[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.
Via Instapundit, Berkeley students are revolting.
A somewhat more measured take on the situation (God knows it wouldn’t be hard) can be found here. Essentially, the students are up in arms because UC-Berkeley students have to pay a whopping 20% of the average tuition for a private, comparable school like Stanford (to use the MercuryNews.com example). They’re having to do this because California keeps spending money that it doesn’t actually have, which makes things like fully-subsidized college educations a thing of the past, at least if your family makes more than seventy grand a year.
Personally, I’d handle this situation by expelling everybody who participated in this thing. Not because it’d solve the fiscal crisis*, but because it offends me that these people so blithely toss around the phrase ‘police brutality.’ We have standards by which to judge that, these days. Or did we start executing students for protesting these days, and I just missed it?
Moe Lane
*Although if said expulsion didn’t come with a refund, that’d be a good one-time fix.
Having worked 45-60 hours/week to pay for undergraduate tuition, I find it exceedingly difficult to sympathize with these turds.
Berkeley has produced ever-more petulant students since the “free speech” riots. Shut the school down, sow the ground with salt, and improve the intellectual climate of the world by ensuring it never springs forth again.
As a former UC alumni (although not from Berkeley), my response to these students is “screw you”. This is a temper tantrum, pure and simple — mommy and daddy can’t afford to buy them new toys this year and they think it will help if they burn the house down. Kids with that degree of emotional immaturity *should* be expelled from college and sent back to grade school until they grow up.
If they must protest, let them protest the corrupt government officials who bled a once-wealthy state into a condition of bankruptcy over a span of generations.
This dope has spent a number of years voting assets away from her education.
There is only so much to go around. And, she has been voting to fund other Liberal pet projects – but, without realizing there has to be income to cover expenditures. Time for her to be part of the solution, eh…
By the way, I graduated from UCSD in 1987. My tuition 23 years ago was around $5,500 a year. Inflation adjusted, this dope is paying $5,242 in 1987 dollars.
Not such a bad deal is it.
What a moron!!!
Get an education…
Going Gault!!!
A bit of irony in this. If Berkeley & other schools were educating their students classically, those same students would not only comprehend what’s behind the rising fees but also have the tools to deal with it. Berkeley created a mass of students incapable of either by occupying their days with pointless courses geared toward marginal degrees.
Sad for all involved, sadder still these kids are so clueless in the short and longer term.
You’re setting the bar exceedingly low if you’re claiming that anything less than death can’t be “police brutality”. While I haven’t seen the videos here, there’s plenty of brutality that happens in this country that gets covered up, even when videos of it are posted on the internet. Bringing up images of Iran looks like a weak attempt to divert attention from that fact.
None of that excuses people setting fires and acting like idiots while trying to get handouts from the state.
I love the fact that the leader of the pack at UC Davis was “Laura Mitchell, a fifth-year women’s studies major.” A useless twit, learning a useless major, and taking extra years to do it. Smash the patriarchy, right on….now get me a double-shot espresso, honey.
I’m just finding the whole thing ironic: They’re pissed about paying more tuition… so naturally they destroy their campus, which means the university is going to need even more money to fix what these idiots broke.
Did these people never learn critical thinking or the way cause and effect works? Gotta love that public education!
I’m unfamiliar with the UC system, but if they’re like state schools in the Midwest, they could cut the LBGTQIAF center, the Womyn’s Centers (these days there’s more than one), the Race-based Centers, the on-campus gym and day spa, the club-like music venue, the bondage club, the gourmet meals with endless vegan/organic/fair trade requirements and tie-ins to local restaurants, the suites with private bathrooms, and the free WiFi for the whole city. Fire the Vice Presidents for Diversity, Multiculturalism, Sustainability, and Environmental Affairs and shut down their departments.
Not all that long ago (I am in my 30s) people went to college to learn for four years instead of partying in comfort for six: you need are classes/labs/teachers, a library, and some dorms. Maybe a nurse’s office, depending on the town. All that other crap is available off-campus; students who want it can pay for it and students who don’t (especially non-traditional students who already have homes and families off-campus) can get educated for less.
That’s pretty much the model of the online universities, isn’t it? You get your cheap learning from them, and your vegan fair-trade breakfast (at noon) from someone else.
Rob: Shut the school down, sell the faculty, students, and staff into slavery, flatten the buildings, plow it under, and then sow it with salt.
Kill them all, God will save his own.
Astroturf signs….check.
More cameramen then when 100k to 500k show up at a Washington DC Tea Party Rally…check.
Requiring everyone else to change except themselves…check.
“I’m smarter than you” attitude…check.
Extreme sense of entitlement…check.
They’re growing a good crop of liberals this year.
One word to these people….leave. Find another school. Vote with your feet.
But UC Berkeley has a clear source of major revenue, which has just recently been unfairly cut off by the federal government. I agree with these students that it must, at all costs, be restored.
Build new nuclear weapons, and Berkeley will be rolling in dough. Restore the level of high-tech weapons research the nation funded in the 50’s and 60’s, and California will be as prosperous as ever. It’s the peace dividend that has done in the “Peace” lifestyle.
You’re welcome. Now get back to class, and get a job.
The further legacy of the baby boomers in action. How long until we drain this atavistic idiocy from the national bloodstream?
You don’t think that these students are rioting over the tuition, do you? They are rioting because it is fun to be part of a group of people focused on the same thing, like at a football game, and to feel like they are doing something momentous and heroic.
I’ll guarantee you they aren’t thinking about money in any real terms – that doesn’t come till later, when they find out that they have to repay those student loans. Right now, I’ll bet not one in a hundred even knows what he owes.
So when they are met with any kind of force, they will naturally regard it as wrong and brutal, because all they are doing is having fun.
There’s no way to expel them, either. A moment’s reflection will tell you that the University can’t afford the due process costs.
If you live in CA, write your rep to support reducing state aid to education, and to reduce the university system’s budget. Oh, wait, that won’t work because there are all those union employees jobs involved.
Guess we’ll just have to wait for the general collapse of the state government. Chickens, home, roost & all that…
The University of California system has a “Vice-Chancellor for Diversity,” and each of the ten campuses has its own “Associate Vice-Chancellor for Diversity.” Each one makes more than $200,000 per year.
If those students want to keep their tuition down, I know where they can find some money! Alas, I don’t think that solution will make the Grievance Studies majors very happy.
Yes, yes, yes! HeatherRadish, that’s what I found myself saying while reading your post, all the way through. Don’t get me wrong; I lived in CA for 25 years and still love the place. But this entitlement mentality and herd instinct these young people have glaringly ‘demonstrated’ here show their ignorance of economics. Their actual anger should be directed toward the liberal gov’t of the Golden State and the corporate robber-barrons that allowed (and actually participated in) the rape of the county’s financial system. Bottom line is though, a subsidized education is a privilege, not a right.
Just as a comparison if you go to http://www.berkeley.edu/about/fact.shtml#fees
you see that tuition and fees as $10,333. lets deal only with that. A state university in New Jersey would be charged about $15,000. It varies a little depending on the campus but that is $5,000 more and it is going up!
“While I haven’t seen the videos here, there’s plenty of brutality that happens in this country that gets covered up”
True. Like the thugs who threw concrete on a bus full of RNC delegates, and the thugs who planned to bomb the Republican convention. The ANSWER thugs who attacked Tea Party protesters, the SEIU thugs who have assaulted many. Oh, the multiple, coordinated attacks on Bush/Cheney campaign offices during the 2004 campaign season.
Back in 2001 there was a campaign of violence against whites in Cincinnati; it did not register in the mainstream press.
And who can forget the virtual carte blanche union violence gets? Plant “star nails” and pipe bombs, beat up “scabs”, murder whistle blowers… it’s all good, ‘cuz you’re a union thug!
Rob, good point. Police officers in this country typically double as union thugs, too, which is about 99% of the problem. Same with teachers’ unions.
Getting unions out of government would be a good start…
Heard a report last night about Univ. of Nevada considering closing their School of Agriculture.
So…we’ll all be eating the work-product of Gender Studies and MFA programs in the future. Great. Just great. What goes better – ketchup, or mustard ?
Are we really this stupid ?
Folks,
These dimwits are paying the same tuition cost to attend a UC campus that I did 23 years ago – inflation adjusted.
Why should they pay less (inflation adjusted) than I did in the early to mid 1980’s?
Maybe the politicians bought some votes in the late 1990’s by lowering tuition during the .com boom, but reality has been knocking on the door for over a decade now. Time for them to pay for their benefits – which a University of California education is.