Guest Post: UCR Students Promote a Bad Tuition Plan as Police Beat Protesters
The following is a guest post by Bob Samuels , President of the University Council - AFT and a lecturer at UCLA. It is cross-posted from his blog , where you should go to find all of the original hyperlinks. I highly recommend also reading his November entry in the Huffington Post on why public higher education should be free . The UC Regents meeting had a little of everything this week: UCR students came up with a new way to fund the university, a long list of new salary increases was released, UCSF asked to quit the system, a retired professor was fired, protesters disrupted the meeting, Regents met behind closed doors, and police attacked protesters who were using books as shields. What does it all mean? Perhaps, it all adds up to the demise of the modern Western social contract. Without being too dramatic, we are seeing an attempt to resist the destruction of the central institutions of modernity: the university, the public commons, and the welfare state. Although it was once take...