Mark LeVine: This is How a Great University Dies

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UCI and Chair of the Irvine Faculty Association. He can be reached at mlevine@uci.edu.

It sounded promising, the loud drum rhythm outside my office window. The first day of class and already the protests against tuition hikes were beginning! At least that’s what I fantasized.

Of course, the drums did not represent an opening salvo of a full-blown protest movement against the huge raise in tuition once again imposed on UC students as they begin a new year. It was just a student organization looking to attract passers-by to its table along Ring Road.

But surely, someone must be protesting? I thought. There must be at least three dozen booths on Ring Road. With tuition rising over 17 percent in the last year, courses and TAships cut, sections more crowded, less staff to handle increased demand — except at the senior administration level, which somehow keeps growing without rhyme or reason — surely students were no longer going to take the situation laying down.

The students obviously care enough about something to take time out of their schedules to sit there for hours and talk to strangers; otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.

And sure enough, it turned out that a few hundred students were protesting at that very moment. But up at Berkeley. At Irvine, and the other campuses, nothing. Not a single booth in my tour of Ring Road or a single protester addressing the slow destruction of the world’s greatest public university....