The UC Administration Pressures Faculty to Join It In Opposing GSR Unionization (SB 259)

Many of you will be familiar with a bill that recently made it through the California state legislature: SB 259, which would allow graduate student researchers (GSRs) at public universities to unionize. It passed the state senate on August 23 and has been sent to the desk of Governor Jerry Brown for a signature. Living up to all of our expectations, the UC administration -- like many other universities across the country -- has come out in public opposition to the bill, urging Brown not to sign it. A number of predictably managerial arguments have been enlisted, such as the fact that this could cost the UC $10-18 million a year, as UC spokesperson Dianne Klein put it, without yielding "significant benefit." It goes without saying that the university's 14,000 GSRs might see things somewhat differently. Notably, the UC Berkeley Faculty Association has also come out in support of the bill, deftly critiquing the administration's arguments and "affirm[ing] the right of all employees to organize and . . . the importance of Graduate Student Researchers helping to shape the contract stipulating conditions of their work." [Update: the Council of UC Faculty Associations has written a letter as well.]

For obvious reasons, the UC administration doesn't want any push back from its faculty. This is because the faculty play a key role in the administration's media strategy to defeat SB 259, according to which it's not really a question of profitability but rather one of maintaining the pleasant relationship between GSRs and the professors they work for: "extending collective bargaining rights to graduate student researchers would change the relationship between these students and their professors from an academic mentee/mentor relationship to a professional employee/employer relationship."

It appears that the administration is doubling down. What follows is an email sent yesterday by Jeff Gibeling, the Dean of Graduate Studies at UC Davis, to the Academic Senate. In it, he lays out the UC administration's case against SB 259 and "suggests" that faculty members write to the governor to voice their opposition. He also attached a document containing the administration's talking points as well as a letter from UC president Mark Yudof to Brown. Toward the end of the email, almost as an afterthought, comes the following line: "you are, of course free to express that position as well - notwithstanding that it is different from the official UC position." Of course, this brings up a series of questions about whether recommending and facilitating your employees taking a specific position of a piece of public legislation is legal, and what constitutes implicit coercion. At the very least, it reveals just how desperate the administration is.

From: "Gibeling, Jeffery"
Subject: Legislation Affecting Graduate Student Researchers
Date: September 7, 2012 11:05:42 AM PDT
To: "academic-senate@ucdavis.edu"

Dear Academic Senate Colleagues

In the past, the Public Employment Relations Board has interpreted state law in such a way that Graduate Student Researchers were deemed to be students rather than employees, hence ineligible to be represented under a collective bargaining agreement. Recently, legislation that would extend collective bargaining rights to GSRs (SB 259) has moved through the legislative process. It has passed through the State Senate and the State Assembly and has been forwarded to Governor Brown. He has 12 days from last Wednesday to act on the legislation (sign or veto). The text of the bill is available at http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201120120SB259&search_keywords=).

The University administration has officially taken a stand in opposition to the bill as described in the attached talking points and letter from President Yudof to the Governor. Last year, the systemwide Academic Senate also took a position to oppose this bill (http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/AcademicSenPositiononSB259_REVISED_050411.pdf).

Some of the concerns are that under a collective bargaining agreement, compensation for GSR’s could be forced to be the same across all disciplines and all campuses. This change would impact our ability to offer competitive stipends that vary by discipline. A collective bargaining agreement might potentially result in fewer UC graduate researchers being hired due to the additional requirements that will likely be imposed as part of a union contract. Moreover, a union contract may seek limits on working hours during a given period, preventing well-intentioned graduate students from pursuing their research and degree objectives as they see fit. The costs associated with implementing the collective bargaining process will also draw away from UC campuses some resources that could otherwise be devoted to providing direct services to students. While I agree that the cost and workload issues are important, my greatest concern is the potentially damaging effect that this change in relationship between graduate students and their faculty mentors may have on our graduate students and our programs.

I anticipate that some faculty will have concerns about this legislation. If you wish to express your opposition, you may want to visit the website:
http://www.ucforcalifornia.org/uc4ca/home/opposeSB259 and consider sending an email or making a phone call to Governor Jerry Brown and asking him to veto SB 259. I also recognize that some faculty colleagues may support this legislation, and you are, of course free to express that position as well - notwithstanding that it is different from the official UC position. Following is the contact information for the Governor and key advisors on this matter:

· Governor Brown: (916) 445-2841
· Nancy McFadden: Executive Secretary to the Governor: (916) 445-2841, nancy.mcfadden@gov.ca.gov
· David Lanier, Chief Deputy Legislative Secretary, Office of the Governor: (916) 445-4341, david.lanier@gov.ca.gov
· Marty Morgenstern, Secretary of Labor & Workforce Development: (916) 327-9064, marty.morgenstern@labor.ca.gov

If you have an opinion on this matter, you may wish to make your views known to the Governor.

Sincerely,

Jeff Gibeling


Jeffery C. Gibeling
Dean--Graduate Studies
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
phone: (530) 752-2050
FAX: (530) 752-6222

The Invisibility of Corporatization: On Sullivan and the Board of Visitors

The firestorm over the firing of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan continues. Yesterday, hours after thousands of students, faculty, and workers held a demonstration in support of Sullivan, the Board of Visitors named Carl P. Zeithaml, head of the McIntire School of Commerce at UVA, interim president. Calling for the resignation of the head of the Board of Visitors, the faculty senate has planned a vigil that will take place this afternoon. And the word "GREEED" was graffitied in red dye on the columns of the Rotunda, the central building on campus.

Most commentators have framed the conflict between President Sullivan and the Board of Visitors as one of "broad philosophical differences," namely a tension between the "university" values of the former and the "business" values of the latter, made up of real estate speculators, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers. One of the earliest articles to publicize what was happening, written by UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, praised Sullivan's leadership skills and vision for the university, while criticizing the language used by members of the Board to describe what they saw as her faults: concepts like "strategic dynamism" imported from the world of business. Vaidhyanathan writes, "The inappropriateness of applying concepts designed for firms . . . to a massive and contemplative institution as a university should be clear to anyone who does not run a hedge fund or make too much money." Similarly, David Silbey ridicules the emphasis on "strategic dynamism" and the "cultural obsession with the market" that exists here in the US, asserting that "If business and academia function exactly as they should, especially if they function exactly as they should, they are antithetical to each other." And David Karpf goes over the same argument once again in a piece published today. After noting the resignation of Vice Rector Mark Kington, one of the plotters involved in the backroom coup against Sullivan, he writes:

Much has been made of the strategic mumblespeak offered by Rector Helen Dragas. After two years on the job, President Sullivan had not demonstrated enough "strategic dynamism." She apparently was forging an incremental path for moving Mr. Jefferson's University into the future. The big donors on the Board of Visitors wanted her to run UVA more like a business.

It is certainly true that the importation of concepts from the business world, the corporatization of the university, the privatization of public education, and the financialization of everything have caused innumerable problems at public universities, none more significant than the $1 trillion of student debt that has placed students in a state of indentured servitude. But there's a serious problem with the way these arguments are being framed. Administrators have been running universities like businesses for decades. For this reason, the conflict between President Sullivan and the Board of Visitors is not a question of running the university "more" or "less" like a business. It is not a conflict between good, old-fashioned "university values" on one hand and nonsensical or inapplicable "business values" on the other. It is rather a conflict between competing business models.

President Sullivan herself has long been applying the language of business to the public universities where she's served as an administrator -- UT Austin, University of Michigan, and University of Virginia -- all sites of intense privatization during Sullivan's time there. Indeed, this is precisely why the Board of Visitors hired her in the first place. In his piece, Vaidhyanathan praises Sullivan's administrative prowess by noting that, once established at UVA, "she had her team and set about reforming and streamlining the budget system, a process that promised to save money and clarify how money flows from one part of the university to another. This was her top priority. It was also the Board of Visitor’s top priority." Initially, at least, all actors were in agreement with regard to the need to rationalize the university's money flows.

Over the course of two pieces at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jack Stripling outlines Sullivan's proposal for a "more decentralized budget model" in a little more detail. "Often described as 'responsibility center management' or 'RCM,' the model allows individual academic units to retain the revenues they generate." In the other article, he continues:

Ms. Sullivan's signature effort over the last year was a reinvention of Virginia's budgeting model. . . . Versions of the model are employed by a number of elite institutions, including Harvard University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Ms. Sullivan was provost before she came to Virginia.

Ms. Sullivan's faculty supporters say her two-year tenure did not allow enough time to test the model, which is designed to promote creativity and entrepreneurship among departments that will benefit directly from money-making programs.

RCM was pioneered at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s and from there began to spread. By 1997, a survey found that approximately 16 percent of public universities and 31 percent of private universities had fully or partly implemented RCM. Since then, its reach has only continued to grow. Major universities that now use RCM include University of Toronto, University of Michigan, USC,  University of Indiana, University of New Hampshire, Kent State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Iowa. As of fiscal year 2012, University of Arizona and and the University of Washington both have plans to implement RCM.

In his book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, David Kirp tracks the rise of RCM, focusing especially on the experience at USC. He writes:

Proponents [of RCM] contend that a university should be run like a firm, in which every academic unit carries its weight financially. In business terms, that means each unit is expected to be a profit center. Whether it's the college of arts and sciences, the dental school, or the business school, the costs -- which include salaries, space, and the like -- cannot exceed the revenues, whether raised through tuition, contracts, grants, or gifts. A school that runs a surplus gets to keep it, while a school with a deficit has to pay it back.

(...)

Though this sounds arcane, the stakes are high. The debate over the wisdom of running a university according to the principles of the corporate profit center is in essence a contest of worldviews. It is an argument between those who believe that the citizens of a university are members of a company whose chief mission is to maximize dollar profits and those committed to the idea of the university as a community in which "gift relationships" are the norm. (pp. 115-16)

What's interesting about this formulation is how much it resonates with the standard story about Sullivan's ouster. What appears here as a "contest of worldviews," one essentially corporate and the other essentially academic, is resurrected in a very different context today. Its appearance is the same, but on scratching the surface it becomes clear that the goalposts have shifted, that the worldview that Kirp identified as so clearly corporate and inappropriate to the university context has simply become part of the norm, a principle so obvious that it no longer seems out of place or offends. In a way, this invisibility, the fact that so many critics have missed the fact that Sullivan's leadership, like that of the Board of Visitors, is informed by business practices, is one effect of privatization -- we no longer recognize it even when it's right in front of our eyes.

The structural logic of administration makes it impossible for university administrators today to opt out. No university president, however independent, can hold out for long against the pressures of the academic market. It doesn't make sense to criticize the corporate "mumblespeak" of the strategically dynamic Board of Visitors without at the same time understanding that President Sullivan not only used such language herself but made its implementation at UVA the "signature effort" of her presidency.

Sullivan's ouster was not the result of a clash of worldviews, academic and corporate. It wasn't about running UVA "more" like a business. It was a conflict, rather, between different business models that could not be effectively brought together. That's why bringing Sullivan back, as the faculty senate hopes to do, will not keep the market out of the university. It's not administrators but students and workers that are fighting privatization and austerity at every step of the way. Only by eliminating the administrative class can a new kind of university emerge.

The Structural Logic of Administration: Notes on the Ouster of UVA President Teresa Sullivan

The recent ouster of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, engineered by the real estate developers, hedge fund managers, and former Goldman Sachs partners who sit on the Board of Visitors (analogous to the notoriously corrupt UC Regents), has gotten a lot of attention and generated significant outcry over the past few days. The story is clear: as reported yesterday in the Washington Post, Sullivan was forced out because she was seen as resistant to austerity measures:

Leaders of the university’s governing board ousted Sullivan last week largely because of her unwillingness to consider dramatic program cuts in the face of dwindling resources and for her perceived reluctance to approach the school with the bottom-line mentality of a corporate chief executive. . . . Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

This detailed analysis of the situation, by Doctor Cleveland, outlines three specific areas that the Board of Visitors was pushing: 1) online education; 2) high-profile faculty recruitment; and 3) "Program Prioritization," in other words shifting funds from certain unfavored programs to other favored programs that the Board has deemed more valuable -- despite the fact that these programs are actually less profitable. "Program prioritization allows the central administration to take money from profitable units and redirect it to unprofitable units that the administration favors."

All of this, of course, resonates strongly with the policies that the UC administration and the UC Regents have sought to implement since the 1990s and at an accelerated pace over the last decade. Programs like "Operational Excellence" serve as a framework through which the administration can cut salaries and fire workers in the name of "streamlining" and "efficiency," while giving themselves raises and hiring ever more "deans, deanlets, and deanlings" who fill the bloated bureaucratic ranks to the point that senior managers now officially outnumber faculty at the UC. Academic programs have been cut and consolidated, class sizes have increased, out-of-state students are being accepted at higher rates, and everybody's tuition is skyrocketing.

But there's an important point from the experience of anti-privatization struggle at the UC that has so far been missing from the discussion. One of the earliest articles published on the topic, by UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, accurately likened the Board of Visitors to "robber barons" who have "tr[ied] to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris." (These words would do equally well slapped across the foreheads of Dick Blum et al.) But Vaidhyanathan frames his argument as a defense of President Sullivan:

Sullivan is an esteemed sociologist who specialized in class dynamics and the role of debt in society. The author or co-author of six books, she spent most of her career rising through the ranks at the University of Texas, where she served as dean of the graduate school while I was working toward my Ph.D. in the late 1990s. She was known around Texas as a straightforward, competent, and gregarious leader. She carried that reputation from Texas to the University of Michigan, the premier public research university in the world, where she served as the chief academic officer, or provost, for four years.

When the University of Virginia sought a president to lift it from the ranks of an outstanding undergraduate school to a research powerhouse, while retaining its commitment to students and the enlightenment Jeffersonian traditions on which it was founded, the board selected Sullivan in 2010. She became the first woman to serve as president of UVA, a place she could not have attended as an undergraduate in the 1960s because it was all-male at the time.

Sullivan, in other words, is the administrator's administrator. Since the 1990s, she has occupied increasingly senior administrative positions at UT Austin and University of Michigan before being hired by UVA. Vaidhyanathan lists these positions as a way of praising Sullivan's qualifications, but the dark underside of his story is that these flagship universities are precisely the ones that have implemented some of the most wide-ranging privatization policies over the last two decades -- precisely when Sullivan was entering into the administrative ranks. It's no coincidence that Mark Yudof was dean from 1984-1994, then executive vice president and provost from 1994-1997 at UT Austin, before becoming chancellor of the University of Minnesota then president of the UC. And the University of Michigan has become a model for the privatization of public research universities across the country.

Sullivan's own policies may not have been too far out of line with the austerity agenda of our own UC administration. Vaidhyanathan writes, once again intending it as a compliment, that once established at UVA "she had her team and set about reforming and streamlining the budget system, a process that promised to save money and clarify how money flows from one part of the university to another. This was her top priority. It was also the Board of Visitor’s top priority." She may have had different ideas about how to go about making these cuts, but at the end of the day her agenda also turned on its own set of cutbacks.

Furthermore, over the last two years, that is, in each year of her term, President Sullivan has overseen substantial tuition increases: 9.9 percent for in-state students (6 percent for out-of-state) in 2011, and another 8 percent for in-state (6.9 percent for out-of-state) in 2012. In a familiar twist, part of the money raised from the tuition hikes went directly to fund the operation of new buildings. In total, that made eight consecutive years of tuition increases of "somewhere below 10 percent."

No doubt real tensions existed between Sullivan and the Board of Visitors. And it seems clear that, beyond "philosophical differences," these tensions had to do with divergent views regarding what was seen as the appropriate pace of and sites for cuts. But for those of us on the ground at the UC, the public response -- calls to "reopen discussion" about Sullivan's resignation, even votes of no confidence in the Board of Visitors' decision -- seems somewhat misdirected. The removal of the president was sketchy as hell and the Board of Visitors is clearly corrupt, but the answer to the university in crisis is not more or even "better" administrators. "Better" administrators just mean that the implementation of privatization is smoother, if slower. But at the UC we have learned that it is a mistake to think of administrators as individuals: "This struggle against the administration is not about attacking individuals -- or not primarily. It is about the administrative logic of privatization, and the manner in which that logic is enforced." Sometimes this logic is enforced by riot cops, other times by billionaires on the Boards of Visitors. Sullivan's ouster must be read as a necessary result of this administrative logic, the same pressures that push administrators across the country to adopt, implement, and enforce similar policies. Once begun, privatization demands continual blood. But if Sullivan were to return to office, she would face the same economic pressures and would be forced, sooner or later, to accede to them.

The argument is structural; that the administrator plays, and must play, a particular role in the management of the late capitalist university. It's not by chance that across the US all universities (certainly all public universities) are moving in the same directions: massive tuition hikes and corporate fund-raising campaigns, new construction projects to bring in grants and rich students, worker layoffs while adding to the bloated ranks of the administration. If the capitalist is capital personified, the late capitalist administrator is the personification of austerity.

The only way to stop the privatization of the public university is to take it back from the administrative class whose existence depends on its continuation.

NO REGENTS / NO VISITORS / NO CAPITAL / NO BOSSES

UC Considering Another Round of Tuition Hikes [Updated]

More tuition hikes are on the horizon:

University of California students could face significantly higher tuition if the state doesn't increase funding and voters don't approve the governor's tax initiative.

University officials are considering a plan to raise tuition by 6 percent this fall if the state doesn't increase funding by $125 million for 2012-13.

Administrators say the 10-campus system would need to consider a mid-year tuition increase in the "range of double digits" or make drastic campus cuts if voters don't pass Gov. Jerry Brown's tax plan in November.

The tuition plans were outlined in an agenda for a UC Board of Regents meeting that was posted online Monday.

Board members are scheduled to discuss various tuition scenarios when they meet in Sacramento on May 16. No action is expected until July.

[Update Wednesday 6/9 4:43pm]: Chris Newfield analyzes some of the possible tuition scenarios here:

The document identifies a current year shortfall of $847M, and a $1 billion shortfall next year -- even assuming the Governor's small January revenue increases and further efficiency savings. Existing budget parameters build in further cuts in what we cannot cut without irreparable harm. Cutting the uncuttable is what we do at UC -- now on an annual basis. This document shows that we will be doing it again next year, even though we can't.

The Governor's May Revise may buy out the tuition increase that you haven't heard about, defined here as 6% for next year.

In Scenario A, in which good revenue numbers come in, the state provides an additional $125.4 M to avoid this increase. As the UCLA FA blog has pointed out, receipts are actually behind projections. This increases the likelihood of Scenario B, which is the 6% increase. Looming in the background is the unidentified Scenario C, in which revenues are behind, the November tax increases fail, UC is subject to a further $200 M cut, and that tuition increase is doubled to at least the low double digits. 12% would bring the base tuition to about $13,700 next year, plus the "Student Services Fee" of $972, and campus fees -- check out the many fees! -- that would bring tuition to about $17,000 for in state students.

Reflections from UC Davis: On Academic Freedom and Campus Militarization

 

The following article by Joshua Clover was just published in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies. A PDF of the article is available here. We recommend reading it next to the latest piece from Nathan Brown, "Administrative Totalitarianism at the UC and the Necessity of Direct Action by Faculty."

The autumn of 2011 offered extraordinary images of police brutality against students (and not students alone) on University of California campuses. Two stand out, both seemingly following on from the national Occupy movement. On November 9, students attempting to ‘occupy’ a grassy area at the edge of Berkeley’s famed Sproul Plaza, next to the Mario Savio Steps, were batoned by riot police summoned to campus by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, first during the day, and then again that night when Occupy Cal returned. In no small part because a couple of professors were among the beaten, the event became a national news story. This would pale in comparison to events on the Davis campus nine days later, when a low-key tent occupation on the quad — Occupy UC Davis — was broken up by riot police summoned by Chancellor Linda Katehi from three jurisdictions. The images of one corpulent and distressingly nonchalant officer disbursing military-grade pepper spray to the faces of a couple dozen seated students would swiftly become one of the iconic images of the year, not just for the campus or the university but globally.

In train, there has been considerable discussion of removing the Chancellors who either authorized such actions or were too incapable to command the situation adequately. There has also been a perhaps more consequential debate around the presence of police on college campuses, regarding either their presence per se (for those familiar with the internationally and historically common situation of police-free universities), or in terms of their increasingly militarized form. And these changes in campus dynamics — toward the heavy hand bearing advanced weaponry — have prompted concerns about the implications for the intellectual and academic pursuits of the university, and what we might expect to develop from here.

I want to argue as directly as possible that grasping this new security regime as primarily pertinent to campus intellectual climate is misguided. While this line of inquiry is no trivial matter, it confuses and obscures core issues.

The confusion comes from two entangled commonplaces regarding these dramatic events (and others like them in kind, if not in media saturation). The first is the assumption that we can identify in each case a two-part sequence of cause and effect, in which students protest and police overreact disastrously. The second (with evident implications for the question of academic freedom tout court), is that this to-and-fro is to be conceived exclusively as a freedom of speech issue.

These assumptions form a unity. In this understanding, students first protest, as students are wont to do. The question arises as to the limits of protest, and to what extent certain actions — in this case, politicized camping — count as protected speech. ‘Time, place, and manner’ provisions are invoked; the police are summoned, heavy with tools. Orders to disperse are given, no dispersal is forthcoming, and then the intolerable thing happens, and everyone scrambles to understand and manage the aftermath.

There can be no doubt that these ‘overreactions’ are judiciously calculated to produce a chilling effect on student struggle. As with the endless nuisance charges levied against student (and other) organizers, they are designed to exhaust resources, both inner and material. And further there can be no doubt that this chilling effect spills over to the entire campus. In this sense it is certainly reasonable to consider the implications of these actions for free thought and intellectual exploration.

But there are also good reasons — better reasons, I believe — not to shift the debate onto the terrain of thought, ideas, expression, and so forth. It has suited all sides to allow that this drama revolves around First Amendment issues. Under considerable internal and external pressure, both Chancellors conceded that in these cases, the riot police may indeed have curtailed what really should be protected rights of speech and assembly. Katehi insisted (twice; she is in the habit of using the same formulaic language in multiple press releases) that: “Our campus is committed to providing a safe environment for all to learn freely and practice their civil rights of freedom of speech and expression” (2011a, 2011b); her counterpart at Berkeley, Chancellor Birgeneau, extolled the same virtues. Meanwhile, students did not hesitate to pillory both administrations for having failed the Bill of Rights, while dismayed if still-timorous faculty demanded that Birgeneau “respect freedom of speech and assembly on the Berkeley campus” (UC Berkeley Academic Senate 2011).

The fantasy at play here is that what has gone wrong somehow concerns the excessive assertion of First Amendment rights by students, or conversely, the excessive limiting of same by the administration. The logical remedy is inevitably discovered to be a rebalancing of these matters, extending adequate protections to ‘protest’ and ‘expression’ as abstract ends in and of themselves.

The underlying reality is radically different. What must first be recognized is that in neither case did we see the abstract two-part motion, protest/repression. The unity of each event is considerably more concrete: administrations must deploy force to implement austerity policies. The initiating acts were not student protests but university policies designed to assure that the costs of running an educational system increasingly devolve to students, who are at once ever more compelled to pursue higher education for competitive advantage in a forbidding employment landscape, and concomitantly less able to afford the same without increased debt and workloads.

This misrecognition of the sequence of substantive events is compounded by another, whereby the campus protests are presented as arising from the charisma of Occupy Wall Street and the ensuing national movement over the course of the preceding months. As the Occupy movement has not made a significant issue of education, and as students (especially at purportedly elite or top-tier universities) are often thought to be cushioned at least temporarily from the buffets of the economy (especially the employment market), the inference is frequently drawn that the campus variants of Occupy are lacking real content of their own, and are thus reducible to protest for the sake of protest.

What is forgotten is that the Occupy movement, doubtless inspired by 2010’s ‘Arab Spring’ and Europe’s ‘Movement of the Squares,’ has its local roots in recent US campus organizing, specifically the anti-privatization campaigns of 2009-2010 on UC campuses. They have been ongoing if uneven, and characterized throughout by police violence. The shock over recent events at Berkeley and Davis this November must be taken with a grain of salt. After all, only two Novembers before, both Chancellors called riot police from multiple jurisdictions onto the same campuses to break up anti-privatization occupations. Both times, the police attacked non-violent protestors, and lawsuits are still pending. In short, we are looking at a clearly defined confrontation that has been in progress for some time, on the concrete terrain of economic crisis — not a timeless confrontation between academic freedom and policing, on the abstract terrain of rights.

So we might say that a mistaken assessment of the sequence of events, both this November and over the last few years, allows for a misrecognition of the fundamental issue.This seems perhaps a neutral slippage; aren’t rights good for everyone? However, this reflexive motion — in which future political organizing and action turns on itself to address the formal conditions of previous actions rather than the preceding causes — in actuality serves the university administration admirably by displacing the debate into the arena of form rather than content. The administration can offer a remedy, with tonalities of magnanimous self-correction: they can promise to be more thoughtful and diligent about respecting the right to protest, and thus seem to slip out of their position in the struggle, that is, as enthusiastic co-authors of the privatization process. They themselves turn to become a context, not a class antagonist.

This is indeed precisely what has happened. One suspects there will be some payouts to injured students, and that a cop or two will be pastured. And the matter will be tentatively resolved, despite the economic content remaining entirely unaddressed; thus, the administration wins by ‘losing.’

One can see that this movement has become a substantial quagmire for the professoriat within this political cycle: what is sometimes called ‘the articulation trap.’ It is a double truism of the faculty member’s position, especially the professor’s, that she is not identified clearly with either side of the current struggle between the economic interests of students and administrators; at the same time, her job’s basic supposition (especially in the humanities) is that position-taking is itself an action. These two factors supply a powerful if implicit determination toward intervening not by entering into the content of this struggle, but by offering, at a remove, often-eloquent assessments that tend toward seemingly neutral ethical (or pseudo-ethical) categories like rights and freedoms. I fear we professors are quite often guilty of looking for our car-keys under the streetlight — that is, participating in this particular antagonism in the ways we are best equipped for, rather than in the ways that the conditions and goals demand.

In thinking about campus militarization, UCSC professor Bob Meister provides an extraordinarily useful account of the relation between campus securitization and securitization of university economies, as they have recently developed. In his talk on “Debt, Democracy, and the Public University,” he sets forth the cruel historical developments through which William Bratton was retained to lead the investigation into the pepper spray incident, and what it reveals about “the link between the privatization of public universities, the financial services industry and the national security industry” (Meister 2011). Meister observes that:

Since 9/11 the US defense industry of the Cold War has morphed from being mainly in the military hardware business into a new role as global provider of security services that enables government and corporations throughout the world to outsource intelligence, policing, background checks, construction of secure sites and various operations that may need to be deniable — as well as the public relations efforts necessary to support such deniability.

Most Americans do not know that there is a huge domestic market for services provided by the defense industry....The fastest growing market for the defense and security services industry is in the area of local government and public agencies that feel threatened by political protests, such as the Occupy movement, and that have reporting and other obligations under the Patriot Act. Former LA Police Chief William Bratton was hired to build this market for Kroll Security by its parent company, Altegrity, a defense contractor that is itself now owned by a private equity firm that also invests in both for-profit higher education and financial services (Meister 2011).

While the specifics of such connections inevitably vary from place to place and situation to situation, the systemic logic is plain enough. Heightened campus security is inextricably linked to heightened campus securitization in its two main forms: the decision of universities to pursue a certain line of investment strategies which move money away from educational services and into capital projects; and the corresponding decision to cover those educational costs by shifting burdens to students at a rate which can only be financed though student loans, concomitantly providing profitable investment for banks laden with otherwise fallow capital. The rise in tuition and indebtedness within the context of economic crisis simply is the militarization of campus; they are one and the same.

It is impossible to conclude other than this: even if one does adhere to the belief that the matters of intellectual freedom, free speech, and free assembly are fundamental to this unfolding political economic sequence, the place where such things will be arbitrated is not on their own terrain — the terrain of formal rights — but elsewhere. The necessary arena in which such rights might be protected presently and for the longer durée is the arena of direct antagonism between, on the one side, those fighting against backdoor privatization and austerity programs on campus, and on the other, those who implement and enforce them. This is not a rhetorical struggle, and moreover, the retreat into the sphere of articulation risks affirming the misrecognition of the struggle’s character. Such formal rights are far less an enabling condition for this struggle than an outcome of its material content.

Professors: stand with your students, literally. It is the best thing to be done for academic freedom; it is the least you can do for them.

UC Berkeley Capital Projects, Stadium Edition

The Wall Street Journal reports on the UC Berkeley administration's disastrous plans for financing the renovation of the football stadium. In short, the brilliant idea was to raise $270 million from the sale of seats, presumably to its hyper-rich, 1-percent alumni. As one might expect, things didn't quite work out as our highly-paid financial managers imagined: only $31 million (about 11 percent of the total) was raised over a period of three years, leaving us about $240 million in the hole.

Wonder who's going to get stuck footing the bill...

Although its $321 million price tag would make it one of the most expensive renovations in college sports history, the university said the project would be funded privately, largely through long-term seat sales and naming rights.

But three years into the fund-raising effort, a projected $270 million from the sale of seats has failed to materialize. At the end of December, the school had collected only $31 million in the first three years of the sale. Now it has become clear that the university will have to borrow the vast majority of the money.

In recent interviews, university officials acknowledge that if revenue projections fall short and won't cover the bond payments, the shortfall "would have to come from campus."

The idea that money for the football stadium could come from campus funds, which include student fees, is an admission likely to stir outrage at a school that's already facing possible double-digit tuition increases. "It is disconcerting that the university may be gambling with student fees and other academic funds to cover a massive financial commitment for a football stadium," said Cal computer-science professor Brian Barsky.

(...)

The nearly half-billion-dollar Cal athletic project encompasses a $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium that opens Sept. 1 and $153 million for a new multisport training facility. That's far more than Stanford University spent building a new stadium in 2006.

In public pitches for the project starting in 2006, university officials talked about raising hundreds of millions through an "Endowment Seating Program" that was to endow all 29 of Cal's varsity sports and more yet by selling naming rights to various components of the stadium. The official name will remain Memorial in honor of war veterans. But the economic downturn hindered sales and by November 2010, [Sandy] Barbour [Cal's athletic director] had posted online a letter to fans saying she was "heartbroken that the program's intentions will, in all likelihood, not be fully realized."

The total bonded debt for the project, including the training center, will be $447 million. That's apparently an unprecedented amount of borrowing for a college-sports project, far above the $220 million that Minnesota borrowed to build a new stadium in 2009, the $200 million that Washington has borrowed for its stadium renovation and the $148 million that Michigan took out to add luxury seats that opened in 2010.

Against Legal Repression: Picket California Hall Next Week

Update from a comrade on the recent revelation that UCB students and faculty are facing criminal charges for the protests of November 9. Not surprisingly, the police officers who beat these students and faculty with batons and arrested those they could pull to the ground by their hair are not facing charges or repercussions of any kind.

As many of you no doubt know, our colleague Celeste Langan and 10 students have been formally charged by Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley in connection with the protests on November 9th. Crucially, those charged are not limited to those who were arrested that day, and there is reason to believe that those singled out within this category were chosen for their prominent roles in the movement to restore public education. This is to me nearly as disturbing as the events of November 9th themselves, and potentially far more chilling of free speech than any specific instance of police brutality. In effect we are being told that:

-- Any protester on campus is at risk of prosecution, regardless of her level of involvement in an event and/or arrest.

-- The UCPD, ostensibly designed to protect and serve campus values, of which free speech must be one, will routinely invoke mutual aid, invite riot cops onto our campus, and then hand over evidence to public bodies with no commitment to campus values whatsoever.

-- Chancellor Birgeneau's declaration of amnesty under the Student Code of Conduct is rendered at once moot and cosmetic because it does not apply to those who were not arrested but face public charges and because it doesn't protect any protester from those charges.

-- Processes like the Police Review Board must be seen in a new light as strategic sites of data collection, since those who have testified there may have their testimony and that of others used against them.

At the very least, it seems to me we should put pressure on Birgeneau to take a public stand on the issue of these charges. Ideally he'd publicly request of O'Malley that the charges be dropped, but at the very least the administration should not be allowed to separate itself from this development merely because it is technically beyond a UCB purview.

To that end, several concerned people (undergrads, grads, and faculty) met informally last night to discuss possible responses. In addition to identifying the need for a swift editorial campaign (I believe the first arraignments, including Celeste's, are scheduled for 3/16), we decided on a picket of California Hall starting Monday at noon. It's not being called for by any particular group, nor should it have to be; it's a spontaneous response to this latest outrage by those in the community who are at risk (namely, all of us) and who stand in solidarity with those charged. I urge you all to come on Monday at 12pm so that our numbers are meaningful and our voices loud enough to reach those inside.

The View from the Other Side of the Barricades [Updated]

From our comrades at Occupy Everything comes this email from UC President Mark Yudof to UCSD Professor Charles Thorpe regarding the police violence at the most recent Regents' meeting at UC Riverside. In the course of the demonstration, police beat protesters with batons and shot them with rubber bullets (for an extended analysis of the day's actions, see this post). Videos like the one above (more here) remind us of what it looks like to face off against a line of riot cops, wildly swinging their batons, cradling and reflexively caressing their firearms, staring out like robots through the foggy visors of their riot helmets. But Yudof's email reminds us of what things look like from the other side of the barricades. Not the cops' view, exactly, though they overlap significantly, but the view of the regents and senior managers themselves. Worth a look.

[Update 3/8, 3:23pm: Read the original letter that Professor Thorpe, along with nearly 50 other faculty members, sent to Yudof and the rest of the UC Regents.]

Video from the Occupied Chancellor's Office at UCSD

And from our comrades at Reclaim UCSD, a "Statement of Intention from the Reclaimers of the Chancellor’s Complex to the UCSD Administration":

• We have initiated a civil, peaceful, and indefinite Reclamation of the UC San Diego Chancellor’s Complex.
• The UCSD Administration can resolve the Reclamation by fulfilling the six UCSD Institutional Demands issued on March 1st, 2012.
• If the Administration fails to fully implement these six Demands by March 8th, large-scale community action will be taken against the Administration.
• If the Administration cannot implement any particular Demand(s) by March 8th, they must provide an acceptable justification and a detailed timeline for rapid implementation.
• Because our assembly is public and promotes transparency, the Administration is invited and encouraged to continue holding meetings in Conference Room 111A for the duration of the Reclamation.
• We have the right to actively and civilly participate in any such meetings.
• Furthermore, we insist that the Administration play an advocacy role on behalf of our statewide and national demands.

Sincerely,
A coalition of students, Alumni, faculty, workers, and community members.

Another Round of UC Construction Bonds Backed By Tuition Hikes

The Daily Cal reports:

The California State Treasurer’s Office sold $860 million worth of University of California 100-year bonds, which will be used to fund capital projects at the university, to 70 large investors Tuesday.

The money raised from the sale of the bonds — which mature over the course of a century and pay about 4.9 percent semiannual interest rates in May and November — will be used for long-term UC capital projects approved by the UC Board of Regents, according to UC spokesperson Dianne Klein. The bonds will also fund individual capital projects at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UCLA, including a portion of the repair of Memorial Stadium, according to Klein.

(...)

UC bond sales are part of standard operating procedure and take place a handful of times each year, but this sale was unprecedented because of its 100-year maturation period combined with the large value of the sale, according to Tom Dresslar, director of communications at the treasury.

The 100-year bonds were designed to appeal to institutional investors, including insurance companies, hedge funds, banks and pension funds, whose interests span multiple generations, according to Klein.

The university is the real world. One positive effect of these bond sales is that they reveal -- if there were still any doubt -- the many and intimate ways in which the UC is tied to the world of Wall Street finance. These ties are the result of a series of conscious decisions made by UC administrators and the Regents to transform the university into a profit-oriented, revenue-generating institution. State funding has decreased, but the shift toward this privatized model, in which the university increasingly generates unrestricted revenues through student tuition hikes (themselves backed by student loans) on one hand and the exploitation of workers on the other, is not, or not only the result -- it is also a cause.

The Daily Cal article unexpectedly pulls a Meister and does a good job of outlining the economics of UC bonds by going back to a 2009 sale of $1.05 billion in construction bonds:

In August 2009, the UC announced that proceeds from approximately $1.05 billion in federal stimulus “Build America Bonds” sold to the public would help fund about 70 capital projects on all ten UC campuses.

In a press release following the 2009 bond sale, Moody’s, a ratings agency, explained the appeal of UC bonds in a shaky economy, since the university has the ability to raise its revenue by increasing student tuition despite state budget cuts.

“In-state tuition has increased dramatically,” the press release stated. “And the out-of-state market remains a comparatively untapped resource that could provide additional growth in tuition revenue should State funding be cut further.”

But they don't look as carefully at the bond report for the current sale, rated AA+ by Fitch. The first thing that becomes apparent is just how happy the bond raters are with the UC's financial managers:

WEAKENED STATE FUNDING: Recent reductions in state appropriations, and the potential for additional cuts through the intermediate term, are mitigated by UC's limited reliance on state operating support. Timely measures consistently taken by UC's 26-member regents and highly experienced management team during times of state fiscal stress provides further rating stability.

As Bob Samuels has been arguing for years, the UC gets its "marching orders" from the bond raters. Fitch is down with the UC's "highly experienced management team" because they've done exactly what Fitch wanted them to do. As students and workers at the UC, however, we aren't so happy with their tenure because we viscerally understand that we're the ones getting screwed. The university is being run for them, not for us.

The other thing that's useful about these bond reports is their honesty. They tell us what the UC administration is really thinking about doing, without funneling it first through an (admittedly flawed) public relations machine. Again, Fitch is happy with the UC's plans for dealing with the likelihood of future budget cuts from the state. In fact, Fitch thinks these budget cuts are a good thing because they increase the university's "operating autonomy." What this means essentially is less restrictions on what the UC can do with its revenue -- while state funds are restricted, meant to cover the university's instructional costs, private funds are not, and can be used for anything from capital projects to paying debt service on previous construction bonds. Fitch tells it like it is:

Appropriations declined a total of $750 million to about $2.27 billion for fiscal 2012, including a mid-year $100 million cut resulting from the state's ongoing revenue shortfall. UC took numerous steps over the past few years to offset the loss in state funds, including significant student fee increases, staff reductions and other cost savings initiatives. On a combined basis, these measures have enabled UC to close about 26% of the total fiscal 2012 budget gap (approximately $1.1 billion).

While the governor's fiscal 2013 budget proposal, currently under review by the state legislature, recommends no further cuts to UC, Fitch believes that state funding for higher education will face continued pressure going forward. The budget proposal is dependent upon various revenue generating ballot measures subject to voter approval. Should these measures fail to gain approval in November, the proposal calls for a $200 million appropriation cut to UC effective Jan. 1, 2013.

The university's management team continues to explore various options to offset reduced state aid, including working with the state on a potential multi-year funding agreement which would provide UC longer term stability in state support in exchange for increased operating autonomy. Options being considered under this agreement include specified general fund increases through fiscal 2016; an increase in the state's share of employee retirement plan contributions, both subject to voter approval of the above-mentioned ballot measures; and more regular, less dramatic increases in tuition.

UC continues to benefit from one of the most diverse revenue streams in higher education, and Fitch notes positively its low and declining reliance on state aid as a revenue source (12.1% in fiscal 2011). The university's other significant funding sources include revenue derived from the operation of its five medical centers (27.1%), grants and contracts generated by its substantial sponsored research activities (24.5%), and student-generated revenues, including tuition, fees, and auxiliary receipts (16.6%).

Straight from Wall Street to the UC: another round of construction bonds, another set of marching orders.

Reaching Out to the Faculty

Yesterday we posted some of the administration's emails regarding UCPD's brutal attack on the #occupycal encampment on November 9. In these emails, Chancellor Birgeneau, who was out of the country at the time, is notified of what happened, and responds that the violence is "unfortunate" but necessary. "Obviously," he wrote to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer, "this group want [sic] exactly such a confrontation." Later, Birgeneau wrote again to Breslauer, declaring that upholding the university's encampment policies at any cost was essential: "Otherwise, we will end up in Quan land."

These emails, along with a number of other documents, were uncovered by the ACLU of Northern California by means of a Public Records Act request. One of the other emails, not discussed by the ACLU or in the Chronicle article ("UC chancellor raised no objection to baton report"), caught our eye, especially because of some of the ongoing conversations about faculty and solidarity. Yesterday, for example, our comrades over at the Bicycle Barricade posted an important analysis of the situation at UC Davis in the context of the recent vote on a motion of no-confidence in Chancellor Katehi which was not approved. The piece should be read in full, but for now we just want to quote a small part:

Many professors, believing themselves to be the beneficiaries of privatization (in the form of grants, donations, endowed positions, etc.), support Katehi’s agenda. Now we know that at least 343 of them support enforcing privatization by violent means. This is useful knowledge.
We also know that “only 37% of UC Davis faculty vote on measures regarding campus events that received worldwide attention.” And professors complain about student apathy.

Those professors who brought forward the motions of no confidence and against police violence should be applauded. It’s risky to speak out when promotion and tenure depend on toeing the line. It’s encouraging to note that 312 professors support their students.

But these motions highlight the limits of institutional struggle (petitions, motions, declarations), where the administrators will always have the upper hand. They write the rules, and circumvent them when necessary. For years, faculty have fought a losing battle to defend shared governance, tenure-line positions, and academic freedom from a rapacious administrative logic. It’s time to abandon institutional forms of defense and turn the tables on the admins. Solidarity means attack.

With this in mind, take a look at the following email, sent by Vice Provost Janet Broughton on November 16:

We don't know what the results of this fishing expedition were. What seems important here is the fact that the administration sees the faculty as (at least potentially) an ally instead of an adversary. Not only that, but it is clear that if professors were to show up to the encampment, and were to try to talk the students into leaving -- in the administration's words, if they were to "help to facilitate a voluntary end to the encampment" -- they would be doing the work of the administration. This is not to say that these professors would literally have conspired with the administration but rather that they would be furthering the administration's goals -- the constant de-escalation, displacement, bureaucratization, channeling organizing energy away from the antagonistic administration and into vague efforts to "further build[] support for public higher education."

If de-escalation is the administration's goal, direct action is the only alternative. We join with our comrades from Davis in calling for the faculty to reject institutional forms of struggle -- which are inevitably coopted and recuperated -- and join with students and workers in shutting down this university.

STRIKE MARCH 1 / OCCUPY MARCH 5
(more info here)

"We Won!": Reflections on Two Occupations of the Same Library

Guest post by our comrade @repoliticize...

With so few “concrete” victories since the wave of student uprisings swept California in the fall of 2009, it’s a pleasure to stop for a moment, open up a beer, and say it: we won.

For the second time, a “study-in” occupation at the UC Berkeley Anthropology Library has yielded measurable—and surprisingly swift—results. I’d like to think for a moment about what it means to say, “we won,” whether or not we actually did “win,” and what this means going forward, but first, the background on the library occupation.

A much-loved and well-used library on the southeast corner of campus, the George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library was the first to suffer the disastrous consequences of a university policy that aims to eliminate 20-30 library staff positions over the next two to three years via a process of attrition. When the Anthropology Library’s only permanent staffer left his position over winter break, no interviews were set up to replace him. As a result, that library’s head librarian—herself in an interim position since 2009—had no choice but to sever the library’s hours by nearly 50 percent.

As of today, the library has returned to its Fall 2011 schedule. Faculty from the Anthropology Department have agreed to staff the library until a student can be found for a temporary position, and interviews for a permanent staff member will begin within 30 days.

Moving in last Thursday, the occupiers of the Anthropology Library threatened to extend their occupation until their demands were met and the library hours were restored with full staffing, and this was accomplished in just two nights, or about 50 hours of occupation. This is not an unprecedented success: two years ago, the Anthropology Library was occupied after its Saturday hours had been eliminated, and in less than a week, the library hours were restored.

One lesson we may take from this is that direct action works. In fact, in the case of the Anthropology Library, it has consistently worked. And we should take this moment to celebrate the significant manner in which direct action has restored part of the basic functioning of the university and—at least in this one case—reversed the terribly damaging policy of an increasingly profit-oriented administration.

But moving forward, we should be weary of overstating our success in the Anthropology Library. I write this from a re-opened library in its restored hours. One banner remains, hanging from a balcony outside until the rain stops and the department chair deems it “safe” enough to recover it. Twice now, we have made the extraordinarily reasonable student demands of keeping the library open, and twice now, we have achieved these demands—at the expense of the long-term indefinite occupation (or in 2009, a rolling, recurring occupation).

In short, this occupation is as much of a success as we allow it to be. In 2009, restoring the libraries' hours meant the end of the library occupations, but the library “study-in” model became enormously successful in its own right, being reproduced across the state on countless occasions. On the UC Berkeley campus, the library occupations took a pause, but the success bolstered organizing on campus for the November 20, 2009, occupation of Wheeler Hall—the largest and best-remembered event on campus in recent memory.

In 2009 we had no “Occupy”—we were, for a time, alone in that game. We were the California occupationists, the crazies at the marches with the U-locks in our backpacks and the “Occupy Everything” banner overhead. Winning at the library, at that moment, was cause for escalation. It confirmed for us the effectiveness of our tactics and reminded us to keep moving, keep organizing, and to keep taking what was already ours, returning and reshaping public space for the public.

In the nearly three years of student uprisings, the library occupations have earned us our only concrete, measurable successes. But the wrong lesson would be that by keeping our demands small, and by staying “reasonable,” we may achieve our goals. What we have won here is a band-aid for a university system suffering from hemophilia. Don’t get me wrong: we need band-aids—we need lots of them—but our small, reasonable, achievable demands will fail to produce either the university or the society for which we fight. They will simply bandage up the tools of class reproduction.

Our greatest successes over the last three years have been neither concrete nor measurable. And although a good deal of thought must be put into what “Occupy” is and represents, there can be no doubt that at the beginning of 2012, we stand on an entirely different ground from where we were a year ago. This shift has been effected not by policy enacted or reversed, but by on-the-ground organizing and a growing consciousness of and a willingness to act—to take direct action—against the structures of domination of which we have become a part.

This victory is only a victory if we use it as a springboard for further escalation and further growth. The policy we’re witnessing at the libraries is symptomatic of a larger shift at the university towards temporary, underpaid, and underemployed labor, which in turn reflects changes beyond the university as well. We must make these connections, and recognize that what it is at stake is, yes, the library, but it’s also the university, the public space, and the terms of our own subsistence. If we fight only for policies, then we have already failed.

Statement from the Anthropology Library Occupation

[Update 1/20 9:02 am: Check out Zunguzungu's reportback from the library occupation.]

Via Occupy Cal:

We love our libraries and are here to protect them. Libraries are critically important for excellent education for all. We students, faculty, and community members collectively have decided to occupy the Anthropology Library at UC Berkeley to protest the dismantling of the library system on campus and public education as a whole.

We chose to occupy this space because the Anthropology library is a recent victim of extreme service cuts. The hours of operation are being cut from the previous, already slim, 9am-6pm to the current 12pm-5pm, because the university has not taken the necessary steps to sufficiently staff the library. The multiple attacks on campus libraries are a reflection of privatization and the devaluation of the public education system.

We are here to reverse this process. We call on the administration to take immediate action to hire another full-time librarian to ensure full access to this valuable resource.

The administration may claim that there are insufficient funds, but in reality these resources exist, but their allocation by UC administrators and the state does not adequately reflect the values of excellent public education. Why have the UC Regents continued to approve 21% increases in administration salaries, while students are being denied access to their libraries? Why are the taxes of the 1% so low while essential social services are being cut across the state and country?

We stand in solidarity with the Occupy movement as a whole and the protestors at UC Riverside who were met with violence in their attempt to protest the austerity policies of the UC Regents, Sacramento, and Washington D.C.

Defend our libraries and schools. Occupy together.

--- The Anthropology Library Occupation
January 19, 2012

UCR Book Bloc Disrupts Regents' Meeting

A beautiful book bloc, appropriately featuring Foucault's Discipline and Punish, faced off today against the cops called in to defend the UC regents. The LA Times takes a good picture, but writes a terrible article:

Two demonstrators were arrested for crossing the police lines at the Student Union Building, according to UC Riverside spokesman James Grant. No one was reported seriously injured in the incidents, although one campus police officer suffered minor cuts on his hand from a demonstrator’s sign, Grant said.

One campus police officer suffered minor paper cuts on his pinky. Certainly, there were no students beaten with police batons or shot with rubber bullets.

Clearly, UC officials did not want a repeat of the controversial incident in November when UC Davis police pepper-sprayed student demonstrators at that campus.

Clearly, UC officials told the police to forgo the pepper spray and go straight to rubber bullets.

Fuck the police and their stenographers in the mainstream media. The real reporting's from our comrades at UC Rebel Radio:

The UC Regents' Meeting at UC Riverside began early today. Most mainstream media were inside the HUB building in which the Regents gathered. While we waited outside, reports from inside were telling that the public comment session was often interrupted by the Regents in their failed attempts to appease the student protesters who only had 1 minute each to express themselves. One comment was that regent Sherry Lansing tried to address the students by the usual means of misdirecting the students efforts towards the capital. The reports were that her comment was "useless and boring". After the public comment session was done with, the students offered their own meeting via mic check. But the Regents did nothing but hide in another room with very few people allowed in from the public. Police remained inside but did not move to arrest anybody. At around 1 p.m. everybody was running from the front doors of the HUB to the back doors through which the Regents were supposed to make their quick escape. Students took over a staircase and then another as police in riot gear blocked their way. Administrators were seen at the windows and balconies of the buildings while talking on their cell phones, taking video, and laughing at the people below them.

The police issued several orders to disperse and every time the students booed them and asked them "Why do we need to disperse? Give us a reason!" But the police only managed to repeat the same statement over and over. At one point the Chancellor of UC Riverside, Timothy P. White was seen on the balcony and was confronted by students asking to be allowed into the building and to the meeting. Upon being recognized, he quickly left the balcony and went back inside the building to never be seen again.

Later in the day, at around 3:30 p.m. the students were notified by scouts that the police were gathering in the back to make way for the exit of the Regents. Students split their ranks and took both exits, but no Regents were seen. At 4:30 p.m. (give or take) the Riverside Police Department sent in re-enforcements and the police line started their push back on the back side of the HUB building next to the parking lot.

Rubber bullets and pepper balls were fired. The police was chased over to the other side of the building. Over 5 people were arrested and there was a rumor that a fence was thrown at the riot police.

Word is that this face-off is still on-going.

We will keep you updated.

[Note: most the videos that were originally posted below have been moved to this post.]

[Note #2: for a more detailed analysis of the day from a comrade down south, check out these reflections.]

Access for Whom? The Middle Class Access Plan (MCAP), Diversity, and Privatization

In December, UC Berkeley announced a "groundbreaking" financial aid program called the Middle Class Access Plan (MCAP), which Chancellor Birgeneau hailed in the press release as a means of "sustain[ing] and expand[ing] access across the socio-economic spectrum" in an era of incessant tuition hikes. The following analysis was written by Zach Williams and posted at the blog Good-In-Theory. A summary of all the data used in the writing of this post is available here.

Class Conflict and Racial Strife Across the UC and its Golden State

What could be wrong with increasing access? Even further, what could be wrong with increased access for the middle class, when it appears as if current policy has been pushing the middle class out of Berkeley?

But wait, who is the middle class? And how are we increasing access for them? And why are they being pushed out? And why does it matter -- that is, why is that the problem we’re throwing money at? Because there are plenty of problems at which to throw money ($10-12 million dollars worth of money, in fact). But Birgenau has chosen this one.

So what is the problem, exactly? A shrinking middle class population (likely chiefly white) at the UCs.

But why is that happening? Because the high tuition/high aid model has led to a split in the population of the UC, divided between low-income families (~36% earning under 50k/year at Berkeley) and high income families (~30% earning over 150k/year at Berkeley. Another 10% or so still fall under the Blue and Gold program, which caps out at 80k. The remaining band of 20-25% has been narrowing, and thus needs our help.

Why? Well, because apparently declining enrollment among ‘the middle class’ is inequitable.

Never mind that likely 80% of California children live in families earning under 80k/year, while over 40% of UC Berkeley students come from families earning over 100k/year.

You see, under-representation of the bottom 80% is normal -- it’s expected, even, along with over-representation of the top 10%. But decreasing enrollments for part of the top 20% of children in the state? That can’t be tolerated.

So we have to lure them back in. And don’t be fooled -- this is about nothing other than luring people back in. Sure, MCAP has a friendly face to the extent that it eases costs for already enrolled middle class students, but this program is not about a temporary spate of relief for enrolled ‘middle class’ students. MCAP is taking a long view of the strategic situation in which the UC finds itself. And that situation involves intense competition with the Ivy league and other top tier liberal arts colleges and research universities over elite students.

So who are the students UC can draw in? Well, they aren’t Asian students, who attend the UC at a rate much higher than any other group already. There may be a few other minority students -- ~2200 UC system wide who are accepted but elect to go elsewhere and have middling acceptance rates. But the bulk of those who UCB is now pursuing fall into 10k or so white students who are admitted, but do not accept, UC enrollment. These students are, proportionately, the least likely to both apply to the UC and to accept enrollment when admitted.

Where are they going? Comparable private colleges, of course. That’s why, nationally, the MCAP program is perceived as a first effort by elite public schools to compete with the Ivy league over the upper middle class -- and this gets precisely to the point. MCAP isn’t about Californians. It’s about Out of State (OOS) enrollments.

While UC Blue and Gold is restricted to California residents, MCAP is restricted to ‘domestic’ residents -- that is to say, residents of the United States. And what do non-Californian ‘domestic’ residents pay? Another 23k/year in tuition. That more than covers any pittances extended to California’s middle class.

What MCAP does is introduce further granularity into the price discrimination scheme run by the UC. UC Blue and Gold allowed for an attenuated rate of tuition for in-state students earning under 80k. But there’s no fidelity among out of state students, who don’t qualify for Blue and Gold, or other in-state inducements like Calgrants. So while a California family earning 80k/year may pay 0 tuition, receiving 12k in subsidy to the cost of attending the UC (priced at 32k total, 24k excepting the expected student contribution), an out of state family earning 80k has a 35k a year tuition bill, plus that 20k/year in cost of living expenses, with no relief in site.

But the UC doesn’t need 35k to break even. Berkeley, the most spendthrift of campuses, lays out 19k per student. That’s 12k in tuition dollars plus 7k in state funding. OOS tuition has to make up the 7k not covered by the state. The rest is pure profit. Every lump of OOS tuition delivers about 16k in profit.

By fixing cost of attendance at no more than 15% of income for the in-state portion of fees, the UC has committed to giving middle class families up to 12k in subsidies. For Californians, some of that would be covered by Cal Grants. For those who qualify for Blue and Gold, some of that would be covered by Pell Grants.

But for out of state students, it all comes from Berkeley’s institutional aid.

The MCAP program allows for previously unavailable granularity in pricing for OOS students. Now, instead of all OOS students being saddled with roughly 35k/year in tuition, they will pay anywhere from 23 to 35k/year in tuition (disregarding non need-based aid). This is to say that the chief function of MCAP is to further increase the ability of Berkeley to recruit relatively wealthy out of state students who are willing to pay a lot, or at the least take on a lot of debt, in order to attend the UC. OOS students, after all, accept admission to the UC at a lower rate than in-state students, so anything to pull in more of these cash cows is desirable.



The other side of this story is how this program speaks to the general structure of the UC’s funding model. MCAP clarifies how tuition, through Blue and Gold and MCAP combined, functions effectively like a tax rate. This is a tax rate expressly for the purpose of redistributing income -- all the recent tuition increases have consisted of a return-to-aid portion, which is to say a significant portion of all tuition increases has been devoted to mitigating the effect of those tuition increases for people with low income.

For families within California, this reflects how the failure of state policy has led to the UC replicating the functions of the state. Because the California public as a whole is not willing to pay taxes to support public education by popular mandate, the wealthy in California have been able to avoid subsidizing the accessibility of the UC.

Instead, the UC has taken advantage of high demand for its product and the loose climate in higher education funding (through Federal support and student loans) to transfer the burden of maintaining UC accessibility on to wealthy or debtor students who wish to attend the UC.

In this way, accessibility to a quality university system is now contingent upon the realized demand of the wealthy, and the indebted, for that university system. Quite simply, the UC’s public mission has been privatized. Private charity, in the form of OOS tuition and ever increasing in-state tuition for the relatively rich, maintains access for poor students.

In this way, the burden of maintaining the UC is being shifted to wealthy and/or debtor students by raising their ‘taxes’ with nearly yearly tuition hikes. The turn to increasing enrollment of OOS students, coupled with the middle class access plan, allows the granularity of this tax to extend across the most profitable segment of the UC’s population.

The failure of tax policy at the state level has led to taxation at the UC level. This shifts the tax burden in three ways. First, it shifts the burden from CA taxpayers to CA families with children, who are, on average, poorer than CA taxpayers (though the children who go to the UC are not). Second, it shifts the burden to out of state money. Third, it shifts the burden onto in-state and out-of-state student and family debt.

What this leaves behind is any focus on the demographics and issues of California as a whole. The UC remains disproportionately wealthy while Hispanic and Black students remain disproportionately absent.

The collapse in public support and the turn to privatized financing cannot be disentangled from the persistent and endemic racial disparities proper to the UC. Increasing state diversity and increasing UC privatization are not simply coincidental. Rather, the demographic shift in the college-aspiring population of California has accompanied a general increase in private responsibility for the cost of college.

The UC has been able to sustain this shift while still enrolling poor students by relying upon the contributions of out of state students and wealthy in-state students, as well as increasing the expectations of student and family contributions across the board for all students, regardless of income.

As state funding falls, this means that the UC’s continuing operation as an accessible university comes to depend more and more upon the private demand for an elite education of non-Californian students. Poor Californians are increasingly at the mercy of the largess of rich out-of-staters.

In this way the public mission of the university has come to depend upon the private wealth of the rich who choose to attend it, and as such the character of the UC, as a public university, depends upon its ability to cater to these students.

This is to say that the UC must cater to the desires of the rich (largely white) kids who keep it afloat rather than the poor (largely hispanic) ones who make up a growing portion of the state. And so national competitiveness with elite institutions trumps focus on the challenges faced by California’s youth. MCAP, rather than acting as a boon to California’s middle class, merely serves as another way of catering to the rest of the country’s elite students, by further incentivizing their attendance.

In this manner, the people and students of California are losing control over their University, as their University, and their ability to attend it, comes to depend more and more upon the choices of others.