Press Release from Protest at UC Regents Meeting Tues March 23

For Immediate Release Contact: Gina Szeto, (415) 532-6946, mohdahmsum [at] gmail.com March 22, 2010 Gabi Kirk, (408) 966-3773, gabikirk [at] gmail.com


***Press Release***

STUDENTS AND WORKERS PROTEST UC REGENTS MEETING Students and Workers tell UC Regents not to privatize our schools and demand that the Regents keep fee levels constant and fee processes transparent

Protest and Rally Tuesday, March 23rd @ 11 am. 1675 Owens St. Community Center, UCSF Mission Bay Campus

On Tuesday, March 23, students from across the UC system will protest the UC Regents meeting and their proposal to rewrite the UC’s fee policies with little to no public input. Currently, a student can reasonably expect that the fee levels when one enters school will stay consistent throughout one’s education. However, the new policy would give the Board of Regents the right to “establish fees at any level it deems appropriate” (UC Regent Live blog, 3/20/10)

This new policy will have disastrous implications for the future accessibility of the UC system. There is no transparency for the process of raising fees, so how can one know that a level the Board “deems appropriate” is fair for a public school? Thousands of lower and middle-class students, already worried about how to pay for the UC after recent fee hikes, now have no peace of mind that they can get through years of college without mounting ever-increasing debt. In an economic recession, this new policy is not only unwise, it is downright cruel.

We join the tens of thousands of other students across the state in protesting tuition and fee hikes, campus worker furloughs and layoffs, and other indicators of our state’s abandonment of its citizens’ education and prosperity. We are distressed by what the privatization of California public education means for continued access to our schools, and other public campuses, by students from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

The shell game of decreasing investment in public education to remedy other areas of budget shortfall will, for the time being, relieve some pressure from the state’s coffers. But what will happen over the course of the next decade and beyond? Are we creating a “lost generation” of would-be students who will scale back their ambitions of applying to and enrolling in a UC because of the (justifiable) perception that our leaders have turned their backs on our youth? Will we see a revival of the legal profession’s status quo—white, affluent associates—and a rapid decline in graduates going into public interest and government work, since anything less than a six-figure salary will make school debt simply unmanageable? For these reasons, we raise our voices alongside those of our fellow students across the state.