Posted on 10/13/2010 5:21:34 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
The good news is that Berkeley produces a skewed world view. The bad news is that it provides an all too accurate microcosm of academia. “Campus radicalism is back, big time,” Michael Cohen writes in the latest issue of Radical Teacher. “For the first time in a generation, massive rallies, marches, blogs, and, increasingly, student strikes, building occupations and confrontations with the police are drawing the public’s attention to the crisis in public higher education.”
“On March 4 of this year, rallies in 28 states and 11 different countries testified to a growing movement to reverse the now thirty-year neoliberal trend towards privatization and inequality not just in higher education but in American life in general.” Cohen teaches American Studies at Berkeley. Radical Teacher is “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.”
“These growing protests have both immediate causes and long term roots,” Cohen writes. “In California, where I live and teach, we are witness to the spectacle of the richest state in the country claiming that it is broke, and that billions in deficits must be made up for exclusively by cuts to schools, parks, food stamps and other necessities of public life.”
“These cuts have fallen on public higher education where the community colleges are canceling entire quarters, the California state schools are reducing enrollment by nearly 40,000 and the University of California system just raised student fees 32 % while furloughing faculty and laying off 1900 uinionized workers.”
“The 2010 Budget Act holds General Fund spending essentially flat compared to the prior year–$86.6 billion in 2010 compared to $86.3 billion in 2009-10,” according the enacted budget in the Golden State. Nevertheless, Cohen sees budget cuts.
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
Those types of professors crawl all over UW Madison and the other UW schools. Par for the course. Also, professors who say that we either deserved 9/11 or that 9/11 was an inside job also teach there.
Hey, Cohen, you moron. Socialism doesn’t work. Buy a clue.
For those who are on federal funding, tell them if they continue to trash the US you will inform their granting agency, and each member of their grant review committee that they are spending most of their academic time trashing the US and not doing the work for which they were funded. Tell them you are going to copy FOX on the correspondence you send. They’ll back off.
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