Education Uber Alles

Posted by The Editor on Nov 27, 2009 in From The Editor's Desk | 1 comment

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”
—Abraham Lincoln

The recent round of student protests and building take-overs at campuses across the University of California system this week have been both inspiring and heart-breaking. The devastating and unprecedented 32 percent increase in student “fees” (the UC system’s way of getting around using the word “tuition”) approved by the UC regents on November 19 reminds us of just how short-sighted, stupid, and callous most university administrations have been in their response to state budget cuts across the country. Instead of standing up to Sacramento and demanding restoration of cuts, UC President Mark Yudof told reporters after the vote: “Our hand has been forced. When you don’t have any money, you don’t have any money.” This is, of course, easy for Mr. Yudof to say whose first year salary was $828,000 and whose $10,000 a month house in Oakland, the New York Times reports, is entirely paid for by the University.
Instead of throwing up his hands and saying there is nothing he can do, why did Yudof not threaten to resign? Why not encourage the regents, all of them who voted for this disastrous increase, to do the same and resign unless the state restores the cuts? Why not work with his students to oppose these cuts rather than kowtowing to the whims of the state? The answers to these questions are clear: because the governance of the UC system, like so many university systems across the nation, is such that administrators and regents and presidents and trustees see themselves as somehow at odds with the faculty and students whom they are supposed to serve. The trend of corporate-structured oversight of public universities has brought those institutions to their knees and until this is changed there is little hope that these kinds of cuts will not continue.
Equally heartbreaking was the relatively low turnout in response to these increases. Instead of thousands, even tens of thousands of students protesting at every campus across the UC, the biggest protests never reached more than 1,500 people and although some campus buildings were taken over and strikes called, they seem to be having little impact on the actual functioning of the schools, which continued with their business as usual, despite the noise of protest all around.
Nonetheless, these demonstrations were inspiring for several reasons. First of all, despite the relatively low numbers (considering the nature of the increases), the protests were aggressive and vocal and received an enormous amount of national and local press. At UCLA on the day of the vote, protestors attempted to block vans bringing the regents onto the campus, heckled regents as they crossed the university toward the meeting site, were maced and beaten by police, and then after the vote, surrounded the building linked arm in arm, refusing to let the regents leave for more than three hours before they were dispersed by police in riot gear. Simultaneously, students across the system, including Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Cruz began large protests and building takeovers. Until Saturday night, administrative buildings and classrooms were still being occupied on several campuses. More than seventy students at UC Santa Cruz were arrested Sunday morning after a three day takeover of a building there, where they were in close negotiations with the UCSC administration over demands. These responses show that students are ready and willing to put their bodies and their futures on the line against the police and the callous UC administration. In resisting these tuition hikes as they have, the UC students have managed to raise the bar yet again, setting a very different kind of precedent, which might well be the start of a much bigger, more organized and, more permanent form of campus resistance.
But what does all of this mean for us? What lessons can we at CUNY take from these protests and demonstrations? After all, we are also facing yet another round of tuition increases, cuts, layoffs, and service reductions. What can and should we be doing now to prepare to resist these cuts? The first thing to be learned from the UC protests is that there is strength in numbers and any successful student protest campaign must make sure that it has the support of a majority of the student body and that those students are fully educated as to the nature of the protests and why those protests are in their best interest. One of the most disheartening things about following these protests were the number of UC students who seemed unconcerned about the cuts or who were actively angry at the protestors for disrupting the campus. While this may not have been the majority of students, the fact is that many students, for whatever reason, still went to class, and still allowed the university to keep functioning. Why they were not with their fellow students on the lawns protesting or at least refusing to attend class is a mystery, but the fact is that without the support of these groups no protest will be truly successful.
In addition to recruiting students to the cause, it is imperative that any campus resistance also include a good share of professors and lecturers who are willing to call in sick, cancel classes, or hold classes off campus until demands are met. Although a handful of radical UC professors vowed to do this (three of them actually appearing live on Democracy Now! to announce their intentions to honor the strike) they seem to have had little impact so far, and as we go to press on there have been few reports of any significant continuing protest on any of the UC campuses.
The other big lesson to take away from these events is that university administrations clearly do not care about the interests or the welfare of the students they represent. Not only did President Yudof and the regents refuse to do anything to stop the cuts, they allowed campus presidents and UC police to brutally disband several of the protests and building takeovers. At Berkeley, police in riot gear shoved and dragged students out of Wheeler Hall, while students at UCLA were maced, beaten with billy clubs and otherwise harassed by police. Some students are even facing charges of felony burglary for refusing to leave Wheeler Hall. This kind of zero tolerance, life-destroying retribution sends a chilling signal to all of the other students who might be tempted to protest or disrupt campus activities as a form of political action.
Surely the situation is dire for students across the country and it is becoming increasingly clear that dealing with the attacks on public education one extraordinary case at a time may not be the best strategy. Perhaps it is time that students began to create and re-create national student resistance organizations in response to the budget cuts and tuition hikes that are afflicting campuses everywhere. These organizations should not only be ready to organize and help coordinate massive student strikes, walkouts, and building takeovers, but should encourage higher education unions to form solidarity coalitions in an effort to tackle these problems at the legislative level as well. These organizations must agitate not only for laws that limit tuition increases and guarantee funding, but must also push for new legislation to reform university governance at large state and city university systems like UC, CUNY, and SUNY. While legislative action is often slow and full of awful compromise, when backed up with a powerful movement willing to put bodies on the street, and willing to face arrest and police brutality, it can be a powerful tool for creating real change. “Students and workers united,” as one recent protest chant put it, “will never be defeated.”
Whatever the strategy, though, it is clear that something significant must be done soon to end the economic violence against the working and middle classes. The creeping decades-long trend of budget cuts, even during periods of so-called “economic growth,” has seriously and perhaps irreversibly undermined the very foundations of public higher education. The students at UC are not only fighting for their own educations but are also fighting to insure that their children will someday have access to the excellent and affordable education they deserve.