College Republicans in California are in a unique position to deliver a meaningful blow to special interests and hypocrites everywhere by praising Governor Schwarzenegger for his fiscal responsibility, even though his intended actions come at our own personal cost. The governor’s proposed budget for 2008-2009 includes an across-the-board 10% cut in spending. This would naturally include a roughly $1 billion cut to higher education.

Students who marched on Sacramento yesterday demanded that higher education be given special treatment over all other state expenditures. I would like to ask protesting students from where they think the extra funds should be extracted. Should the money come from a reduction in the quality or number of teachers for primary education? Perhaps we could stop paying our social workers, or rescind programs aimed at protecting the environment. The causes behind these expenditures have their own special interest groups that will be feeling just as disenfranchised as students once the cuts take effect. To serve all of the special interests would require spending money that simply does not exist unless we want to leave massive debt for future generations of Californians.

As a college student, I regret the real effects that budget-cuts to this University will have on me and my peers. Still, I recognize that subsidized education is a privilege and not a right; it is only available to me at the cost of others. I urge all campus Republicans, along with any other champions of reason, to remind other students that these cuts are the result of fiscal responsibility, not a de-emphasis of the importance of higher education.

For those of you far away from Berkeley who have not heard, this week is spring break. I have been enjoying the land of Orange County.

In case you missed any news this weekend:

Over 400 motorcyclists drove into Berkeley to support the military and the Marine recruiting center. Insidebayarea.com has the story.

Also, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about College Republican support for McCain. The story quotes the Patriot’s own Rohit Joy.

Since school is on break and I am away from Berkeley, my material for posts has dwindled. To give you some entertainment, I am going to post some items that I thought were interesting but for one reason or another never made it to this blog.

On Monday classes and the utter madness of the ASUC elections will start.

I was just at a rally on Sproul to eliminate the SAT. The rally claimed the SAT was biased and a tool of discrimination to keep low income people and minorities out of college. Organized by BAMN, By Any Means Necessary, it was a standard rally of theirs. All of the usual BAMN suspects were there, like Ronald Cruz who has been around as long as anyone can remember and Yvette Felarca, who graduated two years ago after a ridiculously long time here.

In the words of Ronald Cruz, standardized tests are “degrading and anti-human.” He said they do not measure his leadership, his Filipino heritage, or the struggles he faces as a gay man. What Cruz should know is the SAT does not measure those things for anyone who takes it. No one is awarded an advantage or disadvantage for those factors only how well they can do on the test.

There are two things that mystify me. If BAMN really wants high school students to do well and get into college, why do they hold rallies on a college campus in the middle of the day and encourage high school students to come? Going to a rally in the middle of a school day will not help any student learn any of the subjects necessary to do well in school.

Secondly, why were they chanting in Spanish? With the exception of language classes, all classes at this University are in English. If they want students to get into college and be successful they should be encouraging and using the English language. Yelling “Yes we can” in Spanish is pointless.

BAMN does not have a history of doing what is helpful to anyone but itself. If anyone wants an example of how far BAMN has gone to get what they want, check out what happened three years ago when they took the ASUC to court.

Check out Time’s cover. It has Berkeley students.

In the back on the left is the Patriot’s own editor in chief Alisa Farenzena. In the middle row on the right is consistent Patriot writer and Berkeley College Republican Executive Director Alex Marlow. Even BCR’s External Vice-President Kyle Tibbits made it into the back row. And let’s not forget ASUC External Affairs VP Danny Montes in the back right.

The article talks about the importance of the youth vote. However, the Berkeley students on the cover don’t get any mention in the text of the article, only a couple of lines in the caption of pictures of them hanging out around campus. The picture of Alex does a great job of capturing the dark weather we have had for the last two weeks in Berkeley.

I’m not going to steal Chris’s thunder about the Time magazine cover, but I wanted to mention something in the same vein. The SF Chronicle did an audio slide show of the Berkeley College Republicans and some of their campaign work, featuring some of our compatriots and fellow campus conservatives.
View it here, showcasing our friends Kyle and Ross, who speak very well on behalf of our organizations. Go take a listen! I’m also in there photographically, but the pictures are hardly flattering.

Stay tuned for Super Tuesday updates. Unfortunately I still vote in a state that has a Feb 19th primary, so I won’t have much to add, but Chris and others should have plenty to say about the vote today.

Last night was the affirmative action debate. BAMN, By any means necessary, brought their national spokesperson Shanta Driver while the Berkeley College Republicans brought Star Parker.

I think almost everyone walked into the room with a solid position on affirmative action. Most people went to cheer on their own side. During the evening, the talk moved away from the policy of affirmative action and its merits.

When Ms. Parker said, capitalism leads to wealth and redistribution leads to poverty, Ms. Driver laughed. Then I remembered the connections between BAMN and the communist group the Revolutionary Workers’ League. Check out this and its many links.

Ms. Driver put words into Ms. Parker’s mouth, claiming she thought black people were biologically inferior. Ms. Parker was called a “self-hating minority,” which later prompted a question from the audience (toward Ms. Driver) “How can I be a self-loving minority?”

During the question period, BAMN’s hearings on hostile climate toward minority students were brought up as evidence that racism still exists in a large way on the Berkeley campus. To me this was laughable. I went to one of their hearings on hostile climate. Two people I knew gave testimony about the discrimination they received. They were called “the puppet of the white man” and an “Aunt Jemima.” However, BAMN turned their cameras off, struck their testimony from the record, and laughed at them when they learned they were politically conservative.

Some of the people for affirmative action are willing to use children to advance their cause. During the question and answer period, a little kid got up to ask a question. The question he asked was not one he came up with himself, it had been written down for him to ask. The kid even had to ask the person next to him what one of the words was.

Does anyone have a favorite quote or point to share?

By now most of you have seen the chalk and flyers around campus advertising tonights debate. It’s hosted by BCR and BAMN, who have brought respectively Starr Parker and Shanta Driver. (Ms Driver debated Mason Weaver at the last such event.)

The event is happening at 6pm in 155 Dwinelle.

I’ll open it up to commentary on this/past/future debates on this topic. Is affirmative action right/necessary/ethical etc? Why is diversity important? IS this issue systemic, and why should we care about it? Go for it.

The Los Angeles Times covers a program where some University of California campuses receive money for referring students to an online college. According to the LA Times, Capella University operating out of Minneapolis has paid $12,000 to UC Irvine for the students it has received from there. This program is being ended for “appearance of an ethical breach.”

UC Berkeley has a similar agreement, but has not profited from it:

Three of the eight University of California campuses that have extension programs — UCI, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley — have credit-transfer agreements with Capella, said Chris Harrington, a spokesman for the UC president’s office. Santa Cruz does receive payments. Berkeley, which set up an arrangement similar to UCI’s in 2004, has not received any per-student fees because no one taking a class eligible for referral has transferred.

Berkeley also is ending the program because of the public perception of ethical problems, said Ann Guy, spokeswoman for the university’s extension program.

Shameless plug for Education Debate
If you like talking about education, the Cal Dems and BCR are having a debate on Thursday at 7 PM in 145 Dwinelle. The topic will be K-12 education in California and moderated by the Informal Debate Society.

This article on race, 209, and UC admissions by Ward Connerly doesn’t really have anything we haven’t seen before. Essentially a piece on how officials (of UCLA specifically) are narrowly skirting breaking the law and vaguely praising those who do in the name of diversity, it contained a phrase I found particularly sound.

The irony is that in a formally “colorblind” admissions structure - no race “boxes” on the application, no encouragement to applicants to convey their racial background in essays, no intent on the part of admissions officers to find proxies for race - U.C.L.A. could admit the Francis Harris’s of our society with few complaints from hardly anyone.

While no breath-taking stretch of logic, I’m suprised this doesn’t get mentioned more. The less you focus on race, the less it becomes a divisive issue.

Yesterday UC Berkeley released a survey of its economic impact on Berkeley and the surrounding area.

From an ABC 7 KGO TV report:

The university calculates it infuses close to three-quarters of a billion dollars a year into the local economy.

$31 million is spent in Berkeley on goods and services.
$314 million in salaries are paid to Berkeley residents.
$117 million is allocated to capital projects, and $282 million in student spending.

They have a video if you want to see what Berkeley looks like on TV. There is also an interview with a Berkeley resident who said there were more important things than money, like values. Unfortunately, the report does not uncover what Berkeley values the University is corrupting.

From the Berkeley Newscenter:

As the largest employer in the city of Berkeley, as well as in the East Bay counties of Alameda and Contra Costa, the campus employs more people than the next nine largest employers in the city combined, providing jobs to 24,700 staff, including 9,700 students who work on campus.

I wish I could work out practical teleportation in one of my Physics classes. I would teleport the entire University to a different city. Then as the City of Berkeley fades into obscurity and loses the hundreds of millions of dollars dumped into its economy it can realize the error of its ways. Until that happens, I have to live here to attend the best public university in the country.

The University’s revised student group naming policy has generated some more attention. While the story was first broken by Yaman and followed up by Beetle two weeks ago, it only made it to print in the Daily Cal Monday. If you missed all those and the latest on Beetle, here is the short version.

The University will not allow any new student groups to have names that contain UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California unless it is a reference to the geographical place of Berkeley. The reasoning I gathered is the University does not want to give the impression the University is in agreement with or endorses anything such a named group says or does. Established groups with now illegal names will not be affected (yet). Considering the University was rather touchy about Calstuff and their use of Cal written in script, they have a history of being protective of what they see as their name.

This should help you register groups that do not conflict with the new rules.

I thought of an interesting turnaround. If the University does not want the public to possibly think student groups speak for the University, then the public should not be tempted to think the University administration speaks for students. If students can’t use UC Berkeley, then neither should the Chancellor when he writes an opinion piece like this.

Intelligent people understand the words of student groups only express the opinions of the student groups that said them, even if their name is Berkeley or has Cal in it. One thing is clear, the University has no claim at all on regulating the use of California or Berkeley.

Update: As as happened so many times before, if I wait long enough Beetle will have something good to say. Here he explains how to effectively fight this. Some people will not like it, as whining is not allowed.

I just heard about the scandal over at Diablo Valley College, one of the many prominent junior colleges around the Bay Area. This Contra-Costa times article which was published in May confirms that as many as 400 poor grades were changed via the records department over three years in exchange for money, sometimes up to $600, and possibly also sexual favors. Bay Area junior colleges are big sources for transfer students at Cal, it is possible that some of your classmates may have been admitted based on lies and bribery. The scholastic world is continually more cutthroat, which drives students to break some legal and moral boundaries has been seen before by The Patriot, like in a May 2006 Patriot article on prostitution.

The fault lies with the students for not taking responsibility for their failures and for cheating, and it also lies with the administration for taking bribes and permitting the rules to be broken. Any DVC alumns with comments out there?

Over on the farm they have people who are not students hanging out. On Friday The Stanford Daily reported a person claimed to be a graduate student and had used the physics lab and offices for four years. This comes right after Stanford discovered another person was posing as a student a few days earlier.

The Daily also reports there were signs that the “student” was not what she claimed to be. As reported:

But to the physics doctoral students who work in the lab, Okazaki’s lack of an affiliation with Stanford was not surprising. Dan Green, a doctoral student in theoretical particle physics, said he became suspicious that Okazaki was at the lab under false pretenses more than two years ago. He said that his relationship with Okazaki soured about a year and a half ago when she moved into a visitor’s office in the building and stayed there for more than a month.

However, the administration did not listen to students’ concerns.

“We met significant resistance from the office,” Green said. “When we tried to describe Okazaki’s behavior to them, they gave us the same stories that she had told us. The office was willing to accept every excuse she gave them.”

I can understand people not questioning a person who knows what s/he is doing. I remember hearing about someone (Steven Spielberg I believe) who just took over an unused room on a movie lot and acted like he worked there. However, he was one of the best at what he did. It is reported this person does not even know physics very well.

If I do not get into graduate school I can always go to Stanford. If someone can hide out there for four years I should be able to do at least as well with a real physics degree.

On Tuesday night there was a vigil on Sproul for those affected by the shootings at Virginia Tech. Even though I only found out about the event at the last minute, it was well attended. From what I understand, the event was planned by two students who had attended Virginia Tech or were in another way related to the school were from Virginia and close to many in the Virginia Tech community. A few people spoke, including a Cal student who was in the same high school graduating class as one of the victims.

People wrote messages of support on a banner that will be sent east at the end of the week.

The 33 people who died and their families and friends are in our prayers.