*Exporting Our Brains
*/Gray Brechin/
The Chancellor was absent as University of California police kitted out
in battle gear vigorously beat and arrested students and professors at
on the Berkeley campus
(http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Ebarsky/occupy.Cal.html). Called to
account by the Academic Senate two weeks later, Robert Birgeneau
declared himself ?extremely disturbed that these events happened.?
Claiming to take full responsibility for a terrible miscommunication, he
explained that he had been on a trip through Asia at the time.
(http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/11/29/faculty-senate-criticizes-response-to-occupy-cal-protest/ ).
The trip, he said, concluded with a ?phenomenally successful,? though
unspecified, mission to Shanghai, so he did not hear how badly things
went at home until the following day. The two events on opposite sides
of the Pacific coupled with a subsequent crisis in Berkeley provide a
freeze frame for the self-inflicted decline of the West.
Chancellor Birgeneau and the dean of Berkeley?s College of Engineering,
signed an agreement to open a 50,000 square foot building in Shanghai?s
Zhangjiang High-Tech Park two days after clubs fell on Cal students
agitated by what they perceive as the progressive privatization and
commercialization of their university. According to the /New York
Times/(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/world/asia/cal-berkeley-reveals-plan-for-engineering-center-in-china.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Zhangjiang&st=cse
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/world/asia/cal-berkeley-reveals-plan-for-engineering-center-in-china.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Zhangjiang&st=cse>),
the new branch will give U.C. an Asian beachhead by opening ?a large
research and teaching facility as part of a broader plan to bolster its
presence in China.? Other premier American universities such as Duke,
NYU, and Stanford are, for a price, establishing similar ?partnerships?
that China ?hope[s] will form the base of a modern high-tech economy.?
As U.S. funding dries up, college administrators hope that such
collaborations will ?support fundraising efforts that target wealthy
Chinese alumni? not to mention attracting their children more able to
pay ever-rising tuition than American students.
California?s business elite until recently oversaw the establishment and
growth of a prestigious twelve-campus system ? if you count U.C.?s twin
nuclear weapons laboratories ? meant to do for the Golden State what the
university now will do for China. Codified in the 1960 Master Plan for
Higher Education, the promise of a virtually free and high quality
education for Californians worked well to that end until 1978 when
voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13 to cut their taxes. In doing
so they fired the opening gun of a tax revolt that spread quickly to the
rest of the nation.
Starved of funding, California?s public schools plummeted from the best
to near worst, but many believed that the University of California?s
crucial role in the state?s and the nation?s economy would immunize it
from the rot consuming the rest of the Golden State?s educational
apparatus. Banker Russell S. Gould, chair of U.C. Board of Regents,
called the university ?an essential incubator of the California dream,?
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/12/EDIP196JU1.DTL,
but as California piled up multi-billion dollar deficits, U.C inevitably
joined the rest of the public sector on the dream factory?s cutting room
floor. Campus-building in the state?s three-tiered higher education
system ceased, but after the 2008 stock market crash, the entire system
began dramatically contracting even as student tuition and debt
skyrocketed.
As with any organism fighting for its life, available money has moved
like blood from regions the university administration considers
expendable to those regarded as vital profit centers such as business,
biotechnology, sports, and online learning initiatives as well as lavish
executive pay packages meant to retain, those executives say, the very
best talent. Last year, for example, the university?s flagship campus at
Berkeley quietly divested itself of its outstanding Water Resource
Center Archives to save the cost of four clerical positions and thus
free space for the expanding College of Engineering
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Resources_Center_Archives). The
University library closed on Saturdays, but at UC San Diego, three
specialty libraries closed altogether while a fourth ? the largest
oceanographic library in the world ? will close in 2012
(http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/892450-264/as_library_footprint_shrinks_university.html.csp).
Two weeks after the Shanghai agreement, and on the eve of final exams
and a proposed faculty vote of no confidence in Chancellor Birgeneau,
the campus email system crashed. For the following week, an institution
that its overseers still boast as the world?s greatest public university
struggled to function in the 21^st century with only periodic and
guttering communication. Earlier cost-cutting that removed phones from
professors? offices only aggravated miscommunication. Shelton Waggener,
the campus associate vice chancellor for information technology,
explained to the student newspaper that by failing to upgrade to
increased demand he was ?trying to be prudent given the budget
situation, (but) now in retrospective it would have been good to have
invested money in the storage so we would have avoided this crisis.?
Advanced communications and information technology will be among the
first areas of research undertaken by the College of Engineering?s new
partnership with Chinese industries seeking to overtake California?s
fabled Silicon Valley.
For centuries, city states and nations jealously guarded their home
industries to the point of sending assassins to dispatch those trading
secrets with rivals. Decades of neoliberalism have encouraged today?s
elites to do the opposite. Availing themselves of the deregulation and
lowered trade barriers for which they paid and the communications
technology they developed, they exported their industries and jobs to
wherever labor costs are lowest and environmental constraints absent.
Derelict factories, ruined towns, failing infrastructure, and prisons
now pock those countries still imagining themselves members of the First
World. The natives back home grow ever more restless and noisy.
The screams of students belabored for asking where their university is
going and for whom
(http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/tag/urban-shield-2011/) raises the
question whether intelligence will be our last export, or whether it was
among our first.
//
/Gray Brechin is a three-time U.C. Berkeley alumnus and visiting scholar
in the UBC Department of Geography. He is the author of/ Imperial San
Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.
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