Fighting Privatization, Occupy Activists at CUNY and UC Kick Into High Gear
Though the regents (and leading California Democrats) have blamed the current tuition hikes on the Great Recession, students say the regents have been pushing privatization on their public university for a long time. In the decade leading up to 2007, the UC system’s management positions grew four times as quickly as its faculty. In 2004, the chancellors signed an agreement with then-Governor Schwarzenegger to seek private donations to the system’s budget. Berkeley’s chancellor paid Mitt Romney’s old consulting firm, Bain & Company, $7.5 million to help the university “achieve [greater] efficiency.” Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley has called for Berkeley to build more virtual campuses, rather than “bricks and mortar” ones. Nowhere is the close relationship between California’s public universities and private corporations more apparent than in the UC Board of Regents. UC Regent Richard C. Blum is both the husband of Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Chairman of the San Francisco-based investment firm Blum Capital Partners. Though he has served on the board since 2002, his firm is also the largest shareholder in Career Education Corporation and ITT Education Services Inc., two for-profit higher education companies that have both been under federal investigation. In a 2010 expose, the Sacramento News & Review reported that the UC investment managers invested $53 million in public funds in both companies. Despite these connections, UC officials claim that no conflicts of interest occurred.
Read full article [here].
by Josh Eidelson, The Nation.