Solution for the budget problem?
Apparently 1000 faculty signed a petition saying, “that workers earning under $40,000 a year be exempted from mandatory furloughs and pay cuts that began this month for most of the system’s staff and faculty.”
Well, that sounds like a good idea. And in fact, we can make that program, demand, plan, or whatever you call it, pay for itself, by increasing the furloughs for these 1000 faculty! After all, the faculty should take their fair share of the cut, and as a more highly-paid individual, they should share a larger percentage (percentage of their usual earnings) of the burden!
If you don’t see the absurdity of this proposal (or the even more absurd proposal that the university increase spending in any area without corresponding cuts elsewhere, especially when there is no profit margin to serve as a buffer), then we are not going to see eye to eye. If you don’t see the hypocrisy of faculty protesting these cuts without making personal contributions (hey, how about some donation to the university?) to make the cuts unnecessary, I am not sure if I want to talk to you even. This is the same hypocrisy you see in some white proponents of affirmative action who would not resign from their positions of power so that a black person or another minority can take their position instead.
I frankly didn’t see the crowd firsthand. I came to work at 8 a.m., crossed the picket line as I wanted to, and did my job. The picture makes it look like a sizable crowd in the Sproul Plaza, but then, UC Berkeley does have 30,000 students and all they had to do was walk 5, 10 minutes to get to the rally location, so excuse me for doubting the enthusiasm of the crowd there.
P.S. BTW, who ever chose red the color to show support for this rally? Red? Really? Couldn’t you have chosen something else? Like blue and gold, maybe? I’m not the one to get hung up on vain symbolism, but why did they have to choose the color of communism to identify the rally with? And why did any American student choose to wear it?