International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

The question of the public university and its devaluation has long been the subject of debate and protest. The University of California is one of the northern lights of the “public university” because of its sheer size and rich activist legacy; in 2009 it was a site of a new protest movement that grew from dissatisfaction with privatization measures and increased student debt. The neoliberal economic policies in effect from the Nixon administration onward did much to strip the programs and advances that the student protest movement had won. In November 2009 the University of California Regents met and voted on a proposed 32 percent tuition hike for undergraduates and a continued 10 percent salary cut for faculty that would take effect in January 2010. The burden of student debt had been shouldered disproportionately by minorities over the last 20 years and signaled the general trend of privatization and shifting public funding of the university to financing its budgets via student debt. Since the early 1990s, UC public funding shortages had depressed African American enrollment while drop-out rates increased. The faculty and student protestors attributed UC's increased tuition mirroring similar trends of public divestment to neoliberal economic models of education finance that took root in the 1980s. In the early 2000s the economy was already in a post-boom slump. By the time the ... log in or subscribe to read full text