Be Realistic — Demand the Impossible!:
Stopping Student Fee Increases and Transforming the World

By Will Parrish
For as long as there have been fee increases at the University of California, there has been student resistance to them. Back in 1967, it cost a grand total of $150 a year to attend the UC for undergraduate California residents (adjusting for inflation). When Ronald Reagan announced his plan that year to cut the UC budget by 25 percent, several thousand students responded by marching on Sacramento.

Since then, UC students have engaged in rallies, occupations of administrative buildings, walk-outs, boycotts, and various other demonstrations against the skyrocketing cost of their education. Occasionally, these actions have made a concrete impact, causing a reversal of some portion of the CA State Legislature’s planned UC funding cuts or the UC Regents’ planned fee increases.

But that impact has invariably been limited, and it seems that the same gut-wrenching cycle takes place every year. The State Legislature cuts funding for higher education, the Regents announce a fee increase, students protest, student governments lobby, a new batch of student activists graduate, and still the fees go up.

In short, campaigns to counter fee increases have been failing for 38 years, despite some great organizing on the part of several generations of students. The first step, if we are to come to terms with this failure, is to recognize the circumstances that caused the cost of a UC education to begin its steep climb in the first place.
The second step is to reformulate the strategies of past anti-fee increase campaigns in a way that takes into account the real source of Student Power.

As the price of a UC education becomes increasingly unaffordable, the decline in diversity at UC campuses has been staggering. Meanwhile, the average debt of college graduates in 2003 was $17,000. As we strive to transform this staggering injustice, let’s keep in mind a popular slogan of the May ’68 uprising in Paris: “be realistic — demand the impossible.”

Fee Increases in a National and International Context

Fee increases are inevitable unless we pursue the goal of cheaper or free higher education as part of a campaign for much broader and deeper social change. To take only one very obvious example, there certainly won’t be cheaper or free higher education at the UC, or anywhere else in this country, as long as the US in engaged in a $200-billion-and-counting war of conquest abroad. Likewise, the war in Iraq connects with countless other local, national, and global injustices.

During the ‘60s, the student movement at UC Berkeley emerged as a major political force, but it also induced serious resentment among a significant portion of the voting population of California. Ronald Reagan was elected as governor in 1966 based largely on his promise to clean up “the mess at Berkeley.”

Reagan’s election was historically significant largely because his repressive approach to student Over the past 40 years, this backlash has brought to power a series of reactionary politicos who have colluded with their corporate

sponsors and partners to continually expand public spending on war, corporate give-aways, prisons and the “War on Drugs” – at the expense of education and social services.

George W. Bush and his administration are strong inheritors of this tradition. Most Democrats currently in power are not fundamentally much different.
To quote the Long Road Collective, a group of UCSC graduate students who published a pamphlet on UC funding priorities in spring 2005, what is happening in the UC system is “not happening in a vacuum.” What goes on at the UC “connects with what goes on in California state politics, which must be understood in a national and international context.”

In a nutshell, here’s the complex task before us: We must come to understand how efforts to address the cost of a UC education are related to other efforts to bring about the kind of transformation that would make free higher education possible.

What is to Be Done?

Just as Argentine students in 1918 and 1919 mobilized a highly successful student strike in which virtually all of their demands were met (mainly, student involvement in decision-making); just as students and workers went on strike in Paris in 1968, nearly precipitating revolution; and just as students all over the world have conducted general strikes dating back to the 1600s, it’s high time that we in the US learned from our forebears and simply stopped going to class.

As the folks in these past movements realized full well, the main power students wield is their power to withhold their cooperation from a system that depends on this cooperation for its very existence. By attending class, buying textbooks, supporting campus businesses, etc., students are like the pillars propping up a top-down educational apparatus. When we act from underneath this oppressive structure, our impact is invariably limited. But if we remove the pillars (by withdrawing our support), the structure will collapse, and suddenly those in power will be in an extremely vulnerable position indeed.1

We’re at least a few years away from a ripe time for a national student strike, so let’s start with something more modest: a UC student strike in, say, the fall of 2006 or the winter of 2007.
The demands of the strike don’t even have to stretch beyond the UC.

The UC Regents get away with increasing our fees on an annual basis for the same basic reason they get away with exploiting campus workers, overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories, and investing billions of dollars in businesses that prop up oppressive political regimes: namely, a lack of democracy. For example, when was the last time you were asked to provide meaningful input into any important decisions regarding the institution you’re paying tens of thousands of dollars to be a part of?
That’s exactly what I thought.

As the extremely oppressive and undemocratic institution that it is, the Board of Regents deserves to be severely disempowered, if not entirely abolished. In its place should be instituted a system of shared governance on the part of students, faculty members, staff, and perhaps some full-time administrators. The highly successful “participatory budgeting” system that originated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, provides one possible model that the UC could adapt.2

While democratizing the UC wouldn’t solve all our problems, it would be a tremendously important step, one with the potential to inspire similar processes of democratization at scores of institutions all over the country and world.
Students acting in isolation often lack the power to challenge institutions based on extremely concentrated power, which is one reason it’s vital that we continue to build on the promise of the student-worker coalitions that have formed at the UC in recent years. Make this a UC-wide student and worker strike, and then we’re talking about some really major changes.

Take another look at the chart on thia page. Compulsory fees for in-state undergraduates have soared by over $2,000 in the last three years alone. When you look at that chart, realize that, given the US’ current political direction, things are poised only to get worse — much worse.

When you take a look at that chart, also realize that the trend it displays is only a tiny microcosm of the sort of injustices being perpetuated at every moment of every day by the present global system of centralized power and corporate-state-industrial domination. As maddening as it is to be paying over $7,000 a year and counting for something that very well ought to be free, the burden of doing so is nothing compared to the misery wrought on those who really suffer at the hands of this system.

The anger students feel over fees being increased at an unprecedented rate presents a unique opportunity for masses of students to connect the dots and recognize this ugly system for what it truly is. If we transform the UC, we can stop student fee increases. If we transform the UC, we can begin to transform the world.

1. This idea is based heavily on a concept called “People Power.” For more information, visit http://globaljusticeecology.org/peoplepower.

2. For more information, Google “participatory budgeting Porto Alegre”