Eyewitness Description of UCLA Protests (UC-AFT Pres Bob Samuels)

UCLA made an official press release on Wed. stating that no one was tasered. They later retracted their release and said two students were tasered. Most of the students were tasered on Thurs. I know that at least one person was tasered while lying on the ground outside of the parking garage. New reports said that several people were tasered when they were escorting Yudof out. I believe there is video evidence of this.

I also have to say that what I saw on Wed, while I was negotiating with the police about allowing students back into public comments, a police officer went out of his way to intimidate and baton an African American student. If you look at the video and photo evidence, almost all of the examples of excessive policing involve students of color. This looks really bad. Also, remember that UCLA has already had a problem about tasering a student in the library.

One other personal account. I was inside the regents meeting and did a public comment. We had worked for weeks on arranging the speakers and clearing them with the regents secretary. However since the regents took an extra thirty minutes for their bathroom break, they cut off public comments before the people who were announced to speak could speak. The students and workers started to shout "let them speak." Someone announced that the meeting is now an unlawful assembly. I went to the hall to call people outside, and I was passed by police with their rifles held out in a very menacing fashion. They then arrested several students and workers. This was thurs morning.

Eyewitness Description of UCLA Protests

bservations from the student protest at UCLA on November 19th

On the way into my office yesterday, I joined the student march as they rounded Campbell Hall.  There were not many faculty in the crowd but another colleague soon joined when the student marchers stormed his class in Haines Hall. We then walked with the students through campus into Westwood and back to Covel Commons.  Throughout the march the students were bold, spirited, organized, and they chanted for more than a no vote on the fee hikes.  Rather than simply focusing on this more immediate concern, the students articulated broader claims to a strong, public education system as a fundamental right rather than a privilege and thereby located their opposition to the fee hikes within a broader movement against retrenchment and privatization in California’s public colleges and universities. Further many students criticized the state's bloated prison system as a wicked alternative to investments in schools and students.  They marched against fee hikes but they were organizing for so much more. Their commitment was made clear when several of the students put their bodies in front of a car as it tried to drive through their protest at the intersection of Westwood and Wilshire boulevards.  The driver continued to push against them until a police officer intervened, reminding the driver that his frustration over traffic was not a reasonable cause to run the students over. As the marchers continued toward Gayley, my colleague passed the driver’s car and took note of the UCLA blue parking permit hanging from his rear-view mirror, suggesting that the driver was a UCLA staff or faculty member.

When we returned to Covel Commons, the students and their labor union allies awaited the vote on the fees hikes. They made speeches, chanted, played music, and joked around. When the vote for the fee hikes was announced, the students took it in stride. No one was surprised and they quickly moved into the next planned phase of the protest by blocking all of the exits from the Covel Commons area. They were going to make the UC Regents hear their protest and make it clear that they were ready for more than a one-day action. The students chased, harassed, harangued, and hollered at anyone in a suit who left Covel Commons. “Shame on you!” they chanted while pushing against police barricades and escorts.  Even Karen Bass was caught in a crowd of students as she tried to reach her car. She spoke with the students and they let her be but most of the regents kept their eyes down as the students pushed and hollered, and as the police pushed and hollered back. The students chased one group of regents into a nearby building.  The students shouted into the building but a guard reached out and pepper sprayed the students at the door. Most students turned and ran, but one fell to the ground and laid slumped over at the door. While the students expressed their outrage, the regents were quickly evacuated through a backdoor after changing their clothes and crouching down in a getaway car.   A little while later, students chased another four regents exiting Covel to a van parked in the Sproul Hall turnaround. The regents got in the van. The students surrounded the van and sat down.  This standoff lasted quite awhile. In a heated debate, university officials asked the students to move but they refused and dozens of officers were required to escort the regents from the van to a back exit through Sproul Hall.

Within a few hours all of the regents were out of the building and many of the students boarded the buses that had brought them from across the state.  The vote on fee hikes had come and gone but the students had made clear that a committed and highly organized generation of students along with critical allies in the labor movement were going to loudly fight back against the cut backs and, in the process, make broader claims about rights and privileges in California's changing economy.

Compact, Fees Up; No Compact, Fees Up Even More

BACK
UCSC Professor Bob Meister and I were on UCPB for most of the 2000s, and have been remembering the battles we had with UCOP trying to persuade them that the Compact was bad financial math for UC. Bob had a darker take, though, and here he summarizes his many arguments with then-Budget Director Larry Hershman:

UC has certainly suffered insofar as the Regents relied on the Compact with Schwarzenegger, but they were NOT innocent victims, as Blum suggests. Schwarzenegger had a budget director who believed that the state should not "subsidize" the large number of UC students who could afford to pay much more [buy using state General Funds to keep fees low]. So Schwarzenegger offered to let UC keep it tuition increases (without imposing offsetting cuts in state funding) if UC promised to become increasingly tuition-dependant in the future. That was the real deal--a green light for Michiganization. Dynes leapt at the opportunity, and the Regents (Blum included?) went along.

This was the moment when the Regents (most?) finally signed on to the "net tuition" concept--i.e., that the real cost of UC is not the total fee, but what the median student pays net of financial aid. The compact was ESSENTIALLY an agreement between UC and the Governor to raise net tuition--otherwise increasing fees would not offset declining state support.

So the real fiscal model was to replace state financing with personal DEBT financing--parental mortgages and student loans. (The full amount of UC's planned reliance on private debt would be increased: net tuition multiplied by total enrollment.) Events have obviously derailed the Regents' plan for an increasingly debt-financed UC (to which several of us objected at the time). It remains true that Schwarzenegger's failure to fund enrollment growth has made things worse.

It was clear to Bob and I - and to other Senate members - that the Compact was a recipe for raising fees 10% every year. But under the Compact, there would also be mediocre and inadequate but nonetheless some kind of General Fund stabilization and minor growth. GF would be kept just a bit above inflation and below real cost increases. Operations were always squeezed and fees always went up, faster during cut cycles, so that cost would be shifted from the public to the private user. This was not a political decision or popular desire, but an effect of budgetary engineering that originated in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance and his appointed director, Donna Arduin.

Public cuts could mathematically be offset with high fees, but these were undesirable and politically unpopular. What we got instead were fee increases of 2 to three times the rate of inflation every year, coupled with general fund increases that didn't cover increased costs. There was the appearance of normalcy but no improvement, especially given constant (and often unfunded) enrollment growth. Ambitious leaders of smaller units who could do the math raised fees enormously: Berkeley Law's fees rounded $30,000 a couple of years ago and are heading for $40,000.

Were UC to keep its current financial structure and maintain quality by charging adequate fees, and use fees to make up the whole shortfall (no furloughs, etc.), fees would go next year to $14,500. Charles Reed has already announced a similar program at CSU - meaning that the Governor's 20% one-year cuts mean CSU fees will climb in one year by 30%.

My ideal: UC Regents find their nerve and announce true fees - $14,500. They accompany this with announced upgrades in the undergraduate programs. Students, parents, and the public balk when they finally see a real number of what a Michigan-style semi-privatized but high-quality university actually costs. They get upset and fly into action which causes media coverage and turns the downgrading of UC into a statewide story. This persuades legislators to restore public funds. This in turn stimulates a discussion of how public cuts raise private costs, and that public services are a more efficient way than for-payment contracts for delivering common goods like an educated public.

UCOP says this will never work but it has yet to be tried.

The state

I'll try not to get carried away. In the meantime, think $14,500 - and how to avoid it with something besides crappifying UC.


BACK TO POST
BACK TO BLOG