And on Thursday, to top it all off, the Board of Regents voted to increase undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — by 32 percent next fall, to more than $10,000. The university will cost about three times as much as it did a decade ago, and what was once an educational bargain will be one of the nation’s higher-priced public universities. Among students and faculty alike, there is a pervasive sense that the increases and the deep budget cuts are pushing the university into decline… "Dismantling this institution, which is a huge economic driver for the state, is a stupendously stupid thing to do, but that’s the path the Legislature has embarked on," said Richard A. Mathies, dean of the College of Chemistry here at Berkeley, long the system’s premier campus. "When you pull resources from an institution like this, faculty leave, the best grad students don’t come, and the discoveries go down." As the litany of cuts continues, there is a growing worry that senior faculty members may begin to defect. In fact, some colleges around the nation have begun identifying funds to use to recruit U.C. professors.

Read full article [here].
by Tamar Lewin, The New York Times.

Posted: November 20th, 2009, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.