Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [52]
When the U.C. Regents, who oversee the university system, announced they wouldn’t accept thousands of qualified freshmen because of a budget shortfall, Schwartz drew up a plan. In the spirit of public service rather than personal enrichment, he proposed that the university take 1 percent from the salary of each employee making more than $100,000. This is not unprecedented. Weeks earlier, Barack Obama had capped his staffs’ salaries at $100,000. “That would net you $29 million,” Schwartz told the Regents. “That is more than enough to cover the full costs for those 2,300 new students that you were planning to turn away next year.” The Regents ignored him.5
“Berkeley is trying to brand itself through its athletics, especially football,” Hebdon tells me. “The program is a tremendous investment. Our chancellor, in an act of great misdirection, just announced he plans to raise $1 billion for the athletic endowment by selling off 3,000 front-row seats for thirty to fifty years to private bidders for $225,000 a pop.6 Piece by piece, Berkeley is becoming a trade school. Students, for instance, mostly agree with the idea of a sports university.”
In December 2006, the university announced plans to cut down more than forty huge oak trees on a 1.5-acre site on campus to build a training facility for athletes. A group of protesters built crude tree houses in the branches and took shifts manning them to thwart the plan. Berkeley municipal law prohibits removing any Coast Live Oak with a trunk larger than six inches within city boundaries, but city boundaries do not include the university. The protest lasted for twenty-one months until September 2008, when the last protesters were coaxed down and the grove was demolished.
“During the well-publicized, two-year tree sits, most students supported the university’s plans to build the sporting complex and railed against ‘the hippies,’” Hebdon says. “One student, a war veteran, was treated as an imminent threat for tree-sitting with a sign that read ‘Democratize the U.C. Regents.’ Few students knew that the Regents, who oversee the whole university system, are appointed rather than elected and representative, even though this is required by law. Few really dug in and thought. My strongest memory is of a person selling rocks to throw at tree sitters. He had noticeable crowd support. When I see things like this, I think of how Berkeley, once known for conscientious objection, is training an inhumane, deeply frustrated, indifferent, game-driven people. The military has a strong presence on campus and is one of the few ways for students to pay their way without accruing large debt.
“We have bought hook, line, and sinker into the idea that education is about training and ‘success,’ defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge,” Hebdon goes on. “The competitive efficiency culture—electronic immersion, high-paced everything, career networking as a way of life, prestige, money—it disconnects the so-called best and the brightest from commonsense obligations to society, ecology, and democratic ideals. Somewhere along the way into the free market, Berkeley forgot that learning isn’t about handshaking, résumé fondling, and market rewards.”
“What makes Berkeley a terribly contradictory public institution is its version of the wrought-iron gates that enclose Harvard or Yale: our high-security national laboratories. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, up the hill from campus, is a mystery to most. It is connected to U.C. Berkeley’s historical involvement with nuclear technology, something inherently centralizing, undemocratic, and dangerous to civil rights. The labs have special buses students cannot ride. Buildings are restricted-access, and secrecy abounds. Researcher scientists do not fancy whistle-blowing, as they have no legal right to tenure. Students learn