Higher Education

By David Dayen, Firedoglake

Over the weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown announced that the budget deficit for the next fiscal year has nearly doubled, from $9.2 billion to $16 billion. This almost assuredly means a commensurate increase in cuts to the state budget.

In the last fiscal year, Brown staved off a series of budget cuts by playing a game of “ta-da.” He assumed a fiscal bump from an improving economy of well over $4 billion, and used that windfall to plug the budget. That money never actually materialized, and indeed many were skeptical it ever would at the time. This bought a year to save the budget from key cuts, particularly in health care and education.

By Kelly Goff
New America Media

Educators in the state’s largest public university system staged pickets across the state Tuesday, hoping to draw attention to their faltering negotiations with California State University for a new contract.

If they fail to reach an agreement with the administration, the California Faculty Association’s 23,000 members could call for a strike, which would be the largest faculty strike in U.S. history.

The pickets come on the heels of the overwhelming 95-percent approval rating by members of an authorization to strike should the last round of bargaining fail. As part of the now 23-month-old contract dispute, the two sides had agreed to return to the bargaining table, but according to the CSU, faculty negotiators walked away from those talks Sunday night.

By Peter Schrag

There was no great surprise in last month’s proposal to devolve more control of the University of California’s ten campuses – and thus more autonomy -- to the campuses themselves. And it’s even less surprising that it came from Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, former Provost C. Judson King and other Berkeley officials.

All ten are supposedly equal, but it’s no secret that Berkeley, possibly with UCLA and San Diego, are more equal than others. Similar proposals have come from Berkeley administrators and some outside critics for twenty years or more.

But neither is it a secret that UC, in trying to re-create every new campus – from Davis to Riverside to Merced – in Berkeley’s image, has locked itself into an arteriosclerotic governance and policy structure that’s become ever more unwieldy.

SACRAMENTO – In this Democratic weekly radio address, Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) testifies before the Assembly Higher Education Committee regarding AB 1501, one of two bills that make up the Middle Class Scholarship Act, which slashes state college fees for middle class Californians by two-thirds. The Committee unanimously passed the bill on a bipartisan vote.

The Middle Class Scholarship Act will cover students whose family income is under $150,000, but over the amount allowed to qualify for financial aid. CSU students will save about $4,000 per year or $16,000 over a four-year period, UC students will save about $8,200 per year or nearly $33,000 over a four-year period, and Community Colleges would also receive $150 million to reduce costs for students.

By Sarah Jaffe
AlterNet

You could call it a bubble, but it's more like a ball and chain. Bubbles are, after all, light and airy.

The collective weight of American student debt is now over $1 trillion, and that weight is a drag not just on those paying the debt, but on our entire economy. It's hard to calculate exactly, because the lenders are notoriously unwilling to hand over their data, and with students defaulting at ever-higher rates, interest rates and fees are always changing, adding constantly to the weight of the burden college graduates (and those who didn't graduate but still have to pay off the loans they took out in more hopeful times) carry.

By Kelly Goff
New America Media

As debt-saddled California faces increased budget cuts in the coming year, educators in the state’s largest public university system are poised to authorize a future strike, even as they agreed today to return to the negotiating table to discuss key issues in their labor dispute with the California State University.

Faculty within the CSU are preparing to take the next step in a long struggle for a new contract as they vote throughout the next two weeks on the possibility of a 23-campus rolling strike sometime in the future if the next steps in negotiations fail.

Members of the California State Faculty Association, which represents roughly 23,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches who teach within the system, say they want a contract that addresses concerns over pay increases, academic freedom and the direction of the system.

In this Democratic weekly radio address, Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblymember Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) visit the UC Berkeley campus to talk with UC, CSU and community college students about the Middle Class Scholarship Act (AB 1500 and 1501), which will cut state college costs by two-thirds for middle class families. The plan is paid for by closing a tax loophole benefitting out-of-state corporations and would benefit students whose families make less than $150,000 per year.

For more information on the proposal, go to www.MiddleClassScholarship.com.

This week’s English address is 4:15
http://www.asmdc.org/audio/20120412RadioAddressEnglishMCSPerezSkinner.MP3

This week’s Spanish address is 5:58

By Sara Robinson
AlterNet

Progressive commentators have been piling on Rick Santorum for a weirdly incoherent statement he made about the state of American history classes in America's colleges. Here's what he said:

"I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And the state of California universities -- I think it's seven or eight of the California system of universities -- don't even teach an American history course. It's not even available to be taught. Just to tell you how bad it's gotten in this country, where we're trying to disconnect the people from the root of who we are...."

The derision Santorum has received is well-deserved. He messed up the facts badly: 10 of the 11 UC campuses do teach US history (the only exception is UC San Francisco, which is exclusively a graduate-level health sciences campus and offers no humanities classes at all).

It also misses the point. It's not news when a conservative says something that was flat-out wrong, or when liberals take smug satisfaction in demonstrating that they are (as usual) factually right. But there was something else Santorum said in that statement that was newsworthy and important -- and in our zeal to debunk the facts, many progressives are completely missing it.

By Joshua Pechthalt
California Federation of Teachers

As has been reported by the news media, one week ago the Millionaires Tax Coalition came to a negotiated agreement with Governor Brown, Senate President Pro-tem Steinberg, Speaker Pérez, and their allies by setting aside our separate ballot measures and joining forces on a new initiative to raise needed revenue for California public education and social services.

This agreement represents a major victory for the thousands of Californians who have risen up over recent months to demand that the wealthiest Californians start paying their fair share, that low and middle-income families still reeling from the Great Recession be spared undue burdens, and that our state raise sufficient, reliable revenue to restore cuts to education and vital services.

By Lillian Taiz
California Faculty Association

Without a public mandate and without open discussion within democratic processes, the administration of the California State University is transforming California’s great public university—“The People’s University”—into the image of a For-Profit higher education enterprise.

This is the overall assessment of “For-Profit Higher Education and the California State University: A Cautionary Tale,” a white paper the California Faculty Association released Tuesday at a meeting of the CSU’s Board of Trustees.

For years, the faculty on campuses up and down this state have tried, in vain, to get CSU administrators and its Trustees to rethink the path they are on. Some of them, having decided that the era of public funding for higher education is over, have set a course for our state university system that threatens to nail the coffin shut on public higher education.