Tag: UC

Categories
Communiqués

October 7th Day of Action for Public Education

/////// PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY /////////

In solidarity with the October 7th Day of Action for Public Education [http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/strike-on-october-7th/] we call for a virtual sit-in of the websites of the Office of the President of the University of California and the UC Regents. This virtual sit-in will take place for all of October 7th, from 12:00AM the night before to 11:59PM the night of.

We need hosting for this action. Please contact any of us if you can provide hosting for the html files for the action.

Recent actions taken on March 4th by students, faculty, staff and allies around the world were joined online by a virtual sit-in. The swift and violent response to the virtual sit-in from the UC administration and police against Ricardo Dominguez only reveal the effectiveness of the action and must be seen as part of a larger strategy of the criminalization of resistance including the arrest of hundreds of faculty, students and staff around the world who are struggling to redefine what the future of education will be. The UC continues to make efforts to expand the prison-military-education-industrial complex in the face of demands, occupations, strikes and blockades by those willing to put their bodies, physically and digitally, on the line for a better future for education.

By organizing this action, in the tradition of ECD as a distributed tactic as performed by the Electrohippies, the Federation of Random Action and the borderlands Hacklab, we are demonstrating that the hydra has a million heads and Yudof, the Regents and their police cannot stop Electronic Civil Disobedience by putting their boot on the neck of one man. A virtual sit-in is a mass action by thousands of people and we will not be stopped.

More virtual strikes can be expected until:

* The budget cuts across the UC system are turned back
* Those laid off in the past year are rehired
* Charges are dropped and investigations ended against all of those arrested for struggling for the future of their education

Join the actions in the streets, the campuses and the university buildings if you can. If you want to join the virtual sit-in, go here for a list of urls:

http://october7thvirtualsitin.wordpress.com

If you have any questions about this e-action contact:

(alphabetical)

Zach Blas, zachblas@gmail.com
Xandre Borghetti
Micha Cárdenas, azdelslade@gmail.com
Elizabeth Chaney, chaneyeh@gmail.com
John Falchi, pacerjp14@sbcglobal.net
Autumn Hays, autumnhays@ymail.com
Linzi Juliano
Rashne Limki
Bradley Litwin
Benjamin Lotan, benjaminlotan@gmail.com
Luis Martin-Cabrera
Elle Mehrmand, ellemehrmand@gmail.com

If you would like to help organize the action and be added to the list of organizers, email us.

/////// PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY /////////

Categories
Communiqués

Statement of Solidarity with UCSD/UCR Faculty

We strongly condemn the investigations of faculty members Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll and Ken Ehrlich by the University of California. These “investigations” represent an alarming violation of academic, intellectual and artistic freedom. They function as a smokescreen – distracting from the actual problems addressed by Dominquez, Cardenas and Ehrlich’s work. UC administrators would do better to listen to the messages contained in the work and begin acting to address them appropriately. Such repression of basic freedoms will only exacerbate the existing problems within the UC and radically escalate the public response.

–Occupy Everything Collective

Categories
Communiqués

UC System – The Business

from Continental Drift

February 23, 2010 by Brian Holmes

“Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We’re doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who’s going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that’s where we’re running into trouble.”

Mark G. Yudof, President, University of California

transcript here

Intriguingly, one finds almost no information on the net about the UC Center for Nanoscience Innovation for Defense, except the now-vanished page recounting its foundation back in 2002, preserved at archive.org, and a mention of its continuing existence by the National Nanotechnology Initiative — which is one of the many federal centers coordinating the development of so-called “dual-use” technologies with civilian and military applications. Maybe I’m paranoid, or maybe just anti-militarist, but whenever I look into the ways that higher education in the United States is being transformed into a functional innovation system for those profitable businesses that Yudof talks about, it’s the Defense Department funding that catches my eye.

A few years ago I wrote an article on flexibilization, corporatization and militarization in the universities of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. What the investigation revealed was an education system that had become the perfect lamp and mirror of neoliberal management. When Bob Samuels remarks, in a very succinct and useful article, that “research universities like UCLA now spend less than 5% of their total budget on undergraduate instruction,” the questions worth asking are: Where does the rest of the money go, and where does it actually come from in the first place? Why are the administrators so keen to drastically reduce the size of English and Sociology departments? What kind of research is being supported by students’ overpriced tuition? And how did formerly public universities reach the point where their agenda is set by a corporate accountant’s logic grafted onto the priorities of the national security state?

These are some of the questions that we’re going to raise at the upcoming Continental Drift sessions at the Public School in LA, on Feb 27-28, just in advance of the next UC walkout on March 4.

* * *

–> For more insights into the management of the UC business, consider these podcasts and articles on UC Regent Richard Blum — upstanding citizen, construction and real-estate magnate, owner of the $7 billion Blum Capital Partners private equity firm and husband of Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein. Thanks to Daniel Tucker for sending the podcast:

– Richard Blum, Alpha Regent

– Richard Blum: The Man Behind California’s “Developing Economy”

– Disaster Capitalist University