mortiz055

Another negative report about the University of California appeared last weekend, this time on the  front page  of Sunday's Los Angeles Times .  The headline summarized the storyline: "UC is handing out generous pensions, and students are paying the price with higher tuition." The piece has some analytical problems, but that doesn't keep it from painting a powerfully dark picture of the UC system.  I should say up front that I appreciate the investigative efforts of the piece's author, Jack Dolan, and his Times  colleagues to collect internal university data and to report coherently on an important issue. UC employees have been treated to two major pension tierings in less than a decade (where new employees get reduced benefits).  They have had their contributions increase from 0 to 7-9 percent of pretax salary depending on their employee group, during a period of de facto salary freezes.  No UC employee group ever requested the "contribution holiday" ...

In the aftermath of the failure of Milofest, the Berkeley Faculty Association has written an op-ed that raises important questions about the relationship between free speech, academic freedom, and political attacks on the university.  As the BFA notes: Freedom of speech is one foundational principle of the public university. Academic freedom is another. Since 1964, when the UC Berkeley administration was successfully challenged by the Free Speech Movement to extend First Amendment protections to campus space, the university has had to balance the obligation to allow citizens’ speech against the commitment to academic freedom. As a public entity, UC Berkeley must respect the airing of diverse viewpoints; as a higher learning institution, UC Berkeley must protect its autonomy from political interference and harassment. Increasingly, the threat to the campus’ autonomy, on which academic freedom depends, derives not from government legislators—as in the era of the FSM, when former UC P...

Trump presides as the King of Pain, inflicting turmoil and loss on others, seemingly without effort or long-term benefit.  Last week the pain came from his administration's  termination  of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program this coming March.  The idea seems to be to threaten the program's 800,000 recipients with impeding job loss and deportation while the Congress that made DACA necessary by failing to pass immigration reform works again on passing immigration reform. In "The Psychic Toll of Trump's DACA Decision," Karla Conejo Villavicencio writes , Spreading fear and anxiety, of course, is part of the administration’s plan. Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, recently said: “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable. You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.” The renewed fear comes to a community that already leads a kind of lower-cast...