Academic Freedom Economy Education State Government State Politics

Cut Education, Wound the Economy?

cslb.gif

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.

29 Comments

  • Am I to believe that the universities run so tight that there isn’t waste in their spending? Just walk around most campuses and you’ll see waste on the outside. Then, walk through their books and see the waste there. I used to audit some major universities. I saw it.

    Rather than asking taxpayers to give up more money, ask the professors to give up some of theirs (except Celeste.) See if they care more about the economy and students than their own greedy pockets. Most of those guys couldn’t make it in the world outside of academics and are overpaid for what they can do.

    California Faculty Association President Lila Jacobs led a chant of “Stop the cuts,”….
    Disgraceful.

  • In giving this a little more thought, someone should steer the students to find waste as their colleges. it’s often easier to save a buck than to make one. The students are there most of the time and see it, even though they might be too young or inexperienced to catch everything.

    Celeste, make it a class project with your classes for one day and see what they report.

    Is there a sorry professor sucking money away that should be fired? Oh, yes. They have tenure. Are lights left on all the time even if not needed? What about the HVAC system? How many monuments does a school need? Are the buildings more extravagant than needed? Could each full-time professor pick up another class rather than hiring new ones? Are there idiots in administration (for sure) and more than enough people running the offices? How much food or supplies is thrown out each day? Are women’s sports eating away at the budget? Thanks title IX. How many conferences do the professors and administration need to jet away to each year? This could go on forever.

    This is a good one…find out how much unnecessary equipment was purchased the last week of the fiscal year just so that all the budgeted money was spent and an increase could be asked for the next year.

    Good luck, students. This is going to be easier than protesting.

  • Sorry Woody but you’re wrong (and ignorant) as usual. Just go visit CSULB and see those “Palatial” facilties! The place looks like a high school with goiter. Here’s a hint: It COSTS MONEY (lots of it) to staff and equip a university. Want to see sticker shock? Go into the book store and price textbooks – intro to Econ runs $150. Now image the cost of professional journals and technical books that the library must stock – astronomical costs! Lab equipment doesn’t come from the science fairy. Right now a lot of it is hand-me-downs from local tech companies. And the biggest expense is staff. Teaching and research is done by Ph.D.s and they have to be compensated. Course in Woody’s world they work for minimum wage – just like CPAs.

    In the real worl you need resources – that’s called “Money”.

    Back when this state has sane leadership we taxed and spent – and got good schools, the Higher Education system the world wanted to copy (Including UC which outshined the Ivies), good roads, water systems, parks, and so much more. And the world, and high tech companies came in. Silicon Valley is South of SF not Atlanta. Wonder why? No you probably don’t.

    Now everyone says “I’ve got mine.” Selfish bastards. Hope they enjoy their coming poverty.

  • A very unique file hosting website, that allows you to upload/share and search textual files, such as MS word, PDF, text, MS Excel etc. very helpful resource for students and researchers, thousands of available documents…
    MaiFile.com

  • ric says, as usual, “Back when this state has (sic) leadership we taxed and spent – ” AH, the good old days. Of course everything wrong in Calif. is that we’re not taxing enough. Lord help us from these 60’s liberals. “Back when” we didn’t have masses of illegal, illiterate and low-income residents, we had a controlled population, whereas we’re now in a Marxist phase of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” And the two groups don’t coincide at all. Simple economics dictates that a nation state cannot continue to offer generous or even adequate social services, when its population is so uncontrolled and disparate. That’s a basic premise of Milton Friedman’s widely accepted economic theories — and Friedman’s coming from a libertarian point of view with no position on social issues — strictly from economic reality. In fact, it takes great political bias to deny the economics.

    The cost of incarcerating illegal immigrant recidivists alone was put at $850 million by a report quoted on Ch. 7 news within the last couple of days, whereas the government reimbursed us only for $100 million. Then we’ve got the huge disparity between cost of educating illegals’ large families of kids, vs. reimbursements; our 11 “free” clinics and County ER’s are collapsing from the weight of illegals, who are the vast majority of users — sometimes coming to this country to take care of catastrophic illnesses; food stamps, welfare and unemployment benefits also flow to illegals.

    A Dem. Senator from N. Carolina, Schuler, has proposed a bill to discourage illegals from staying by requiring employers to check for status. Of course, the liberal Dems on the Council and state level (Nunez, Cedillo, even Pelosi) shot this down as “discriminatory,” when it’s not. Look at Canada, often touted for its free social services; they’re extremely strict about illegal immigration, even deporting highly skilled and educated Eastern Europeans like Poles who overstay their visas. They adhere to the Milton Friedman laws of common sense economics. NOT leftist voodoo theory.

  • BTW, in the same libertarian spirit, I should add that I don’t deny that the almost trillion or whatever it is amount we’ve spent on the war has been catastrophic, too. It’s the first time since the Revolutionary War that we’ve had to borrrow, go hand in hand really, to finance a war. (Anyone watching the Adams series on HBO, where he does literally that, bouncing in supplication from France to Holland to wherever?)

    Except now, we’ve sold our soul to China and other countries who “own” us, so we can’t even be free to speak or act on behalf of the “rights to self-determination” we alegedly fought in Iraq for. Except now it’s especially pitiful, because the Tibetans truly want and would appreciate support for their return to independence or at least autonomy, while the Iraqis have never seen themselves as one country any more than the former Yugo — and had to be held together by ruthless dictators. The “country” should have at best, been turned into a Federation. Now extremists are more active than ever there and in Afghanistan, and have taken their fight to Pakistan, whom we’re also supporting to the tune of (borrowed) billions. And as we’ve glimpsed even on this blog, they blame us for “trying to buy” their “sacrifices.”

    In the process, our dollar is so low it may be supplanted as universal currency by the Euro.

    But I’m equally disgusted with the endless argument that if it weren’t for Iraq, we could have spent all that money “fixing” everything from schools to universal healthcare. See Comment #5 about why that’s leftist voodoo “economics.”
    What this country never manages to do, if follow the middle road.

  • A little ignorance on display here, though I won’t say that it surprises me. The average CSU prof does not make a ton of money (the administrators on the other hand…), in fact they . Just a few years out of college I was offered a job as an executive assistant where I’d make more than many tenured professors (we’re talking $60-70k, which is worth less in Los Angeles than Georgia).

    As to Milton “Maggie” Friedman, well you don’t have to be some kind of raging partisan not to believe in Milton Friedman’s economic theory (whether we’re talking unfettered free markets or the effects of immigration). Even his most ardent supporters typically recognize that his view is just one of many and that while it’s been influential in recent years, it’s hardly the sign of a crank or crackpot to find other views more compelling.

  • Mavis Beacon is smelling sneaky rat, using type-writer tutor.

    Aaaaah yes “Milton Friedman” say
    “Lord help us from these 60’s liberals” this sound berry suspicious, like sneaky liberals wearing Che Guevara tee-shirts.”

    Milton say…
    “Except now, we’ve sold our soul to China and other countries who “own” us, so we can’t even be free to speak or act on behalf of the “rights to self-determination” we alegedly fought in Iraq for. “

    But why “Milton” before, say ok to give American jobs to people in India? Milton think India need American souls?

  • rlc, companies are now leaving California for states with lower taxes–like Georgia. Good job.

    Don’t tell me that there is no fat to cut at universities. I listed some above, but how about dropping expensive courses and majors that do nothing–starting with feminist studies, African studies, and gay and lesbian studies?

    Here is a list of some real courses offered at colleges, and many of these are in California. Are there any that you would drop to keep down costs?

    The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur
    Pornography: The Writing of Prostitutes
    Queer Musicology
    Taking Marx Seriously: “Should Marx be given another chance?”
    Blackness
    Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism
    Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration
    Cyberfeminism
    Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism
    Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco
    Drag: Theories of Transgenderism and Performance
    Lesbian Pulp Fiction
    The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States
    Stupidity, which compares the American presidency to Beavis and Butthead.
    Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay & Lesbian Plays
    Reincarnation – Who Were You?
    Super Smash Brothers Theory and Practice
    The Science of Superheroes
    African American English
    Queering the American State: Politics and Sex After 1968
    How To Print And Sell Nonsense
    The Phallus, Critical Theory, and Social Justice
    How To Spot A Whore

    Yeah, we really need a course on that last one. It must be taught by Democrats with a lot of experience. Why is money being wasted on these courses at all?

    Besides dropping stupid courses, we could drop stupid requirements for good courses that others don’t need.
    Why do I pay more tuition for stupid courses I don’t need?

    Still don’t think that colleges can cut some fat?

  • Mavis, point is, the 60’s “more taxation fixes everything” leftists have NO compelling arguments, just politically biased theories which are essentially Marxist — what was considered radical when he turned capitalism on its head in “Dad Kapital” is now basic left-liberal philosophy. Certainly not valid economics. While some Ivory-tower philosophers still love and teach the brilliance of Marx’s self-contained theories, that’s just what they are — self-contained, and have never worked in the real world and can’t, except to destabilize societies.

    Of course there’s no point in arguing with the converted any more than with the Pope — it’s a matter of faith, which by definition can’t and never has been proven, but must be felt and believed in the gut.

    Just one case in point of a fairly moderate pair of voodoo economics attempting to put a purely economic and social spin on the immigration situation: Myers/Pastor in the Op Ed in the Times 3/22, arguing that illegal immigration isn’t a factor in our financial crisis, insist that illegal immigration is an overall significant plus, while offering up stats that 1/3 of the L A County population are immigrants (mainly illegals), and fully 2/3 of the youth of the County are their kids. They have no “arguments” at all and their own numbers refute their thesis. But with you people, as long as you have a group of like minds to reinforce each other’s fallacies, you will cheerfully race to the abyss screaming that higher taxes will fix everything. One cannot argue with the religiously irrational. A handful of whom have found their way to this blog like flies to flypaper, precisely because they’re so out of touch with mainstream social and economic reality.

    (Sure, blame all our problems on “outsourcing,” to people whose kids and families we don’t have to educate, provide free healthcare for, welfare, housing, infrastructure, and who pollute and congest their own streets and skies. And whose countries are increasingly stable allies as a result.)

    The only economic “reality” is the Hispanic politicians’ need to pander for votes, the other Dem politicians beating them to the pandering for votes (Obama, Newsome, Rosendahl/Hahn/ even Zine now, on the local level); even a moderate Republican like Arnold has to sidestep the immigration issue in order to get support from the Dems on other issues. Wealthy developers get CRA and other public money by offering a token number of “affordable units” in their projects, and the top echelon will always find a way to benefit from the third-world problems we’re acquired. But any attempt to justify “benefits” of illegal immigration to the average Joe by “persuasive argument” or facts and figures is inevitably doomed, as will be this city and county. (Of course, none of those rich and politically connected enough to be benefiting from all this pandering and profiting, live in the gritty world or send their kids to the illustrious public schools of LAUSD.) These people I “get,” but lefties who have no personal benefit from denying the obvious are just plain religiously-blinded dumb, so are always on the attack because it’s all they’ve got.

  • Ah yes, “bourgois freedom,” “capitalist exploitation,” “human emancipation,” all within the context of Marxist “historical progress.” Actually, I did take such a course from a similarly earnest True Believer, so I can appreciate the genuine beauty of the self-contained logic, what it means when philosophers admiringly say he “turned Hegel’s dialectic” into his economic thesis to explain “historical progress,” and inevitability, that is, why the triumph of the proletariat over the capitalist oppressor is inevitable.

    But the fact is, Marx wrote all this in a library in Vienna, as a “bourgeois” himself, and was about as attuned to the real world as was my Philosophy prof of this one at Amherst. (My prof’s pants bore this out: worn-out old brown cords, bagging at the knee just so, holding his shape even when he took them off at night, no doubt — I imagined his closet full of rows of these things. Reminded me of Thoroux’s identical description of his pants and his self-contained world at Walden Pond: “Never trust an enterprise which requires new clothes.” Or getting in the world. My prof would walk into the classroom talking to himself in a stream of thought, exactly where he’d left off the day before. A truly brilliant mind as long as he exists in an insular world where logic doesn’t bump up against any outside realities. (In the pure world of Marx, he didn’t envision trade unions, for one thing, which allowed Dickensian society to change enough to stave off his planned revolution — and moved it to the agricultural masses of feudal oligarchies like China and Russia.)

    I honestly felt this course was worthwhile because of the mental discipline, and because if you want to learn how the enemy thinks, you must study it. (More people should have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, too, and they’d have known that he spelled out exactly what he would set out to do, and why.) Amherst is a private college, at least. But if we’re going to subsidize Cal State and CC courses, you have more of a point as to what courses are truly relevant to educating the public at taxpayer expense. Maybe we need to set aside “core” courses from certain electives like this — much as many won’t like the idea of someone designating which is which. Just saying. It’s better than jacking up fees for everyone.

  • Milton I doubt if your namesake was as ignorant as you but it is hard to seriously a person who refers to REP Health Schuler as a “Senator.” Also you should know that Marx , to the best of my knowlege never spent any time In Vienna – now Lv Bronstein AKA “Trotsky” frequented the Cafe Centrale but that is another story. No Marx, as everyone knows, spent long hours in the British Museum researching and writing what would become “Das Capital.” Whether he ever had a pint in the pub accross the road I cannot say. And it is Thoureau. Thoroux might refer to Paul Thoroux the travel writer and novelist but not the haunter of Walden Pond and neighbor of the Alcotts and Emerson.

    Really standards must have slipped at Lord Jeffrey’s outpost since the days when I did time at a college in Brunswick ME.

  • Of course Woody it was your governor, Zell Miller, who saw the value of education and started those scholarships for Geogia Students. Not everyone in the peachtree state is dense.

    (and yes, I’ll say a kind word for old Zell when he makes sense)

  • I won’t respond to your “Course list” since: a) you don’t say which ones are from public universities in California and b) you provide no source for the list and. frankly, in the past your evidence has been, shall we say, light on veracity.

  • Thanks so much for the invaluable spelling tips, ric. Nice you’ve seized on the substantive aspects of Marx’s writings, and no doubt “everyone knows” the intimate details of his and Trotsky’s biographies in your world, but the pt is Marx was just the sort of bourgoisie he wrote so contemptuously about. It’s a Philosophy course not biography, that’s in question. (I’ll spend more time researching murderous revolutionaries, but I’ve drawn the line at Marx — he never actually personally killed anyone, at least. Trotsy and Lenin are among the subjects of a book called “When Nerds Become Genocidal Murderers,” which I have in mind — maybe some Prof can turn it into a psycho-sociology class.) But yes, it was Dickensian England which motivated his ideas.

    So, you’re saying you went to Bowdoin? Ah, no wonder… Can’t see you taking tea in Lexington, MA, with Paul Revere’s dad’s silver, but out in the woods wearing one of those brown cords, studying Trotsky — that makes sense.

  • Make that, “When Nerds Become Genocidal Murderers in the Interest of Human Emancipation: Studies Towards Ending Capitalist Exploitation Within the Context of the Pathological Mythology of Bourgois Freedom.” Now, it’s bound to get someone tenure for sure.

  • rlc, I assure you, some of those courses are from public universities in California. However, maybe you would like to peruse courses offered at UC-Berkeley. You’ll be impressed with some of the completely useless courses, which suck up funds and provide no societal benefit. Just go to gender studies as a start.

    Also, is it justified to pay guest speakers $20-30,000 for a college appearance or was it worth the UC-Davis paying $100,000 to your favorite impeached president to speak instead of them trying to reduce student tuition?

    Oh, but there’s no waste in colleges. It’s all the fault of the taxpayers for not paying more and more taxes.

  • Hey, want to check endowments at California colleges? The University of California has almost $6 billion in endowment funds. http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/22/pf/college/richest_endowment_funds/index.htm

    Wouldn’t you like to know just how badly those funds are managed and how little those funds help to keep student costs down? I guess not.

    We don’t have a revenue problem at colleges. We have a management problem made worse by tenure, unions, and the idea by college administrators that colleges have an entitlement to all the money they can spend.

    Celeste, you need to look at other sources of revenues and better controls of costs before you start insisting on more tax money for California colleges. Why pour good money after bad? Colleges need to start acting more like businesses.

  • Most of those guys couldn’t make it in the world outside of academics and are overpaid for what they can do.

    Ah yes, like the decades of scientific research that is responsible for making the U.S. the greatest country in the world. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that by “academics” you meant “non-sciences”. If not, then you are completely ignorant of what constitutes academic research.

  • Woody I just checked the Berkeley Website and, funny, I couldn’t find those courses. I did find the following for a BA in the College of Letters arts and Sciences:

    Subject A (composition) – required
    American History and Institutions – 2 courses in history or Poltical science.
    American Cultures – oh, stuff like art, Anthropology
    and a seven course “Breadth Req” in areas like philosophy, history, art, social science etc.
    2 composition course (English, Rhetoric of Foreign language composition)
    1 Quantt course (Comp Sci, math, stat)

    Didn’t see any basket weaving courses when I checked the catalog but I’ll leave that to you. Can’t speak for UGA of course.

  • Actually down at the Harpswells, reading Hawthorne or Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H) another Bowdoin Grad!

  • My cousin is helping Auburn University raise almost one billion dollars in contributions this year. If a college with only 22,000 students can do that, then why can’t those kids and professors in California’s large schools get off of their duffs and help raise decent money for their schools?

    Paul, I respect the departments for science and business and medical schools in colleges, as they spend more time being productive rather than being agitators for socialism; and, they typically raise their own money from gifts for expansions rather than rely on taxpayers.

    rlc, did you catch this class at Berkeley?

    Berkeley Male Sexuality Class Reinstated
    Students Watched Class Instructor Have Sex

    A course at UC-Berkeley dedicated to the study of “Male Sexuality” was suspended and then reinstated after it was revealed that the class’s student instructors had organized trips to strip clubs and “sex exchanges,” held class parties that turned into orgies, and engaged in sex in front of students.

    “There was an orgy at one of the parties,” Christy Kovacs, a freshman student at Berkeley explained to the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, which broke the story of the course’s exploits. “And after we went to a strip club, at the party, people took pictures of their genitalia.” The anonymous Polaroid photos were then placed in a box and students and class instructors played a game attempting to match the photos with the person whose genitals were featured. Course instructors claim that the party was organized to help students taking the class meet one another, and that no one was pressured to take the Polaroid photos which they label a “party game.”

    A second questionable incident occurred when several course instructors accompanied a group of students when they visited a gay strip club as research for their final project for the class. While at the strip club, they watched one of their instructors undress and have sex onstage.

    Still see no waste that can be trimmed?

  • College classes are chosen by good ole fashioned supply and demand. If not enough students sign up, then the class doesn’t happen. Pretty simple. And obviously, at least one would think, if you cut one class you find objectionable those students will have to take another class. This doesn’t save any resources, it just imposes your personal tastes on a statewide university system. But the point is really just to complain, isn’t it?

    And in case you’re honestly asking why CSU students can’t raise a ton of money it’s because the majority of these kids are first generation college students who come from family’s that don’t have a lot of extra dough. Many CSLA students, and I imagine this is true for the other CSU’s as well, work to support their families while in school. Real American dream stuff. I know the Woodys of the world don’t believe in using government to help anyone, but for those who do, you couldn’t find a more worthy target than the average CSU student.

  • Mavis, it takes more money to add departments, department heads, and courses. It’s not like adding another section for Western Civ 101 costs the same as the these new and wasteful studies, whose cost is further felt in commerce when students graduate with studies that have no demand in business or with job potential. And, most of these wacko courses didn’t have demand until it was manufactured. It’s actually the left that has diligently imposed personal tastes on college studies rather than the other way around.

    Money for colleges is not raised from families so much as it is from businesses. It’s sad that so many people turn to government for solutions when they have the capacity to handle problems themselves, but are too lazy or too unimaginative.

  • Right Woody, that is real believable.

    I doubt you would last a week at the Haas School of Business!

    And, and for your info, UC and CSU are separate institutions but nice try.

  • rlc, I got my masters at one of the best business schools in the nation. I’ve taught at colleges, taught students to prepare for the CPA and CMA exams, and made presentations at CPA conferences. I think that I could hold my own…especially in knowing the difference between the real world and academics.

Leave a Reply to richard locicero X