Students sharpen attack on UC costs with satire

Students sharpen attack on UC costs with satire:

"It's been a seriously dramatic year at the University of California, where hundreds of students seized buildings, demonstrated and shut down regents meetings last fall to protest rising tuition and the perceived privatization of the public school."



It's also been a satirically dramatic year, thanks to the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization, a fledgling group of mostly grad students in business attire that uses humor tinged with sarcasm to lampoon UC officials.
Their own name is an example. Many UC students believe leaps in tuition and reduced state funding are turning the public university into a private institution.
The UC Movement for Efficient Privatization says, "Why not?"
"Unlike others whining about the direction of privatization, we're concerned about the snail's pace at which the inevitable transformation is proceeding," said Shane Boyle, 27, unofficial chairman of UCMeP.
That's You See Me ... you get the idea.
In the spirit of theatrical political activists, from Billionaires for Bush to the Yippies, the 5-month-old group says its goal is to help UC leaders advance their goals.
"We take them to the logical extreme to show how ridiculous they can be," said UCMeP's Chief Artistic Officer Brandon Woolf, 26, a doctoral student in theater with Boyle. "It's another tactic for protest."
To wit:
On Thursday, UCMeP organized a dozen or so people into a Student Counter-Activist

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/15/BA6A1BUGLU.DTL#ixzz0fheO1oYr