The G.E. Bill

Leave it to the ASUC to defy your expectations even as it's fulfilling them.

Early Friday morning (or late Thursday evening, depending on how normal your circadian rhythms are), the Senate approved bills demanding divestment from General Electric and United Technologies "because of their military support of the occupation of the Palestinian territories." That they passed was hardly unexpected: they're the latest in a string stretching back at least the 4 years I've been here of bills with no practical value except to divide further the student body, and to satisfy the ASUC's self-righteous lust for grandiose displays of intelligence and largess. What is surprising is the count by which they passed: 16 for, 4 against. This means that for the first time in memory, the voting did not progress strictly along party lines (though unsurprisingly, all the opposition came from Student Action). I suppose it's only appropriate to the stupefying incompetence of our money-sponge student government that the vote that crossed partisan lines would be one of the worst calls in recent ASUC history.

A brief examination of the bills themselves. They insist that "[these] ASUC resolution[s] not be interpreted as the taking of sides in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict" – yet realistically, despite their assurance that they also condemn Hamas for the rockets it launches, they don't leave any other recourse. A pro-bill speaker at the argument session last night suggested that his opposition would try to downplay the bills' merits by suggesting that companies that (directly or otherwise) fund nations like Saudi Arabia are more deserving of divestment. Of course, he was right – but then, so is that argument. Israel ranks 47th in the world on The Economist's Index of Democracy, and received the top score of 1 (out of 7) in political rights and 2 in civil liberties from Freedom House. By contrast, as examples, China is ranked 138th and Saudi Arabia 159th in the Index of Democracy; and both received scores of 7 and 6 from Freedom House. Israel is clearly held against a higher standard in Berkeley than any nation in the world, with the possible exception of the US ("John Woo should be arrested and tortured," etc.), and to suggest otherwise is either dishonest or – even more frightening – misguided.

But this isn’t really about politics, skewed though they may be. The bills are a moronic exercise principally because they demand divestment from General Electric and United Technologies. It's a clever ploy to sugar coat the bill's intent, and I applaud Tom Pessah and Co.'s ingenuity in framing their destructive political desires. Still, I can't imagine anything dumber than disassociating with two such faceless conglomerates, in the hopes that such an action would send any message (except, perhaps, that we’re willing to lose money we desperately need if it’ll make the student government appear sympathetic to the local AARP crowd in the IRA t-shirts). GE doesn’t give any more of a crap about the ASUC's opinions than Israel itself does.

The biggest problem the affair suggests is that the ASUC will continue to disregard the consequences their actions hold for the student body in whose interest they were purportedly democratically elected to serve. Last night, more than any other time in my all-too-long tenure here, the senators showed no hesitation in parting yet further the gap between the Israel crowd and the Palestine crowd. In other words, the ASUC is intent on appearing to care about peace in the Middle East, 7500 miles away, but not remotely interested in ending conflict here in Berkeley.

It was somewhere between the first and second rounds of finger snaps synced to quotations of Mario Savio last night that I came to a realization: there is no way to reason with Berkeley's student government. It will always act in its own best interests, and to promote its own image in its own eyes; it will always waste money and time; it will always act as though more important than it actually is. It’s time to either redirect our efforts towards dismantling the hateful machine once and for all, or to leave our senators – all, that is, except for Parth Bhatt, Sandra Cohen, Anish Gala, and Noah Stern – to their beloved circle jerk in peace.

No Surprises

Husam Zakharia. What a stupid asshole.

Oh, I beg your pardon – what was that? That was uncalled for? I see. You mean to tell me that Berkeley is an institution that fosters dialogue; that my hostility does nothing to advance meaningful exchange.

Well, having been raised as a human being (someone inclined to treat people well, because that’s what human beings should do), I’m of the opinion that some actions rob of you of your normal right to be treated with any shred of respect. And being a good man, I consider hitting a girl – a short girl – from behind – with a shopping cart to be one of those actions. To be fair, though, you’re right: I should have chosen my words more carefully.

Husam Zakharia. What a stupid, cowardly asshole.

(Additional props to Daily Cal political reporter Zach E. J. Williams – who, incidentally, between the perpetually sweaty brow and the buzz cut looks like a future repeat sex offender – for somehow erroneously suggesting, after a year of coverage of the very case, that John Moghtader was involved in the Zakharia-inititated throwdown of November 2008. Good thing you don’t need a good memory or scruples to go into journalism.)

For What It's Worth

The conditions conspired on behalf of my ignorance. Last night, as another small riot paraded through Telegraph, I was a mere four blocks away, yet nestled in a small, crowded room in a friend’s apartment, playing boisterous poker. This morning, though Telegraph looked like a mess, it didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary – especially given the winds foretelling the storm that would shortly rage, which by noon were already strong enough that they were hurling trash cans across the Bancroft sidewalks. All things considered, then, there was no reason for me to expect that another parade of self-righteous Berkeleyites had trashed Southside yesterday, even though I’d effectively been there during and after; it was left to Facebook to raise my ire.

To summarize, courtesy (shudder) of the Daily Cal: “A crowd of more than 200 people swarmed the streets of Southside early Friday morning in a riot involving six law enforcement agencies, runaway dumpsters, flaming trash cans, shattered windows and violent clashes between rioters and police.” The aftermath added up to only two arrests: Marika Goodrich, a 28-year-old senior, charged with assault on a police officer, inciting a riot and resisting arrest ($32,500 bail), and 26-year-old Berkeley alumnus Zachary Miller, charged with inciting a riot, resisting arrest and obstructing a police officer ($22,500).

The disorder began with an occupation of Durant Hall, once the home of the East Asian Library and soon to become office space for L&S. To get in, the “occupiers” broke a few locks; once inside, they broke some windows, applied some graffiti, and scattered some construction equipment. They chose Durant Hall with the idea that they would “reclaim it for students”. A brief pause here. It’s presumably safe to say that none of these people had ever set foot in the East Asian Library – even in its expansive new location, much less its cramped old ones in Durant Hall – because if any of them had ever done so, they wouldn’t have been laboring under the false impression that it had been anything to “reclaim for students.” In fact, it was a squat, poorly ventilated, ugly edifice with inadequate access to bathrooms; further, as a library, it had never exactly been the hangout spot they’re making it out to be. Another sad consideration in that the best these political heroes could do was a fenced-off, hollowed-out building whose year-long construction was bemoaned by anyone at Berkeley only because it meant you could no longer cut through the low road past Dwinelle on your way to the west side of campus. But I digress.

From there, our fearless leaders moved to the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph, where one of their number – presumably in a desperate act of compensation for a laughably small set of genitals – broke windows at Subway around 1:40 AM. The mob settled at Durant and Telegraph.

Police on the scene included “[o]fficers from UCPD, Oakland, BART and the California Highway Patrol, in addition to all but four Berkeley Police Department officers on duty that night.” They made a line in front of the Bank of America, and watched as the crowd, gathering momentum, pushed a dumpster into the intersection and set it on fire. The Berkeley Fire Department and Blakes employees cooperated to put the fire out.

The mob then threw glass bottles, plastic buckets, pizza and other objects at the police line, in between call-and-response exchanges of “Whose street? Our street!” Its leader, if anyone, was a shopping cart with a stereo in it, whose movements dictated the movements of the mob. In a similar display of missing touch with reality, the crowd ghost rode the whip alongside a white Dodge Charger, apparently blissfully unaware it was February, 2010. It was finally dispersed shortly after 3 AM by cop cars, after sending two dumpsters riding down Durant Ave. toward police.

Throughout, as our Mario Savio wannabes wandered, destroying private property in their wake, they offered choice epithets for the cops on the scene: “assholes,” “fucking pigs,” and other clichés of middle-class suburban unrest. To offer an idiom that would sail tellingly far over the heads of these troglodytes, sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black.

All signs indicate that this petulant display of destruction will serve primarily as a warm-up for next week, when more large-scale rallies are expected in protest of the fee hikes. For now, the justifications will, of course, be the same as before. The responsible parties will offer either that desperate times call for desperate measures, or simply that there was nothing wrong with what they did, at all. This is all one can really expect from this crowd, the fists and testicles of the proverbial body responsible for Berkeley’s response to these fee hikes. The time has come to take the blame to the source: the brain.

In class this week, one of my wishy-washier professors (not herself a bad person, it should be emphasized) likened the wave of Berkeley protests to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. It’s people like this that claim that these repeated instances of violence in response to the fee hikes are examples of a legitimate form of protest taken to an extreme by radicals. Yet really, it is they – and their ridiculously lofty rhetoric – that enable this sort of behavior.

This crusade is nothing like the Civil Rights movement. That was a group of minorities seeking the legal rights to which they were justly entitled by the Constitution: not a “just” cause, but a right cause, one to which there was no justifiable alternative, legally or morally, to taking direct action. This is a group of entitled post-adolescents (and others who should be way too old to qualify for this category, but aren’t) protesting fee hikes at a school whose tuition – even after the hikes – is still an unqualified bargain relative to other schools of its caliber. Now, this isn’t to say that the University doesn’t need to take drastic steps to remodel its finances. (And let the record show that I regularly feel guilty forcing my parents to endure a semester of yet higher tuition fees this Spring.) However, the simple truth of the matter is that the Chancellor’s reluctance to dig into his slush fund to keep fees low is not the reason fees are being raised. It’s because UC Berkeley is morbidly obese.

The mazes of paperwork and bureaucracy that Berkeley runs on puts Office Space’s Initech to shame. It has positions like a “Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion.” It has a student senate that absorbs funding like a sponge, one which has an External Affairs VP and feels compelled to offer statements of solidarity with the victims of the Darfur Genocide. Most of those who make arguments like that detailed two paragraphs back retort that a progressive university needs institutions like these to keep it running. They could be right (they aren’t, but that’s a different story), but Berkeley isn’t a “progressive” university – it’s a public university. In a state like California, this necessarily means limited funds to run an enormous school. Period.

By raising the conflict over the fee hikes to something more noble than it actually is, the “brain” of the movement has made no progress, and actually, moved backwards. Certainly, there’s been no movement towards lowering fees; the only thing that it’s clearly accomplished has been enabling the imbeciles of the movement to indulge their destructive impulses. If Berkeley’s populist intelligentsia truly wants to lead the rest of the state forwards towards an ideal California, they need to begin by holding themselves accountable for the angry sheep their follow them blindly, instead of merely apologizing for them. Until then, I think the ASUC should divert some of its slush fund to helping the proprietors of Subway fix their windows, and I hope we see many more than two people rightfully arrested next week if any more property is destroyed. Otherwise, I’ll have to start calling for a lobotomy.

There's a Riot Goin' On

It takes something thoroughly messed up to get me to side with UC Administration. I see the it as the embodiment of everything wrong with modern infrastructure: horrific incompetence, systemic laziness, self-serving cold-heartedness, and miles – literally, miles – of red tape. Yet on Friday afternoon, another cavalcade of self-righteous, empty-headed Berkeley shitheads managed to not only leave me siding wholeheartedly with the beast itself, but disgusted enough to disrupt my work during finals season, something that no one deserves, but especially students at a school as soul-crushing as Cal.

On Friday night, at around 11:15pm, a group of protesters as big as 75 strong – some of them bearing torches – gathered around Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s home. The slogan of the evening was “No justice, no peace,” and they fully intended to stick to their word. Things quickly descended to breaking planters, lights, and windows. It got worse: the torch-bearers actually threw their lit torches at the house and the cops.

Eight people were arrested, six of them non-students. It was about 67 people too few.

The most pressing concern, obviously, is that these assholes could actually have hurt someone, particularly with the torches. To put in writing what shouldn’t need to be said to anyone, ATTACKING SOMEONE BECAUSE THE UNIVERSITY IS RAISING FEES AND SLASHING BUDGETS IS BOTH UNCONSCIONABLE AND ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. But consider everything else wrong with this picture:

(I) These attacks were perpetrated against Bob Birgeneau. He could very well serve as a dictionary picture alongside the definition of “figurehead,” but even were he to occupy a more meaningful position, he still would by no means control the actions of UC Berkeley, much less the University of California as a whole.

(II) Creating a need for repairs at University House – which is, as the name suggests, university property – is counterproductive when one of the things you’re protesting is an unjust allocation of reduced funding.

(III) Even with their heads so neatly tucked up their asses, these idiots should have realized that the civil protests of the 1960s that they were so desperately hoping to emulate took place at least half a century after such affairs no longer had to be torch-lit.

(IV) And why exactly was this issue stirring enough to six non-students that they not only attended, but caused sufficiently disturbance to be picked out of the mob and arrested?

On that last note, here are the most noteworthy charges against Zachary Bowin and Angela Miller, the two Cal students arrested: rioting, attempted burglary, attempted arson of an occupied building, vandalism, and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Even accepting the idea that local wackos are liable to engage in this sort of behavior, shouldn’t two kids paying to go to school know better? What the hell is this school teaching kids, anyway?

10:1 odds they were Peace and Conflict Studies majors – just guessing.

Tedford's Last Stand

I make no secret about the fact that the football team was a major factor in my decision to enroll at Cal; given my love of the sport and the school’s reputation as one of the better football schools on the West Coast, and overlooking dismissals along the lines of “It’s only a game,” it was a logical move. Yet as so often happens, the disconnect between the ideal and reality has proven vast. Despite being denied student section tickets each of my first two years at Berkeley, I’ve attended every football game (except those that conflicted with family or religious commitments), and mustered far more school spirit than would be suggested by my extreme enmity towards Berkeley as a university and a city. Suffice it to say by the inclusion of a football entry in this blog, my efforts have not been rewarded.

Since 2006, I’ve seen meltdowns and collapses by teams good and bad; heard 70,000 screaming people fall silent in an instant; sat through a downpour that left me returning home in clothes that weighed 15 pounds and shivering through a hot shower; and heard no fewer than 15 sorority girls discussing at full volume who they’d had sex with since the semester began. I’ve watched the uninspiring efforts of players less athletic than me, coaching decisions that showed less foresight than Custer’s declaration of victory at Little Bighorn, and execution far more brutal than that of Louis XVI. Yet the last 2 games have been the worst of my tenure here – indeed, of the Tedford Era – and have thrown the team’s inadequacies into the spotlight beyond the point of return. In Cal’s two losses to Oregon and USC, the team was outscored 72-6; they went 108 minutes and 12 seconds between their two made field goals. The coaching, incredibly, managed consistently to overshadow the team’s atrocious play, as evidenced by the almost comical number of times the team resorted to running its offense in the gimmicky “wildcat” formation – which, as former NFL coach Brian Billick was heard to say in an NFL game two weeks ago, “never works.”

Like the school’s problems in other departments (discussed in the backlog of posts here), the football woes would seem to be inescapable. There are two contributing factors. First, the self-perpetuating “black hole of talent” seen in today’s college football means that underperforming schools recruit inferior talent – and are thus, usually, forever robbed of the chance to escape mediocrity. More damningly, though, just as UC administration is unwilling to “trim the fat” in response to the current financial abyss, so too is the management of the football team unwilling to recognize that the coaching of this team does not work. History has already shown that head coach Jeff Tedford did a miraculous job of turning an abysmal program into a distinctly above-average one, but also that his self-destructively conservative play-calling and inability to instill a disciplined, winning attitude in his squads make him unable to transform Cal football into a good program, much less an elite one. Yet he will stay in place as long as the University’s systemic complacency remains intact, as, for the most part, will his squad of assistant coaches and coordinators.

Today’s contest was the Joe Roth Memorial Game – the annual home game against USC or UCLA designated to honor the only man whose jersey has been retired by the University, and whose outstanding career and life were cut short by melanoma at the age of 21. Though the team’s disgraceful performance was more than enough to render this a woefully unbefitting tribute to one of the greatest players in school history, even worse was the fact that the sole reference to the night’s being dedicated to Roth was an advertisement for the sale of a memorial T-shirt during a media timeout. It’s abundantly clear that despite whatever our fish-out-of-water Canadian Chancellor Robert Birgeneau tries to suggest at games, the football team is nothing more than a cashcow for Berkeley, and one which will, on the strength of the unflinching loyalty of fans like me, remain profitable no matter how badly the program is allowed to stagnate. It’s an unpleasant discovery to make and one that provides a dreary outlook for the decade to come: records wavering between 7-5 and 8-4, and boring, inappropriately close victories in the Sun, Emerald, and Vegas Bowls.

I maintain that choosing a football team is a perfectly legitimate reason to select a university for those so inclined, and believe I always will. I’m also certain now that anyone doing so should save themselves the ordeal and forgo becoming a Golden Bear.

Take a Long Walkout Off a Short Pier

Moments of fiscal crisis have traditionally proven heart-wrenching, difficult landmarks of American history; images leap to mind of bankrupted investors jumping to their deaths off New York skyscrapers and of Dorthea Lange’s immortal photograph “Migrant Mother.” Evidently, under the present circumstances, UC Berkeley’s faculty and students have decided to take a decidedly less heroic stand for posterity.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the University is set to suffer widespread budget cuts, which will inevitably lead to fee hikes – potentially, massive ones. UCs are by no means alone in their plight: my father, a professor in the CSU system, is going to have to take furlough days, as will all other members of the faculty. And yet, predictably, constituent parts of the University of California are set to take it upon themselves to stand against the issue, the only way they know how: public protest.

On Thursday, September 24, UC faculty plans to walkout, in what the University calls an illegitimate strike - one not carried out according to the procedure stipulated in the existing institution-faculty agreement. The demonstrations will include any number of faculty members picketing, and many others engaging in teach-ins purportedly designed to inform students as to what the practical impact of the $813 million budget cuts will be for students. The day is, of course, supposed to be an instructional school day, but classes are likely to be almost universally cancelled, to further heighten awareness of the situation. The move has been met with widespread approval from the collective student body: websites have been set up to organize students in collaborative demonstrations with professors, and on September 13, the UC Student Association unanimously approved a resolution supporting the stoppage.

Perplexing and irritating is the following oversight: in an effort to protest what is perceived as an immoral blow to hard-working students and faculty alike, the powers that be have arranged the cancellation of one of the few remaining days of school under the “reduced” price – one whose tuition has been paid in advance and whose work will need to be made up across the board. Even worse is the disingenuousness of many of the professors, who – though understandably upset about the paycuts – are taking this opportunity to rob their students of lecture time (lest we forget: students pay to go to class, professors get paid) under the pretense of protecting the student body’s interests. Worst of all are the students themselves, who have evidently bought into the idea that by proving their willingness to pay tuition for a day of no instruction, they’ll convince the University to reconsider the fee hikes and furloughs.

This is the sort of logical travesty I’ve gotten accustomed to over my 3+ years at UC Berkeley; I guess now, at least, I can take solace in the knowledge that I was getting it on sale.

(Don't) Panic of 2009

I hail from San Francisco, and one of the main benefits I derive from summer is the chance to detach myself from the world of Berkeley – including both the psychos wandering its streets and the sadists responsible for apportioning grades. This detachment is so thorough (excepting the contact which I keep with my Berkeley friends) that, happily enough, I haven’t so much as visited this blog since I posted the last entry. Sometimes, though, Berkeley reaches me while I’m away, as it did today, with an email marked “URGENT” from Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau.

This particular communiqué addresses the continued dire financial straits in California, and the continued budget cuts to the UC system assumed to be pending. The good news it sends is that Berkeley’s $145 million deficit has, via several adjustments, been trimmed by $45 million. The bad news is that lingering $100 million deficit. Now, the Chancellor’s tone reads like one of wary optimism, based on faith that the ingenuity of the constituency of our institution will carry the day, despite any obstacles. He also assures that, regardless of what the as-yet still undetermined budget ends up saying, “We will not sacrifice Berkeley's commitment to breadth and depth of academic excellence.” Despite their comforting airs, though, his words of fortitude leave one wondering from whence the money is going to be drained; the rest of the email makes it clear that he’s not quite sure of that himself. In the public interest, I’d like to suggest some guidelines.

First: that on a probationary basis, strict limitations be placed on the ASUC Senate, as warranted by its extreme ineptitude and tendency towards financial waste last year. Any faith one has in the incoming personnel of the Senate should be overridden by these kind of lingering concerns, and besides, as I’ve spent pages arguing by this point, the Senate’s Constitution limits the institution’s power to the point that even if it was staffed by hardworking, earnest students, it wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything, anyway. In effect, it’s a waste of money no matter how much the Chancellor and his crew decide to allocate to it, and so should be the most obvious target to be trimmed.

Second: that the university should allow profitable businesses to rent out campus space and charge them accordingly. Berkeley’s antipathy towards chains is irrational. To use a pertinent example, the reason Panda Express hasn’t been allowed on campus is not because it, say, pillages the rainforest, or runs sweatshops in third-world countries, but because it’s a chain, and chains are inherently evil. A better approach is to understand that chains aren’t big principally because they’re unscrupulous, but rather, because they’re markedly better at providing their products and/or services than their competition. Allowing Panda Express (among others) on campus would provide a new, major source of revenue for the university, and give thousands of students cheap access to food they enjoy, to boot. As for the opposition, frankly, how the university parcels out its property should be for the administration, not the student body, to decide.

Third: that landscaping projects, no matter what size, should be drastically scaled back. Last year, there were an appalling number of construction sites to be found around Sproul Plaza, and presumably, many more in less visible places. None of these, so far as I or anyone I know could tell, were anything more than cosmetic modifications. Yet as anyone who’s ever had to deal with home repairs knows, even small projects inevitably prove costly – and I doubt I’m making too bold a leap in assuming that replacing Sather Gate was rather more expensive than installing new light fixtures. Granted, keeping up appearances is important in attracting new students, but if maintaining the “breadth and depth of academic excellence” really is the university’s top priority, the concrete botox needs to stop.

Finally: that the inevitable cuts should not be made “across the board.” Though this was mentioned in the email, where the Chancellor meant that larger departments would be experiencing cuts proportionate to their size, I mean that the university should make its most significant cuts in its least significant departments. Though I won’t enumerate which departments I feel are relatively unimportant, this should be perfectly clear: they should be those without notable faculty members; those with smaller numbers of students; those with smaller numbers of applicants; those not ranked as highly in the polls as so many of Berkeley’s departments are. It’s time that Berkeley acknowledged that the Cuneiform and Forestry departments simply are not as important as MCB and English are. Yes, this will mean some unfortunate losses of some fascinating subjects, but in economic downturn, the university should focus on what it does best, and save its “hobbies” for days when it has more resources to throw around.

Sadly, it’s hard to believe that Chancellor Birgeneau and the other parties responsible will consider any of the above arguments. Unnecessary expenses will continue to drain finances; the few obvious chances at supplementing income at the expense of someone other than California’s taxpayers will be rejected; unimportant departments will receive funding they simply don’t merit. I have faith in this country, and in the perpetuity of its history of economic fluctuation, so I’m sure that at some point, the UCs – including Berkeley – will once more have access to the budget they deserve. I just hope management hasn’t run the damn things into the ground by then.