Where Are the Protesters at UC-Irvine?

Mark LeVine is a Middle East history professor at UC Irvine (where I am a part-time teacher). He has written an op-ed in this week's New University (campus paper). It this op-ed, LeVine laments the lack of action on the part of the UCI students in the face of tuition hikes. He unfavorably contrasts UCI's students with those at UC Berkeley, who rioted last year in response.

http://www.newuniversity.org/2011/10/opinion/this-is-how-a-great-university-dies/

"And sure enough, it turned out that a few hundred students were protesting at that very moment. But up at Berkeley. At Irvine, and the other campuses, nothing. Not a single booth in my tour of Ring Road or a single protester addressing the slow destruction of the world’s greatest public university.

How can that be?"

Below is how Berkeley students reacted to the tuition hikes.




Now that is destruction!

Is that how UCI students should react?

To me, the answer to Mark's question is clear. One walk around the UCI campus would tell you that our students don't have time to act like spoiled children and delinquents. They are here because they belong here. Oh, we have a few misfits and malcontents, but the percentage is infinitesimal. At Berkeley (aka Beserkely) it is a different story.

"In 1989, when I was a student at Hunter College in New York City, then Governor Mario Cuomo proposed budget cuts along with a relatively small tuition increase of our tuition to handle an $18 million dollar deficit. The response of students? To take over an administration building, boycott classes and demonstrate outside the governor’s office at the World Trade Center. We even blocked traffic outside the Lexington Avenue, Manhattan campus during rush hour, and at least 100 students locked and occupied a huge swath of one of the main buildings."

Are you proud of that, Mark? Were I the president of Hunter College, you would have been arrested and expelled.

"Soon after that we marched downtown, almost 10,000 strong, and generally made such a mess of things that Governor Cuomo vetoed his own proposal for tuition increases, at least for that year."

You can march all you want. As soon as you start making "a mess of things", as the hooligans on Wall Street did on the Brooklyn Bridge last week, you get arrested.

"I asked a few of the ubiquitous Christian groups what they were going to do..."

Ubiquitous. Is there a statement there, Mark?

"It is clear that the UCOP and Regents are prepared to let the UC as a public institution die in all but name."

I agree, but for entirely different reasons.

.....(look at what happened to the Irvine 11, for doing something that wouldn’t have even gotten them ejected back at Hunter College)?

Ah yes. The obligatory tribute to the "Irvine 11", those "martyrs" serving probation and community service. It is now de rigueur, you know.  Or ubiquitous, if you prefer.

C'mon Mark! Certainly, you can inspire your students to do better than break things when the cost of things goes up. I mean what if the Anthill Pub raises the cost of beer? Are they supposed to trash the place?