<p>DD says this happened last night, the students are still in the building, it is surrounded by protesters and heavy police presence. No one is allowed in the building. It's the biggest lecture hall on campus. Masked students are yelling to the crowd outside and stating they are nonviolent protestors, urging people to go to ebay.org (which takes me to ebay.com) to see "what they did to us last night."</p>
<p>Last night? I thought it was early this morning =</p>
<p>Well anyways, this is really pointless imo. They’re protesting, but offering no solutions. And the inconsistency of the strike just made it worse. 1 day here, 3 days now? What the hell happened to October? It just kind of angers me that students who had lecture today in Wheeler now don’t have a class because other students want to make a stand, which is all good, except for the fact that the regents already approved of the increase. Unless they can keep taking over buildings, today is going to be worth absolutely nothing at all.</p>
<p>This is Berkeley’s heritage: free speech and peaceful protests against what they fear are unfair actions by the Regents and the the State of California. Maybe those students are upset because not too long ago, 20% of the state budget went to higher education and 1-2% went to the prison industrial complex. Today, California spends 9% of the budget on higher education and 8% on prisons. California is 48th in the nation on education funding and 1st in the nation in funding prisons. (These stats were from an interview aired on NPR in preparation for Tuesday’s Regent’s meeting at UCLA). Money spent on higher education brings back much more revenue to the state than it takes out of the budget. Maybe students don’t like the fact that it costs $46,000.00 to support every Death Row Inmate annually, money that could be used to educate the workforce. That is something to protest about and I support every college student in CA who is striking or protesting today. I hope they follow it up with letters to their representatives expressing how important education is to them. The next thing they should do is ask the taxpayer who is writing their tuition checks (be it Mom, Dad, or themselves) if they have supported education at the ballot box or if they voted instead for prison population-building measures like three-strikes. This didn’t happen overnight. Will today’s protest matter? It will if students take this to heart and start electing representatives who support higher education.</p>
<p>Screw the plutocrats and kleptocrats ruling over us. Prisons instead of universities, investment banks instead of people, etc. We would all do well to read the [Catechism</a> of the Revolutionary](<a href=“http://www.feastofhateandfear.com/archives/sergi.html]Catechism”>http://www.feastofhateandfear.com/archives/sergi.html) and implement it in our everyday lives.</p>
<p>occupying Wheeler hall so that students can’t go to class in the 3rd week before end of instruction isn’t going to help anyone and is certainly not going to hurt the regents. </p>
<p>What we (the students) need to do is organize a boycott of sorts that will hurt the regents in a way so that a tuition hike will not be beneficial for UC regents.</p>
<p>MLK and his supporters boycotted the buses by AA’s finding alternate ways of getting around. Gandhi and friends boycotted imported British goods (cloth, tea, ect.).</p>
<p>We just need to create a situation so that it is counterproductive to increase the tuition by this absurd amount.</p>
<p>“What we (the students) need to do is organize a boycott of sorts that will hurt the regents in a way so that a tuition hike will not be beneficial for UC regents.”</p>
<p>I concur. But how? :|</p>
<p>All 20,000+ students go on telebears and cancel all classes and semesters and therefore unregister. NO STUDENTS, NO MONEY, NO UNIVERSITY XD.</p>
<p>^^that’s what I was thinking…also boycotting finals would make an immediate statement that could be more easily implemented and get the point across sooner</p>
<p>If they don’t increase tuition, they will cut all the adjuncts and probably entire departments. Under higher education law, you can’t fire tenured professors unless you get rid of the entire department.</p>
<p>So which departments do you think the University of California should do without?</p>
<p>The English department would be a good place to start since it adds absolutely zero value to the economy. In fact, after one takes opportunity costs into account, the English department at Cal hinders rather than nurtures education.</p>
<p>I hope posts 9 and 10 are sarcastic. Or are you serious? Just because the English department may not be financially viable to keep up? Recently an article ran in the Daily Californian about how the athletic programs aren’t actually profitable. Each year, they consistently owe money, but so far they haven’t been pushed to become really sustainable. Why can’t we cut those instead?</p>
<p>Cal might as well be a tech school then, without humanities departments. That kind of “attack something that doesn’t affect me” is part of the problem.</p>
<p>If the major or department has “Studies” at the end, out it goes.</p>
<p>Hell let’s just cut all the cream puff major departments. Yeah! REVOLUTION!!!</p>
<p>The facts speak for themselves:
- Only 34% of English majors get employed
- Given the above statistic, you’d hope the remaining students go on to greener pastures but only 10% go to graduate school
- So 56% of the English majors who graduate from Berkeley and have practically nothing to do</p>
<p>The last statistic is a major problem because as a publicly funded institution, Berkeley has a mandate to create students who will go on to better California, something which few English majors are capable of.</p>
<p>We speak English. We should keep our heritage and actually have some experts who know about literature and other things because most of us don’t care. Whereas most of you are probably majoring in X or Y because of hopeful monetary gains after graduation, these people know that they can’t expect much, but they still bother to pick up boring and esoteric books and power through them. I think they deserve more respect than some statistics that judge them as failures. In my opinion, I think you people who categorize others into “practical” and “waste” groups are idiots because not everything is about money.</p>
<p>Majors such as MCB, Physics and Math send in excess of 20% to grad school, not to mention the production of the students produced by these departments is far in excess of that of an English major. More importantly, however, departments such as mathematics provide courses that are the foundation of productive programs such as Haas and EECS. The English department provides nothing–the type of writing it preaches is of little use in academic and professional contexts and its upper division classes are nothing but a waste of taxpayer money. And the professors? What type of mind-blowing research do they carry out that substantiates the six figure salaries they receive in the mail? You really have no point.</p>
<p>IF we were to assume a doomsday scenario and have to decide to either
a) wipe out all Math departments across the US to keep English departments
b) wipe out all English departments across the US to keep Math departments</p>
<p>The former would virtually assure our economic demise as our economy is built of high-tech manufacturing whereas the latter would produce students capable of further improving the economy. The choice is yours.</p>
<p>In regards to your previous post, the measure of production here isn’t “how many students graduate from each department” but rather “how much do X majors give back to California”. Onwards we go…</p>
<p>You’re misinterpreting my statement. Writing is extremely important but by the time students matriculate to Cal, they already know how to write at an elementary level. Regardless, the overly-rosy writing advocated by the English department is useless in academic and professional contexts–that’s why several departments, such as engineering and Haas, have their own writing classes.</p>
<p>We are left with two choices:
- Increase student fees by 32%, thereby taking away education from the poor
- Maintain low fees at the cost of wiping out the English department</p>
<p>I’m sorry but I don’t recall using metaphors when typing up lab reports for Bio 1A but shoot me down if you will.</p>
<p>Despite popular conception that China is the world’s manufacturing leader, the US remains an imminent economic power, manufacturing $2.5 for every $1 China manufactures. But we no longer make our own shoes or clothes, so how do we do it? Today, our manufacturing is high tech–think expensive medical and computer equipment. What type of subjects do people need to take to be able to produce such expensive medical and computer equipment? Well, one needs a firm understanding of math and sciences in addition to social science majors who set the framework for such work to take place. The services of English majors are not needed here.</p>
<p>“Yeah, and why don’t we just harvest all the English majors organs and use them to keep the Math majors healthy.”
Come on.</p>
<p>People come to college to learn. Cutting one program or making them pay more (as in the $1000 extra for engineers) puts some perverse social pressure that may dissuade somebody from choosing a major they are interested in, thus reducing the quality of education they receive.
You guys need to stop looking at this so communist-ically. The state does not control all the resources, nor should you expect it to hand you those resources on a silver platter.</p>
<p>Leftist, “manufacturing” takes a different meaning when it comes to high tech. Here, the main cost isn’t the factory but the engineers and scientist whose minds are behind the operation. Whereas science and engineering students are needed to innovate, social science and business majors are needed to set up the societal framework that supports such innovation. </p>
<p>Please answer the following questions:
- How does the research conducted by the English department solve our pressing problems?
- How do students graduating from the English department give back to California?</p>
<p>I’ve answered the above two questions for the majors I propose be kept yet you’ve failed to answer the above questions regarding the major I propose be terminated.</p>