When the dead speak

The last post was an email from the Dean at Berkeley Law. Unsurprisingly, when a University proves that it is not a cemetery, as UC was described by President Mark Yudof, the fingerpointing has to start.

The information attached to Dean Edley's email is from the UCOP who realized months ago that the finger needed to point to Sacramento. Never mind the billions of dollars in reserve or the $1.35 billion in new debt to finance unnecessary and ill timed capital projects. Forget about the fact that UC bureaucracy is growing many times faster than faculty and yet we still hire PriceWaterhouseCooper to do our financial housekeeping. The problem is in Sacramento where a mere 2% (which is less than the new debt for construction) of the UC budget was cut.

Dean Edley may have only realized that Boalt Hall was not a cemetery last week after a contentious 'town hall' meeting where students clearly articulated their disgust at Boalt's departure from anything resembling a school with a public mission. The Dean's presentation last week focused both on how little the state budget cuts affected Boalt and, yet, how necessary the budget cuts made fee hikes. No, the state budget cuts this year did not precipitate massive fee hikes. The professional fee hikes at Boalt, like most other professional fee hikes this year, were long planned. The UC Budget 'crisis' seems to be a convenient point to accelerate them, making sure that students will bear the cost of corporate privatization more quickly and in greater proportion.

It seems disingenuous for Dean Edley to pass the buck now when less than two years ago, he threatened to leave the school along with a cadre of 'top faculty' if fee increases were not accelerated. The idea that Dean Edley's advocacy for public education can be improved is certainly one that I can agree with. His support for public education is nonexistent. Just as Yudof's fanciful New York Times interview elicited a respectfully outraged response from UC faculty, it is time for professional faculty and students to demand a meaningful leadership for public education. Or perhaps our self-described 'man of the people' realizes exactly who approves his $350,000 salary.

Dean Edley to the Faculty:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: UCOP thoughts on budget crisis, etc.
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:14:51 -0800
From: Christopher Edley
To: Faculty Announcement List



Colleagues, I found the attached document from UCOP very useful in that it gathers together in summary form the "message points" and key factoids undergirding the Administration's stance.

The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow

by Three Non-Matriculating Proletarians

“If you’re scared today you'll be scared tomorrow as well and always and so you've got to make a start now right away we must show that in this school we aren't slaves we have to do it so we can do what they're doing in all other schools to show that we're the ones to decide because the school is ours.”

The Unseen, Nanni Balestrini

Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. “Who’s university?” At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. “Our university!” And in the midst of building occupations and the festive and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only the village idiot or, the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the university administration would think we were screaming about something as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, “The School is Ours!” When the day erupted, when the escape plan from the drudgery of college life was hatched, it was clear to everyone that the university not only belonged to the students who were forcefully reasserting their claim but also to the faculty, to every professor and TA who wishes they could enliven the mandatory curriculum in their repetitive 101 class, to the service workers who can't wait for their shift to end, and to every other wage-earner on campus ensuring the daily functioning of the school.

Statement in support of the UC Mobilisation

24 November 2009

We the undersigned declare our solidarity with University of California students, workers and staff as they defend, in the face of powerful and aggressive intimidation, the fundamental principles upon which a truly inclusive and egalitarian public-sector education system depends. We affirm their determination to confront university administrators who seem willing to exploit the current financial crisis to introduce disastrous and reactionary 'reforms' (fee-increases, lay-offs, salary cuts) to the UC system. We support their readiness to take direct action in order to block these changes. We recognise that in times of crisis, only assertive collective action – walkouts, boycotts, strikes, occupations... – offers any meaningful prospect of democratic participation. We deplore the recent militarization of the UC campuses, and call on the UC administration to acknowledge rather than discourage the resolution of their students to struggle, against the imperatives of privatization, to protect the future of their university.

Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police

This was bound to be a big week in California regardless, as the threat of a 32 percent tuition and fee increase across the University of California system made a crashing entrance into reality with Wednesday’s vote by the UC Board of Regents. Perhaps the Regents and UC President Mark Yudof expected that their diversionary tactics--lament the crisis and direct blame to Sacramento’s budget cuts--would pay off. But this was not to be.

Read More.

Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life

Another from anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com

INTRODUCTION: 7 AGAINST POMPEII

WE LIVE AS A DEAD CIVILIZATION. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series of spectacles preselected for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in such outcomes anymore.

The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resources with our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck) for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitation—until the firm crumbles and we mutter about “plan B.” But this is an exact description of university life today; that mean and petty life has already arrived.


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The Necrosocial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC.

Occupied UC Berkeley, 18 November 2009.

Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening.
UC President Mark Yudof

Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.
Karl Marx

Politics is death that lives a human life.
Achille Mbembe

Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.


Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss?

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