…or so saith the comment I just read in a forwarded email.
I have been reading similar comments all day, in between my visits to campus today. UCLA has been in an uproar– albeit a carefully orchestrated, mostly polite uproar, for a few days now.
The comment was made regarding the protests at Berkeley and UCLA and across the entire UC system over the 32% tuition hike that was voted on today at UCLA by the UC Regents. It raises the cost of schooling to $10,320 by Fall 2009. I read both the LA times and the New York Times articles about it, and many of the comments. While most people got the impact of these decisions, quite a few others made comments like the one cited in my title. Sigh. Let me spell out WHY people should complain about going to Berkeley for 10,000 dollars a year.
(1) First of all, it isn’t 10,000 dollars a year. It’s more like 30,000 dollars a year. Los Angeles and San Francisco have some of the highest rents in the nation. California charges more taxes (I think) that anybody else in the world (ok, maybe that is an exaggeration, but it seems pretty damn close). In LA, sales tax alone is over nine percent. It’s an expensive place to go to school. Also outrageously expensive are things like textbooks, lab supplies, health insurance fees, and the occasional night out on the town. So when you are a student, working some 15 to 20 hours a week (which is a lot), making some 6 or 7 dollars an hour, a 32% hike is a LOT of money. That’s rent for three months. Or texbooks and lab supplies and the occasional flight home to see your parents.
(2) The hike happened MID-YEAR. So students who applied to get into UCLA for this year had noooo idea that their tuition would drastically and dramatically change between Fall and Winter quarter. Clearly, as the State of California is unable to balance her own budget, they could give a rat’s behind about the ability of anyone else to balance theirs. Way to have some foresight.
(3) Perhaps most importantly, this is part of the slow dismantling of the public sphere of the United States. Like parks, libraries, and the notion of the common good, the idea that we have public institutions, and spaces and places, that we all take care of for each other, is being buried under the most recent Walmart superstore. (I do gotta admit here that I am a sucka for that superstore. Good lord, it’s like a whole woooorld in those places. You never, ever, have to leave.) We are slowly becoming a completely consumerist, privatized nation. That we barely flinch in the face of such grand gestures of privitization as this, has got to be some kind of indicator that we have become desensitized to the kind of America in which we once believed.
(4) The dismantling of the idea of equality along racial and socio-economic lines and the corresponding Horatio Alger dream of upward mobility. The middle class is disappearing, and with it, our public schools. $10, 320 dollars is a lot of money for the lower classes, who, by the way, are mostly Black and Latino. Inexpensive, excellent education through public universities is one of the few ways that the classes in the United States can still encounter each other, divided as we are geographically and in our labor. In other words, at a place like UCLA, the children of a maquiladora worker and a Beverly Hills lawyer might sit next to each other in class. They might have a conversation, and get to know about each other’s lives. In a city where the wealthiest and the poorest residents, mostly divided along racial lines, never have to intersect, and never have to learn how they share the same kind of humanity. The way the new system is going, the child of the maquiladora worker will now only be able to afford a community college–if any higher education at all. This means waiting lists for classes, the possibility of having to take a class in the middle of the night (I kid you not– check the link), and a degree that means the class divisions of our society are guaranteed to be reproduced.
I’m not sure what the outcome of this will be. But I am worried, very worried. A generation without hope and failed promises is a desperate generation. Sometimes I look around me and for a moment, I feel as if I have caught a whiff of another world, of decadence in decline, of those eras bygone that tumbled down from their great projects and have had to relearn what really matters.
