Today, Thursday, September 24, is the first day of classes for nearly all University of California students. (UC Berkeley for some reason started earlier.)

It is also the day of a system-wide strike in which a great many faculty, students and UC staff plan to walk out in order to protest a bunch of the policies and cuts of that have been instituted by the University of California President Mark Yudof and the UC Board of Regents in the wake of California’s ghastly budget cuts, which snipped 4 percent out of the the University of California’s budget. (To kick things off, UC Davis held a “naked” protest yesterday, pictured above.)

In order to balance the budget, 100,000 full-time UC employees got a 4-10 percent cut in pay, plus mandatory furloughs.

This has meant fewer classes offered to students and pared down educational services while at the same time students are being hit by a 9.3 percent increase in tuition—with more tuition hikes slated.

Plus there is the little matter of some upper echelon UC employees getting raises rather than cuts.

Bottom line: although everyone understands that cuts were necessary, students, staff and faculty are pretty unhappy at the way those cuts have been done.

The Bay Guardian and the SF Chron have additional details. (For the striker’s POV there this much forwarded open letter from UC Berkeley professor, Catherine Cole.)

I teach at one of the UCs. To be specific, I drive to UC Irvine to teach a journalism workshop that meets once a week for three hours. My first class of the Fall quarter is not until Friday so thankfully I am not faced with the unholy choice of either not supporting my striking colleagues (not good) or yanking away from my 20 students of one tenth of their ever-more-costly instructional time. (Really not good. Ten weeks isn’t long enough as it is.)

The novelist Susan Straight was not as fortunate with her schedule. Susan is a longtime faculty member at UC Riverside. Unlike me, her first class is September 24, the day of the strike. In Wednesday’s LA Times she wrote about how she intends to resolve the dilemma. And because Susan is wonderful Susan, she also wrote about writing and teaching in general and about life.

You’ll be missing out if you don’t read the whole thing, but here’s a clip from the middle of the essay:

….Over the years, some people have said to me that it’s frivolous to teach writing — compared with a practical skill like auto mechanics or biology or engineering. But I say that each of my students who learned to tell a story, who taught someone else how to tell a story, who read a story and thought about it and kept it inside until its meaning was clear, learned something vital. The world runs on stories. It is how we humans survive.

What I tried to give them, and what I hope to give my students this fall, is the power that comes with the freedom to write about themselves, to tell their own stories and the stories of their communities, populated by people they know, real or imagined.

My students are like me: Often the first in their families to attend college. I say to them, you have stories no one else has, and you write about places no one else does, and you give voice to people no one else knows. Don’t let anyone tell you that a Huntington Beach surfer’s story doesn’t deserve to be told (that student went on to teach English in Japan). Don’t ever let anyone tell you a migrant farmworker picking grapes in Coachella doesn’t deserve poetry (that student teaches at the New School in New York City).

What to do tomorrow, then?

I agree passionately with the demands behind the strike. My sister-in-law is a custodian at UC Riverside, a single mother of three. Close friends work as clerical staff or in food service. Anyone who makes less than $40,000 a year should be insulated from the cuts. The faculty, the students and all of us who “own” UC should know precisely how it is spending its money. The faculty should not be powerless, and the latest tuition increases — 50% by the time this academic year is over — only make it all worse.

And yet, what is the right thing to do?

Read her solution here.

Photo by Renée C. Byer for the Sacramento Bee rbyer@sacbee.com

In this morning’s editorial the LA Times says, at a bit more length, what we said a week ago about the case of the the speech making class at LACC, the Christian student, Jonathan Lopez, and the idiot teacher who tried to shut Lopez up.

Here’s a clip or two:

If Lopez’s claims – including allegations that his teacher, John Matteson, called him a “fascist bastard” and told him to “ask God what your grade is” — are accurate, Matteson’s behavior was unconscionable. Even in a college classroom, where there is a tradition of professors provoking lively discussion, his words would be a violation of a professional trust. The teacher also would have crossed a legal line. As Lopez’s lawyers point out in their federal complaint, the courts have ruled that public schools may not discriminate against student speech because it is religious in character.

[SNIP]

Some might say that Lopez’s discussion of how his faith shaped his view that marriage is between a man and a woman was polemical, not informative. (A different assignment required students to deliver a “persuasive” speech.) That’s a quibble. Lopez was informing his audience about his views; that they were rooted in religion is irrelevant.

So is the fact that two students were offended by Lopez’s speech, calling it “hateful propaganda” and “preaching hate.” As long as he was opposing same-sex marriage on religious grounds — and not harassing individual students — he was making an argument that figured prominently in the public debate about Proposition 8. It’s not an argument this page finds persuasive, but we wouldn’t try to suppress it. Neither should a college preparing students to live in a contentious democracy.

On Lopez’s evaluation form, Matteson wrote that proselytizing “is inappropriate in public school.” If he’s referring to himself and other teachers, he’s correct. If he’s referring to college students expressing their views in an open forum, he deserves a failing grade in Free Speech 101.

The US News and World Report has announced their 2009 list of America’s 100 best high schools.

In the article, which may be found here, the magazine tells how—together with their project partner School Matters— they evaluated a total of 21,069 public high schools , out of which 1,925 were recognized for considerably outperforming their state’s standards. In that group, there were 604 schools that also were “found to be doing an excellent job of preparing students for college-level coursework.” Then out of the 604, USN found 100 that ” performed the best in our three-step America’s Best High Schools analysis.”

Two of Green Dot’s charter high schools were in that top 100.

Oscar De La Hoya Animo Charter High was 53rd on the list.

And Animo Inglewood Charter High School was 94th.

I know I natter on a lot about Green Dot on this site. And, look: I don’t think they’re perfect by a long shot. They’ve got a good model, but in some of the newer schools there are ups and downs as they continue to refine their stroke, so to speak.

But they’re doing an awful lot right, as this ranking suggests. And they’re doing it in areas of town where students have been chronically underserved to the point of what often constituted grinding neglect.

Oscar de la Hoya, which was originally located in Boyle Heights, opened its doors to kids who’d been failing in other East LA Schools. At De La Hoya, they began to thrive. (I watched it happen with a couple of kids I knew well, who had crashed and burned at their local public school, and then first began to feel capable at De La Hoya.)

So when, one wonders, are Green Dot’s critics (cough–teachers union—cough) going to decide to do all they can to replicate the best aspects of these school’s successes—- rather than peevishly opposing them?

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PS: While we’re on the subject, here is a video of the three Locke student’s self-taped reactions to the documentary ion the Green Dot charter conversion of Locke High School in which they were profiled.

Two thousand students, administrators and education advocates gathered at Cal State Long Beach on Wednesday afternoon to send a message to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that the proposed $313 million dollar cut out of the California State University system will not only do harm to students, but it will have an adverse affect on the economy.

Among other things, say CSU officials, the cuts are set to feature a ten percent student fee increase, and could reduce planned CSU enrollment by up to 10,000 students.

The University of California system is targeted for a similar hit.

Republican lawmakers don’t want to raise taxes, said one speaker, but students are “are swimming in taxes, which we call fees.”

Other CSUs like San Diego State and Sacramento State have also held rallies.

In Sacramento, 900 Sacramento State administrators, faculty, staff, students and alumni packed the University Theater and several additional rooms to listen to speakers.

California Faculty Association President Lila Jacobs led a chant of “Stop the cuts,” and then outlined the stakes. “We graduate teachers, nurses, engineers, police, state workers; we graduate the infrastructure,” she said. “When we can’t do our job, the whole state is negatively impacted.”

California State University Employees Union President Pat Gantt added that cuts to the CSU budget will harm all Californians. “CSU is part of the American dream because without a prepared workforce, California cannot move forward,” he said.

Arnold and both Dem and Repub state lawmakers would be wise to listen.

Deals have been struck. Kisses have been exchanged. Troths have been plighted. Mutual non-proliferation treaties have been signed. Drake and Chemerinksy are NBFs, reports the LA Times.

Drake traveled over the weekend to Durham, N.C., where Chemerinsky is a professor at Duke University, and the two reached an agreement about midnight Sunday, the sources said.

Cool. All’s well that ends well.

(photo, Duke Law Magazine)

More comes out about the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing to get Chemerinsky dumped, courtesy of the LA Times and the SF Chron.

Making Chemerinsky the head of the law school “would be like appointing al-Qaida in charge of homeland security,” Michael Antonovich, a longtime Republican member of the county Board of Supervisors, said in a voicemail left with The Associated Press.

Now, as the Times reports, there’s a whole new round of wheeling and dealing to maybe get him back:

UC Irvine officials on Friday were attempting to broker a deal to once again hire liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of its fledging law school, just three days after its chancellor set off a national furor by dumping him….

And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s the strange matter of the fact checking snafu, which may or may not have played a part in some of the above wheeling and dealing.

(This is also in the Times article, and is complicated issue having to do with whether Chemerinsky was correct in writing in his August 16 op ed that California doesn’t pay for lawyers at the habeas stage of…… Oh never mind. Just read it. )

(Heaven knows you certainly don’t want to get behind with this story, as there will clearly be new installments to come. And otherwise you’ll have to focus on other unpleasant issues—like, say, the high cost of health insurance….or when Bush is going to bomb Iran.)

And here, in case you’re curious, is the link to the open letter to Chancellor Drake signed by various members of UCI’s faculty and students.

Okay, here’s where we are so far:

UCI Chancellor, Michael Drake says that his choice to rescind the job offer to Erwin Chemerinsky to become dean of the UC Irvine law school wasn’t one teensy, weensy bit political, that it was really just a “management decision.” (Whatever that means.)

Meanwhile Chemerinsky says, he was told, point blank, that he was turning out to be “too politically controversial.”

The UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Law was to have opened its doors in the fall of 2009 as the first new public law school to be established in the University of California in over forty years. (UC now operates law schools at UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and the Hastings Law School in San Francisco.) The search to find the right dean for the school began in December of 2006. Actual screening of applicants started on February 1 of this year. The search committee was filled with heavy hitters from both sides of the political spectrum, many from UCI’s brilliant and well-respected School Social Ecology.

By late summer, the winnowing process was over and Chemerinsky was offered the position on August 16, pending the approval of the University of California Board of Regents.

According to California Speaker Fabian Nunez—who sits on the board—the regents were never asked.

But Something Happened. We know this because on Tuesday 9/11, Chancellor Blake—who, before this debacle was reportedly very well liked, both on and off campus— flew in to meet with Chemerinsky….and withdrew the job offer.

In the days between then and now, poor, beleaguered Chancellor Blake has been dissembling like crazy. First it was the regents who were the problem, then it was Chemerinsky’s mid-summer op ed, then it was….I don’t know….the psychic influence of He Who Must Not Be Named….or whatever.

Finally we were treated to the Rashomon experience of these dueling editorials (here and here) in the LA times.

So what’s the real deal?

This morning’s OC Register offered some clues:

…..as early as Aug. 29, Republican political consultant Matt Cunningham said he received a forwarded e-mail in which Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich asked fellow Republicans how Chemerinsky’s appointment could be stopped.

Bingo.

A little further poking around reveals that also on August 29, a short article appeared in the LA Times reporting that “someone involved with the selection process” had leaked that Chemerinsky was the “front runner” for dean. (One wonders the reason for the leak, but I digress.) Clearly, Antonovich—and likely some others—saw the article and began frantically emailing.

And then someone likely applied pressure. And then more pressure. Finally, somebody—or several somebodies— told Blake that he better do whatever he had to do, but job-offer-or-no-job offer, Chemerensky was a no-go.

It is important to mention here that while conservative meddlers such as Antonovich should be ashamed of themselves, the right-leaning legal/academic community has been almost uniformly stellar in its response to the Irvine/Chemerinsky mess.

As of today, the Orange County Register and others are calling for Chancellor Blake’s head. With his ham handling of the situation, maybe Blake should go, or maybe he should stay. Until we learn the full back story, and what kind of threats….er…suggestions were made to Blake—and by whom— it’s hard to say. (Eventually, we will know. Count on it.)

In the meantime, why should the rest of us care that a job offer was tendered to a Duke University law professor, and then later withdrawn?

Here’s why: Because when the worst kind of petty back room political maneuvering holds that kind of power over one of the state’s best—hell, one of the country’s best—public universities, then we all damn well better care.