I am not ignoring what you and scootah said, but lets shave with Occam here. Large police conspiracy? Or fucksticks wanting to break windows? Again, speaking from personal experience, I know people who went to protests just to break shit. The people who actually have a message and feel strongly about what they are protesting tend to march and try to stop the fucksticks who want to "Der fuck shit up" from clouding their message, but it often does not matter. The anarchists show up and just fuck things up anyway. I have not found the testimony Scootah was talking about after searching for a little bit. You would think that searching "Black Bloc Oakland Police" would bring up tons of sites with mainstream media quoting what was allegedly said, but all I could find was a dubious blog posting that was grasping at straws identifying them as "wearing clothes that looked like they came off the corporate rack"= police. Again. Let me make this perfectly simple. I know from personal experience that people go to protests just to fuck shit up because they can get away with it. They are not some part of police conspiracy that will allow the police to beat some hippies. They are just assholes who want to get away with doing this shit. People break shit and vandalize under the cover of darkness normally, but these people co-opt a valid, (and in the US) constitutionally protected form of free speech, just so they can raise hell. It is sad that they take away from the message of the protest they hide in. But people always look to the extremes because that is what sells more newspapers/page clicks/people listening to Rush. I would like to see more attention focused on the legitimate causes that are being protested. But alas, some fuckstick wants to smash the windows of a McDonalds not because they provide high starch nutritionally bereft meals to the poor urban class, but because they have huge windows, and a trashcan nearby. If you smash shit, you don't have an issue you care about other than smashing. You are a hulk on the loose. The people who want to bring shit to attention do it fairly, and respectably. But you are right, the media only cares about hulk smashes.
And just where did I say that you always have to work with them? If we were talking about total revolution then your rousing speech about freedom and liberty would be great. I'd take no issue with it. But in this case we're talking about a bunch of students up in arms about tuition hikes. That is an issue you deal with by working alongside your government. While it may be a worthy cause, you have to watch out for what problems you can cause by protesting. Such problems include fucking with the lives of students who simply want to study, businesses and public services being disrupted, etc. etc. I get that governments often brush shit to the side and try to ignore it, hell we've all seen it, but as protesters you escalate apporpriately. To say that anyone is unworthy of freedom or liberty because they want to solve problems by negotiating with their government peacefully is ridiculous to the point of being offensive. The point is, you have to at least try to go by the book, to be the better man than your opponent. If you just flout the rules and don't give a fuck about who you hurt then you're no better than the oppression you're trying to overcome.
The main crux of our disagreement (despite how you try to input things into my original post that were not there) is the bolded section above. When it comes to protest - whether it be someone standing on a corner peacefully with a sign or something else - if you believe, as the bolded section would indicate, that 'you have to go by the book' - i.e. follow some procedures or rules laid down by the authority you are protesting - then you are not exercising a right - you're exercising a privilege. Privilege does not equal, nor has it ever equaled, freedom. Freedom means rights that are exercised at YOUR discretion, not the discretion of others. And the original post reflects that sentiment. If you think you need permission to protest, you are not free, nor if you believe that you need permission do you deserve freedom if you are unwilling to accept the responsibilities, and consequences, that may come with exercising a right without someone's ok to do so. If you want to ask for permission, go right ahead. But there is a difference between courtesy - i.e. we're having a protest, just a heads up - and asking if you can. If you can't see the difference, nothing I say will illuminate it.
But I will say this. I appreciate your posts. The more I thought about what you posted, and my responses, I started thinking about people in Syria, Libya and Egypt. That got me thinking even further. Maybe people in my situation (living in an entrenched democracy) do not truly understand freedom. Maybe I don't get it because I never had to really sacrifice for it. I don't know. I'm sure there's a pithy quote from some philosopher on the topic out there somewhere, but I'm lost in my own thoughts right now. Maybe we have it too good. And because we're used to largely being able to do what we want on a daily basis, we think less and less about things that may be encroachments on the things that, at first blush, may well be significant down the road. In short, I don't know if I actually KNOW what freedom is because I never really had to risk anything for it. Anyway, the upshot is your posts got me thinking in that direction, which is requiring me to think more about my own position on the matter. And disagreements like the one we're having is precisely why I read and post here.
We have it better than most ever will. It's for exactly that reason that we can't just shout a one-size-fits-all rhetoric about something as touchy as freedom and liberty. We have it good largely because our government is willing to help us out more often than not if we all act like adults. If they don't listen, if they won't reason, if they flat-out remove our right as citizens as has been done in Montreal, then by all means, take those fuckers down. But don't just adhere to some quote, or a zippy sounding one-liner about liberty and shit. Our issues in North America are not even in the same ballpark as the ones in numerous other countries. My apologies for the get fucked comment.
<a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc#Police_infiltration" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc ... filtration</a> I mean, I don't know what more evidence you need.
The bold part is important. You're in your rights to not go by the book, but you're also within your rights to have an ineffective protest.
I would counter with the following: Maybe the time to stand up is before the horse has left the barn, the barn burned down, the horse whipped, butchered, and eaten to make some noise about a problem. I suspect it's a lot easier to do something about change when the proposed change is small, rather than when it's monumental. And bringing it back around to the point of the thread, I offer the following - with the following caveat - I do NOT know what the exact employment/cost of tuition situation is in Canada. (And I am increasingly impressed with Canadians knowledge of the U.S. system, whereas it appears Americans (such as myself) know very little about our Northern Brothers). Anyway, maybe these students see a bad trend starting, one that started in America in 1980, and has become disastrous for U.S. students - who did very little to address the problem until the last year (and I say 'address' but really mean 'became increasingly aware of' a significant problem). In the U.S., since 1980, average tuition for a four year degree has increased over 100% (this number was adjusted for inflation - source here.) In the U.S., since 1980, average pay for a student with a bachelors degree has increased about 2.5% (this number adjusted for inflation - sources: here and also 'Winner Take All Politics' - published in 2010 - I could dig out the page number, but it cites the average college graduate made $45,000 (adjusted for current dollars) in the early to mid 1980's and $46,000 in 2008. My point is this: maybe these students know, or are worried about something that U.S. students weren't: that college educations were going to skyrocket and job pay wasn't. Which leaves a tremendous discrepancy between what our parents paid for their college education vs. what they made, compared to what college students today pay for an education vs. what they will make (assuming they can find a job). Maybe the time to protest is now. Before the shit becomes such a huge problem that it's institutional in nature, and potentially economy destructive - I've heard on numerous occasions that the newest 'bubble' in America is the education bubble, because the average student walks with anywhere from $25,000 - $35,000 in debt (not what they paid, additional Debt) and if enough people default -say, for instance, because the jobs aren't there, there will be a tremendous shortfall. I don't know, maybe the Canadians are paying more attention, and are doing something about it NOW, when it's easier to do something about it. So maybe taking a hard line early is better. I'm all 'for working with the government' is that government is working with you. In the U.S., I have little faith that that is the situation. Maybe in Canada, it is the situation, I don't know. But anyway, maybe standing up and being resolute now is better than waiting a decade and having to try to undo the decades' decline (which is impossible). Maybe this is what the founding fathers in the U.S. referred to as 'continued vigilance' and how it was necessary to prevent problems. Just my two cents - and the apology is unnecessary, but accepted nonetheless.
My question is this, and if anyone can find statistics to answer it please do: The cost of running a university increases over time, just like anything does. Equipment ages, inflation applies, staff wages rise, etc. Who, then, should pay for these costs? If the students are claiming that $350/year is too much for them to bear, does the taxpayer absorb that? And for how long/how much? When you compare the cost of of a post-secondary education here to that of a post-secondary education in America, you can see how much tuition is already subsidized (or compare it to how much it costs an American citizen to come to class in Canada - foreign students pay a truckload for their schooling). Personally, I think that only programs who produce for jobs where there is a high demand should be heavily subsidized. Encourage people to enter the trades, IT, nursing, etc. Employers can't find enough people to fill the available seats for these positions. Law, fine arts, political science, on the other hand, should be paid full in full by the student since there is already a glut of them in the marketplace. That's an argument for another time, but one last thing on the subject: Bill Maher (of all people) ranted this season that America produced four times the fine arts majors that they did engineers. His point was that people weren't going to school to study real-world applicable things, and it was decimating the workforce and driving tuition debt into the sky. I think he's right. If students want to curb tuition fees, they should be responsible with their education and study something that will pay off in the long run.
Ok. So where does it say that the police are the ones breaking the stuff? Nowhere. You are making an argument against what I am saying i.e people go to protests to fuck shit up. I have readily admitted that police do insert themselves in protests, likely to observe and keep an eye on things from within. Your argument seems to be that "the police" are causing the disturbances. You haven't provided any actual proof that they are causing it. Everything that you have posted as a backup to the argument you are attempting to make proves that they did nothing more than observe and keep tabs. Hardly proof that violent protesters are actually police. Lets make this simple. You just don't seem to understand what I am saying: People use protests to as an excuse to go and fuck shit up. It sucks because they distract from the real issue at hand by making great clips for the evening news. Your argument: The police are actually behind the violence. That infiltrators working for the man are behind the violence. All you have managed to do with your links is prove the point that I acknowledged earlier that the police occasionally get into these groups, or put themselves in a protest to keep tabs, not to purposefully incite a riot. But NOTHING. NOTHING you have posted in the futile attempts to backup your argument have done anything to prove the assertion you are trying to make that the police are behind it all. Here is what you said that I first commented on. Nothing you have provided has proven that, or even suggested it. Here are some choice quotes from your "evidence" This article from Quebec made no mention that they were there to cause shit. From NPR regarding Oakland: Nothing more than a quote suggesting that all it takes is an impassioned person to get into the lead, and perhaps if they had wanted to could have incited them to start problems. My question to you is this: Are you incapable of accepting that there are douchbags who go to riots to fuck shit up? Yes or No?.
Definitely. College is fucking expensive. You can cry to God and all the angels that education is a right and should be available to all, but the fact is that it requires a massive amount of money. Professors go through years of education to do their job. The facilities are expensive. So are the materials. So is the equipment for labs and other research. Where is the money going to come from? In the US, with the exception of FAFSA and other federal student grants, the answer is "The student." You (or your parents) pay for your own education. I think this is perfectly fine. You go into debt, get your degree, and pay it off with the better job that you get from having a college education. This also means that if you don't have a spare $50k lying around, it might be a bad idea to go into ridiculous debt to get a degree in sociology. This is NOT saying that there is something wrong with non-valuable degrees; there is something to be said for the academic life or pursuing your passion. But my neighbor said it best when his son wanted to major in classics: "I'm an engineer. Engineering is a big field, and a lot of the parts are interchangeable with a little bit of training. Also, the skills of a mediocre engineer are still valuable. When you get out of college, you will be mediocre. So it's a good idea to do something where even if you aren't very good, you're still useful for something. I told him, if you major in classics, you can make a living doing it. But there's no room for a mediocre translators. The only people who get jobs are the very best, the people with thirty years of experience and enormous reputations. So if you're going to major in it, you're going to have to work far harder at it than you ever have. So if you think you're taking the easy way out because it doesn't need any math, you're wrong. You're going to be working even harder than the math majors." Of course, most kids aren't thinking about this. They say, "I'm not really interested in chem or bio or math, but Mommy and Daddy say I have to go to college. Oooh, Latin sounds cool." When the government steps in and says, "These kids have a RIGHT to education," what they're actually saying is, "The taxpayers need to pay for them to go to college." And I don't see anything wrong with this, at least in theory. An educated populace makes a lot more money than an uneducated populace. But, as it turns out, a lot of education is not that useful. The government should decide which fields are actually useful and subsidize those. And they don't even have to be academic fields. An electrician is worth far more than a classics major. So, subsidize the cost of an electrician's education and make the classics major pay full price. If the kid is really passionate about Greek and Latin and wants to make it his life, full price won't dissuade him. It will, however, discourage the idiots who are just aimlessly trudging through their four years before working at Stop & Shop while participating in Occupy Protests complaining about how their degree in Russian Literature didn't get them a job.
I agree with almost everything you said, but this made laugh hard enough to squirt OJ out of my nose. Which is a terrible thing by the way.
Oh, I didn't mean that the education was valuable or that it actually made them better at their jobs; I just meant that they go to school for years, and that school is very expensive. There are plenty of doctorate-level professors who are complete and utter garbage... but the fact is that they're the teachers, and their pay is larger because of their doctorate.
I'm somewhat inclined to suggest the opposite: the most employable/useful majors are the ones least in need of any sort of subsidy. They will generally take care of themselves, because the concrete demand is there. Someone will need to hire engineers, so the system to provide them will run relatively smoothly. Worst case scenario, people will make a wager on the likely future wage benefit of this, and do it. If the money is there, capable people will choose to do it. However, things like the arts, literature, etc. are more analogous to a public good: we all benefit from their existence, but it's less clear that any private citizens would be willing to bear the full brunt of the cost. A world with more technocrats and fewer artists is not necessarily a better world to actually live in. I don't really understand the correlation you are attempting to draw between soft majors and rising tuition costs, since all else being equal, STEM and similar fields are much more expensive to provide for. I doubt rising tuition costs can be boiled down to "too many philosophy majors." I'm also suspicious of the idea that there exists a huge overlap between potential STEM majors, and people who choose to major in humanities field in terms of cognitive skills and interests. If one wants to increase the number of people entering these fields, the college level seems far too late. You have to focus on younger children, so that by the time they have reached college, they have skills and interests that are compatible with studies in these fields.
This doesn't make sense to me. You're basically rewarding people for doing something that isn't useful. Let's take a look at the kinds of people who major in art or literature. The first is someone with a genuine passion for the subject. My dad's roommate was an English major; during the summer, he took night watchman jobs so that he could spend his workday reading. He was perfectly content to spend his life reading literature because that's what he was passionate about. Nowadays he's a theology professor and a published writer. People like that will do okay regardless of whether you subsidize them or not. They'll become distinguished in their field because their field is their life. They don't care whether it puts them 300k into debt and forces them into a hole-in-the-wall apartment with an exclusive diet of ramen and cat food; they will pursue it because that's truly what they want to do. The second kind of person is someone who goes to college because he was told by everyone to go to college. He doesn't really know what to do with his life, so he's just kinda sitting there and living the college dream. How much of a contribution is this guy really going to give to literature or art? He's a major in name only; he doesn't really give a fuck about art, he's just there because it doesn't require as much rigor. He's the kind of person who takes the idiot classes "because they're easy." Subsidizing these majors only helps the latter guys. And while this might be open to debate, I can think of a lot more productive things a clueless 18-year-old can do instead of majoring in something that he doesn't really care about. So stick that pricetag on it. The guy who's passionate about the subject and will definitely make a contribution to the field will pay it without a quiver; the guy who doesn't really care about the subject will (hopefully) go do something else.
In 1982, Harvard undergrad tuition was $15,500 (in inflation adjusted 2012 dollars). Today, Harvard is $36,300. It's increased by more than 100%. Facilities are expensive, materials are expensive, salaries are expensive, but are we to believe that the cost of operating a university has doubled since the 1980s? Rather than focusing on where the money is going to come from, I think we need to ask where the hell all the money is going to. (I'm guessing professors are teaching fewer hours, and getting paid more, so you have more faculty earning more money, and probably a ton of expensive administrative personnel.)
I would love to know the answer to this question. Is it going to research? Has equipment gotten more expensive? Does an education simply cost more in this more modern world? Is there some administrator just sitting there bathing in gold bullion Scrooge McDuck style? Personally, I think it's because of increased demand. In 1981, only 70% of the American population completed high school, and 17% of the population completed a four-year degree (source). In 2009, 85% of the population completed high school and 28% completed a four-year degree (source). That means a hell of a lot more people are going to college. When you take into account the fact that a lot of the other 70% of people without a degree still have some college, you have enormous demand for quality education. Which is why colleges like Harvard can raise their tuition to twice what it was in 1982 and still have people willing to give their left nut to gain admissions. So, in short - they're charging it because they can get it. On the other hand, that money also ends up being used to offer more things. A community college today is similarly priced to what Harvard was priced at in the 1980s. What did Harvard offer back then? What do they offer now? What does the average community college offer now? Could Harvard cut their tuition in half and still offer the same things to their students?
Omega - do you really think arts programs are for slackers and losers? Many outsiders have no idea how competitive it is to get into them. There were 40 people in my program, total. Every year, my school accepted 10-15 out of over 300 applicants. It's not something many people just stumble into or choose because it's the flavor degree of the month. Everyone I knew there worked their asses off to get there, and they worked their asses off through school. There's no way you can even get into the program if you don't. //////I think I have a little bit of a unique perspective because my undergrad is a BFA, and I'm currently working on a doctorate in healthcare. (In truth, my life never would have led me to this career without my background in the arts). But, I think that both the arts and sciences are being taken care of. You just have to look for help and the right education for your needs/situation. If you are very talented and/or lucky, like I was, art students can be given scholarships. I have zero debt from my "worthless arts" degree. I had to make compromises...I graduated and worked with people who went to Julliard. I don't have the prestige of a Julliard name on my resume, but I don't have the debt that these people will probably have for the rest of their lives. The last time I checked, there are no full rides to med school. Grad school tuition is pretty sweet because the grand total is $25,000. I think it's awesome that my doctorate costs less than some schools' yearly tuitions. I agree with Cowbell...it's ironic because I will easily get a job when I graduate (facilities started offering us jobs during our first semester), and I will easily pay off my student loans. I know some providers who went to private schools, and they have over $100,000 in debt. We will be making the same starting salary...it's not like their education was substantially different from the one I'm receiving. Some students choose to sign "loan forgiveness" contracts with facilities, promising that they will work for them X number of years. My cousin had her nursing degree paid for by her employer. My point is that I think there's a smart way to go about getting a degree in fine arts, and there's a smart way to go about getting a "useful" degree. You can do either somewhat frugally, or you can choose to take a more expensive route. I don't think it's up to our government to decide who's worthy of discounted tuition.