The University and the Ruins of the Present
from WeAreTheCrisis:
Our $800 fee hike is the direct result of an unstable global financial system.
As of the Regent’s meeting vote on November 18th, UC tuition has gone up over $800. A year at UCLA, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Davis and Irvine now costs over $11,000 when in 2000 it cost $3,429. That means if you make $10 an hour, you’ll have to work 80 more hours next year, or if you’re a Freshman, take out $2,400 more in debt before you graduate. The tremors of the economic crisis continues to spread, and our chances of getting a job we want with our degrees becomes more and more slim. This is our future…
How can we understand this tuition hike in the context of broader social conditions? We find ourselves in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. 2008 was a shock to the economy as a whole and will no doubt render the world we lived in before unrecognizable. Overproduction of and speculation on real estate, the creation of unsustainable financial tools to be invested in, rising mortgage, credit card and student loan debt — all of these created a crisis in which banks couldn’t lend, people couldn’t pay their bills and abandoned their homes, and states and governments ran out of money to spend. In order to cope with the massive problems caused by the financial crisis, governments around the world have responded in two major
Community or Constituency?
from bicyclebarricade:
Events in UCD’s Mrak Hall Thursday evening unfolded according to a familiar pattern: fees tuition goes up, so students get angry and march on the admin building. A sit-in is staged, demands are made, administrators pretend to dialogue while mobilizing police. Speakers speak, drums drum, and catharsis is reached. Or not. In the end we either stay or we go.
What is the purpose of a sit-in? Is it to force the administration to negotiate? If so, it’s a poor tactic, in itself, because it rarely works. Last November, after the Mrak arrests, the administration was reluctant to send in police during the second building occupation because, well, arresting another 50 students would have made them look even worse. So they “negotiated.” We all remember Janet Gong’s list of empty promises. Negotiation with the administration is futile because it allows them to retain the appearance of reasonableness and because students have no way to force them to keep their word.
When a sit-in refuses to disband itself, the dynamic changes. A minor nuisance becomes a threat to authority and productivity. The riot cops must be called, with them come the media, and the UC receives another black eye. It no longer seems quite so reasonable to raise students’ tuition and then arrest, club, pepper spray and, quite possibly, shoot them into submission. Administrators are nothing if not aware of status and public
