Analysis of Governor Brown’s May 2015 Proposed Budget and Its Impact on the University of California

it's been awhile, but we have many updates to share with you...

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public education

[A] tuition-free, publicly funded system that must provide an education to each [person] within a publicly governed school system. The academic standards, the teachers and administration, the values and methods of operation employed are all subject to oversight and direction by public policy-making bodies. Public education means that a wide range of decision making resides at the community level through the operation of locally elected school boards and through other avenues of direct [community] participation. Public education also means a system in which the general public can obtain detailed information about their schools.

from Center for Public Education, “An American Imperative, Public Education”

privatization

The transfer of ownership of property or business from a government [or a public entity] to a privately owned entity. One of the main arguments for the privatization of publicly owned operations is the estimated increases in efficiency that can result from private ownership. The increased efficiency is thought to come from the greater importance private owners tend to place on profit maximization as compared to government, which tends to be less concerned about profits.

from Investopedia, “Privatization”

campus real estate and capital projects

We continue to invest in our revenue generation and expense reduction efforts… A primary motivation for utilizing PPPs [Public Private Partnerships] is access to capital. UC, however, has robust financing capability… As we continue to integrate capital needs into our operating budget, we recognize that each dollar the campus devotes to capital is one less dollar we have for student aid, faculty pay, campus maintenance, or a myriad other needs… External funds, student fees, and auxiliary funds comprise the primary sources of capital for new construction… An aggressive and entrepreneurial approach to Real Estate operations and revenue can significantly improve our bottom line.

from UC Berkeley Real Estate Department, “Public Private Partnerships at the University of California”, “2013-14 UC Berkeley Budget Plan”, and “The Evolving Real Estate Portfolio at Cal”

The University of California has signaled an aggressive shift toward privatization, taking many simultaneous forms: increased “revenue generation” in the form of selective tuition hikes and Real Estate investments, decreased compensation for UC workers and/or hiring temporary workers as an “efficiency” measure, and leasing public land to private developers with “Public-Private Partnerships.” The following analysis examines how Governor Brown’s recent budget proposal further enables each of these processes.

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On May 14, Governor Brown announced a revised budget proposal, which will be the subject of discussion at the Regents’ meeting on Thursday, May 21. While the budget proposes a two-year tuition freeze for in-state students, put in context, the proposal as a whole presents a concerning advance toward UC privatization.

Tuition Hikes: One Source of New Revenue Generation

2014-15 UC tuition levels:

            in-state tuition and fees:            $13, 878

            out-of state tuition and fees:     $37, 902

2020-21 projected UC tuition levels:

            in-state tuition and fees:            $16,869

                        (assuming 5% annual increase starting in 2017)

            out-of-state tuition and fees:     $60,146

                        (assuming 8% annual increase starting in 2015)

In reality, the tuition “freeze” for in-state students is only a two-year deferral of hikes already built into the plan. Beginning in 2017, the cost of attending UC for California residents will rise by at least the rate of inflation, a very open-ended figure that will enable to Regents to vote on increases above this rate in order to generate maximum profit. This subtle phrasing turns out to be quite significant: as our economy continues to recover from the 2008 real estate crash and subsequent global financial collapse, the U.S. inflation rate this past year was actually negative, averaging -0.1%. If the cost of attending the UC were actually pegged to inflation, there would be a tuition reduction this year—not likely in an era of privatization.

While we don’t yet have a clear picture of the actual rates of increase for in-state students, we do know that beginning this fall, out-of-state and international students would be subject to up to 8% annual increases indefinitely. This hike will bring their cost for a UC education to up to $60,146 per year just five years from now, a 59% increase in the current cost. The relative profit generating potential of non-California students provides a structural incentive for UC to accept more out-of-state and international undergraduate students who can afford to pay this high price. UC President Janet Napolitano confirmed this preference when she proposed an increase of out-of-state enrollment as UC “campuses have been instructed to keep their enrollment of California students flat…If we wanted to, we could make Berkeley and UCLA 50/50 (resident and nonresident), easily, just by snapping our fingers. The demand is that high.”

But with a looming sticker price of $60,000+ before even factoring in the ballooning cost of living in California, can the UC just “snap” non-resident students into ponying up? What will they receive in return for this high sticker price?

Rationing Education

Equally concerning is the Regents’ plans to reduce the time-to-degree to three years. This reduction may seem appealing at first blush for middle and working class students who often take multiple jobs while in school to reduce their education debt. And with the Governor’s proposed $18 million cut to the Middle Class Scholarship Program, poorer students will likely welcome spending less time at the UC.

According to Reclaim UC, “The reduction of time-to-degree is presented as a solution to a problem that would not exist absent university privatization.” In other words, the shortening of time at UC Berkeley is appealing only in a context in which students cannot afford to stay on campus for very long. In addition to loading up on summer courses, some analysts speculate that this reduction in time-to-degree would be accomplished by eliminating core undergraduate curricula, which would starve many departments that depend on significant student enrollments in lower division courses of critical funding. It increasingly seems as if the UC Regents and the Governor imagine a very narrow range of majors within an overall college education that does not include foreign language courses; coursework in ethnic studies, sociology, gender and women’s studies, and anthropology; or education in art, literature, or music, to name only a few of the likely programs that would succumb to such a restructuring plan.

We instead call for increased funding to these departments, whose classes are typically over enrolled and in high demand. Increased financial support would enable them to hire additional full-time professors and offer more and smaller courses, moving the UC away from the mega-class model it has instead forced on many students, faculty, and GSIs. Can the UC continue to offer quality, affordable, and accessible education, where students will be able—and will even want—to pursue their educations at a more reasonable pace?

Why would the University pursue three-year degrees? What is in it for them? One analysis might connect the shorter stay on campus with students’ diminished institutional memory and capacity to form meaningful political associations that might challenge the process of privatization. And students aren’t the only ones who will feel this squeeze.

How the Budget Impacts UC Workers

Perhaps the most egregious part of the budget contains a significant blow to workers’ retirement benefits, which has recently taken the form of forcing new employees into separate and less secure pension plans or “tiers.” That the Governor has recommended the creation of yet another tier with significantly reduced retirement benefits signals very deep structural concerns within the UC system. In addition, we have seen a dramatic undermining of union contracts, where the UC in increasingly hiring underpaid temporary workers and denying them benefits that typically come with UC employment. The UC is now cutting very basic mechanisms of support—this is what they mean when they say “efficiency”—while increasing tuition in perpetuity—we are the “revenue generation”—leaving us to ask if not on education or staffing, then where is the increased profit going?

UC Berkeley’s Real Estate Department: The New Face of Privatization

These changes in tuition, education restructuring, and cuts to workers’ benefits are happening alongside another very aggressive and relatively novel dimension of privatization. This marks a radical shift in the UC’s role as an institution of higher education to a large real estate development and investment firm. Following the expansion of Berkeley’s Real Estate Department and the formation of “The Berkeley Real Estate Management Company,” this unfortunate situation is not hyperbole.

The cost of renting a shared room in one of UC Berkeley’s large multi-story dormitories is currently approximately $15,000 per year, the fifth costliest student housing in the nation. And what do students get for this exorbitant price? This description by an undergraduate resident in Unit 2 is telling:

I am typing this in a boxy, stuffy, fluorescent-lit room in Unit 2…[I]magine living in a hotel room for months—it gets depressing. These walls, this furniture and these windows are all but personalized. You can tell from their very essence that they are meant to last past you and past the person who will pass you…I simply cannot adjust to a living residence monikered “Unit 2.’” The very name makes me feel like I am living in a cookie-cut cubicle. I realize that I am just a trivial life in one of the many windows that fill the walls of Unit 1, Unit 2 and Unit 3…These dormitories make me feel inauthentic, average and every other sad adjective you can imagine…I wonder what feeling indistinguishable will do to my self-image when I step out into the future.

We should be appalled that students are paying such high prices to live in anonymous concrete boxes. Who would build such things? The answer is that UC has been contracting these types of construction projects to private firms owned or managed by friends of a new class of UC administrators, such as Bob Lalanne, founder of the SF architectural firm Lalanne Group and now Vice Chancellor of Real Estate at UC Berkeley. These kinds of private business deals have seriously indebted the University to the extent that it can no longer borrow money to support core functions: we are now running an approximately $15 billion deficit, up from about $1 billion just over a decade ago. At the same time, these construction projects reap immense profits off of students and tenets, profits for which there is no obligation to spend on education. This is the new face of UC privatization.

Why Is This Happening and What Do We Do about It?

This shift towards UC Real Estate speculation has largely taken place under UC Regent Richard Blum, Chairman of the world’s largest Real Estate development firm, CB Richard Ellis. Since his arrival on the UC Board of Regents, the University of California has enabled him cheap access to public land for private development companies. Blum is an expert in preying on indebted public institutions like the US Post office or the University of California, forcing the latter to construct buildings it cannot afford. In the process, Blum helps create real estate bubbles through rapid development and gentrification, and after these bubbles burst, as they did in 2008, Blum and his allies reap profits again buying up cheap land, leaving many in debt and displaced.

The face of UC privatization is multi-faceted in 2015. We need not only to resist tuition hikes across the board, but also address the corruption embedded in real estate development and support campus workers who are fighting to reverse their own impoverishment. As long as administrators continue to call the UC a “public” school, we need to be here to hold these individuals accountable to the public.

Open Letter Urging SF Mayor to Defend City College: Be There August 20th

What: Rally to Demand SF Mayor Take Action to Save City College of San Francisco

When: August 20, 4pm

Where: SF Civic Center
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An Open Letter to Mayor Ed Lee:

As students, staff, faculty and community members of San Francisco, we share the sentiment you expressed at the July 9, 2013 Board of Supervisors meeting that allowing City College of San Francisco to close would be “devastating.” Indeed, as the largest working class institution in San Francisco, a school of immigrants, workers, adult learners, the formerly incarcerated, and others who depend on it for personal transformation, City College must not close. But neither can we allow its transformation into an elite, undemocratic school serving the needs of the few.

At the July 9^th meeting, you said that we are in a hurry, and that we must act swiftly and decisively to meet the accrediting commission’s demands. But we ask that you pause for a moment to consider why an institution that has been educating San Francisco residents for seventy-seven years is, in the span of one short year, in danger of being dismantled. We ask that you consider why the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, an institution that should want us to succeed at the tasks it outlines, imposed such a severe timetable on meeting those tasks and then administered the disaccreditation death sentence.

In a San Francisco Chronicle piece you wrote recently with California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris, you said: “What’s needed now is a stronger hand, a single individual with the experience, trustworthiness, and focus to turn City College around.” As a mayor elected by democratic vote, we are alarmed that you would advocate such a wholly undemocratic solution to CCSF’s present ‘crisis.’ The City College Board of Trustees was democratically elected by the residents of San Francisco; the macabre sounding “Super Trustee with Extraordinary Powers” Robert Agrella has never been approved by San Franciscans and has now been granted absolute power to dictate the futures of the college and its beneficiaries – the people of San Francisco.

In a foreboding display of secrecy and authoritarianism, within two weeks of his appointment Super Trustee Agrella kicked CCSF Student Trustee Shanell Williams off the chancellor search committee. When the democratically elected Williams attempted to attend a meeting she had been directed to, campus police barred her from entering. This silencing of student voices cannot be tolerated.

The rapid transformations occurring in San Francisco since you were elected in 2011 - a booming tech sector, massive land development, and a devastating housing crisis – have not gone unnoticed by members of our community; certainly not by those who would be shut out by the transformation of City College from a working class institution to a two-year junior college. When asked about the increasing number of evictions, rising homelessness and sky-high rents in our city, you recently said that you “didn’t realize we had a housing crisis.” Perhaps, then, you have also not considered the history of the ACCJC – its lack of transparency, violation of federal, state and even its own laws, and its relationship to a national push to privatize public education. We urge you to visit www.saveccsf.org, where much research and work has already been compiled.

Perhaps you heard the voices of those concerned San Franciscans who marched to the U.S. Department of Education on July 9^th: “Where’s Ed Lee?” they asked. This is because the community members, students, staff and faculty who care deeply about City College were hoping that you, their top elected city official, would stand with them in support of the college, in defense of the attacks and threats of the ACCJC. When many elected officials, including Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and Supervisors Avalos and Campos, have already taken a stand with us against the ACCJC’s attacks on our city, we ask that you join our defense of City College by making a public statement in support of the following points:

• City College of San Francisco must remain an open, accessible, affordable and democratic public institution serving the diverse needs of all San Francisco residents.

• Call on Chancellor Bryce Harris and the California Community College Board of Governors to immediately reinstate the democratically elected Board of Trustees and remove the position of the undemocratic so-called “Super Trustee with Extraordinary Powers” Robert Agrella.

• Call on the ACCJC to immediately remove City College from sanction status.

• Support an investigation of the ACCJC in regard to conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, violations of federal and state laws, and violations of its own formal policies and procedures.

• Do not close campuses. Full and immediate reporting of steps that have already been taken to sell off City College property to private real estate interests. Public accountability for City College common property, which belongs to the past generations who paid for it through their taxes and to future generations in perpetuity.

• Democratic community participation in the creation of the CCSF Road Map.

• Full and open participation in the hiring of the CCSF Chancellor and Vice Chancellor.

• Release Prop A funds as promised and voted on by San Francisco residents.

City College of San Francisco reflects the values that have made San Francisco a refuge for so many people – one of opportunity, not just for the wealthy and successful, but for those who have struggled to turn their lives around. Individuals with little and few places to go come to City College as an opportunity to transform themselves, to better their own lives and those of their communities. We see this in grave danger of being undone, not only if City College is closed – which would be devastating – but also if the college capitulates to the devastating demands of the ACCJC.

We urge you to stand with us in defense of City College. We are sure that you will.

Sincerely,

Students, Staff, Faculty and Community Members of the Save CCSF Coalition

Statement in Opposition to the Appointment of Janet Napolitano as the Next UC President

Our objections to Napolitano’s presidency begin with the very process by which she was selected. Her appointment was announced to the public suddenly at the end of a secretive, closed-door process conducted by the UC Regents, themselves an undemocratically selected body in no way bound to the will of the students, faculty, or workers of the UC system, but riddled with conflicting private interests that include the increasing militarization of UC campuses. It is hardly a coincidence that the Regents’ search led them to the head of an organization that also notoriously thrives on secrecy and militarism. This collaboration marks an alarming acceleration of the degradation of democracy—not only at the university level, as students and workers are deprived of the right to meaningful participation in their schools’ governance, but also at the state and national level, as the sovereignty and independence of education are explicitly handed to agents of privatization and militarization.

Napolitano began her experience with “public” education in her gubernatorial campaign to expand “oneof the nation’s largest…charter schools,” a movement that has left K-12 public schools ravaged across the nation. This laid the neoliberal foundation for later atrocities that made Arizona—and especially its school system—an infamous beacon of racist inequality. As the head of DHS, Napolitano mainly interacted with higher education only to channel ever more of its research and funding away from the public good and towards surveillance and war. She has implied that she will continue her regime of surveillance and privatization by hastening the forcing of online education upon the UC. 

Also, for a university that claims to be pro-immigration, the choice of Napolitano is quite odd. During her tenure as the top administrator of the Department of Homeland Security, she oversaw the deportation of nearly 1.5 million immigrants—the most in any American administration. Furthermore, she implemented policies that further militarized the borders, and she expanded U.S. drone and surveillance programs. In the face of these facts, the appointment of Napolitano is a glaring contradiction to the UC’s supposed immigrant-friendly stance. Napolitano has proven that she is no friend of immigrants, and if the UC really were an advocate of immigrant rights, then the Regents would revoke her appointment.

As a former Governor of Arizona and Secretary of Homeland Security, Ms. Napolitano may be an expert at running large organizations, but she does not have the depth of experience with and investment in California public education that befits a leader of the UC system. The UC was built and funded by the residents of California to educate new generations of Californians. As students, we want the leader of our universities to be a California educator, one who has dedicated a lifetime to California pubic higher education and reflects our values. The shocking choice of such an imperial privateer, whose salary will triple as she becomes the head of a supposedly public institution, to lead a state school ravaged by austerity is only conceivable when one considers that this choice was first made by an executive search firm hired by the Regents behind closed doors. The university community simply will not stand for it.

 From the expansion of funding for weapons development in Berkeley labs, to the distressing investment in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, to the brutal suppression of free speech and free assembly on our campuses, we see the very ideals that draw distinguished students and faculty to the UC now fully undermined. Based upon these and other concerns, we demand that the UC administration revoke Ms. Napolitano's job offer and re-open the process of selecting the next President of the University of California. We further demand that this process take place as it should: visibly and democratically with input from all members of the university community as we search for a fit president who will be accountable to us. 

 

Sincerely,

UC Students and Allies in Dissent

Booz Allen and Online Surveillance...I Mean Education

In the wake of former Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden's revelation about the NSA's massive (and uber creepy) surveillance scheme, I've started to wonder what else this strange company has been up to. A lot, it turns out.

Partnering with institutions like Farleigh Dickinson University and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton @ Work program, Booz Allen has apparently been a major (and powerful and wealthy and, yes, still creepy) force in the disruptive shove towards internet-based education. This is particularly significant when we take into account that they've also worked alongside the NSA to monitor and record virtually all communications and exchanges over the net and our phones. This online education partnership presents itself as a new tool to monitor and constrain free speech, this time in our classrooms. For a sense of what's on offer at one of these education businesses, check out this list of FDU courses.

And they've got people of color especially in their sites. In what reads as a plea for black colleges to just get online already, Reggie Smith III, Chairman of the Board of Directors for the United States Distance Learning Association and employee at Booz Allen, writes, "HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] have an imperative to take their programs online."

Finally, I'll leave you with this extended quote from a Booz Allen position paper on "Effectiveness and Efficiency: Reimagining Government," which makes clear how Booz Allen sees online education as a strategic surveillance tool and the current climate of budget cuts as the perfect time to prey:

"The aging workforce and record budget deficits require an end to business as usual, which means federal leaders...have a window of opportunity to enact change. Not small, short-term, wait-out-the-storm changes, but transformative change that reorients government [or education] to expanding missions, new workforce requirements, and new budget realities. This kind of change is possible because new technologies such as cloud and mobile computing, advanced data analytics, and virtualization solutions provide numerous opportunities to streamline government operations and improve mission performance across the entire spectrum of civilian, defense, and intelligence activities...

"Continuous monitoring also mitigates costly security risks. Best practices are increasingly shared among agency CIOs, so they can be built into new technologies and solutions. In fact, the collaborative model is the basis for how DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] is building out its cybersecurity guidance: Academic institutions [albeit unwittingly], agencies, and CIOs are sharing insights on cyber practices that are evaluated for government-wide adoption."

Flier for June 6 "(Un)Fair Carnival and March"

University of California, "Enterprise Risk Management," and Orwellian Surveillance

On June 5-7, the University of California administrators are gathering together for an Enterprise Risk Management "Risk Summit" conference. There, they will attend workshops like Wes Balda's "Risk Managers Are from Mars, Faculty from Venus," a workshop that highlights the (gendered) hierarchies of labor; the paternalistic response to reforms in workers' compensation, "Mindfulness: An Antidote to Stress, Injuries & Illnesses;" or the Campus Life series talk on "On-Line Depression & Suicide Screening," perhaps meant to monitor lonely, isolated students who've been displaced from human contact and, well, campus life.

My favorite session, though, is straight out of Michel Foucault's writings on management and surveillance. It's titled "Civil Disobedience Training: From Prevention to Response: Latest Thinking in Leadership, Decision Making and Management During Crisis." As the blurb indicates, the session is geared towards UC policy executives and is "not a 'learn the response protocol workshop,'" but a training in how to manage the visibility and scope of a "crisis ranging from campus protests to mega natural disasters" in the context of "external communications" and "social media." In other words, this is a workshop on how management can better make our protests invisible and ineffective in order to manage the value of their "brand." For administrators, this is an especially pressing concern in the face of massive cuts to workers' benefits; tuition and fee increases across the board from education to healthcare; and the aggressive investment in online education and subsequent disinvestment in public education and the labor that supports it. All this going into several union contract negotiations this summer and rumors of potential strikes this fall and spring. Can Enterprise Risk Management make it all go away?

At the University of California, students and workers now pose a "risk" to the university's model of indefinite wealth extraction, and they must be monitored and controlled. And as nearly every Enterprise Risk Management slide show or position paper advises, "A strong system of internal control is essential to enterprise risk management."

See you on June 6 at 12 p.m. in front of the Oakland Marriott located at 1001 Broadway.

UC Online, UC In Debt (by Beezer de Martelly)

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The University of California has recently been in the news again, this time for two spectacular and expensive business failures. But, as UCLA Professor Bob Samuels suggests, “We shouldn’t laugh, because someone is going to have to pay” for them. First was the recent re-branding fiasco, where the UC launched an “updated” version of its logo, which was likened almost immediately to a toilet bowl flushing. After a grassroots campaign gathered more than 50,000 signatures opposing the new logo, the administration reneged on the image only weeks after introducing it. Then, a second seemingly unrelated story popped up a month later. Here, reporters covered a new for-profit version of University of California, UC Online, which had failed to attract more than a handful of the 7,000 students the fledgling company anticipated enrolling. As shown in a UC Online commercial on YouTube that has since been made private, the new logo appeared to be very instrumental in UC Online’s $4.3 million marketing campaign.

These stories are part of a much larger effort by the UC Regents (read California billionaires) to transform the UC system into an even more profitable private entity. Like other large universities, the UC has been operating much like a hedge fund for years, engaging in increasingly risky business with borrowed money. In this example, the Regents approved a $6.9 million loan to UC Online borrowed from the already broke UCs when student fees have more than tripled in the past decade; when it took a massive, statewide effort to pass the much needed (and much watered down) Proposition 30 to help fund education; when funding for libraries, classes, and other services like daycare programs have been eliminated or trimmed to the bone; when national student debt topped $1 trillion last year. After students from China and the military—two groups UC Online apparently targeted heavily—failed to materialize, the university has thus far only been able to recoup 0.0014% of its loan. This leaves many wondering what will happen if UC Online’s business model fails and it is never able to repay this debt back to the university. Conversely, if online education succeeds, what will happen to all of the campus buildings constructed in part from skyrocketing student debt?

To be sure, UC Online is just one project among many on which various members of the UC administration, Governor Brown, and numerous other public and private institutions are working under the moniker “20 Million Minds,” or 20MM. Founded by billionaire (ranked #328 in the Forbes 400) and buyer of “distressed” California commercial real estate Gary Michelson, 20MM is a curious organization, indeed. In a January 20MM-sponsored conference entitled “Rebooting CA Higher Education,” entrepreneurs presented one potential face of what they term “disruptive technology” in the 20MM mission statement, revealing how the organization hopes to “debundle” traditional curricular development. Instead, the online education entrepreneurs promoted an assembly line approach to education where “one person would design a course, another person would present the course, another person would market the course, and none of these people would be involved in research, community service, or shared governance.” And what about the learning side of the equation? As Audrey Watters notes, at the heart of this debate is serious conflict over how we understand the purpose of education itself. But at present, it seems like Gov. Brown and the Regents are not very interested in such questions, already referring to the UC system as “a venerable institution being upended by digital change.” Disruption, indeed. Is it really inevitable, though?

As the lure of online education intoxicates more and more high-level members of school administrations, businesses, and local and federal politicians, and as these interests become ever more deeply linked, it is all the more pressing for us to turn our energies in the direction of online education and to keep asking questions.

Forcing Online Education at the UCs (link to Bob Samuels' piece)

It's been awhile since we've shared news on the public education front, but it's certainly not for lack of drama. We hope to keep up with the seemingly daily deluge of events, but for now, we'll tide you over with this doozy from Bob Samuels about how the UCs have invested $7million of borrowed money (that is, money borrowed from the already under-funded UC system) in a for-profit online education program that's already fallen short of expectations. Enjoy!?

Crisis in Context: The Role of the Student in the Battle for CCSF (by Stephan Georgiou)

“He who counts heads always silences facts and voices.”

- Michel-Rolph Trouillot

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

- Walter Benjamin

“There is not enough time.” Many have used these words since the CCSF accrediting report was released – in Facebook threads, Board meetings and organizing spaces – in response to challenging the legitimacy of the private body that will decide our school’s fate. We have until October 15 to address the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges’ (ACCJC, or WASC) problems; “not enough time,” they say, so we react. We scramble to form committees. We cut and reform. If we submit to the crisis, and work hard enough, perhaps two months will be enough time to save our school. But while our heads are spinning, plans are already being made for further changes. We do not have time to seek out, absorb or reflect on this information. And then the next crisis will fall.

On October 15, the Board of Trustees must submit a plan addressing CCSF’s “problems” or risk losing accreditation, public funding and being shut down. Groups have been formed to deal with each of the 14 “problem” areas in the report. Perhaps students are being solicited for input. For the last six years, however, since the last commission report highlighted eight areas the Board of Trustees needed to address, students were not informed or invited to help. Conversations took place among those in positions of power, and in the face of massive public education defunding, the leadership structures that exist did not address the commission’s demands. And now there is not enough time.

The leaders, the specialists, the policymakers have enough time. They work ahead of us, above us, with the arrogance that they know best. They deal the changes, and we play to keep up. They are the subjects; we are the objects. At a Board of Trustees presentation last month, President of the ACCJC Barbara Beno described the accrediting process. In three hours and twenty PowerPoint slides, she nearly eliminated students from the equation. Our sole factor in accreditation is our product: test scores. They are analyzed, and our outcomes are plotted on graphs. We are data. Opinions about our learning environment are not related to accreditation. “We don’t want to hear stories,” said Beno’s co-presenter Bill McGinnis. With numbers, the accreditors can wrap their small minds around us. It excuses them from taking the time to ask us; it gives them the excuse to transform our existing structure into something they feel more comfortable with. Certain things must go: the shared governance model, the low number of administrators, the percentage spent on teacher and worker pay. A top-down business model would be more efficient. Meanwhile, the students – of which there are 90,000 at CCSF – move to and from class, sharing, learning; transformations occur around us. We study, work; they study us. But not our stories, for which there isn’t enough time; they study the quality of test scores we produce. We do not know what’s best for us. There is not enough time.

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We need not look far back for the last crisis. In 2010, the California Community College Board of Governors created a twenty-member Student Success Task Force to address issues of completion among – predominantly – students of color.¹ One student was invited to sit on the body of mostly administrators and specialists – the Student Trustee of the 112-college system. His task was to speak for more than two million students across the state. When the Task Force recommendations came to the Board of Governors for approval last January – a sweeping overhaul that included taking autonomy away from individual campuses and consolidating power with the Board of Governors in Sacramento – many spoke out against the recommendations. CCSF students, faculty and workers were among the most represented. But it was too late. The Task Force had been at work for a year, and aside from a few ill-publicized town halls, the time for voicing opinions had been taken from us. The Board voted unanimously, with two abstentions, to endorse the recommendations. Now, a series of bills and regulation changes move through the legislature to transform our schools without our input.

Here, power and time reinforce each other to silence student voices. We cannot speak if we are not asked; we cannot influence if our voices do not bear the weight of titles. During the week following the accrediting commission’s report, one CCSF student leader advised me that the conversations I was having jeopardized his position. These “conversations” dealt with the formation of a student union on campus. I was referring not to the building that houses the campus café and student government offices, but the potential for a united body of students capable of mass action. He could not have these conversations because his position prevented him from thinking or acting outside of that position. There are limits in speech and action, in scope and functionality, which accompany positions of power. Our student representatives – hardworking as they may be – are not exempt.

If the Board of Trustees and the Interim Chancellor – those powerbrokers currently possessing clout – are successful at saving CCSF (and their willingness to do anything necessary to satisfy the accreditors indicates they will be), the real battle for CCSF will begin. Problems facing CCSF students, after all, hardly began last month. Most of us, for example, do not remember that our college was free 25 years ago. We do not remember because we were not here, and because we do not have a plaque at CCSF to commemorate each time our tuition was raised. The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education outlawed tuition at California schools – hence the term “enrollment fees” – so publicly enshrining our costs might provoke distress. Most of us were not even here 10 years ago when fees were a quarter what they are now. Years of austerity and a global financial crisis have turned public education into a commodity we must work long hours for, go into debt for, and struggle through a jobless market to repay. Our classes are overcrowded, or eliminated – sometimes mid-semester, as happened in the spring. At Santa Monica City College, a two-tier tuition system would have forced students to pay four times as much for popular classes, crystallizing class-based access to education. When students attempted to speak out against the plan at a Board of Trustees meeting, they were pepper-sprayed. Violence is used to silence us when less visible means fail – say, when we are simply not invited to the conversation. Money, economics – these are things above us we are not thought capable of dealing with. Nevermind that according to the 1960 Master Plan, we shouldn’t be paying any fees. These issues, along with the Student Success Task Force recommendations, preceded the accrediting crisis. If the administrators are successful at saving CCSF, we can expect more.

***

Let us slow time down for a moment, take back those moments of inquiry that have been stolen from us. In this liberated space, let us give ourselves space to question our roles as students and our functions within present operational structures. Can we begin to ask ourselves the kind of college we would like to see in the future, even once we have left the terrain of buildings and knowledge exchange? Can we witness ourselves as imperative subjects, who have the power to expand the possibilities for not only ourselves, but for future students?

Perhaps we should begin by questioning the legitimacy of power structures and leadership bodies that exclude us from the processes that will shape our futures in profound ways. These are political questions, and they require care and patience from those most affected: students. Will the changes desired by the commission improve CCSF for us, and for the teachers and workers who sustain it, or will they benefit an increasingly hierarchical, data-driven public education bureaucracy that places the needs of the state and global competition above those of the people utilizing and maintaining the system? While there may not be enough time before October 15 to challenge the legitimacy of the ACCJC (there is not meant to be enough time, after all), this will expand our conceptions of the possible, and begin to shift the balance of power.

Many have already questioned the ACCJC’s legitimacy. In 2010, in response to the large number of California community colleges placed on sanction between 2003 and 2008, California Community College leaders, including representatives from the Board of Governors and the Academic Senate, formed a task force to investigate the ACCJC.² Chancellor Jack Scott wrote to the U.S. Department of Education claiming that the ACCJC was not following its own bylaws in selecting commissioners. In a KQED Forum segment last month, College of Marin Instructor Patrick Kelly voiced outrage at the high percentage of WASC-overseen colleges given “warning” status or worse, compared to the low percentage in the rest of the U.S. “Is it really that the colleges in California and the Western U.S. are that much worse?,” he asked.³ In a 2008 letter to Barbara Beno from Marty Hittelman, President of the California Federation of Teachers, Hittelman accused the ACCJC of violating state law in its push for Student Learning Outcomes in teacher evaluation.⁴ And the Chair of the accrediting commission, Sherrill Amador, was involved in a prolonged labor dispute during her tenure as President of Palomar College in San Diego County. She received two votes of no confidence from faculty and staff and resigned in 2003; the following year, she began her tenure as ACCJC Chair.⁵ Let us build upon these facts by continuing to research and ask questions.

***

CCSF is a place with a depth of human experience unmatched at most colleges and universities. It is not a school solely for those directly out of high school; it is more complex than that. It is a school of immigrants, workers, adult learners, the formerly incarcerated, those with few spaces left that offer the possibility of transformation. If the ACCJC and the forces above them – like the U.S. Department of Education, which many seem unwilling to recognize as connected – have their way, CCSF will be a more streamlined place, where one comes not for possibility, but for the certainty of a life pre-planned, a social identity pre-constructed. The populations who most need City College will be forced to look elsewhere, and when there is no public place to turn, perhaps they will find the for-profit education engine. A recent Business Insider article described a meeting of investors eager to capitalize on a gutted public education sector. “You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up,” said one consultant.⁶

When we, a rich and diverse body of students, place our trust in single leaders – in the case of the one student representing millions on the Student Success Task Force, for example, or the leader who warned me about “dangerous” conversations – we are diverted from acting ourselves to create change. We have voted, so we can sit back. Even if we did have the time to organize, which many of us at CCSF do not, because of work, family, and other commitments, we trust that others are acting in our place. Elected leaders, restricted by their positions and structures, are powerless to create the change we need, or they act in accord with the power structures against our interests. We resign ourselves to the idea that “there is nothing we can do;” we feel helpless. We become displaced from the political, alienated from the decisions that most directly impact our lives, and we relinquish our power – as individuals first, and then even more disastrously as a collective of voices and bodies.

What is our role as students? What is our function? During a 1968 student-worker uprising in France, individuals experienced a crisis of functionalism, ceasing to function along rigid social lines. Identities that had been taken for granted – student, worker, farmer – were challenged as individuals looked outside of their own places in society and recognized the Other within themselves. Universities and factories were occupied, transformed into organizing spaces, and the streets became sites of information exchange and identity complication. The individual recognized her full power as part of the collective.

At CCSF, the crisis of functionalism is built in to our structure: community college. Learners at City College are not only students – their identities have already been complicated. They are workers, adult learners, undocumented immigrants, members of oppressed communities of color. What is missing is our recognition of ourselves as imperative subjects, recognition of the Others within each of us as an untapped energy reserve. With 90,000 students, the potential for CCSF student power is enormous. The first step is subjectivation – the recognition of this power – and then its seizure.

When the present crisis subsides and the administrators and leaders congratulate themselves for “saving” CCSF, it is the students who will inherit a radically different college. There will be limits on the types of futures we can have; the least socially and economically advantaged of us will be shut out altogether. What type of school do we want? What kinds of things would we like to preserve, and what would we like to change? These are questions existing powers do not want us to be asking. They certainly have not asked us themselves. It is the students who are paying tuition and community members who contribute taxes, and it is us who have the ability to imagine new possibilities for City College, new relationships among students, and between students and administrators. Will we continue to go to Sacramento to beg for an accessible college, only to be congratulated for exercising our rights to free speech and then ignored, or will we call into question the very legitimacy of bodies like the Board of Governors and the ACCJC? Will we accept rapidly rising and discriminatory tuition costs? If the positions of our elected student leaders limit their abilities to speak and act on behalf of the student population, will they abandon these positions and join the students in the streets? Will we continue to accept our positions as objects to be studied and measured, plotted out on the graphs of “experts” and used to justify the failure of our school, or will we claim something more? Will we recognize our position as subjects, deserving a direct role in the operation of our college, committed to meeting our own needs and realizing our own ideas?

Because whether it is the Board of Governors-appointed Student Success Task Force or the WASC accrediting commission or another body enforcing its own code of operations on our college, setting boundaries, limiting access, deciding what is best for us, our future possibilities are diminishing at the hands of our “leaders.” The only people who can challenge this assault on our futures is a united body of students, aware, connected; a new body in recognition of its power and its subjectivity, a body capable of wielding that power through action.

Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits from U.S. K-12 Markets (link to Huffington Post article by Stephanie Simon)

In a recent Huffington Post article, author Stephanie Simon describes investors' strategies to defund and dismantle public K-12 schools in order to then reap massive profits by privatizing kids' education. In a related article, Kevin Welner raises concerns that such steps are part of a larger corporate agenda to commoditize students--a process in which both dominant political parties have been complicit.

For-Profit College Recruiters Taught to Use "Pain," "Fear" Internal Documents Show (link to Huffington Post article by Chris Kirkham)

This article illustrates fairly succinctly the depths to which many for-profit colleges will go in order to ciphon some cash away from folks who are already broke. This story has everything to do with the University of California system, where UC Regent Richard Blum's investment firm Blum Capital is the largest shareholder of one of the for-profit schools mentioned in this piece, ITT Technical Institute. Read on and get enlightened.

Our Public Education System: Cornerstone of American Democracy (by Mark Shalius)

Wide-spread publicly funded education in the United States began in the mid 1800s as a response to economic inequality. Horace Mann, the so-called "father of the Common Schools movement" worried that his state of Massachusetts was, "exposed, far beyond any other State in the Union, to the fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty." He advocated public education because "it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men . . . it prevents being poor." Henry Barnard, another 19th century American responsible for the adoption of public education throughout the US, described it as, "The cause of true education, of the complete education of every human being without regard to the accidents of birth or fortune."

Although our publicly controlled system has not functioned perfectly and has sometimes been subject to abuse, Americans have supported it in principle because it preserves and protects fundamental American values of equality, democracy, freedom and individuality. By preventing poverty, it mitigates the extremes of inequality that can destroy a society. It is fundamentally democratic (controlled by everyone together). It creates an informed citizenry that is the bedrock of our democracy. It keeps us free by emphasizing the well-being and rights of individual citizens, not large organizations. Public colleges, in particular, keep us free by monitoring and limiting undue influence of large powerful entities in society: corporations, government, etc. Americans recognize that education is a fundamental right - the basis for many other human rights. And public schools are the major American institution where people from all walks of life come together to imagine and create a shared future that works for everyone.

A healthy public education system also provides the best quality education. Finland's well-funded public school system is widely regarded as the best in the world right now. And the American public education system used to be much better. But as is discussed in detail in the companion essays, during the past several decades, corporations in America have mounted a systematic, organized attack to destroy our public education system and replace it with a privatized one. As a result, we now have an unhealthy public school system, choked by massive funding cuts that finance corporate tax breaks and subverted by corporate-influenced management that ignores our fundamental American values. Ironically, corporate education privatizers claim that these very shortcomings they have forced upon our public system justify its replacement by a corporate/private system of education - a system that will deny public control to the citizens who are paying for it. This is an attempt to impose taxation without representation, which is as unAmerican today as it was when Americans first revolted against it during the Revolutionary War that created this nation. Privatized corporate education is also unAmerican because it replaces our fundamental American values of equality, freedom, democracy and individuality with the single corporate value of profit. Most studies do not support corporate privatizers' claims of providing "better quality" education than a public system.

19th century Americans originally created a publicly funded, publicly controlled education system to reduce economic inequalities. They saw this as a patriotic action to preserve our values and protect our nation from the threat of "fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty." So as public funding and control of education have declined under corporate attack in the 21st century, the corresponding increase in economic inequality should come as no surprise to us. Undoing our 150 year-old tradition of strong public education risks returning us to the economic misery and chaotic social conditions of the early 1800s. Americans understand that we are headed toward these "fatal extremes" as economic conditions continue to worsen for most of us while the top one percent becomes increasingly wealthy. Americans have a long tradition of reducing this threat of "fatal extremes" through public education. To reverse this trend, we must return to our American roots of public education. We MUST strengthen public funding and public control of education to re-create a healthy and robust public education system. Our American predecessors had it right: a healthy public education system is one of the fundamental cornerstones of our nation. Removing it will destroy this country.

The following compilation contains pieces by concerned American students, parents, and faculty. Some explain in detail how corporate privatization attacks on our public education system are subverting our basic American values. Others suggest strategies for thwarting these attacks and re-creating a healthy, vigorous public education system that is genuinely of the people, by the people and for the people.

On Higher Education (by Charlie Schwartz)

Higher education in America has always been formed with two contradictory faces: one provides the exclusive pathway for children of the elite; the other opens the door to select children from all (or almost all) walks of life. Thus our colleges and universities serve both the aristocracy of a capitalist system while also providing some openings to diversity that a true democracy requires.

The Morrill Act of 1862 provided new college opportunities, especially aimed at distributing technical talent to independent citizens as farmers and mechanics; but by the end of the 19^th century there was already a shift toward more “scientific” training of workers needed for the new technological industries (see David Noble, “America By Design”, 1977, the story of M.I.T.).

The GI Bill, enacted at the close of World War II, opened college opportunities to a huge new class of citizens who had fought in the war for democracy over fascism; but that time also brought forward a huge increase in military funding for university research aimed to enlarge and improve the technologies of war. (The University of California came out as the permanent patron of the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore.)

The 1960’s saw student-led uprisings on many campuses, in support of the Civil Rights movement, against the war in Vietnam, and for advancing many calls for diversity on the campuses themselves.

In California there was the Master Plan for Higher Education, creating three segments: the University of California (UC), accepting the top 1/8 of high school graduates (now with 10 campuses and total enrollment of around 234,000); the California State University System (CSU), open to the top 1/3 (now 23 campuses and enrollment of about 427,000); and the California Community College system (CCC), open to all high school graduates (now 112 campuses and enrolling about 2.6 million students). On the one hand, this arrangement made for a stratification that largely reproduced the existing economic orders in the service of large scale capitalism. On the other hand, it provided for large numbers of students, from almost all walks of life to get onto an upward economic escalator.

California’s system of higher education, from 1960 through the end of the century, has been generally hailed as the world’s most admired system of public education. And it paid off for California as an engine for economic and cultural growth.

But things have been changing lately, changing fast and furious. We call it Privatization. This takes many forms and we need to look at them in some detail to understand how they come about, who wins and who loses; and what forces are engaged in this great political struggle.

Before the Fall: Possible Futures for Anti-Austerity Movements (link to article by Amanda Armstrong)

Please check out this article by Amanda Armstrong about the pitfalls of electoral politics in the struggle to support public education and the workers that enable it.

Mission Statement for Occupy Education Northern California*

The attack on public education is one aspect of a larger attack on the public sector and on democracy more generally, where corporate interests now dominate political, social, and economic decisions. Occupy Wall Street has reshaped the debate over this country’s direction with the demand that the destruction of our communities and our earth resulting from corporatization must end: we seek something entirely different.

Occupy Education Northern California shares these broad goals and believes that we need more than simply increased funding for public education. The problems with education are deeply linked to and cannot be treated separately from racism; privatization; global economic competition rather than cooperation; and lack of access to food, housing, and healthcare. In order to address these issues, we must change the conditions in which students live and learn and provide them with tools to reimagine and reclaim their futures. Furthermore, education must prepare students to be empowered participants in a democratic community and to take respectful care of each other and of the planet.

To these ends, this is our vision:

• Public education, from birth to life-long learning, is to be government-funded and free of charge for all individuals.
• End the privatization of education, which includes funding cuts and fee hikes, top-down control, outsourced labor, standardized test-driven curricula, competition for access to schools, internet-based classes without human interaction, and the militarization of our campuses. 
• Education must be shaped by the needs of students, teachers, workers, and community members with their full, democratic participation in decision-making.
• In the interests of education and all other public services, end corporate personhood and revoke the charter of any corporation that acts against the public’s political, financial, social, or environmental wellbeing.
• Focus the goals of education on supporting the ethical and democratic interests of all the world’s inhabitants. 

We will no longer plead with politicians who act in the economic interests of the 1%, and we will no longer buy into the false notion of “shared sacrifice.” We intend to stop the corporate program to privatize education by carrying out actions that positively embody the above principles.

                                                                                                                     
Occupy Education Northern California believes that the 99% has the untapped political power necessary to realize this vision, and it is our mission to take part in a democratically led transformation of education. We invite you to join us!

*Note: The Mission Statement for Occupy Education Northern California is a living document, and we believe that it should be revised regularly to reflect the changing ideas of our participants, old and new.