Ronald Reagan, Berkeley Basher

Don't like the expensive tuition you and your parents have to pay. In a way, you have Ronald Reagan to thank for that. Before Reagan imposed tuition requirements on UC & CSU students, partially out of a desire to "punish" antiwar protesters and the Free Speech Movement, attendance at state universities was tuition-free. The Gropinator blog lets everyone know the score:

From the first day of his governorship, Reagan and higher education saw each other as the enemy. On inauguration day, Reagan's inept finance director, Gordon Smith, prematurely disclosed the governor's plan to impose a $400-a-year tuition at the university and a $200-a-year tuition at state colleges in addition to the 10 percent cuts. - Lou Cannon, Reagan, p148

Prior to this, California offered the best higher education system in the world to all qualified students. For free. Your parents didn’t have to be middle class, you just had to be smart and hardworking.

In his first run for governor, Reagan had promised a 10% across-the-board cut to all state spending, but in the end only made serious cuts to higher education. He also forced out UC President Clark Kerr, the genius architect of the system which offered UC slots to the top 10 or 12%, CSU slots to the top third of high school students, and community college to everyone, a plan that became a model for the world.

By 1963, as Kerr pointed out, California already had 36 percent of the nation's Nobel laureates in science and 20 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, and had become "bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labor." In 1964, Kerr recalled, twenty-eight of Berkeley's academic departments were rated in the top six in the nation, the first time that a UC campus topped Harvard in the American Council on Education ratings as "the best balanced distinguished university" on earth. - Schrag, Paradise Lost, p37

Kerr's master plan for education, executed under Governor Pat Brown, was no small feat for a laid-back state that grew exponentially after World War Two. But it happened. We had the best universities, and laid the foundation for much of the Silicon Valley technical innovation that currently propels the world economy.

Yet Governor Reagan managed to make higher education his only real cut. (You no doubt know that our current governor is following this ideological formula by shrinking our universities by tens of thousands of seats next year).

Another important detail is that Reagan accomplished the removal of Clark Kerr from the chancellorship by getting access to secret FBI files. According to a San Francisco Chronicle investigation of old FBI files, Reagan used FBI files to dig up "dirt" on Clark Kerr:

"Governor Reagan specifically requested any information on University President Clark Kerr, any subversive information on any of the University Regents and any information the FBI developed indicating a demonstration was to be held on the campus or at press conferences," an FBI memo said.

Some of his press conferences, the governor explained, could be "stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government."

Reagan also asked for advance information on "any demonstrations against him or the university administrations."

Reagan could also be remarkably cavalier in his disregard for whether his authoritarian responses to student protests could lead to innocent people getting killed. As a result of the National Guard deployment at People's Park in 1969, one person died, one person was blinded, and approximately 120 people were injured. Another account of the People's Park demonstrations states that the National Guard dropped CS tear gas by helicopter, which "spread into the community, to children playing in the Strawberry Canyon recreation area on campus, to patients in the Cowell Hospital, and to students in several elementary and secondary schools near the area, all of whom suffered the effects of the CS gas." In fact, when journalists asked Reagan for his feelings on student protests, he replied, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with."

Unfortunately, past and current leaders in the Berkeley College Republicans look upon this aspect of Reagan's legacy a little too favorably. When a convention of college Republicans happened in Berkeley in 2003, former Cal Patriot editor-in-chief Steve Sexton promoted the event as the biggest Republican presence on campus since 1969 when Governor Ronald Reagan dispatched the National Guard to quell demonstrations over People's Park. Either Sexton's warped sense of humor leads him to believe that teargassing hippies is a real kneeslapper or he actually thinks that a military occupation would be worthwhile to achieve political "balance" on campus.

- posted by Jon @ 11:27 PM |