Thursday, March 29, 2012

UC President Mark Yudof will ask regents to endorse Brown tax initiative

University of California President Mark Yudof has announced that he will ask the regents to endorse Governor Brown's tax initiative.  Others should be asking/demanding this as well.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Liz Cheney as #Romney Running Mate?

I had lunch with a senior colleague today who predicts that Romney will choose foreign policy hawk Liz Cheney (Dick and Lynne's daughter) as his running mate.  Here's a piece by Michael Chase outlining the case for Cheney (though he thinks Jeb Bush will actually get the nod).

My colleague shared my glee at Romney's ineptitude and Obama's newfound strength.  I told him that my only fear is that Romney will somehow lose the nomination in a brokered convention.  He doubts that anyone will step up because this is a losing year for Republicans and, in recent history, losing nominees don't get a second chance.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Two 2012 ballot initiatives to raise taxes in California #Occupy

Bob Samuels describes the new ballot initiative on taxes that emerged as a compromise between Governor Jerry Brown's initiative and the California Federation of Teachers' Millionaire's Tax.

1. PERSONAL INCOME TAX:
a. 1% increase on incomes of $250,000 ($500,000 for couples). No change from Governor’s initiative.
b. 2% increase on incomes of $300,000 ($600,000 for couples). Governor’s initiative was 1.5%.
c. 3% increase on incomes of $500,000 ($1 million for couples). Governor’s initiative was 2%.
d. These tax increases remain in place for 7 years. Governor’s initiative was 5 years.
2. SALES TAX: increase quarter cent (Governor’s was half cent). Same expiration as the Governor’s.
3. STRUCTURE: The measure will be based on the Governor’s initiative structure, with the changes noted in #1 and #2 above.
4. REVENUES (NOTE: THESE ESTIMATES ARE PRELIMINARY): This new measure will generate about $9 billion for the 2012-13 budget (up from the $6.9 billion in the Governor’s initiative).

Meanwhile Pasadena civil rights attorney, Molly Munger, the daughter of billionaire Berkshire Hathaway chairman Charles Munger, pushes forward with her own initiative despite Brown's claim that the presence of two tax initiatives on the ballot will kill them both.  Munger's initiative, "Our Children Our Future," increases income taxes on a sliding scale ranging from 4/10 of 1% for households making less than $35,000 and 2.2% for couples making more than $5 million.  It seems unlikely to pass as it raises income taxes on more than just rich people.  The tax increase will raise $10 billion and this will be earmarked for K-12 education.  The initiative has been endorsed by the California Parent Teacher Association (PTA).  Munger has donated $3.4 million to the effort and has already begun airing a very nice television ad.  Munger and Brown are talking but have not yet reached any agreement.

Brown claims that all the money raised by his initiative will go to K-12 education and community colleges but this is only technically true because Brown will reduce other funding to schools and colleges in order to balance California's budget.

Court prohibits 13 UC Berkeley students and instructors from participating in #Occupy on any UC campus

This is an astounding account of the stay-away orders recently issued to UC Berkeley students and instructors.

Those of us with classes and teaching duties (which includes 12 of the 13 being charged) are allowed to visit campus for “lawful business.” We can attend our courses and meet with our students as usual. While a reasonable exception to an unreasonable order, this further reveals how the stay-away orders have been constructed expressly to eliminate our political engagement on campus. The stay-away-order-plus-exception effectively distills our lives as students and workers from all other trivial or superficial aspects. We are reduced to mere academics, without political or social lives, whose sole purpose is to work and study and return home. We cannot attend a lecture on campus. Or meet with a friend for coffee. Or stop to talk with a former student. And we most certainly can’t attend any protest. The court is permitting us to contribute to business as usual at the university so long as we do not do anything outside of the strict delimitation of such business, as long we do not attempt to challenge it in any way. We are made into model students and workers, perfectly obedient, without the encumbrance of feelings and thoughts beyond our academic work on campus.

Henry A. Giroux on Why Faculty Should Join #Occupy

Henry A. Giroux writes movingly on Why Faculty Should Join Occupy Movement Protesters on College Campuses:
The notion of the university as a center of critique and a vital democratic public sphere that cultivates the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for the production of a democratic polity is giving way to a view of the university as a marketing machine essential to the production of identities in which the only obligation of citizenship is to be a consumer.
Thanks to Jaime Becker for the link.

Kenneth Saltman on Corporate School Reform

Kenneth Saltman, in a long critique of the corporate take over of K-12 education, offers several insights relevant to the privatization of public higher education.  

For example:
The corporate takeover of schooling means the overemphasis on standards and standardization, testing and "accountability" that replicate a corporate logic in which measurable task performance and submission to authority become central. Intellectual curiosity, investigation, teacher autonomy and critical pedagogy, not to mention critical theory, have no place in this view. "Critical" in this context means not merely problem-solving skills, but the skills and dispositions for criticizing how particular claims to truth secure particular forms of authority. 
...
Privatization produces social relations defined through capitalist reproduction that function pedagogically to instantiate habits of docility and submission to authority at odds with collective control, dialogue, debate, dissent, and other public democratic practices. Privatization fosters individualization in part by encouraging everyone to understand education as a private service primarily about maximizing one's own capacity for competition. This runs counter to valuing public schooling for the benefit to all. 
Thanks to Jaime Becker for the link.  Wendy Brown is also very good on the relationship between democracy and the privatization of schooling.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Davis Faculty Association's Critique of the Administration's New Demonstration Policies #occupyucdavis

Dear Provost Hexter and Vice Chancellor Meyer:

I write on behalf of the Davis Faculty Association in consultation with its board to raise several serious objections to the “Demonstration Management Principles and Policies” outlined in your email to the UC Davis community on March 1, 2012.  We particularly wish to raise the following three points:

1.  The first of your principles states that “The campus's efforts to manage these situations have been, and are, guided by patience and restraint.”  We find such an assertion to be demonstrably untrue, at least with regard to the first clause. Surely you do not mean to suggest, for example, that the pepper-spray incident itself was handled with patience and restraint.

2.  We find it unacceptable that you elected to introduce these new principles just prior to the long-delayed release of the Reynoso report on Tuesday.  Surely the faculty should at least be allowed to see and digest this report about the pepper-spray incident before they are given, or are asked to accept, any new principles for dealing with precisely such situations.  In our view, you are insulting the very process initiated by the administration — the process that was so often declared to be necessary before any judgment of the Chancellor’s responsibility for these events — by introducing these principles just prior to the release of the Reynoso report.

3.  Your letter fails even to mention, and indeed, seems pointedly to ignore, the recently-passed Senate resolution that "demands that police deployment against protestors be considered only after all reasonable efforts have been exhausted and with direct consultation with Academic Senate leadership." You state that "campus police may be required to help respond to or resolve emergency situations." This statement does not make clear that you intend to account for and include the specific recommendation of the Senate resolution in the structure of the administration's decision-making process.

In short, the board of the DFA believes that the principles outlined in your letter are unacceptable, and that they represent an attempt to bypass and ignore the lessons of our recent history.

We respectfully request a specific response to each of the three points detailed above.  We have also decided to make this an open letter: we are sending a copy of it (and any response you care to offer) to our membership, and are also posting it on our website.

Sincerely,
Scott C. Shershow
Professor of English
Chair, Davis Faculty Association




The Administration's Policy


Dear UC Davis Community,

As Occupy activities continue nationally and locally, some of you have expressed interest in knowing more about our approach to managing campus protests.

We're writing to update you on this and the anticipated release of a report from the Reynoso Task Force, which has been conducting an inquiry into the pepper spraying of students last November 18 during a demonstration on the Quad.

The Task Force has indicated that it hopes to unveil the report and invite input at a public forum on our campus on March 6. Further details will be provided soon. Task force update from Justice Reynoso can be viewed at:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/27156

Meanwhile, since classes resumed in January there has been a brief occupation of the former Cross Cultural Center; placement of tents on the Quad; sustained efforts by a small group of demonstrators to deny access to employees and customers to the U.S. Bank office in Memorial Union; and, most recently, disruption of a lecture featuring Israeli soldiers.

Here are the principles underlying our efforts to protect lawful freedom of expression:

*  The campus's efforts to manage these situations have been, and are, guided by patience and restraint.

*  When protesters' actions exceed established guidelines for protected free speech, we are seeking to engage and listen to them while explaining the potential implications of their actions. At the former Cross Cultural Center, for example, this approach facilitated a peaceful end to a potentially divisive situation. To view the established guidelines for protected free speech please see:
http://news.ucdavis.edu/download/Rights_and_Responsibilities_Re_Peaceful_Protest-2.1.12.pdf

*  We have formed engagement teams to visit protest sites and communicate directly with protesters. At the bank, we have consistently and persistently conveyed to demonstrators that they are violating campus and state regulations by denying access to customers and bank staff, and that they are subject to campus disciplinary and criminal misdemeanor sanctions. You can view information about how UC Davis has conveyed this information (UC Davis pursues legal and campus process for bank blockers) at:
http://dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.php?id=13890

*  We will communicate similarly with any individuals participating in occupation activities on the Quad or elsewhere on campus, recognizing that campus police may be required to help respond to or resolve emergency situations.

*  We will continue to monitor these situations and will take action as necessary to ensure that all members of our campus community can practice their First Amendment rights while also permitting the ongoing operations of the university's teaching, research, and public service functions.

For many, these are difficult times. As a community, we respect the passion and energy of those seeking to create constructive economic and social change. We hope that participants in campus will respect the rights of community members to freely engage in academic, professional and personal pursuits.

Sincerely,

Ralph J. Hexter
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor

John A. Meyer
Vice Chancellor-Administrative and Resource Management

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Political Context of the March 5 Rally in Sacramento

My speech at the March 1 Rally at UC Davis:


Last time I gave a speech at a rally, as a graduate student, I just winged it and it didn’t go so well--so today I wrote some things down.  I want to talk mainly about the political situation surrounding public education and some new openings in the political context.

Since I arrived here a decade ago, I’ve watched the California legislature and Governors Davis, Schwarzenegger and Brown systematically de-fund the greatest public university system in the world.  Meanwhile, the university has tried to balance its books on the backs of the students.

Over those ten years, many of us (students, faculty, staff and sometimes administrators) have organized, lobbied and protested but the cuts have just kept coming.  In the last three years, the Great Recession has made California’s budget crisis even worse, the cuts have been deeper, and the tuition increases have been just ridiculous.

Part of the problem is Prop 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that required a 2/3 supermajority for any increase in California’s taxes.  This allowed a minority of Republican legislators to hold a blue state hostage to their anti-tax, anti-government, anti-equality agenda and forced us into a budget crisis.  Unfortunately, Californians seemed in no mood to repeal Prop 13 despite the deterioration of California’s public services (and especially its schools).  And any attempt at repeal would certainly be countered by a massive corporate advertising blitz.

It’s a bleak picture.  But lately things are looking up a bit. The Democrats are currently two seats away from a 2/3 supermajority in both the Senate and Assembly and the November election may allow them to achieve it.  In 2008, Californians gave a citizen’s commission (rather than the legislature) the power to draw legislative districts.  Under these new districts, the Democrats will most likely pick up enough seats in the State Senate and MAY be able to do so in the State Assembly.  Two of the closest Assembly races are local.  The 8th District in East Sacramento County where three Democrats face off against two Republicans and the 9th district in Elk Grove/Lodi where UC Davis Med School Professor Dr. Richard Pan faces off against two Republicans.  The top two vote getters in the June 5 primary will go on to the November election.

Another development is both hopeful and terrifying.  Governor Brown has placed a referendum on the November ballot to temporarily raise income taxes for the wealthy and sales taxes for everyone.  If the measure passes, he promises an increase for higher education of 4 percent per year for three years.  But if it fails, more cuts.  The measure appears to have the support of a slim majority of the voters at this moment, but only if two similar initiatives are removed from the ballot.

If the Democrats do win a supermajority, the battle to restore UC funding will still be at the beginning.  Democratic legislators, like most politicians, are cowards and many have bought into the Republican argument that tax increases retard economic growth.  We will need to pressure them hard--both during and after the election.  The Governor’s commitment to higher education is also suspect.

We also must pressure the UC and UC Davis Administrations.  Unfortunately, the administration has a very narrow view of politics. It is resigned to meekly lobbying legislators for funding, failing miserably, and then raising tuition.  It has not yet committed to campaigning for a new legislative majority that can re-fund the UC System and forcing that majority to do so.  We must demand such a commitment from the regents, UC President Mark Yudof, and our Chancellor (who happens to be on the defensive right now). 

The protests have been making a difference.  They caused Yudof and the regents to back off the latest round of tuition increases, for the moment.  And 74% of Californians now believe that state funding for higher education is inadequate.  Unfortunately, only 45% are willing to pay higher taxes to restore funding. 

We need to help Californians understand that new revenues will be necessary if we hope to preserve affordable higher education.  We also need to convince them that the benefits of affordable higher education do not just go to individual students but to all the lives they touch. Affordable public education helps Californians to live more prosperous, healthy and meaningful lives, it helps them understand and participate in their democracy, it promotes social mobility and equality of opportunity, and it promotes economic and cultural growth.

The occupy movement has so far remained non-partisan and non-electoral in order to avoid being co-opted by the Democrats and in order to seek deeper levels of change than simply electing a new slate of legislators beholden to corporate campaign contributions. 

That’s probably wise for occupy, but the movement to defend higher education pre-dates occupy and is bigger than occupy.  There are roles and responsibilities for all of us. 

As a movement, we must work at all levels—though not everyone must work at every level—protesting, changing public opinion, lobbying elected officials, and winning elections.  At this moment, we have a political opening—Let’s use it.

I want to end with the names of three websites that I think are especially useful (just google them): ReFund California, Remaking the University, and Fight for your Education.  I also have links to all of these on my blog: after-dinner critic.