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Photos by Colleen Morgan

It’s late and the bus is still filled to the gills with chattering Berkeley students, fogging up the windows and ignoring the exhortations of the bus driver, “STEP BACK! EVERYONE STEP BACK!” Students are leaving campus after late nights studying and working in labs, some headed to Safeway to stock up on supplies.  The student traffic tapers off south of Alcatraz, with older commuters staying on, heading to downtown Oakland and beyond.  The bus quietly undergoes an almost complete demographic change, one that has not gone unnoticed by the AC Transit authorities.

You may have missed the announcement last month from AC Transit: major changes were coming for some of the local bus lines, the most shocking of which is breaking the 51 in half at the Rockridge BART into 51A and 51B, lines that would service the north and the south segments of the 51′s route.  This would require paying for a transfer for non-UC Students, and for students with a Class Pass (a mandatory charge of $69.50 to your student fees, I hope you make good use of it!) presumably AC Transit would be able to charge UC for two rides instead of one. I also do not particularly look forward to getting off at Rockridge and waiting for another bus, especially late at night after a long day of grading.

It’s not a major disruption and will not change the experience of most students who live inside the Berkeley bubble, yet it seems a bit cynical on the part of AC Transit to break the bus line in half at the Berkeley/Oakland border. Students tend to stay in a tight circle around campus, and while this may benefit their university education, it seems a bit sad to live in the Bay Area for several years without venturing into Oakland and San Francisco.  In this respect, breaking up the 51 is just another division between Berkeley and Oakland, punishing those who would venture outside of the bubble.

Due to tuition hikes, many Berkeley undergraduates will have to cut college short, and young students statewide may find higher education entirely foreclosed. For anyone who cares about the University of California, or who values the public university more generally, this is a travesty. Instead of serving as the engine of social mobility by providing top-tier schooling to Californians who can’t afford to go private, UC campuses will increasingly cater to those from wealthy (and out-of-state) families, ultimately reproducing existing class structures rather than shaking them up.

If you’re a Berkeley graduate student invested in the future of your institution, you know all this already. But in all the debate swirling around the lamentable fee increases – most prominently, how best to protest them – another issue is at stake. It’s heresy around here to suggest that anyone who wants and works for it shouldn’t have access to a college education. But does everyone really want a college education?

As San Jose State professor (and Berkeley Ph.D.) Mike Rustigan argued in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, many young Americans are more interested in working with their hands than sitting behind a desk, and to insist that everyone aspire to a four-year degree discounts the value – not to mention national economic necessity – of learning a trade. Caitlin Flanagan’s polemical (and pretty much universally derided) critique of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley serves as the reductio ad absurdum of our unblinking devotion to a liberal arts education at the expense of any practical knowledge. Arguing that school garden programs rob students of valuable time with civics textbooks, Flanagan accuses Alice Waters and her “ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting” acolytes of preventing migrant workers’ kids from getting into college, which is the only way they could possibly escape their fate of diabetes and underemployment. (Waters’ suggestion that working in a garden can prove pedagogically useful is unlikely to breed a permanent underclass of sharecroppers, but if it asks students to write recipes as well as coherent paragraphs about The Crucible – if it produces people who can effectively communicate information rather than haughtily parade their cultural capital in The Atlantic – is that really such a bad thing?) Read the rest of this entry »