[Editor's note: The radical Left in America is once again mobilizing in our communities and on our campuses. Get the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and the new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left by reading the new broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.]
The latest attempt by the radical Left to capitalize on the neo-communist movement known as OWS is emanating from an old source. The “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which derives its name, inspiration, and mission from the original SDS of the ’60s, is calling for a “Day of Action” scheduled for March 1st. The rhetoric is tiresomely familiar. “We believe that education is a right, not an economic privilege for the advantaged,” says their website. ”We demand and fight for a university that is for everyone! … We want student, worker and faculty control over our universities; we should be in control of our own futures and lives.”
Hoping to channel the mob-rage made so fashionable by the broader Occupy movement, it is no surprise who these students blame for their woes. “We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization. They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.”
But don’t count on the campus Left acknowledging government culpability in the crisis it bemoans. It was government, after all, that threatened banks with fines and other restrictions if they refused to lower their lending standards to accommodate mortgage applicants who had no business owning a home. Likewise, government has also facilitated the enormous increases in college tuition. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education discovered college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income rose 147 percent. Why? Because taxpayers are guaranteeing student loans (to the tune of $1 trillion currently)–all of which were taken over by the government in 2010 as part of Obamacare. Thus, colleges have no incentive whatsoever to lower their costs.
Furthermore, one of the critical funding sources for colleges is endowment funds. Even in the down economy of 2009, such funding totaled more than $300 billion. Who endows universities? Those with enough wealth to give large sums of money away, aka the very “1 percent” those currently attending college love to vilify.
Ironically, the same SDS that calls for “chops from the top,” meaning to overpaid administrators, is the one that is calling for even more of the cost-increasing academic inanity we’ve seen rising for decades: “Ethnic, Women’s, Queer, and African/a studies departments,” along with “reparations [i.e., affirmative action] for bias in admissions owing to [longstanding] systems of oppression.” What they don’t know is that they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. “For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.
What kind of administrators? Those who facilitate the SDS wish list. Here’s a partial roster of administrators at UC Berkeley: Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion; Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; Academic Enrichment Coordinator; Diversity Program Coordinator; Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; and Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations.
