And they have directed the hardest budget blows against higher education, long the symbol and substance of California’s commitment to the future. Decades before California became the most populous state, it had the largest number of public college students. The commitment it made a century ago to what historian John Aubrey Douglass calls the California Idea – a higher education system balancing broad access, affordability and quality – created wealth and knowledge unequaled on the planet. It is now being dismantled before our eyes, an act of slow-motion vandalism. Valuing present satisfactions at the expense of the future has always been the road to poverty, but never more so than in the new California. Once a state of arrival, populated heavily by migrants from other states and nations, California is becoming a more settled place, where most new Californians arrive by way of the maternity ward. It is on a path to having the first homegrown adult majority in its history, one that will thrive or fail depending on the quality of investments made today in that majority’s skills and knowledge. Yet the vandalism of higher education threatens to leave that next generation less educated than the last and put California in the pinch of having too few college-educated workers to meet the needs of its economy. This reality has not yet seeped into our political conversation, dominated by the immediate-gratification culture of talk radio and online comment sections, where people pass around brown paper sacks of ignorance and share the crack pipe of spin. But the students who are protesting the fee hikes and enrollment cuts on their campuses know it in their bones; their future and California’s are one and the same.

Read full article [here].
by Mark Paul, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: January 14th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.