To the Editor:
Regarding Monday's editorial ("The price of tuition," Nov. 30): Granted, parallels exist between the situation at Brown and the one Californian students are dealing with. That these should be understood by a comparison between what the editorial page board termed Rhode Island's "attempt to grab money from private colleges" — the bill considered taxes schools $150 per student — and the 32 percent fee increase at UC schools, $2500 more per student — well, that's questionable.
There are similarities, and the editors take notice, worth considering: "many students," here and in California, "object to reductions in staff benefits and jobs while opposing tuition hikes." According to them, "students overlook a glaring contradiction" with these objections — one cannot simultaneously save staff and lower tuition; one pays for the other. This isn't the case.
In California, as we learn from occupyca.wordpress.com, "the University of California does not use tuition money or student fees to fund research and education... they place one hundred percent of this money into an account with the Bank of New York Mellon Trust in order to protect their borrowing power in credit markets. They hold our tuition as collateral in order to finance the largest and most speculative construction projects in the state." At Brown, when we discover a $2 million dollar tuition surplus it goes neither to staff benefits/salary (in the case of our dining workers, Brown sought, and more or less failed, to cut back, thanks to worker-student organizing), nor to financial aid. It goes to fast-tracking the renovation of Faunce.
Both the UC schools and Brown are sitting on fat accumulated investments (forgive me if ours is a few billion short of the Ivy standard), which, thinking like the Once-ler, we keep biggering and biggering, because money, after all, is something that everyone needs. Of course the purpose of this money is not first to reduce tuition or provide worker's benefits, but to be invested — and in what (the occupation of Palestine? hotel chains with horrendous labor practices?) they'll never tell. What we find is the same nothing-else-matters approach to profit that brought the system to crisis in the first place: construct marketable facades and cut the substance, pitting workers against students the whole way. The one that says our economy is recovering while unemployment is rising.
Perhaps the biggest break in parallelism is the actions we take. In California, thousands of students and workers strike, occupy, barricade and blockade. At Brown we choose to complain.
Julian Park '12
Nov. 30
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