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Thousands of Calif. Students, Faculty, Staff Protest State Cuts at University
Thousands packed into UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza for protest rally
BERKELEY - Several thousand people are packed into UC's Sproul Plaza to protest furloughs, layoffs and tuition increases, one of the largest gatherings there in years.
Faculty and students protest against state budget cuts, fee increases and the University of California administration's handling of the California budget crises during a rally at the University of California Berkeley in Berkeley, California September 24, 2009. (REUTERS/Robert Galbraith) "You are wonderful to be supporting our cause. We support you too," a custodian told the crowd. He said he had been laid off last week.
The protest began early today with union picket lines at two entrances to the campus. Similar protests were expected on other campuses throughout the state.
About 60 picketers started the day early in Berkeley in front of a school entrance at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way, shouting, "Chop from the Top," and "You say layoff, we say Yudof," a reference to UC President Mark Yudof.
By 11 a.m., the number of picketers had grown to about 200 people who formed a line, linking arms, to try to keep people from entering the campus.
Most professors planned to stay out of class today and other employee groups and students were joining them on picket lines. Faculty members plan teach-ins and rallies throughout the day. The protests coincides with the first day of classes on eight campuses.
Geology professor George Brimhall was one who said he felt a responsibility to be in class for any student who wished to be there, though he gave them the choice of attending or not.
"I feel like I still have a contract with any student who wants to be here," he said. "I'll lecture to one student if that's who shows up."
On the picket line, a union ceramics technician expressed the broad concern underlying the protest
"All the causes are aimed at one thing, they're trying to decimate the university," Robert Abrams. The "they," he said, was government in general. "There has to be a better way."
Brimhall had a different way of expressing the difficulty of focusing on an issue and a cause.
"The problem is so big that is is difficult to know what any of us can do. I see these legislators wrapped up in small stuff," he said. His idea for a solution was to repeal Proposition 13, the state's groundbreaking cap on property taxes that voters approved in 1978.
Fewer students could be seen on the Berkeley campus this morning. A handful of student club leaders steadfastly continued to try to attract attention to their organization on Sproul Plaza, but interest was low and passersby were few.
Sophomore Nick Iturraran glumly waited for students to sign up for the UC Rally Committee, but the list in front of him was empty.
"At this time of the day, my list would normally be full and I'd have three others already full," said Iturraran, who would normally have been in class on a Thursday morning. All but one of his five classes Thursday were cancelled.
"I understand their point but then again I'm a student and it hurts me not to be in class right now. It's something I'm paying for," he said.
The protest comes after a rough year for the university, which has cut enrollment, ordered employee furloughs and raised student fees to make up for state budget cuts. In November, the Board of Regents is expected to increase tuition by 32 percent over the next year.
Toni Mendicino, 40, an administrative assistant at UC Berkeley law school, said a threatened furlough would really hurt her. "Two-thirds of our union members have salaries in the low $40,000s", she said. "I'm 40 and I have four roommates. Every time I take BART or the bus to work I have to think if I can afford it."
Victoria Fowler, who works in the business school, said Yudof "isn't making any sense" when he talks about raising tuition and faculty furloughs.
"He said he wants to raise tuition in order to maintain a high caliber of tuition, but at the same time he's furloughing faculty. It doesn't make any sense."
31 Comments so far
Show All"... It doesn't make any sense." Sure it makes sense to the rest of us East of you. Regulate the piss out of business, industry, and productive folks. Transfer wealth to non-productives and watch a once vibrant state economy shoot itself in the knees, then watch it stagger, and finally see it collapse into a heap. Progessives' utopia. How you paying for all that? Through the nose, baby, through the nose. We'd feel kinda sorry for you but you've saddled us with Pelosi.
A knee jerk right wing opinion if I ever heard one. Completely devoid of facts or compassion.
Put your gorilla suit back on Clarence.
I'm curious as to where you went to school in California. Perhaps the teachers were furloughed on grammar day.
matthew loughran
clarence you are a right wing jackass. what do you expect from right wing a holes?
wrong on the facts as always. endless tax cuts for the wealthy plus 2 wars its no wonder every state in the country is going broke.
I must have hit a nerve there Mr Progressive progress and the such. So are you going to answer the question about how you're going to pay for it?
Why is it that right-wing knuckleheads rant on and on about the "cost" of education when every day you can see the high price of ignorance?
What's so funny about this particular brand of dimwittedness is that we're expected to look at California, which is the 8th or 9th largest economy in the world, as some sort of pauper. Ridiculous.
Only someone willfully ignorant could look at the dynamic entrepreneurial connections between education and industry. Who do you think built the Silicon Valley and why do you think California workers are among the most productive on the planet? Our first-rate, internationally renowned, and oft-copied system of higher education is a crucial component in the state's economy. California's higher education works for the people of the state and has for decades. No wonder Republicans and far-right ideologues hate it.
In any case, the state has all sorts of funding sources that could be tapped but aren't, owing to the reactionary, anti-middle class, anti-student policies of an intransigent cabal of right wing legislators who'd rather see California burn than set aside their idiotic ideology.
My vote for first funding source to be tapped is the bloated and wasteful budget for prisons. A boondoggle if there ever was one.
Now the cost thing again. How are you going to pay to keep the state from going down the drain? Not some shifting of money from one department to the other. C'mon Mr. Progressive productivity progress scientific whiz kid or some such. I'm waiting for an answer to the question, "Where is the money going to come from?"
You may take it as an insult if you want to but the rest of the country is wondering, looking to all you smart folks and looking for an idea. Do you have one? No three crad monte or shell game accounting tricks either. Get with it and give us an answer!
Your response is a sterling example of why the right is losing traction all across the country.
And yours is the proof that progressivism has no answer and why it spins in circles of futility that alert the middle to the idiocies of the left. Can't admit that your only solution is taxation can you? Real smart of you Mr. Statistics of how great california used to be.
Beeks represents the thievery of the right wing that is out to destroy the opportunities of ordinary people in California after having themselves got where they are today by benefiting from strong public support for higher education in the past. Most of the Republicans in the current legislature who are out to kill UC and CSU graduated from those campuses back in the 60s and 70s, when they had to pay only a pittance in fees, because of progressive taxation. Now that they've got theirs, they are out to prevent anyone else getting theirs. Before Prop 13, California's schools and colleges, from kindergarten through its grad schools, were the envy of the nation. The right-wing barbarians have pretty much succeeded in destroying public K-12 education in the state. The universities are next on the chopping block.
The money should come from the wealthy who've been making out like bandits for the last 3 decades in California: business pays incredibly low property taxes as they transfer stock and technically hold the same property ever since Prop 13: the ration of income from personal property taxes from individual residences is higher than ever anywhere in the US compared to corporate/business property tax. So there's a place to get some money.
And then modify Prop. 13 on individual property taxes to phase in starting with the super rich, then the rich, and then the petite-rich, with no increase for anyone making under say $150k. That and making businesses pay would push the budget out of the red in one year.
So that's where the money could come from.
I'm old enough to remember my Republican parents and their Republican friends nod their heads in pride that in California anyone could afford to go to college and graduate school: we were quite proud of providing something equal of Hardvard without either the arm and leg of cost, nor the snooty nose in the air snobbery.
Then Mr. Reagan came in and sounded great: raise tuition, so rich pay more, and neutralize effect on everyone else by funding huge increase in scholarships. People believed him, voted him in, and yes he raised tuition. Then gave it to the rich instead of scholarships for the rest of us. My parents and their friends: fooled again.
I offered several answers and you instead parrot the same question you must have heard on some low-end talk radio show. There's money all over the place, whether in new taxes on internet sales, off shore oil, or other hardly tapped revenue streams. There's money in the wasteful prisons budget.
Mr. Beeks, you and your ilk have been answered time and again. You'd rather burn the state down that govern rationally. Good luck with that.
"Get with it and give us an answer."
Go figure it out for yourself Mr. Beeks, sounds like you have plenty of problems of your own, why are you waiting for Californians to solve them?
It makes sense. First you get an actor to be governor after selling out his union membership back in the '50's during the McCarthy era. Then he ruins the CA university system that was set up to maximize the GI BILL. Then when he's gutted the low tuition and books set up to educate the people of the state, he made sure Proposition 13 passed so there would be no way to revive education for the masses there.
Clarence Beeks, go troll else where. There's nothing Progressive about the current situation in the UC system. And Progressives voted for Cindy Sheehan not that corporate whore Pelosi.
Why bother to protest cutbacks when the job market for college grads is on the wane?
If they hope to get a job when they graduate, students at Berkeley and every other college and university should be protesting Obama's "health care reform" as vehemently as students protested war, social injustice and corruption during the 1960s.
If the US adopted single-payer health care, the only real reform, millions of boomers would retire immediately from their "family-wage" jobs, thereby opening millions of good jobs for students when they graduate.
Unfortunately, Obama never allowed single-payer to be considered. The regressive corporate welfare package that Obama is pushing through disguised as "health care reform" will result in those millions, plus more boomers delaying retirement 5, 10 or 15 years beyond what they had planned, thereby further drying up the worst job market for college graduates in over 1/2 century.
Well, the good news is that Berkeley won't be able to afford John Yoo any more!
Surely the first pink slip printed should read, "This one's for Yoo!"
· Yr Obd't Servant
Good for the UC staff & students. May the community college system follow.
California is bankrupt.
Economically, mentally, socially and morally.
This is just the end result of that process.
Walk in peace.
But the rest of the country is humming along with just fine, watching California's woes on their 56 inch plasma TV's, secure in their high paying jobs with full benefits, their kids excelling in the finest schools, their cities free from crime and corruption. Stupid Californians.
Ya know, fuck them. I don't rememberr them protesting when Yoo got hired to teach constitutional law recently, moved on though he may be. Was naught a whisper.
But want more of their MONEY???? Well, that is a whole lot more critical than Yoo whoever. Let's protest with indignation. Their parents worked hard for that $$$.
Signed, a SFSU grad who knew a lot of Berkely trash. ALL with credit cards, nice cars, spending money, homes, bills paid and not a job between them, except in Daddy's co. if they could buy a b.a.
Morality, no/ Money!,, theirs? yes, Marx said they'd kill for that.
It is ABOUT TIME.....finally....teachers and students UNITE to save education!!! We need a new paradigm..one that encourages intelligence, good health for people and the planet and shuns GREED FOR MATERIAL GOODS!!
Yea....UC Berkeley!!! : )
The rally at UC Irvine also was uplifting, albeit, smaller than the one at Berkeley. At noon several hundred students, faculty & workers to hear speaker after speaker lambast the UC administration for raising tuitions, either handing pink slips to workers or forcing them to take furloughs (ie pay cuts), and cutting classes from the schedule so as to delay graduation for many students. When one speaker noted that military and war spending is going up while education gets short-changed, the response from those gathered was especially gratifying. Additional activities, including teach-ins, were scheduled for today. All in all the Irvine rally certainly was a success, perhaps even auspicious of more and better yet to come. Like what? Like what happened 40 years ago (beginning at UCB) on campuses throughout the land. Oh, but there was conscription then, and there's no better motivator than self-preservation? True, of course, but these perpetual wars, while being fought by a voluntary army, are bringing down the economy, and with that, the jobs and future that today's students have been counting on. And that's more than enough reason for optimism. Unless, of course, one considers the rantings of right-wing nuts to be the only thing worthy of consideration.
correction (third line from the bottom) ......And for students today that has the potential of being a powerful motivator.
You may take it as an insult if you want to but the rest of the country is wondering, looking to all you smart folks and looking for an idea. Do you have one? No three crad monte or shell game accounting tricks either. Get with it and give us an answer!
Arbitrage Conspiracy
Arbitrage Conspiracy Review
Sure. hypothetically of course. Burn down some General's empty summer retreat, call youself People's Freedom. Call it in to the nyt's say it was done to protest IrAfPak. bang-war & peace discussed in the msm.
it would take tradecraft and courage and conviction
hypothetically. to make the lion devour itself, we must be more cunning than the lion, not stronger
The money should come from the wealthy who've been making out like bandits for the last 3 decades in California: business pays incredibly low property taxes as they transfer stock and technically hold the same property ever since Prop 13: the ration of income from personal property taxes from individual residences is higher than ever anywhere in the US compared to corporate/business property tax. So there's a place to get some money.
And then modify Prop. 13 on individual property taxes to phase in starting with the super rich, then the rich, and then the petite-rich, with no increase for anyone making under say $150k. That and making businesses pay would push the budget out of the red in one year.
So that's where the money could come from.
I'm old enough to remember my Republican parents and their Republican friends nod their heads in pride that in California anyone could afford to go to college and graduate school: we were quite proud of providing something equal of Hardvard without either the arm and leg of cost, nor the snooty nose in the air snobbery.
Then Mr. Reagan came in and sounded great: raise tuition, so rich pay more, and neutralize effect on everyone else by funding huge increase in scholarships. People believed him, voted him in, and yes he raised tuition. Then gave it to the rich instead of scholarships for the rest of us. My parents and their friends: fooled again.
Simple, if people like Beeks would get off their asses and get the U.S. government to stop spending trillions on wars, there would be plenty of money for a good education system, along with health care, and jobs.
I saw a university study that showed how many jobs were lost by category, per billion dollars spent on military.
Get with it. Get the government to stop pour our tax dollars down the drain, and spend it on us, who pay those taxes.
thanks,joe
Get every repug in my state to go to a red state and then we can get to work to fix what is broken.They can take their money too but,for sure,all their bullshit.Tony