Links for January 26, 2012

A letter from Justice Cruz Reynoso indicates that the UC Davis Police Force is not cooperating with his investigation as they promised.

David Wittman has a recent post on how he got involved in Davis protests.  It is part of a new blog on how Faculty can support Students.  Check it out.

Victory at Kroeber Library.

CSU Trustees agree to limit pay increases for CSU Presidents. 


The PPIC is out with their latest polling on Californian's and their Government.  A lot of mixed messages: good for K-12, less for Higher Ed and social services;  Good for increasing the progressivity of taxes.  But still a lot of confusion.

The Nation has an analysis of Obama's Education Rhetoric.  They were no more impressed than I was.

Faculty at University of Oregon begin drive for Unionization.

Stanford rethinks their undergraduate education.

I think this is what they really mean when they talk about creative destruction.

Thanks to Cameron's austerity policies England now is in worse shape than at the equivalent point of the Great Depression.

A Letter from the London Review of Books points out:

Universities under Attack

‘If we can’t speak the language of our enemies, not only will they not listen to us,’ Michael Wood writes, ‘but they can’t’ (LRB, 15 December 2011). He is far too defeatist. Under New Labour, the arts were told that statements about value, quality and excellence were irrelevant and self-serving, and would be rejected out of hand by the Treasury. Unless the arts could demonstrate, numerically, their instrumental utility to society, the economy, the environment and social development, they would never get a decent hearing in Whitehall. For a decade, arts leaders demonstrated that they could run their organisations in ‘business-like ways’ – which is totally different from running them ‘like businesses’. The sector poured out instrumental indicators by the ton. But the arts never gave up their own language for describing the real nature of their activity.

The essential question for higher education is not ‘will they listen?’ It is ‘will we speak out?’

John Tusa
London N1