By PETER ROBINSON
During the "Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education" on Thursday, tens of thousands of students, teachers, professors and administrators marched in California and some 30 other states to protest cuts in education spending. David Patterson, a librarian at Cañada College, a community college in Redwood City, proved typical.
Asked beforehand to explain his participation, he employed the vocabulary of idealism that appeared on every placard and sounded from every bullhorn. "I'm hoping that students . . . feel connected to Montgomery, to Selma . . . to the sit-ins, to Freedom Riders, to the farmworkers' struggle" of the 1960s and '70s, Mr. Patterson wrote on the Socialist Worker Web site. "Now that's an education: To see your fight against oppression connected to a long line of others' fights."
The demonstrations did offer a certain sort of instruction, though not of the kind Mr. Patterson and his fellow protesters had in mind. They demonstrated the entitlement mentality and self-absorption that has come to dominate much of higher education.
Associated Press
An unidentified demonstrator pleads with police blocking their access to the Interstate 80 as students demonstrate at the UC Davis campus in Davis, Calif. on Thursday, March 4, 2010.
If you went searching for the proximate cause of the "Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education," you wouldn't find it in any pattern of oppression. You'd find it in a couple of acts of desperation last year. First, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, facing the worst budget crisis in state history, cut about $600 million in overall funding for 10-campus University of California and the 23-campus California State University. Then the U.C. regents and C.S.U. trustees, facing budget crises of their own, reduced programs, furloughed workers, and raised tuition.
Students and faculty erupted throughout California, but nowhere with quite the indignation displayed at the state's oldest and most prestigious public institution of higher learning, U.C. Berkeley. Addressing students last