: the state of CA is thus giving away resources to the oil corporations while it asks middle class families and their children to mortgage their futures in order to pay for their educations. We are thus GIVING AWAY money to both the oil corporations and Wall Street (the beneficiary of student loans) while we ask the middle class to sink deeper and deeper into debt.
SUTTON:
4) The subcommittee on funding strategies has been asked if private funding is the way to go -- especially with reference to our research mission. Obviously, we have already started down that road. But private funding for research is a VERY POOR substitute for public funding, because donors seek results that serve their purposes. Consider the number of universities that now refuse to accept funding from the Tobacco Industry because the research that that industry funds is thought to be tainted; or the fact that at Harvard Medical School the students have had to organize in order to protest the way that private funding from pharmaceutical companies is distorting what they are taught in the classroom. Private funding, moreover, will never be adequate to fund research in the humanities and social sciences, despite the fact that the analytical thinking and communications skills that are taught in the humanities and social sciences help to shape the future leaders of this state
5) The commission has been asked to think about funding for graduate students. Indeed it should, because graduate students follow the funding and the UC has fallen woefully behind on that score. Graduate students need multi-year packages that cover all tuition and fees as well as living expenses. The fact that UCOP has benefited from rising graduate student fees while campuses have been given inadequate funding to attract new graduate students shows that there is a mismanagement of priorities in the system. Because of this year’s cut-back in funding for graduate student teaching assistantships, departments throughout the system are being forced to seriously compromise the quality of education that we offer to undergraduates – by eliminating discussion sections and assignments that teach analytical skills rather than rote learning.
6) The subcommittee on Size and Shape has been asked if the UC campuses should focus on graduate and professional education and undergraduate education that cannot be delivered by other public segments. This question seems to be asking the committee to consider a University of Chicago or Johns Hopkins model. Such a model does not fit our public mandate. The thrill of studying, as undergraduates, with the researchers who create the knowledge that shapes the world we live in is one of the fundamental attractions of THE BEST PUBLIC RESEARCH INSTITUTION IN THE US. Providing that opportunity to undergraduates and exposing them to top research libraries and laboratories is thus one of our best forms of public relations to the citizens of California, which we can't afford to lose. Moreover, teaching undergraduates is not only a major way in which graduate students fund their educations -- it is a form of apprenticeship that prepares them for their careers. Severing the research mission from the undergraduate teaching mission would have dire political consequences, because the UC would garner even less support from the citizens of the state, who would feel totally out of touch with the services that the university provides.
7) The commission has been asked if the UC should cut educational costs by accepting more transfer students, employing more adjuncts and lecturers, and offering on-line courses. Such cost cutting measures would constitute a serious violation of our mission to provide the future leaders of this state with the highest quality education. Transfer students are less prepared for higher forms of critical thinking and writing than are students who spend all four years at the UC. Already about 30% of our students are transfer students. Going further down that road will contribute to the decline of the quality of the work force of California. On-line learning is an extremely poor substitute for face-to-face discussion and debate – it fosters rote learning, and is not what we want to deliver to the state's best and brightest. Again, if we go that route we are contributing to the decline of the quality of the state's work force and we risk harming our reputation among research universities and with the citizens of California.
Sharon Farmer, Professor of History, UCSB; Jack Sutton, Professor of Sociology, UCSB
As chair and vice-chair of the UCSB Graduate Council Jack Sutton and I have given careful consideration to the full text of the charge documents that have been sent to the commission on the future. Our comments fall into two categories – the need to take a proactive stance in defending the university, and the urgent necessity of remaining faithful to our teaching and research mission. I will speak to the first issue, and Jack Sutton, the chair of the council, will speak to the second.
1) It is an underlying assumption of the questions that have been posed to the commission that "declining state revenues" are a given. This is a false assumption. Declining state revenues for the University of California have resulted from the political decisions of a governor who believes that private education should replace public education. The last president of the university acquiesced to that vision and the current president embraces that vision. The commission on the future needs to say NO to the vision of privatization, and it needs to pressure the regents and the president to do the same. As recently as April, 2009 a poll of California voters indicated that they opposed cuts in public funding to higher education by a ratio of 2 to 1.
2) A second underlying assumption of the charge to the commission is that we need to prepare for declining demand for the educational services that the UC provides, especially to undergraduates. This too is a false assumption. While the proportion of young adults to older adults will decline over the next 20 years, the raw numbers of high school graduates will continue to grow – by 26%. As an aging population leaves the workforce it will continue to depend on the services and leadership of these young adults, who must be trained to provide the services and leadership.
3) The subcommittee on funding strategies has been asked, : "What are the ways to improve
the University's chances of obtaining state funds." We need a president and regents who understand that public education serves the public good IN WAYS THAT PRIVATE EDUCATION CANNOT. We need a president and regents who are willing to pressure the legislators and the governor to provide the public funding that we need. We need to join the majority of voters in their state in advocating for a severance tax on oil extraction: In the US today we are the only state that does not charge such a tax: the state of CA is thus giving away resources to the oil corporations while it asks middle class families and their children to mortgage their futures in order to pay for their educations. We are thus GIVING AWAY money to both the oil corporations and Wall Street (the beneficiary of student loans) while we ask the middle class to sink deeper and deeper into debt.
SUTTON:
4) The subcommittee on funding strategies has been asked if private funding is the way to go -- especially with reference to our research mission. Obviously, we have already started down that road. But private funding for research is a VERY POOR substitute for public funding, because donors seek results that serve their purposes. Consider the number of universities that now refuse to accept funding from the Tobacco Industry because the research that that industry funds is thought to be tainted; or the fact that at Harvard Medical School the students have had to organize in order to protest the way that private funding from pharmaceutical companies is distorting what they are taught in the classroom. Private funding, moreover, will never be adequate to fund research in the humanities and social sciences, despite the fact that the analytical thinking and communications skills that are taught in the humanities and social sciences help to shape the future leaders of this state
5) The commission has been asked to think about funding for graduate students. Indeed it should, because graduate students follow the funding and the UC has fallen woefully behind on that score. Graduate students need multi-year packages that cover all tuition and fees as well as living expenses. The fact that UCOP has benefited from rising graduate student fees while campuses have been given inadequate funding to attract new graduate students shows that there is a mismanagement of priorities in the system. Because of this year’s cut-back in funding for graduate student teaching assistantships, departments throughout the system are being forced to seriously compromise the quality of education that we offer to undergraduates – by eliminating discussion sections and assignments that teach analytical skills rather than rote learning.
6) The subcommittee on Size and Shape has been asked if the UC campuses should focus on graduate and professional education and undergraduate education that cannot be delivered by other public segments. This question seems to be asking the committee to consider a University of Chicago or Johns Hopkins model. Such a model does not fit our public mandate. The thrill of studying, as undergraduates, with the researchers who create the knowledge that shapes the world we live in is one of the fundamental attractions of THE BEST PUBLIC RESEARCH INSTITUTION IN THE US. Providing that opportunity to undergraduates and exposing them to top research libraries and laboratories is thus one of our best forms of public relations to the citizens of California, which we can't afford to lose. Moreover, teaching undergraduates is not only a major way in which graduate students fund their educations -- it is a form of apprenticeship that prepares them for their careers. Severing the research mission from the undergraduate teaching mission would have dire political consequences, because the UC would garner even less support from the citizens of the state, who would feel totally out of touch with the services that the university provides.
7) The commission has been asked if the UC should cut educational costs by accepting more transfer students, employing more adjuncts and lecturers, and offering on-line courses. Such cost cutting measures would constitute a serious violation of our mission to provide the future leaders of this state with the highest quality education. Transfer students are less prepared for higher forms of critical thinking and writing than are students who spend all four years at the UC. Already about 30% of our students are transfer students. Going further down that road will contribute to the decline of the quality of the work force of California. On-line learning is an extremely poor substitute for face-to-face discussion and debate – it fosters rote learning, and is not what we want to deliver to the state's best and brightest. Again, if we go that route we are contributing to the decline of the quality of the state's work force and we risk harming our reputation among research universities and with the citizens of California.
Prof Songi Han Statement to UCOF at UCSB
Statement By Songi Han, Assistant Professor of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry on the first hearing of the UC Commission of the Future headed by President Yudof, Chairman Gould and the Regents.
Let me repeat what was already said before as it speaks to the legitimacy of this UC Commission and the meaning of these hearings.
Why are NO members of the UC Regents, Provost and the President present, not even all faculty chairs/co-chairs, at the very FIRST UC Commission of the Future hearings? It is as if we had a UCSB Commission of the Future hearing without our chancellor Henry Yang and executive vice chancellor Gene Lucas present. This would be unthinkable! It is too apparent that these hearings are just a make-up show. Why are the Regents, Provosts and the President not LISTENING on a HEARING tour?
If you asked me personally one year ago about my view on the University of California, I would be praising it over everything. You don't want to ask me now about my confidence in the upper UC administration that I lost so dramatically in just a few months. Don't underestimate the fact that the fuel of the faculty is our passion and love to what we do. Once that passion and love to our institution is gone-and it is truly NOT just about money-you will see the negative consequences of it painfully directly, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but in the future. In the budget calculation of the upper administration, the value of the passion and love with which we drive our profession is not taken into account, and the loss that this institution will experience if you lose this value not considered. The result, I fear, will be a mediocre University, as one UCSB History Professor beautifully laid out for you.
Let me repeat what was already said before as it speaks to the legitimacy of this UC Commission and the meaning of these hearings.
Why are NO members of the UC Regents, Provost and the President present, not even all faculty chairs/co-chairs, at the very FIRST UC Commission of the Future hearings? It is as if we had a UCSB Commission of the Future hearing without our chancellor Henry Yang and executive vice chancellor Gene Lucas present. This would be unthinkable! It is too apparent that these hearings are just a make-up show. Why are the Regents, Provosts and the President not LISTENING on a HEARING tour?
If you asked me personally one year ago about my view on the University of California, I would be praising it over everything. You don't want to ask me now about my confidence in the upper UC administration that I lost so dramatically in just a few months. Don't underestimate the fact that the fuel of the faculty is our passion and love to what we do. Once that passion and love to our institution is gone-and it is truly NOT just about money-you will see the negative consequences of it painfully directly, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but in the future. In the budget calculation of the upper administration, the value of the passion and love with which we drive our profession is not taken into account, and the loss that this institution will experience if you lose this value not considered. The result, I fear, will be a mediocre University, as one UCSB History Professor beautifully laid out for you.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
UCSB Teach-In: Nelson Lichtenstein on Clark Kerr
Clark Kerr’s Forgotten Legacy
Nelson Lichtenstein
Department of History
Chair, Ad Hoc Teach-In Committee
University of California, Santa Barbara
October 14, 2009
Welcome. We expect to have an exciting day before us. The term “teach-in” had its origins in the 1960s when students and faculty sought to understand and therefore become active participants in the debate over the war in Vietnam. The same is true today: by assembling both experts and activists, inside policy-makers and outside critics, we will best prepare ourselves for the task that confronts us: nothing less than the defense of a great university in a time of acute dangers.
Our event here is both educational and political, designed to provide a progressive, alternative analysis of the budget crisis and a positive road forward for California, the UC system, and education at all levels of our state. The threat comes not from those who have actually denounced public higher education, but from those inside the UC system and the state government who say they have the University’s best interests at heart even as they distort and defame all that has made the University great. We hope this teach-in will forge the analytic weapons necessary to fight back.
To understand what we are in danger of losing, it helps to know why and how our university was built. This system is a product of the early post World War II years when the University of California was refounded, refunded, and greatly expanded. Although no single individual can lay claim to reshaping an entire institution of higher education, Clark Kerr comes close.
Kerr was a visionary. He was Berkeley’s chancellor in the 1950s and UC President from 1958 to 1967. As the architect of the 1960 Master Plan for higher education in California, Kerr refounded the UC system as the standard to which every other institution of higher learning aspired. Kerr’s hallmark was a guarantee “that there would be a place in college for every high school graduate…who chose to attend.”
Kerr’s dream for a “multiversity,” as he called it, was rooted in his career as a labor economist and liberal. He finished his BA at Swarthmore and then came West to Stanford for graduate study. He hated Stanford! To him the school was an institution in which its wealthy trustees distorted the educational mission. So he transferred to Berkeley where he worked with Paul Taylor, the radical advocate for California farm workers. Together, they studied the poverty, hardship, and desperation that John Steinbeck captured in his 1937 novel, the Grapes of Wrath. Kerr’s Depression-era experiences left him keenly aware of the inequalities that distorted American democracy but also dedicated to the peaceful resolution of conflict between labor and capital in the U.S. and elsewhere.
By the 1950s, Kerr had become convinced that a vastly expanded system of higher education was the key to a dynamic, harmonious society based on skill and knowledge. In this new economy, mass higher education was the key to this newly prosperous America where a booming California was clearly in the vanguard. In his famous 1963 book, “The Uses of the University,” Kerr argued that the university was “at the hinge of history.”
Kerr's vision is all about you: a university campus designed to educate the great mass of the American people. To accommodate the influx of baby boomers, Kerr oversaw the opening of the San Diego, Irvine, and Santa Cruz campuses and he greatly expanded UC Santa Barbara. And despite the expenditure of an enormous sum of money, a UC education remained affordable. Under Kerr’s tenure, UC students had no tuition and almost no fees.
Four principles underlay Kerr’s University; they should be honored and defended today.
First, he rejected the philanthropic model for higher education, a model which then and now puts the name of so many wealthy men and women above the doorways of our great schools. UC would not be dependent upon the likes of a Leland Stanford, an Andrew Carnegie, a James Buchannan Duke, a John D. Rockefeller, or an Andrew Mellon. Instead it would be a product of the people of California, dependent upon the tax revenue of the state and accountable to a democratic polity.
Second, UC would be a system both decentralized and a unitary. Under Kerr’s leadership, UC Santa Barbara got its first independent chancellor and so too did UCLA, Davis, Santa Cruz and the rest of the campuses. But UC has always been one system, with one standard for faculty, student achievement, and administrative procedures. This is an amazing accomplishment, envied but still not emulated by many state systems, including such good ones as Michigan, Virginia, New York, and Wisconsin.
Third, all Californians would have access to higher education: a three tiered system that enabled first generation college students to live at home and then transfer to a State University or a to UC when and if they chose. Not all faculty liked this idea, especially if you were stuck at a state university without UC’s graduate programs, but for students it provided a ladder that they could climb, so that immigrants and the working class, in California more than any other state, might gain the knowledge and skills they so demanded. But all of this was and is dependent on low fees and plenty of classroom seats. Kerr built and expanded nine campuses of UC in the 1950s and 1960s. Today we have built Merced, just one more, and although enrollment at UC is higher than in Kerr’s day, it has not kept up with soaring population of the state.
And finally and perhaps most important, Clark Kerr and his generation of educators understood that the university was an investment, not in individual well being, although that was certainly true, but in the public goods that make a society both prosperous and democratic. Kerr himself too often thought that corporations and agribusiness would use the knowledge and trained graduates generated by the university in an equitable fashion – that was one reason students at Berkeley and Santa Barbara students revolted against his leadership 45 years ago.
But that the university was a public trust, that it must be responsible to a democratic populous, this Kerr firmly believed. It was the kind of vision that could inspire genuine loyalty to UC at the ballot box and in the legislature where both Republicans and Democrats voted tax increases to pay for it.
Today, Kerr’s idea of a unified, egalitarian, system of higher education requires a renewed defense. It is a vision that this event seeks to recapture and recast for our own time.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Prof William Warner Statement on Censure to UCSB Faculty Legislature
My name is William Warner, Professor of English and member of the Faculty Senate
My 1st observation:
The Senate has for the most part gone missing in this crisis. When the pay cuts and furloughs were proposed, in the build up to the Regents meeting, and in their granting of extraordinary emergency powers to President Yudof, where was the UCSB faculty senate? Why was there no argument to the university and the public at large that the furloughs would be a grievous stroke to the future competitiveness and future greatness of this university?
So agenda Item one: how can this body seize an active role going forward? How, for example, can we demand and win impact on the deliberations of the Gould commission. (should we form a senate task force composed of members of different senate committees, draw on faculty not now in the senate, etc.) With all due respect, Chancellor Yang’s special Budget committees cannot speak for the faculty or the academic senate.
We need more scheduled meetings: I’m a member of the Senate, and I note that the Senate calendar for this fall has this October 8 meeting and then a Senate meeting on November 5th: this is not enough meetings for us to develop, in a patient and deliberative fashion, a response to this crisis.
On the issue of contributing to greater transparency: One goal of organizing ourselves should be to develop channels of communication to the whole faculty so that what the senate knows the faculty knows. Why not have a regular Chairman’s letters on the crisis? those letters could describe what is being proposed by university administration and what the Academic Senate’s position is.
Final issue I will address and it is controversial: We the faculty senate of UC Santa Barbara should issue a censure of President Yudof; we should perhaps call for his resignation.
Now I can imagine some saying—but a storm is a terrible time to challenge the captain. To which I rejoin: but what if Captain Yudof is taking this great ship in the wrong direction?
There are 3 indications that this is so:
1) He has been authoritarian: in responding to the budget crisis he did not consult in a robust fashion with the members of his university—instead, he requested and gained from the Regents what Georgio Agomben calls “a state of exception”, a law that suspends law, an assertion of the sovereignty over normal protocols of shared governance, to make, if you will, laws outside the laws.
1) He has been authoritarian: in responding to the budget crisis he did not consult in a robust fashion with the members of his university—instead, he requested and gained from the Regents what Georgio Agomben calls “a state of exception”, a law that suspends law, an assertion of the sovereignty over normal protocols of shared governance, to make, if you will, laws outside the laws.
2) He is promoting for the university a set of financial remedies that will continue the privatization of this university (increased tuition, differential tuition fees, more out of state students, more foreign students, acquiescence to lower and lower state funding) In all of this, he evidences remarkably little understanding of what this university is about.
3) Finally, every time that he has spoken on the crisis, he has proven himself a terrible spokesman for the ideals of public education. When the New York Times gave him a forum in which he might have spoken for the values of the University of California, an opportunity that most university presidents would love to have, he spoke of the bloom having gone from education and he compared the University of California, in an odd and tendentious analogy, to a cemetery. To which I say let’s haunt him! This body should censure President Yudof. Thankyou
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Speech on 24th September T. J. Clark
My name is Timothy Clark. I came to Berkeley in 1988, and the 21 years I have taught and researched here have been in many ways the most rewarding of my life. Therefore my feelings are painfully contradictory, you can imagine, as I look out at these old and new friends. It is an honor and a privilege to make the first speech on this occasion, but at the same time a tragedy.
Let me speak to the honor first. What I see in front of me – the banners, the faces, the demands – is the life of the university as I understand it. It is the university taking on form in the public sphere – escaping from the academic boardroom, shrugging off the jargon of the entrepreneurs and patent-seekers, and reminding us what a university really is. A university is not a brand name. It is not an umbrella organization for a 150 assorted corporate laboratories, with the faculty inside each striking bargains with their funders about how much or how little of the new knowledge they produce is immediately going to be “privatized.” A university – a public university – is not a finishing school for the sons and daughters of the shrinking few able to afford the fees. A university does not build its future on the backs of those most vulnerable in its midst – the men and women who keep the places we learn in safe and clean and continuing to function. A university – this is the last and vital element in its moral and intellectual life – does not see its crisis in isolation from the one that is threatening the state as a whole. It knows what is happening in schoolrooms in Richmond and Oakland and San Jose. It feels the despair of those for whom community college or the Cal State system seemed to offer a way forward, and who now see their courses cancelled and buildings shuttered. And all this – this is what is unforgivable – in a state whose concentrations of private and corporate wealth remain immense, but which a failed political system has put off limits even when the very life or death of our society is at stake.
People will say that in comparison with the hard times in California at large the university still has it good. I have two replies. First, of course we are not claiming parity in suffering with the truly disadvantaged and vulnerable, who are bearing the brunt of the state’s financial meltdown. We acknowledge the things we still have – but at the same time we know that a system of public education in a great state like California is a complex, interdependent unity, and that we should fight with all we can, without apology, to preserve its whole fabric. The UC system is a precious resource – a public resource – built over more than a century with taxpayers’ money, private generosity and shrewdness, and the intellectual energy of generations of students, teachers, and staff. A state in its right mind does not destroy that resource when times get tough.
But this, make no mistake, is what is happening. How many times in the past two weeks have students found their department office closed, when they urgently needed advice on courses and requirements – “due to staff shortage”? How many times have you had to remember that if you needed to study in the library the coming weekend – that basic need of a university life – you should think again, for libraries at Berkeley cannot afford to open on either Saturday or Sunday? (Unlike those at the Universities of Mississippi and Alaska.) A colleague told me yesterday of a conversation she had had – one of many such conversations this week – with a trusted and dedicated member of staff in her building: the one person spared the layoff, asking her, with real desperation in his voice, “But how am I supposed to do the job now? How can one person prevent the whole facility from deteriorating to the point of no return?”
This is no time for the politics of denunciation. I know that many of these decisions are being forced on deans and chairs who can see no other way to do what has been mandated from the top. But as an overall policy, what we are living through makes me choke with anger. It is destructive and deeply unfair. It steers too close – if I may borrow an infamous phrase from a famous member of our faculty – to an “organ failure” model of crisis management. And if our leaders in UCOP think that in the end they will wear us down by using the oldest tactics in the reactionary playbook– Divide, Deceive, Conceal, Demoralize – they are deeply mistaken. We shall fight back.
Finally, then, let me offer the bare outlines of an alternative. There is a real emergency, we recognize, and many of us are willing to help address it. What do we want? What would bring us on board, as active participants in a work of reconstruction?
Well, supposing we were presented with an honest and transparent and coherent plan for the preservation of the public university in hard times… Supposing the plan was one in which sacrifices really were shared – in which the pet projects and inflated building programs and hidden overhead were no longer off limits when cuts were discussed… Supposing the profit-generating parts of the UC system (and they exist, by the way) were asked – maybe temporarily, as part of the true emergency – to contribute a proportion of their surplus to the urgent needs of the university’s teaching heart… Supposing the preservation of the true economic, racial, and ethnic diversity of UC’s student body was an absolute priority, an un-negotiable part of our institution’s character… Supposing it was simply unthinkable for the university’s future to be decided, as Yudof and the Regents are planning, by a commission of professional school managers and technicians who seldom or never face an actual classroom or a lab…
Then we would come on board. And this can still happen, my friends. We are at a moment of near-breakdown, and no one is pretending that the way out of it will be pain-free. An immense amount depends on the wider politics of the state. It is up to us to argue the case for a public university – for public education -- in a democracy in crisis. The crisis is real. But crises produce choices. They shine a light on managers and management-speak. They make another vision possible. They remind us of why we think teaching and learning and the production of new knowledge matter – why they are vital to the life of society at large – and they call us to fight to preserve the space in which they can thrive. The fight has begun.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
USC Faculty Letter Supporting Sept 24 Day of Action
We, the undersigned faculty and graduate students of the University of Southern California, write to express our solidarity with the University of California professors, students and employees in their system-wide walk-out, 24 September, 2009.
The walk-out has been called in response to the UC administration’s handling of budget cuts over the summer, which have harmed the university’s mission, disproportionately affected students and lower-paid workers, and compromised the University’s principle of shared governance. The University of California is a cornerstone of social and economic progress, and these cuts reflect a massive failure of our larger economic and political system. Nonetheless, the cuts have been planned, announced and implemented after minimal consultation with the UC community. They fail to take into consideration numerous alternative budgetary measures that could meet the budget shortfall with greater fairness and less impact upon UC’s capacity to fulfill its core educational tasks. The upper administration has flouted the traditions of shared governance with faculty, without which no university can achieve or maintain a high quality of research or teaching, and it has imposed furloughs and layoffs upon its lowest-paid workers rather than generating these funds through more substantial reductions to the size of the management and to executive compensation. We repudiate such measures, no matter which institutions they affect.
But we are not concerned only with the manner through which the cuts have been proposed and implemented and the negative example it presents to academic institutions nationally. We are concerned that these cuts represent a further downward step towards the irrevocable decline and steady corporatization of the University of California. We are concerned that the UC’s administration is willing to sacrifice the internationally recognized quality and accessibility of its campuses for increased dependence on down-sizing and private funding. Rather than engage in a serious reevaluation of budgetary priorities or take up the political fight for the survival and reinvigoration of public education, they have opted for cuts, increased fees, and corporate funding.
In his recent speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama invoked the example of the role that public universities play in setting a standard and a model for the private universities. As faculty and students of a private university, we thoroughly concur with that observation. Public education—free as it has been or should be from the interests that inevitably come attached to private funding, however philanthropic, and free as it can be from the demands of fee-based revenue—has established throughout California and the nation an example of disinterested learning and research. It has helped to guarantee the autonomy of academic pursuits and the possibility of exploring avenues of research and teaching that do not ultimately depend on their immediately measurable value, either socially or economically. In doing so, it has set a standard which any private university that lays claims to be a first-rate research university must and should emulate.
We believe that a well-funded and faculty-led system of public education is the cornerstone of all educational quality, private and public, in the state and the nation. Without a vigorous public university education, available to all at reasonable cost, no academic institutions will thrive as they should. We therefore stand in solidarity with faculty, students and employees of the University of California in their walk-out and in their ongoing campaign against the cuts in California’s historically leading university system. We call on the UC administration, and in particular on President Yudof, to negotiate in good faith with their representatives in order to arrive at a fairer and more far-sighted budgetary solution. And we call on politicians and policy-makers state-wide to consider the dismal effects of any further decline in UC’s standards and reputation for the state as a whole.
Elinor Accampo
History
Paul Adler
Business
Deborah Alkamano
American Studies and Ethnicity
Lois Banner
History and Gender Studies
Rick Berg
English
Brandon Best
American Studies and Ethnicity
Brent Blair
Theatre
Sheila Briggs
Religion and Gender Studies
Jolie Chea
American Studies and Ethnicity
Jih-Fei Cheng
American Studies and Ethnicity
Araceli Esparza
American Studies and Ethnicity
Vincent Farenga
Classics
Joshua Goldstein
History
Macarena Gomez-Barris
American Studies and Ethnicity and Social Science
Sandy Green
Business
Ariela J. Gross
Law
Larry Gross
Communications
Judith Halberstam
American Studies and Ethnicity and English
William Handley
English
Carol Hofmann
French
Janet Hoskins
Anthropology
Mark Irwin
English
Jane Naomi Iwamura
Religion and American Studies & Ethnicity
David James
Cinema
Peggy Kamuf
Comparative Literature
Colin Keaveney
French and Italian
Robin Kelley
American Studies and Ethnicity and History
Tony Kemp
English
Priscilla Leiva
American Studies and Ethnicity
Akira Lippit
Comparative Literature, CNTV and East Asian Languages
David Lloyd
English
Alvaro Marquez
American Studies and Ethnicity
Tara McPherson
Cinema
Natania Meeker
Comparative Literature
Celeste Menchaca
American Studies and Ethnicity
Claudia Moatti
Classics
Viet Nguyen
English and American Studies and Ethnicity
Laura Pulido
American Studies and Ethnicity
Jessica Quizar
American Studies and Ethnicity
Shana L. Redmond
American Studies and Ethnicity and English
Abigail Rosas
American Studies and Ethnicity
John Carlos Rowe
American Studies and Ethnicity and English
Margaret Salazar
American Studies and Ethnicity
Sriya Shrestha
American Studies and Ethnicity
Bruce Smith
English
Nomi Stolzenberg
Law
Karen Tongson
English and Gender Studies
Yushi Yamazaki
American Studies and Ethnicity
The walk-out has been called in response to the UC administration’s handling of budget cuts over the summer, which have harmed the university’s mission, disproportionately affected students and lower-paid workers, and compromised the University’s principle of shared governance. The University of California is a cornerstone of social and economic progress, and these cuts reflect a massive failure of our larger economic and political system. Nonetheless, the cuts have been planned, announced and implemented after minimal consultation with the UC community. They fail to take into consideration numerous alternative budgetary measures that could meet the budget shortfall with greater fairness and less impact upon UC’s capacity to fulfill its core educational tasks. The upper administration has flouted the traditions of shared governance with faculty, without which no university can achieve or maintain a high quality of research or teaching, and it has imposed furloughs and layoffs upon its lowest-paid workers rather than generating these funds through more substantial reductions to the size of the management and to executive compensation. We repudiate such measures, no matter which institutions they affect.
But we are not concerned only with the manner through which the cuts have been proposed and implemented and the negative example it presents to academic institutions nationally. We are concerned that these cuts represent a further downward step towards the irrevocable decline and steady corporatization of the University of California. We are concerned that the UC’s administration is willing to sacrifice the internationally recognized quality and accessibility of its campuses for increased dependence on down-sizing and private funding. Rather than engage in a serious reevaluation of budgetary priorities or take up the political fight for the survival and reinvigoration of public education, they have opted for cuts, increased fees, and corporate funding.
In his recent speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama invoked the example of the role that public universities play in setting a standard and a model for the private universities. As faculty and students of a private university, we thoroughly concur with that observation. Public education—free as it has been or should be from the interests that inevitably come attached to private funding, however philanthropic, and free as it can be from the demands of fee-based revenue—has established throughout California and the nation an example of disinterested learning and research. It has helped to guarantee the autonomy of academic pursuits and the possibility of exploring avenues of research and teaching that do not ultimately depend on their immediately measurable value, either socially or economically. In doing so, it has set a standard which any private university that lays claims to be a first-rate research university must and should emulate.
We believe that a well-funded and faculty-led system of public education is the cornerstone of all educational quality, private and public, in the state and the nation. Without a vigorous public university education, available to all at reasonable cost, no academic institutions will thrive as they should. We therefore stand in solidarity with faculty, students and employees of the University of California in their walk-out and in their ongoing campaign against the cuts in California’s historically leading university system. We call on the UC administration, and in particular on President Yudof, to negotiate in good faith with their representatives in order to arrive at a fairer and more far-sighted budgetary solution. And we call on politicians and policy-makers state-wide to consider the dismal effects of any further decline in UC’s standards and reputation for the state as a whole.
Elinor Accampo
History
Paul Adler
Business
Deborah Alkamano
American Studies and Ethnicity
Lois Banner
History and Gender Studies
Rick Berg
English
Brandon Best
American Studies and Ethnicity
Brent Blair
Theatre
Sheila Briggs
Religion and Gender Studies
Jolie Chea
American Studies and Ethnicity
Jih-Fei Cheng
American Studies and Ethnicity
Araceli Esparza
American Studies and Ethnicity
Vincent Farenga
Classics
Joshua Goldstein
History
Macarena Gomez-Barris
American Studies and Ethnicity and Social Science
Sandy Green
Business
Ariela J. Gross
Law
Larry Gross
Communications
Judith Halberstam
American Studies and Ethnicity and English
William Handley
English
Carol Hofmann
French
Janet Hoskins
Anthropology
Mark Irwin
English
Jane Naomi Iwamura
Religion and American Studies & Ethnicity
David James
Cinema
Peggy Kamuf
Comparative Literature
Colin Keaveney
French and Italian
Robin Kelley
American Studies and Ethnicity and History
Tony Kemp
English
Priscilla Leiva
American Studies and Ethnicity
Akira Lippit
Comparative Literature, CNTV and East Asian Languages
David Lloyd
English
Alvaro Marquez
American Studies and Ethnicity
Tara McPherson
Cinema
Natania Meeker
Comparative Literature
Celeste Menchaca
American Studies and Ethnicity
Claudia Moatti
Classics
Viet Nguyen
English and American Studies and Ethnicity
Laura Pulido
American Studies and Ethnicity
Jessica Quizar
American Studies and Ethnicity
Shana L. Redmond
American Studies and Ethnicity and English
Abigail Rosas
American Studies and Ethnicity
John Carlos Rowe
American Studies and Ethnicity and English
Margaret Salazar
American Studies and Ethnicity
Sriya Shrestha
American Studies and Ethnicity
Bruce Smith
English
Nomi Stolzenberg
Law
Karen Tongson
English and Gender Studies
Yushi Yamazaki
American Studies and Ethnicity
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Mike Davis: The Mine has caved in
The UC strike com. asked me this morning to write a short piece on 'solidarity'*
Mike Davis
1331 33rd St San Diego CA 92102
mdavis@ucr.edu
Many years ago in the faded Art Nouveaux splendor of a Gorbals (Glasgow) pub, I met a man who told me an extraordinary story about his grandfather, a coalminer who had been killed in a pit disaster before the First World War. A methane explosion, followed by a roof collapse, had trapped his grandfather and his mates deep in the mine, where they were eventually asphyxiated. When rescuers reached their tomb days later, they found a final, defiant message chiseled into the coalface: 'God save our union.'
The spirit of these doomed Scots miners isn't easily replicated in rational choice models of social action. Nor can simple economic calculation explain the fervor with which Lancashire cotton workers, whose wages depended upon Southern cotton and the British domination of India, supported Lincoln and later Gandhi. Likewise, from the 1934 San Francisco General Strike to Justice for Janitors in the 1980s and 1990s, California working people have repeatedly translated their passion for justice and dignity into the slogan 'an injury to one, is an injury to all.'
The labor and civil rights movements, to be sure, aren't fairy tales, and the heroic moments are often counterbalanced by the petrification of militancy into leaden bureaucracy and the selfish calibration of seniority. Solidarity is too often an orphan. In our case, there are disheartening examples of the tenured strata ignoring the recent picket-lines of catering workers, secretaries, lecturers, and students.
UC faculty, indeed, are much like the residents of Jonathan Swift's city of Laputa: distracted by their departmental micropolitics and the distribution of FTEs while they float on a cloud above the existential distress of K-12 and community education. The Senate faculty also must share responsibility with the Regents for the system's transformation into a vast machine for the transformation of public research into corporate profit. Most UC campuses now more resemble gated communities than public temples of learning.
A lot of us have complained about this situation for years, but our discomfort has seldom moved us to action. But the challenge is now epic-historic: equity and justice are endangered at every level of the Master plan for Education. Obscene wealth still sprawls across the coastal hills, but flat-land inner cities and blue-collar interior valleys face the death of the California dream. Their children - let's not beat around the bush - are being pushed out of higher education. Their future is being cut off at its knees.
The September 24 strike movement, in my opinion, is most important because it defends non-tenured employees and demands public disclosure of the Regents' secret diplomacy. It is an elementary reflex of a progressive, humane consciousness: an antidote to the staggering selfishness and elitism of Andrew Scull and his Gang of 23.
A strike, by matching actions to words,, is also the highest form of teach-in. This seed of resistance, of course, will only grow to maturity through cultivation by unionized employees and students. They are the real constant gardeners, and hopefully branches of a unified fight-back will quickly intertwine with the parallel struggles of CSU, community college, K-12 and adult-education workers.
The strike also provides a bully pulpit to counter the still widespread belief that the UC system has a unique dispensation and can once again negotiate its own special deal in Sacramento. Many of our colleagues are simply in denial. This time around, the first-class passengers are in the same frigid water with the kindergarten teachers and community college janitors.
The 24th is the beginning of learning how to shout in unison. And whatever the outcome, it at allows us write our beliefs on the coalface.
* UPTE/CWA has voted to strike U.C. on September 24
Mike Davis
1331 33rd St San Diego CA 92102
mdavis@ucr.edu
Many years ago in the faded Art Nouveaux splendor of a Gorbals (Glasgow) pub, I met a man who told me an extraordinary story about his grandfather, a coalminer who had been killed in a pit disaster before the First World War. A methane explosion, followed by a roof collapse, had trapped his grandfather and his mates deep in the mine, where they were eventually asphyxiated. When rescuers reached their tomb days later, they found a final, defiant message chiseled into the coalface: 'God save our union.'
The spirit of these doomed Scots miners isn't easily replicated in rational choice models of social action. Nor can simple economic calculation explain the fervor with which Lancashire cotton workers, whose wages depended upon Southern cotton and the British domination of India, supported Lincoln and later Gandhi. Likewise, from the 1934 San Francisco General Strike to Justice for Janitors in the 1980s and 1990s, California working people have repeatedly translated their passion for justice and dignity into the slogan 'an injury to one, is an injury to all.'
The labor and civil rights movements, to be sure, aren't fairy tales, and the heroic moments are often counterbalanced by the petrification of militancy into leaden bureaucracy and the selfish calibration of seniority. Solidarity is too often an orphan. In our case, there are disheartening examples of the tenured strata ignoring the recent picket-lines of catering workers, secretaries, lecturers, and students.
UC faculty, indeed, are much like the residents of Jonathan Swift's city of Laputa: distracted by their departmental micropolitics and the distribution of FTEs while they float on a cloud above the existential distress of K-12 and community education. The Senate faculty also must share responsibility with the Regents for the system's transformation into a vast machine for the transformation of public research into corporate profit. Most UC campuses now more resemble gated communities than public temples of learning.
A lot of us have complained about this situation for years, but our discomfort has seldom moved us to action. But the challenge is now epic-historic: equity and justice are endangered at every level of the Master plan for Education. Obscene wealth still sprawls across the coastal hills, but flat-land inner cities and blue-collar interior valleys face the death of the California dream. Their children - let's not beat around the bush - are being pushed out of higher education. Their future is being cut off at its knees.
The September 24 strike movement, in my opinion, is most important because it defends non-tenured employees and demands public disclosure of the Regents' secret diplomacy. It is an elementary reflex of a progressive, humane consciousness: an antidote to the staggering selfishness and elitism of Andrew Scull and his Gang of 23.
A strike, by matching actions to words,, is also the highest form of teach-in. This seed of resistance, of course, will only grow to maturity through cultivation by unionized employees and students. They are the real constant gardeners, and hopefully branches of a unified fight-back will quickly intertwine with the parallel struggles of CSU, community college, K-12 and adult-education workers.
The strike also provides a bully pulpit to counter the still widespread belief that the UC system has a unique dispensation and can once again negotiate its own special deal in Sacramento. Many of our colleagues are simply in denial. This time around, the first-class passengers are in the same frigid water with the kindergarten teachers and community college janitors.
The 24th is the beginning of learning how to shout in unison. And whatever the outcome, it at allows us write our beliefs on the coalface.
* UPTE/CWA has voted to strike U.C. on September 24
Thursday, August 13, 2009
UCB Prof Christine Rosen on Studying Budgets and Subsidies
I'd like to know more specifics about the issue of higher subsidies for professional schools as well. Haas has negotiated with the university for permission to move toward a market based, external funding model. As a result some of our faculty positions, for example, are now, as I understand it, entirely non-state funded. The external funding comes from the "market based" tuitions we charge students in our MBA and executive education programs, and from endowments.
Can the subsidies be analyzed for us and broken down by professional school as well as by departments within the professional schools and within L&S? My guess is that these subsidies vary considerably in scale even within L&S. Chris Newfield says as much in his second post:
"Thus a med school may get $50,000 per student FTE (a figure mentioned by UC's then-budget director in 2005), and a law school may get $35,000 per student FTE. One case I studied in detail had a humanities division's departments averaging closer to $5000 per student FTE and social sciences still lower than that. In that case, science departments were closer to the humanities, and engineering in between hum and the professional schools. The professional school amounts vary quite a bit, but I have never seen a systematic comparison."
What are the criteria that are being used to allocate the subsidies?
Equally important, just what are we talking about when we throw around the notion of a dollar amount of subsidies per student in one school versus another? Per undergrad student in the department's (or school's) major? Per grad student? Per total number of students, grad or otherwise, enrolled in a department's classes? Since students take classes in departments outside their majors and graduate programs, I would be concerned about these statistics. At least I would want to know exactly what is being measured and compared.
There are many ways to analyze and compare subsidies. For example, we faculty are also subsidized by the state in various ways, other than through our state funded base salaries. How do the state funded components of faculty start up packages compare across the university? Again, we may very well find that they vary considerably between departments in A&S and in the professional schools, as well as between schools. We are also likely to find that the packages granted to faculty in the sciences and engineering (a professional school) dwarf those received by faculty in the humanities. This is no doubt due, at least in part, because they include labs, but likely also related to other factors. Again what are the criteria that the campus uses to allocate state (and non-state) funding? Are they fair? Are they rational according to some logic?
It sounds like we might be trying to open a can of worms by even thinking about looking into this. What can we learn about how UC and UCB take from one pot to give to another pot that is not going to appear to threaten those that get more, while infuriating those that don't get as much?
Yet if the $/student subsidies figures that Chris N. and Charlie S. are using are disguising or distorting the reality of student subsidies, it would be good to try to figure all this out, if only for transparency's sake.
In his piece on The Cost of Undergrad Education on his website, Charlie asks:
"The new question, not previously asked, is this: Is there some logical, moral or political limit to how high student fees (tuition) could be raised at a public research university? A fee level at 100% of the actual cost of their education seems to provide a most significant boundary. Beyond that point, undergraduate students (and their parents) are being forced to not only pay for everything they get, but must also subsidize the other functions - graduate education and faculty research - which undeniably provide broad benefits to the whole public, beyond the individual student. One could call this selective taxation, privatization, or any other name you wish; but such a forced subsidization is something that deserves serious debate as a matter of public policy."
In my view we need a great deal more information before we can answer these sorts of questions. We also need to think the issue of cross subsidies through more clearly. There are all sorts of cross subsidies taking place: between departments and schools, between undergrad and grad ed. At Haas tuition is funding faculty appointments. Students take courses in other schools and departments. Several of the so called Enviro-deans subsidized the Berkeley Institute for the Environment for several years out their discretionary funds. The cross subsidies are not just monetary - they also build the "Berkeley brand." The high reputation of our graduate schools helps attract the best undergrads. Grad and UG students, alike, benefiting from having the best faculty. Buildings and rec centers are built courtesy of the tax payers via money raised by state bonds. Berkeley's world class reputation is the product of all of our strengths. We are interdependent. Berkeley itself is greater than the sum of its parts because of the all resources, publically and privately funded, that exist here in our faculty, our undergraduate and graduate students, and our staff.
Chris
Can the subsidies be analyzed for us and broken down by professional school as well as by departments within the professional schools and within L&S? My guess is that these subsidies vary considerably in scale even within L&S. Chris Newfield says as much in his second post:
"Thus a med school may get $50,000 per student FTE (a figure mentioned by UC's then-budget director in 2005), and a law school may get $35,000 per student FTE. One case I studied in detail had a humanities division's departments averaging closer to $5000 per student FTE and social sciences still lower than that. In that case, science departments were closer to the humanities, and engineering in between hum and the professional schools. The professional school amounts vary quite a bit, but I have never seen a systematic comparison."
What are the criteria that are being used to allocate the subsidies?
Equally important, just what are we talking about when we throw around the notion of a dollar amount of subsidies per student in one school versus another? Per undergrad student in the department's (or school's) major? Per grad student? Per total number of students, grad or otherwise, enrolled in a department's classes? Since students take classes in departments outside their majors and graduate programs, I would be concerned about these statistics. At least I would want to know exactly what is being measured and compared.
There are many ways to analyze and compare subsidies. For example, we faculty are also subsidized by the state in various ways, other than through our state funded base salaries. How do the state funded components of faculty start up packages compare across the university? Again, we may very well find that they vary considerably between departments in A&S and in the professional schools, as well as between schools. We are also likely to find that the packages granted to faculty in the sciences and engineering (a professional school) dwarf those received by faculty in the humanities. This is no doubt due, at least in part, because they include labs, but likely also related to other factors. Again what are the criteria that the campus uses to allocate state (and non-state) funding? Are they fair? Are they rational according to some logic?
It sounds like we might be trying to open a can of worms by even thinking about looking into this. What can we learn about how UC and UCB take from one pot to give to another pot that is not going to appear to threaten those that get more, while infuriating those that don't get as much?
Yet if the $/student subsidies figures that Chris N. and Charlie S. are using are disguising or distorting the reality of student subsidies, it would be good to try to figure all this out, if only for transparency's sake.
In his piece on The Cost of Undergrad Education on his website, Charlie asks:
"The new question, not previously asked, is this: Is there some logical, moral or political limit to how high student fees (tuition) could be raised at a public research university? A fee level at 100% of the actual cost of their education seems to provide a most significant boundary. Beyond that point, undergraduate students (and their parents) are being forced to not only pay for everything they get, but must also subsidize the other functions - graduate education and faculty research - which undeniably provide broad benefits to the whole public, beyond the individual student. One could call this selective taxation, privatization, or any other name you wish; but such a forced subsidization is something that deserves serious debate as a matter of public policy."
In my view we need a great deal more information before we can answer these sorts of questions. We also need to think the issue of cross subsidies through more clearly. There are all sorts of cross subsidies taking place: between departments and schools, between undergrad and grad ed. At Haas tuition is funding faculty appointments. Students take courses in other schools and departments. Several of the so called Enviro-deans subsidized the Berkeley Institute for the Environment for several years out their discretionary funds. The cross subsidies are not just monetary - they also build the "Berkeley brand." The high reputation of our graduate schools helps attract the best undergrads. Grad and UG students, alike, benefiting from having the best faculty. Buildings and rec centers are built courtesy of the tax payers via money raised by state bonds. Berkeley's world class reputation is the product of all of our strengths. We are interdependent. Berkeley itself is greater than the sum of its parts because of the all resources, publically and privately funded, that exist here in our faculty, our undergraduate and graduate students, and our staff.
Chris
UCLA Prof Michael Meranze on privatization debate
Dear All,
Colleen and Mark wondered if I might be able to provide any information on discussions at UCLA or other southern campuses similar to the issues you have been considering about the "Michigan model" or the other concerns raised in the exchanges that followed David Hollinger's post and his exchange with Chris Newfield. My initial response is that I do not have a huge amount of information to offer. As far as I can tell, the discussions here at UCLA have tended to be more fragmented (as befits a more fragmented campus) and less concrete than yours. The last of our large town hall meetings occurred before the final version of Yudof's furlough policy was announced and at that point the discussion tended to be focused on that issue and, alas, revealing the many fault lines among faculty according to discipline, seniority, budgetary source, etc. We are, as well, one of the medical school campuses so our financial arrangements make Berkeley's look like the local bank in "It's a Wonderful Life." Whether there are similar discussions about changing UCLA's financial relation with the system as a whole going on within the administration or in Senate committees I cannot say for sure. But there were some discussion about out of state students in the Spring and I would be surprised if some discussion of that was not happening at least in the administration. The independent faculty discussions that I have seen have been more along the lines of trying to think of strategies to make more apparent the worth of the University to the State as a whole. Nor am I aware of any systematic discussion at either Riverside or San Diego (although that may just be my ignorance). I have heard that Irvine recently had a faculty meeting to start discussing issues and of course Santa Barbara has been deeply involved in both analysis and activism (some around Newfield's blog). But again not along the lines that your thread seems to have pursued. The one exception to all of this, of course, has been the proposals (put forth first by the Sociologists and San Diego and then elaborated in modified form by at least some other department chairs at San Diego and by the Sociologists at UCLA) to formalize a sort of tier-system within UC. I don't think that that has gone all that far.
On the other hand, in reading the exchange between David and Chris I was struck by two different things. The first was that to a large extent they talked past each other on some substantive issues. In some ways, this situation is understandable on the part of Chris since my sense is that he was asked to respond to fiscal and funding issues rather than to the implicit aspects of David's statement. David, in turn, did not really respond to the economic issues that Chris raised (apparently none of them were surprising) and focused more on Chris' tone. But even if we all agree that more research on the funding implications of at least some of the campuses moving in a new direction on out of state students, that doesn't--as others have pointed out--exhaust the implications for the University at large or even, in the long-term for Berkeley.
David writes unabashedly as a Berkeley proponent and that provides a welcome clarity to his arguments. I will take his word that he is used to fighting off Berkeley people who are too humble about their relation to the system (although I have to say as someone who got a Ph.D. at Berkeley and have since taught at 2 other campuses for 20 years I can't recall meeting very many of those). But David assumes that one's first loyalty should be to the campus as opposed to UC (again having experience on 3 campuses may affect the way I look at this). There may very well be an argument to be made for rethinking what different campuses do within the system (as David says this is already de facto the case: we have a medical school, you don't, we have a large medical center you don't etc, Santa Cruz was designed to be different--and still is, etc) but if the question is how should the UC change to best fulfill its goals as a public university I am not sure that that decision can, or at least should, be made except through a deliberation process that would include the faculty whose lives would be being redefined. And that could not simply be the faculty at Berkeley and UCLA. I say could not in the sense of should not--obviously it could be done solely by them. But that would be a matter of power not principle. It may be that a debate within the larger community would take too long or get slogged down. But that is the risk of democratic or intellectual debate.
I was surprised by all of this because David has been a most eloquent critic of the increasing ways that Universities have allowed themselves to be reshaped by the changing configuration of outside power and capital (that was after all the point of the essay that he linked us to). But here the suggestion is that the external environment cannot be changed or challenged and that we must acquiesce and reconfigure the University. This was doubly perplexing given David's original invocation of Lowell. If ever a poem called out for not accepting the limits of the realities provided by market and state it was Lowell's Present Crisis. Instead, Lowell's was a call for thinking and agitation to change the given environment. If as Lowell said, "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-" I am not sure how having a few campuses try to rearrange the system in their own interests will change that.
Thanks for the invitation and I hope that you have success in coming up with strategies for the crisis.
Sincerely,
Michael
Colleen and Mark wondered if I might be able to provide any information on discussions at UCLA or other southern campuses similar to the issues you have been considering about the "Michigan model" or the other concerns raised in the exchanges that followed David Hollinger's post and his exchange with Chris Newfield. My initial response is that I do not have a huge amount of information to offer. As far as I can tell, the discussions here at UCLA have tended to be more fragmented (as befits a more fragmented campus) and less concrete than yours. The last of our large town hall meetings occurred before the final version of Yudof's furlough policy was announced and at that point the discussion tended to be focused on that issue and, alas, revealing the many fault lines among faculty according to discipline, seniority, budgetary source, etc. We are, as well, one of the medical school campuses so our financial arrangements make Berkeley's look like the local bank in "It's a Wonderful Life." Whether there are similar discussions about changing UCLA's financial relation with the system as a whole going on within the administration or in Senate committees I cannot say for sure. But there were some discussion about out of state students in the Spring and I would be surprised if some discussion of that was not happening at least in the administration. The independent faculty discussions that I have seen have been more along the lines of trying to think of strategies to make more apparent the worth of the University to the State as a whole. Nor am I aware of any systematic discussion at either Riverside or San Diego (although that may just be my ignorance). I have heard that Irvine recently had a faculty meeting to start discussing issues and of course Santa Barbara has been deeply involved in both analysis and activism (some around Newfield's blog). But again not along the lines that your thread seems to have pursued. The one exception to all of this, of course, has been the proposals (put forth first by the Sociologists and San Diego and then elaborated in modified form by at least some other department chairs at San Diego and by the Sociologists at UCLA) to formalize a sort of tier-system within UC. I don't think that that has gone all that far.
On the other hand, in reading the exchange between David and Chris I was struck by two different things. The first was that to a large extent they talked past each other on some substantive issues. In some ways, this situation is understandable on the part of Chris since my sense is that he was asked to respond to fiscal and funding issues rather than to the implicit aspects of David's statement. David, in turn, did not really respond to the economic issues that Chris raised (apparently none of them were surprising) and focused more on Chris' tone. But even if we all agree that more research on the funding implications of at least some of the campuses moving in a new direction on out of state students, that doesn't--as others have pointed out--exhaust the implications for the University at large or even, in the long-term for Berkeley.
David writes unabashedly as a Berkeley proponent and that provides a welcome clarity to his arguments. I will take his word that he is used to fighting off Berkeley people who are too humble about their relation to the system (although I have to say as someone who got a Ph.D. at Berkeley and have since taught at 2 other campuses for 20 years I can't recall meeting very many of those). But David assumes that one's first loyalty should be to the campus as opposed to UC (again having experience on 3 campuses may affect the way I look at this). There may very well be an argument to be made for rethinking what different campuses do within the system (as David says this is already de facto the case: we have a medical school, you don't, we have a large medical center you don't etc, Santa Cruz was designed to be different--and still is, etc) but if the question is how should the UC change to best fulfill its goals as a public university I am not sure that that decision can, or at least should, be made except through a deliberation process that would include the faculty whose lives would be being redefined. And that could not simply be the faculty at Berkeley and UCLA. I say could not in the sense of should not--obviously it could be done solely by them. But that would be a matter of power not principle. It may be that a debate within the larger community would take too long or get slogged down. But that is the risk of democratic or intellectual debate.
I was surprised by all of this because David has been a most eloquent critic of the increasing ways that Universities have allowed themselves to be reshaped by the changing configuration of outside power and capital (that was after all the point of the essay that he linked us to). But here the suggestion is that the external environment cannot be changed or challenged and that we must acquiesce and reconfigure the University. This was doubly perplexing given David's original invocation of Lowell. If ever a poem called out for not accepting the limits of the realities provided by market and state it was Lowell's Present Crisis. Instead, Lowell's was a call for thinking and agitation to change the given environment. If as Lowell said, "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-" I am not sure how having a few campuses try to rearrange the system in their own interests will change that.
Thanks for the invitation and I hope that you have success in coming up with strategies for the crisis.
Sincerely,
Michael
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