Within the next few years, Cal State Long Beach (and the rest of the CSU system) will probably have to print diplomas on recycled toilet paper, and they most likely aren’t going to be worth wasting the scarce water it takes to flush them.
CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, and his UC co-conspirator President Robert Dynes, essentially sailed our butts – and our educations – up the proverbial dung stream without a paddle a few years ago.
In a secret meeting with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004, the triad conspired to guarantee student tuition increases beyond the end of the decade through a covert agreement titled the “Higher Education Compact.”
According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, GReed, Dynes-nasty and the Educ-Hater opted to fix the state’s and university systems’ budget shortcomings on our strained backs by guaranteeing “large student fee hikes” until 2011.
The harshest aspect of their clandestine meeting was that it wasn’t open for public debate. The State Legislature wasn’t even allowed to “voyeurize” that unholy three-way.
The governor, facing a $14 billion deficit and afraid to say no to the powerful prison system, threatened the two “Avarice-Meisters” with budget slashes for the third year in a row.
They responded by crawling into his office on gold-plated kneepads. We’ll call this one “Cigar Incident – the sequel.”
Now the systems are crying broke and have a $1 billion wish list to “match their level of quality in 2001, the last time the universities were in relatively good fiscal health.”
What more justifies the enormous pay raises Reed and his thugs just offered themselves than an executive decision to screw their students in the frayed hole next to their empty wallets?
Now that’s old school politics, girls and boys. Can everybody say “Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall?”
CSU presidents tout that the stained degrees they pass out are the best educational bargain in the land.
Certainly, CSULB tuition is among the lowest in the U.S. by national comparison, but that valuation doesn’t calculate factors like California’s high cost of living into the equation.
Part of the sweetheart deal “calls for modest annual increases in state funds [and] private fundraising to help pay for basic programs.”
The long-ago deal with taxpayers was to keep higher-education costs low so more minorities had access. The low-cost strategy of inclusion has been working, too.
According to Reed’s comments in the Times, 54 percent of CSU students are nonwhite. But that trend will reverse when tuition prices start ripping through the ceiling.
Because taxpayers are liable to refuse to infuse more cash into the university systems, it’s easy to see how candy drives, car washes and frequent visits to the blood bank are going to be the only way to sustain a semblance of quality education.
Not all is lost on the economic horizon, though. Loan sharks will surely smell the blood about to ooze from our veins and will soon be circling the campus looking for autographs.
Reed is skipping town (or at least the CSU) in June. It’s too bad he won’t be fixing the state prison’s economical problems, from the inside, like the more respectable trustees in that system.
Don’t count on your single-ply diplomas for absorbency, co-eds. They probably won’t be worth wiping with in a few years.
By the time we pay off the loan companies, we could be wearing something more technologically advanced, so why worry about it now?
