It’s 4:30am Wednesday, not yet daybreak, at the intersection of Hagar and Coolidge on the UCSC campus. Already a few dozen intrepid protesters have gathered to block access to campus from the main entrance despite the chill of dawn and undoubtedly short-circuited sleep cycles. Soon word comes fromthe other entrances: they have been effectively blocked, and the protesters have their first victory before the sun has even appeared on the horizon.
Why the group, calling itself Occupy Education, is out here on such a dreary day is a tricky question. One could easily get lost in a myriad of details. So many statistics crowd the issues that it’s a wonder anyone can actually keep it all straight. Yet the movement differs from its cousin on Wall Street only in the particulars. Here, too, people are outraged that a group of unaccountable, unelected and out-of-touch millionaires have virtually unchecked power to make decisions about the future of the great majority of people.
“[The UC Regents] don’t understand what it means to send a student to a university on a working-class salary,” says politics grad student and UAW unit chair Mary Virginia Watson. “People don’t understand that these changes are ongoing. It’s about a real decline in the quality of our education. They are destroying the best public university system in the country.”
The regents, for their part, shift the blame to Sacramento, where the state legislature has consistently voted to slash funding for higher education. Citing a $1 billion budget gap, the regents voted to increase student fees by yet another increment of 8 percent for the current school year, continuing a trend that has led fees to increase by more than 100 percent since 2000. “It’s worth what you pay to attend here,” stated UC President Mark Yudof in a press release at the time of decision.
For students and faculty dealing with the pincer of budget cuts and fee increases, Yudof’s words ring false. “When it comes time to approve a raise for administrators,” said one student, who wished to remain anonymous, “they can always seem to find enough money for their friends.”
