Day 17

Two stacks of campus newspapers sat on our front reception desk this morning: the student-run The Daily Californian, and the campus public affairs office-run The Berkeleyan. Top headline in the student paper: "UC Students May Face Major Fee Increases." Top headline in campus-run paper: "It now costs less to park at Berkeley." Different priorities, different perceptions on what constitutes news, differing opinions on whether we have reasons to be optimistic. Allow me to point out the contrast in the dollars of these articles. As staff member, as I've mentioned before, the parking fee cut will save me $87 this year. Based on information from the campus registrar website and the student paper, a student will have to pay $5428 more for school in the next year. I think the student paper wins on this round.

We received an email from our building manager this morning that if the trash or recycling bins in our offices and cubicles need to be emptied, then we are being asked to put them in the hallways rather than leaving them where they are and expecting custodial services to go into each of our spaces like they used to. When I first started working here, my trash and recycling were emptied nightly with zero effort by me. For about the past year or so, it has been about once every other day. As of today, the trash currently in my bin has been there for a week. Not that it's a big deal for me to put my cans outside my door, because it certainly isn't, but it's just a small, noteworthy detail from our deteriorating budget and workforce.

Speaking of decreased labor force, I watched Mark Yudoff's remarks to the UC Board of Regents this morning about his budget proposal, which includes dramatic increases to student fees. There are many points from his speech that I would like to point out as particularly interesting, but for now, I am going to stick to highlights on the labor issue. Yudoff told his audience that while he did his best to make the furloughs fair, he understands that the whole thing really isn't fair, in part because of the high complexity of a university as an organization. He refutes two of his opposition's biggest criticisms: that the university has a huge amount of financial reserve they could be using to avoid a furlough, and that top administrators received raises. I found it interesting that throughout the speech, Yudoff remained mostly calm if exasperated with the situation UC finds itself in, but that he was almost spitting mad when he talked about the unions. He asked the union representatives who have refused conversations with him, and who have refused to participate in the furlough program, to go knock of the doors of fellow union members who have been laid off, and explain to them and their families why the union decided they should be laid off rather than take a relatively minimal pay cut. I'm just quoting the man, so don't shoot the messanger. And while his language may be extreme much in the same way as those he criticizes, he makes a good point. Finally, he says that he wishes that critics of the administration would walk arm in arm with him and his team to Sacramento to demand attention and funding for UC. I wonder if he would walk out of his office, and ask his chancellors and other administrators to walk out with him in support of faculty, staff, and students on September 24. Now that would be a united front.

Also in higher-education-union-eruption-news, Oakland University (this school is in Detroit's backyard, not Berkeley's) faculty held a week-long strike to fight against hiring non-tenure track faculty and the removal of faculty control of the institution's curriculum and other academic decisions. This relates to the upcoming faculty walkout at UC because of the universal issue with faculty strikes of leaving classrooms without instructors, and therefore harming the education of the students. Opponents to the walkout here at Berkeley don't like leaving classes empty, but imagine if we had a week-long walkout? Not exactly the same as a nurse's union staging a walkout, but significant just the same. Higher tuition for empty classrooms (and empty department and advising offices, while I'm at it)? I can hear the furious tax- and tuition-paying parents already...

The other big news today is that the House will probably pass a bill essentially deconstructing the current system in which the US government subsidizes private loan companies to offer student loans. They hope to instead use the money to just do the whole thing themselves and eliminate private lenders from their program. Many student loans, particularly undergraduate, are issued directly by the federal government anyway. In my personal student-borrowing experience, federal loans are managed better, have lower interest rates, and are more flexible than private loans. Opponents say that it's an egregious attempt by the federal government to take over education. Um, okay. The federal government essentially has control of the whole damn thing anyway (kind of reminds me of farm subsidies), but with the current system, private lenders face virtually no risk with loans in default thanks to government subsidies, and they get to keep all the profits. This is a pricey deal for taxpayers. I'm not necessarily in favor of government takeover of a private industry on principal. But in the recent past, private lenders have caused financial damage to student borrowers, colleges and universities, and taxpayers. As a California citizen, and advocate for my students who will soon be drowning in new student debt, I am in favor of providing them with the lowest interest rates, and most flexible payback schedules this country has to offer.