Serious Business: A preemptive eulogy for UCB? No one’s listening.

Two days ago, my favorite source of sudoku puzzles ran an article where Birgeneau responded to the allegedly “widely-circulated blog post on the Atlantic Magazine Web site.” Man, I can’t believe I missed seeing that! Maybe I should check out the Atlantic site more often, or maybe read the Daily Cal Blog regularly for Berkeley-related internet news.

Dickish sarcasm aside, I’m sure I would have caught this blog post if I bothered to check Twitter, ever.

Here’s the blog post in question. Here is an excerpt:

The damage to the university is likely to be irreversible. It will be less able to compete with other institutions in the hiring of distinguished faculty. Funding for complex research will be less accessible. Tuition fees will inevitably rise, as they’ve already risen, putting the place out of reach for the underprivileged. Staff will be let go. Programs will be zeroed out. No doubt Berkeley will remain an estimable institution, and a significant player in the intellectual and economic life of the state. But its days as one of the very greatest universities in the country are clearly numbered.

Birgeneau’s solution? More private funding!

Daily Cal commenters band together to make me agree with them, and therefore feel bad about myself:

As long as the Top Cop at Cal hauls in a cool $200k per year *I* will not give one blue dime to this school.

This is the wrong path to go down. A lot of our brightest students (those in the middle to upper middle income range) turn down top privates in order to go here because they can save tens of thousands of dollars a year. Once that incentive is gone, you may well see a brain drain on our university. Who wants to go to a school that can’t retain top profs and offers few student services? If Birgenau actually wants to make this work he needs to increase Berkeley’s appeal FIRST. If you’re going to ask for market value, you need to make sure that market value is high and increasing not plummeting as it currently is.

My advice to students: graduate quickly because soon the diploma will be about as meaningful as one from CSU.

But then again, the Daily Cal comments section is still the Daily Cal comments section:

I would also like to point out, if it were not for those hippies, the draft would still be around and you would probably be overseas being shot at.

Moreso than the budget crisis, etcetera, etcetera, the Daily Cal comments section gives me anxiety about getting a degree from Berkeley, out of all institutions.

On the other hand, I shouldn’t worry too much about it. It’s a small minority of the campus that bothers to comment on dailycal.org. (Sometimes I like to imagine what their lives are like. *thoughtful silence*)

In reality, no one else is listening. This is because students are stupid and pretty much useless. Good riddance, I say.

*takes a dump on a student’s chest; increases pay for UC execs*

Serious Business: “Bleaching” the UC; or, Fuck those Whiteys

I know our readership prefers videos of farts and poops to “sober, thoughtful commentary”, but unfortunately I only have so many farts and poops to offer you.

I’ve been fairly out of the Berkeley news loop, given that I’ve been spending about 60% of the last two weeks not in Berkeley. Also someone other than Andrew Sullivan is blogging over at the Daily Dish for the time being and that’s enough anti-incentive to keep me away from blogosphere. So to speak.

The last sober, thoughtful commentative post was put up about four days too late, and now that I’ve spend the last hour or so reading up on the recent queef in the face that the UC administration has offered up to the student body, my blogging Tourette’s forces me to comment on this particular op ed.

The writers (Christine Hong, Catherine Lee, and Andrew Leong; incidentally, it’s also illustrated by Alan Chen) complain that the administration has been brutally dismissive of the impact of new admissions policy as well as the UC Berkeley cuts on the Asian (and APA) population.

Although intended to promote greater African American, Chicano/Latino and Native American admissions, the new policy, as the UC’s own commissioned study and data indicate, will have negligible impact on the designated target populations while decreasing Asian and APA admissions rates by 10-20 percent. At the same time, white admissions are projected to increase by 20 percent or more. Far from diversifying the UC student body, this misguided policy will result in the latter’s dramatic bleaching. As Professor Emeritus of ethnic studies Ling-Chi Wang, notes, the new admissions policy is essentially “affirmative action for whites … extremely unfair to Asian-Americans on the one hand and underrepresented minorities on the other.”

Oh wait, just in case you didn’t catch it the first time:

…white admissions are projected to increase by 20 percent or more.

What? I didn’t quite hear you.

…white admissions are projected to increase by 20 percent or more.

IRL News 7/20/09: No more 24 Hour Library Hours during Finals Week

Upon remembering, for the first time in a month, that we have a Twitter, I dutifully logged in. I momentarily considered writing an update, but then this comment came to mind:

Don’t use the twitter account, for God’s sake. Take the names, but don’t use them. Even Kanye won’t use Twitter. Do you really want something called a “microblog”? Jesus Christ. Next you’ll be having guest posts by Cory Doctorow.

by Don’t talk to me May 16, 2009 at 12:13 pm

So I thought better of it, and instead went and checked out the twitters we follow*. (*meaning, I suddenly realized there are a bunch of Berkeley twitters that we ought to follow). As it turns out, there’s a great little news item that got buried on the Daily Cal website. Fortunately, whoever maintains their Twitter has their priorities straight:

Chancellor Birgeneau at Regents meeting Wednesday: No more 24 hour library days during finals: http://tr.im/sHOk
4:42 PM Jul 16th from web

Apparently no one’s realized this yet, as none of my Asian girl friends have updated their Facebooks with angry, borderline suicidal statuses, but never fear, asucpres to the rescue!

@dailycal in light of this really bad news the ASUC’s library on the top floor of Eshleman Hall WILL stay open 24-hours during finals
5:55 PM Jul 16th from web in reply to dailycal

Well, that’s a relief. I’ll be sure to get there first thing in the morning, so I can steal one of the coveted spots both near an outlet and away from the incessant buzzing of the vending machines.

This post might be full of bitter snark (I am pretty grumpy in the morning; plus it is like 90 degrees out), but I do think this is a disaster. I might be lucky enough to have my own room in a fairly quiet apartment (other than the guy who lives beneath me who occasionally plays techno at full blast at 5 in the morning), but I can’t help but feel like I should have just gone to a fucking private school.

In other news, Twitter is still pretty stupid.