California Scheming
California’s budget crisis was not inevitable. The state, points out George Lakoff, who teaches linguistics at UC Berkeley, "is the world’s seventh-largest economy–there’s plenty of money." The real issue, Lakoff said, is that "conservative ideology says the only public good is a private good." When a university education is conceived as a market commodity purchased by students purchase in expectation of a higher-paying job, "it means changing the very nature of a research university." That change has been in the works in California at least since 2003, when Schwarzenegger took office. In 2004, the governor signed a "Higher Education Compact" with the UC and California State University systems, which effectively made gradual privatization official policy, specifying that both systems would "seek additional private resources and maximize other fund sources…to support basic programs." Until then, it had been the state that was committed to supporting "basic programs." But one year earlier, said UC Santa Cruz politics Professor Robert Meister, who was on UC’s Planning and Budget Committee at the time, Schwarzenegger gave UC administrators "a green light to raise tuition as much as they thought necessary without the threat of cuts." Immediately, Meister said, UC "began using tuition as capital assets for projects."
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by Ben Ehrenreich, The Nation.