By snoadmin
Dear Gov. Schwarzenegger,
It is without hesitation that we in pursuit of higher education appropriately nickname you the Educ-Hater (both homonym and antonym for educator), because you’ve shown contempt for every individual in our public learning systems.
Consider this an indictment of your crimes against humanity in the Golden State. Wherever you’re sitting when you read these allegations, peek out of your window at the reminders of your broken promises to “Cul-ee-forn-yah.”
The student demonstrators, reaching from San Diego to Arcata and points in between, represent at least 3.2 million and counting. They also embody the sentiments of tens of millions of parents and taxpayers. These youthful dreamers now march en masse to repel your budget assignments.
You swore to lift California education into the highest echelon of national and global prominence after you launched your 2003 gubernatorial candidacy on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. What we got in return is an ongoing assault and battery on education. Obviously, governor, you gained little from your tuition-free public education at Santa Monica City College.
A recent study by the Campaign for College Opportunity projects 27,000 students – the equivalent of an entire university campus population – will not have seats on our campuses during the next 2 1/2 years, as reported in the Los Angeles Times. We will be crammed into overcrowded classrooms because teachers will be put on the street and nothing will be invested in our infrastructures.
California has built only one new public university in the same time span it opened 17 new prisons. Under your watch, prison populations have exceeded 4 percent annual growth. Is this a message that we’re better off in penitentiaries than in college, as Dolores Huerta said in her recent visit to Cal State Long Beach?
Because you reneged on the illicit Higher Education Compact of 2004 you covertly entered into with the leaders of both public university systems, not even the miniscule 2.5 percent annual growth promise will be sustainable.
Your budget threatens to cut financial aid to all needy college-bound high school graduates. The already over-burgeoning community college system will be forced to reject 50,000 students. The ones who will be hurt most are “low-income, first-generation and non-white students,” according the study.
While promising you would be a champion against poverty, you’ve launched a vicious economic offensive on public services at every level – placing minorities, the disabled, the impoverished, our children and elders in harm’s way.
How will policies of elitism and racism help the state’s economy over the next 20 years? At a time when unemployment (currently at 6.2 percent), is the highest it’s been in more than 15 years, it looks like the lower economic strata will be entrenched in poverty for decades to come.
You promised to protect the most vulnerable cubs in the “Bear State,” but now children are your most hunted and endangered species. This will result in skeletal resources for K-12 schools at the clip of hundreds of dollars per child.
What’s to be your next budget recommendation? As California milk costs at the register outpace gas prices at the pump, will you soon forbid humor in elementary school cafeterias because the state can’t afford the white-gold-through-the-nose results of childhood laughter?
Rather than being a fiscal action hero, you’ve proven to be a leviathan of moral turpitude to everybody who can’t afford a contraband Cuban cigar, drive a Humvee or zip back and forth to work in a private jet. Your overt hedonism can hardly be viewed as effective leadership during hard times.
The future of this state deserves more than your sunshine lollipop, rainbows everyday rhetoric. Higher education is here to challenge you by refusing to take your abuse lying in the gutter.
The 10 percent across the board budget cuts should be prosecuted as hate, er, “Educ-Hater” crimes.
We demand you use common sense to protect our most critical resource – education – or we will take you to the mat and kick your butt.
Sincerely,
Your student constituency
