Against the Mind-forg'd manacles

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 
---William Blake


Following their very successful demonstration of November 10, where somewhere around 50,000 made their way to London to protest the proposed elimination of governmental support for university teaching and the reduction of the students to debtors, UK students and faculty will take once more to the streets in London on the 24th of November.  Despite the size of the protest, the Coalition government has insisted that they will not retreat in their commitment to oversee the long-term elimination of university arts and humanities while reducing higher education to an appendage of business and the immediate labor market.

Strikingly, the English students, teachers, and allies are protesting against an arrangement that has long been the fundamental reality for US higher education--increasing student debt, declining government supports for higher education, the transformation of students into consumers, the redefinition of education as a commodity purchased on the market as a private good rather than a public trust promoted as a common good.  Equally striking are the protesters' attempts to make common cause between the transformation of higher education financing and the larger Conservative and Liberal Democratic effort to reduce security for the poor and the elderly.  As in the United States, the government seems determined to produce a general state of social insecurity.  A petition in solidarity with the protesters can be found here.

Closer to home, of course, the Regents last week decided once again to raise tuition on students.  We will have more analysis on that in the near future.  But for now I wanted to highlight two separate--although interrelated--points.  The first is that the increase in fees comes right on the heels of renewed efforts by the Obama-Bowles-Simpson deficit commission to justify cuts in social security and the reduction of aid to the working and middle-classes while promoting tax breaks for corporations.  As with the Regents, those in power are making "hard choices"--although for some reason they seem to be "hard" only in their effects on the less fortunate.

The second point worth noting is that in the aftermath of the Regents decision and the questions raised about police conduct at the Regents meeting, campus police at both Berkeley and UCI apparently have attempted to close off free speech and protest opportunities.  At Berkeley, for example, police have been reported as having torn down posters protesting police action and threatening to cite students and others for distributing the flyers.  Bronwen provided links to some of these incidents in her comments on Pop The Mace.  You can find additional information here and here. The latter also gives a photo of the poster in question.  Please check out the links and see for yourself.