Meister

Bob Meister's back with a new article that rips apart Yudof's "Blue and Gold" plan. Enjoy the whole thing. Here we've posted just the part dealing with B&G.

You have also recognized that financing higher education through increased personal debt is a growing problem for many students. That’s why you argue that UC tuition increases will not deter attendance provided that the Blue and Gold program, which relieves families from paying tuition, is available to a wider income band. Much of the press and the public seem to have bought your claim that higher tuition can actually make UC more accessible by extending UC’s Blue and Gold program to families with annual incomes of up to $80,000. But the high tuition burden still falls disproportionately on those just above this cut-off, so you mitigate this obvious problem by giving students a one-year reprieve on tuition increases if they are otherwise eligible for aid and if they come from families with incomes of $120K or less, after which they will simply have to borrow more. You then claim that higher tuition would leave the majority of UC students (55%) with undiminished or improved access. This claim is based on two assumptions: first, that the incomes of UC graduates will continue to grow -- and to grow much faster, than those of other Californians, much as they did during the high tech boom; and, second, that Blue and Gold means that most UC students on financial aid will need to borrow less in order to attend.

According to your own, internal, financial aid studies, both of these assumptions are false. The first assumption is false because the income of UC graduates has not increased at all for the past ten years, and neither has the willingness of most students who borrow to take on greater debt. As a consequence of their growing debt-resistance, UC has a growing middle income access problem -- it seems that students in the income band that takes on the greatest proportional debt are also transferring down within the Master Plan scheme -- and that 70% of Community College transfer students now go to for-profit institutions. So, we now have a Master Plan that seems to operate in reverse.

Schedule of Actions for November 16-18 UC Regents' Meeting

From thosewhouseit:

Once again, the Regents will meet to increase fees, decrease access to the UC and give themselves big bonuses. Let’s stop them!

Nov. 16: Early morning picket of California Hall. Be there at 6:30 AM so we can greet the senior administrators as they come in to work. We’re demanding that they actively oppose the fee increase, abandon Operational Excellence and its 200 layoffs, end the repression of student protesters via the widely-criticized Office of Student Conduct, and endorse and help negotiate a fair contract for GSIs and other staff in contract negotiations. Please arrive at 6:30 AM. We will be there all morning. Rally @ 12 noon.

Nov. 17: Early AM protest at the Regents’ Meeting (UCSF, Rutter Center). Let’s shut it down! We need as many people as possible at the Regents Meeting as early as possible. From the East Bay, take BART to the downtown San Francisco Embarcadero Station and then transfer to the MUNI T-Line. There are some buses leaving from UC Berkeley. You can reserve a seat here.

Finally, here are links to some inspiring news from London, where 52,000 people have mobilized in defense of education and against austerity. It’s nice to be reminded that we are part of a global anti-austerity movement:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2010/nov/10/demo-2010-student-protests-live

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/11/10/uk.protest/index.html?hpt=T2

The Lawsuits Begin

The other day, we reported that the UC administration appears to be feeling some heat on the legal front for the many reprehensible procedural violations it has committed in the course of subjecting student protesters to conduct hearings. But another target is feeling a more direct form of pressure. As thosewhouseit notes with regard to the second half of the conduct case for one of the Wheeler Hall occupiers:

In fact, the math professor chairing the commission was served with papers at the hearing tonight. Our comrade is suing him in small claims court. From now on we will take anyone who participates in this charade to court!

At the very beginning of the hearing, as the panel members were filing in, the chair Paul Vojta was served with court papers. According to the Campus Rights Project, Vojta had also chaired the panel of the previous hearing. Apparently, a suit has been filed in small claims court against him. In other words, the university itself is not liable, but it could be an effective tactic in terms of pushing back against those members of the university community who are complicit with the administration's repressive apparatus.

For further reading, check out Vojta's ratings on Rate My Professors.

Contextualizing the UC Conduct Hearings

From occupyca:

BERKELEY, California -- Last Fall saw a 32 percent tuition increase in the UC system, but perhaps equally memorable was the array of occupations throughout the UC and CSU systems. At Cal, dozens of occupiers, now better known as the Wheeler 43, took over Wheeler Hall on November 20, 2009. Only now, nearly a year later have we seen any judicial proceedings on the matter -- albeit, proceedings in a kangaroo court. Laura Zelko opted and fought to hold her hearing open to the public; even after 12 hours at the initial meeting that continued past midnight, the hearing panelists were unable to decide the verdict. This case will continue today at 5:30pm. (SF Chronicle published a story on Ms. Zelko’s case.)

According to ReclaimUC, the possibility of a lawsuit potentially being brought against the UC Berkeley Office of Student Conduct is unnerving the administration a little. Additionally, Cal is now paying tens of thousands of dollars on merely technical and staffing aspects of the hearings, let alone legal costs potentially yet unreported. So far, the sanctions against student protesters include such things as 7-month suspensions and reflective essays that serve more to “re-educate” protesters on the the proper protocols of innocuous political demonstrations than actually provide insightful ruminations. Seemingly, the high cost of punishing demonstrators is well worth it for the UC administration as long as it’s able to push its political will onto campus. With the coming 8% tuition increase and a slew of mini-crises hitting the UC -- including the troubling police and judicial repression of protest to the pension fight of low-paid workers to the contract struggle for teaching assistants -- it’s a wonder the university isn’t splitting at the seams.

Update [Wed 11/10, 12:25 am]: @reclaimuc live-tweeted the hearing. OSC recommended a sanction of a 1-year suspension. The panel's final recommendation, however, was:

Now the only question is whether the UC administration will once again arbitrarily impose a harsher sanction, as they did in the previous hearing.

The New UC Fee Hike [Updated]

Earlier in the year, there was talk about a 20% fee increase in November, along with a number of student protests across the campuses. Now that we’re closer to the fee proposal being released, the fee increase will probably not be in the ballpark of 20% -- word has it that it’s in the low 10s or the single digits.

The fee hike will be announced later today. Stay tuned.

[Updated Monday 12:09pm]: The magic number is 8 percent.

Scared

The UC Berkeley administration is looking scared of the possibility of a lawsuit regarding the Office of Student Conduct's procedural violations in their prosecution of student protesters from last year, as well as the arbitrary nature of the process in general. Associate Dean of Students Christina Gonzales's comments are particularly revealing. (Gonzales, by the way, is directly implicated in all of this: she's the one who, as Associate Dean, improperly suspended the student conduct timeline, something that only the Dean can do.) She acknowledges, in the first place, that the fact that the administration arbitrarily upped the sanction is extremely rare, suggesting that the decision to do it in this case is purely political. Second, according to Gonzales, the answer to arbitrariness is more arbitrariness: the student can always, uh, go talk to Chancellor Birgeneau, or something. This from the Daily Cal, whose reporting on the issue has been great:

Frustration is growing among students charged with misconduct for their involvement in last November's protests after one student received harsher sanctions Monday than those recommended at his hearing, increasing talk of a possible lawsuit against UC Berkeley.

The student, who did not want to release his name for fear of retribution by the Center for Student Conduct and Community Standards, received a letter Monday morning from Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard's designee Steven Sutton imposing two sanctions - disciplinary probation and a reflective writing assignment - according to Daniela Urban, a student at the UC Berkeley School of Law and member of the Campus Rights Project, which has been advising students.

Urban said the sanctions are significantly harsher than what the student's hearing panel recommended in mid-October, which was a reflective writing assignment and a warning letter.

"I was shocked because on the one hand, I was expecting the sanctions that the hearing panel had recommended," the student said. "It blows my mind. Why did we have a hearing if the dean, or in this case his designee, was going to arbitrarily impose whatever sanction he wanted anyway?"

According to Christina Gonzales, associate dean of students, the sanctions initially proposed by the panel are only recommendations. Under the campus student code of conduct, the dean of students or his designee may impose different sanctions, taking into account factors including the alleged behavior the student was found responsible for and the impact to the campus community, she said in an e-mail.

She added that instances of the dean or his designee changing sanctions recommended by the panel are uncommon, citing only three or four such changes in the last four years.

While the decision on sanctions is final, concerns regarding the sanctioning process, alleged procedural violations and decisions made throughout the conduct proceedings can be appealed to Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Harry Le Grande within 10 days of receiving sanctions, according to Gonzales.

However, the student said he is "skeptical that (his concerns) are going to be heard."

"There is no recourse within this system," said Neil Satterlund, a campus law student and member of the Campus Rights Project. "We are very close to believing that there is no longer any reason to participate in this process."

If the student's appeal is rejected, as the student said he predicts it will be, taking the issue to court is an option.

"We've talked about filing a lawsuit against the university," the student said. "I hope that happens. The only possible way that anything good can come of this situation is by going outside and levering some sort of external pressure against the university. They won't listen otherwise."

According to Gonzales, without a student actually having gone through the appeals process, it seems too "speculative" to state whether it would be rejected.

She added that going outside of the campus should not be necessary because should an appeal be rejected, there are still officials -- including Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer and Chancellor Robert Birgeneau -- who would be willing to sit down and "talk about the issues."

"Whenever a decision is made, if there's anything that wasn't appropriate, there is always some policy that can assist a student, staff or faculty member to go to another route or bring up these issues," she said. "They shouldn't have to go outside of the university."

They shouldn't have to go outside of the university. Please don't go outside of the university! They're finally starting to feel the pressure.

SF Giants Win the World Series!

(more at occupyca)

Spokescouncil #2, Thursday Nov 4

Second spokescouncil to get organized for the regents' meeting will take place on Thursday, November 4 from 6-9pm in 370 Dwinelle Hall. Here's the description (from Those Who Use It, copied from Facebook):

People are frustrated with the General Assembly model... so we’re trying something completely different!

WHAT IS A SPOKESCOUNCIL?
Not a decision making body. It is a non-hierarchical means of communicating between/across affinity groups.
A spoke (or representative) of an affinity group goes to the spokescouncil to represent the intentions/plans/skills/offerings of their AG and sees how they might or might not collaborate with other... AGs... The spoke takes info from the spokescouncil back to their affinity group.

WHAT IS AN AFFINITY GROUP?
Small group of people that acts/organizes/makes decisions together, that trusts each other, and takes care of each other.

Unaffiliated people are welcome.

AGENDA FOR THURSDAY: coordinating for the Regents mtg
People were happy with the first spokescouncil and called for a second one. Please come prepared to talk about your group’s plans for plugging into action on 11/16 and ideas for 11/17.

Last week some groups sent a spoke while other groups came as a unit. You’re free to do either, but this time let’s try to give priority to having the spokes speak and the rest of each group (if present) hang back…

BE ON TIME. RESPECT EVERYONE’S TIME.

All: feel free to use the comment section below to add to this loose description/report/agenda...