I saw that there was some kind of a sit in at UCLA, but Berkeley seems kind of quiet. Anything happening with regards to the strike at UC law schools?

Cancelled due to fear of missed classes I hear.

I'm here in California, I'm looking at going to a UC for law school...and I certainly am a strong proponent of easy, affordable access for all Californians to high quality education.

However: these students/staff/faculty are idiots. I would expect more from at least the grad students and faculty.

Why they are not going to Sacramento is beyond me. The Regents are doing what they have to, for the most part (certainly there are grievances to be aired). But, in the end, the budget shortfall is due primarily to a cut in funding from the state.


Go to Sacramento, and picket there....where it can actually do some good.

Strike's going. There's definitely protesters and whatnot marching around -- hard to tell what percentage of the campus is affected though. A lot of classes were cancelled on Wed. and a good chunk of my supermod took advantage of what was basically a free day off to get in some outlining.

As the actual issues, yeah, gotta love California. The actual goal of the strikes have been a bit confusing IMHO. Some of it is about workers' rights and some of it is about increased tuition. Then there's this general concern about how the UC system is being privatized. It's all very difficult to decipher.

There aren't many people striking near/at Boalt today. There were more yesterday.

I don't think it's fair to characterize the students or faculty (also, the law faculty was not involved with the strike) as idiots. I don't think this action was going to be successful, but they have every right to express their issues. I am a little annoyed by the pressure the strikers tried to exert on other students to join them.

As for classes - None of mine were canceled. Attendance yesterday was low in my classes (like 50%) and today more like 80%. I've heard the upper level classes were better attended. Most of the students who did not attend class did not picket or take part in any action.

You can check out Nuts and Boalts if you want more perspectives.

anybody here get bean-bagged?

We had a wonderful prank fire alarm during an exam today and there are apparently people occupying a building on campus, including somebody in my class. It seems to be a minority of students that participated, and I think a lot of people just used the strike as an excuse to skip class.

52 UC Davis students were arrested yesterday.

I'm part of UCSA, the UC system's student governance board. I had relayed my concerns that the protest would be ineffective at the last couple UCSA meetings, but most people thought it best to simply show how angry students are. In the end, the protests fell on deaf ears as students were arrested and "fees" increased as planned. A sad day indeed...

I don't think people werer expecting a different outcome, we all knew they were going to go through with the increase, protest or no protest. Did people actually believe that these protest were going to do anything more than result in some arrests and media coverage? Regents don't care about these protests, they know it's still really cheap to attend the UC's, most of which are highly regarded and a fraction of the cost of similarly regarded private schools. They also know that a UC students or potential UG UC students aren't going to attend a CSU, even with the cost increase.

I agree with this. The governor and legislature are getting off easy. I don't see why the regents are being blamed here.

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who think they can protest the fee hikes away. I'm a student at Hastings, which is not affected by this particular fee raise since we are not governed by the Regents, but our fees are going up a lot next year and I can't tell you how many students I talked to that thought they could make the administrators change their minds by "threatening to transfer en masse" etc. The new movement is to support the staff in their effort to unionize under the delusion that if it happens, the union will speak for the students at the bargaining table and get the 2010-11 fee hikes reversed. It's not that I think it's always pointless to speak up or protest, but people have to understand that by the time the school or the Regents or whoever is ready to announce these kinds of increases, then we're stuck with them.

If anything, people should be trying to effect more long-term changes that could prevent future fee increases.

That said, fuck the Regents. This increase may or may not be their best/only choice (I honestly have no idea), but still. I went to a UC for undergrad about 10 years ago and we all hated the Regents then, too. Glad to see nothing's changed!

It would nice if the protestors came armed with, say, specific policy points they'd like implemented, perhaps:
1) Charge OOSers OOS their whole time, like UVA, etc.
2) We are willing to have our teachers paid less
3) Charge foreign students triple

Whatever - just something, other than, "Give us money you don't have!!" "Pretend there is no deficit." What is their point? I certainly hope the law schools aren't involved with these protests - they are really poorly structured.

At UCLA on Thursday there was a ton of stuff going down, lots of police / firetrucks heading up there all day and a police helicopter. I think 14 or so people were arrested.

I agree with those who said that the protests should be directed towards Sacramento, but it is much easier for students to protest at their own campuses. As a recent UC grad (and someone who is looking at several UC law schools) it really makes me sad that public education in california essentially is becoming unaffordable to those who need it most.

Regents would probably say "we can't do that cause it would hurt diversity and we want to make UC accessible to all!" This is also part of what they plan to do with revenue by shoveling it towards those in the low-income brackets through financial aid/scholarships or whatever (or so they say). In one of the other threads, someone said that cutting from the top would make productivity/incentive go down. I don't think this would be the case with a research based university such as the UC system where the professors wouldn't pay attention to their students regardless because research almost always trumps teaching.

Yeah. The massive cut to the CSU system is arguably worse than what's going on with the UCs right now; but either way, ugh.

I'm not as surprised at where the protests are directed as I am at how little relative protest there is. I don't go to a UC school, but from what I read in reports, it seems pretty docile on the whole. I would expect Berkeley to be in a complete uproar. I'd be protesting if I were there....

I expected more from Berkeley. Honestly, from their reputation, the whole school should have gone on strike for this. The police overreacted, though....

I WISH my tuition was only going up by $2,000 next year

Is it just me or does this seem like a non-event? Tuition rates have been skyrocketing for the past decade all over the country, and no one has made any significant peep over it, and nothing has changed in favor of the poor who want to attend these schools but can't afford it. Why are people acting as if this is new?

I stand by my position that California sucks.

My guess is that the outrage is really more over the cancellation of CalGrants, which 1/3 of the students received. I agree, to me a $2,000 tuition hike doesnt seem that wild. But somebody somewhere has got to take a stand....today's $2,000 increase is tomorrow's $7,000 increase.

I used the calculator on the NYT page and figured that if the tuition at UC law schools continues to rise by 10% a year over the next 6 years it will be $60k in-state.

Also, some of the protests (like the takeover of a Berkeley campus building) were about the firing of some staff.

The "strike" is being advocated by the same handful of students who made Boalties look like impractical, spoiled hippies when they petitioned the school to either replace John Yoo as professor of one of the Civil Procedure II sections, or to create a third Civ Pro II section, because the non-Yoo section that already existed had a time conflict with some seminars or clinics, or something. Almost no one got on board with this, but the students acted as if their fringe position was supported by the majority of Boalt students, just as they are doing now with their inane rhetoric about how everyone should "strike" against tuition increases that will surely cause Boalt to lose its "public character," (the existence of this "public character," they add, is the "probable" reason that most of Boalt's students chose to enroll there instead of at a private school (never mind that out-of-state Boalt students have long been paying what they would have paid at any private institution)). The result is that students elsewhere think Boalties are insufferable pseudo-Commies who never miss a chance to stick it to the man in the most ineffective and annoying way. Unfortunately, only the over-the-top whining filters through to the outside world (who can blame anyone for latching on and mocking law students who behave this way?), and no one realizes that the "strike" is criticized or ignored by almost all Boalties, or that, at the same time the petition calling for John Yoo's firing or for the creation of a new Civ Pro II section was circulating (and being mocked by online communities), so many students signed up to take Civ Pro II with Yoo that his section ended up having a 70-person waiting list.