You don't often hear complaints about large and unfair tax hikes issuing from the ramparts of America's most progressive public university system.
Nevertheless, many faculty, students and staff on the 10 campuses of the University of California system are ticked off at how the state is handling its budget crisis. Last week, their anger over the resulting layoffs and tuition increases helped turn a dance party at Berkeley into a riot. The question now is whether on Thursday we will see more of the same at the protests, marches and teach-ins planned for what is being billed as a "Day of Action to Defend Public Education."
Angry protests involving the UC community are nothing new. What's interesting is the way some are characterizing their grievances. In an article for the Huffington Post earlier this month, Bob Samuels—a UCLA lecturer who also serves as a president for a faculty union—explained that "students have understood that the recent increases of student fees (tuition) by over 41% in one year is the same as a tax hike."
Mr. Samuels is right: Some of these students do understand it that way. "Let's call this what this really is," Berkeley sophomore Robbie Bruens told his former high school newspaper. "A big fat Schwarzenegger tax hike on middle class students and their families."
It's hard to blame them when you don't hear much better from people who ought to know better. A year ago, John Garamendi—then California's lieutenant governor and a University of California Regent—issued a press release declaring that a proposal for higher tuition fees was "nothing more than a $662 a year tax increase on every student at the University of California."
At an October Democratic rally at UC Davis, he was quoted as calling the tuition increases "the single biggest tax increase" in the last California budget. The next month he was elected to Congress.
Now, when professors and politicians cannot distinguish between a reduction in a state subsidy and an increase in taxes, we better understand the dismal shape of university and state finances. On further reflection, however, it seems we might have here what our president likes to
