Saving the UC – but at what cost to students?
Oh my view of state government hasn’t really changed because I thought it was broken before I took this job and I think it’s broken now. One thing that has changed in this role, though, is my perspective of state legislators. I did a lot of lobbying and advocacy on behalf of students before I got this job and I went on a number of lobby visits with legislators and legislative staff and all of them say, to the last man or woman, “We’re advocates for higher education, we’re champions for higher education, we believe in higher education, we went to a UC, our children go to UC’s, blah blah blah.” And then they turn around and they pass a budget that cuts the UC system $650 million as is the case in this last budget cycle. And it took me some time in this job to realize that we were getting snowed a little bit — that it was just a really, really effective sales job. And that all those people who told me that they were advocates for the UC system, who then would vote for the increased pay for prison guards and then cut the UC by hundreds of millions of dollars, had fooled me a little bit. And I’m not fooled anymore.
Read full article [here].
by Holly Kernan and Jonathan Stein, KALW News.