Community Studies, Capitalist Growth and Development

Two leading Community Studies staff at UC Santa Cruz were cut today, including the field studies coordinator [and also, ironically, the faculty who coordinates student government interns].

Over the next three years, if these changes are allowed to sit, this university and all students who participate in it will lose the majority of SUA [student government's] decision making powers and effectiveness, the much beloved and unique Community Studies major, as well as a variety of increasingly valuable classes such as intro to marxism.

This is not a joke, and it is not an empty threat. We--those of us with voices and souls, who have not forgotten the thrill of learning and discovery for its own sake--we're right to be horrified. However, in the face of increasing student support, the UC admin etc. are cutting some of the heart of this university with these new cuts and they've gotta be doing so deliberately--either that, or they're just that stupid.

These programs are the ones students love, the ones that keep us coming back and grounded in our educational experiences in spite of whatever terrors capitalism is able to bring up in our lives. These are the programs that turn campus into Home, that turn learning into an art form, that make growth exciting.

In a world increasingly structured according to the standards set by AP scores Meanwhile, of course, the UC admin do not appear interested in cutting classes which seem fundamentally based in premises such as: 'why NAFTA was a good thing, womyn deserve to be raped when they refuse to have sex on command like wind-up dolls and why capitalism is TOTALLY the best possible system to structure human growth even if it's based in colonialist warfare destruction and totalitarianism'...

Just to name a few.

Community studies is a significant and vital part of the heart of UCSC. It's the major that probably produces the most folks working in the local community in various ways and with various local organizations to make the kind of social change that is designed to meet the demands and needs of US, instead of meeting the demands of Frankly, any major which requires students learn again and again about the difference between charity and help--between intervening in other folks' belief systems, lives and goals in order to validate your own sense of self, as opposed to acknowledging other people are people too and not wind-up toys who must respond with 'gratitude' to handouts or risk losing their status as the 'deserving poor' is an invaluable asset to this or any other community. Any class or system that asks us to question again and again the difference between ways we give to one another in order to serve our own mutual best interests, or ways we give to each other in order to justify setting ourselves above other people as 'more valuable or deserving of respect for being able to be in this position of choice of whether to give or not', rocks.

This is possibly the most interesting and valuable lesson in adulthood I have ever been given, and by god I am still learning it.

This culture, this system, and most of all these particular administrators, lawmakers, legislators, Regents, they do not want students to be valuable and producing members of the community. Consumer culture thrives on keeping us as kids forever dependent on some parental authority figure above us for handouts, for the right to exist and to have even some of our needs met--though only by suppressing our own truest desires, of course.

Community studies seems anyway to figure that we will all choose to give anyway, so we might as well give in a way that benefits ourselves and others as much as possible.

Most majors--hell, most people--still seem attached to the idea that humans must be forced to give, must be forced to do anything really, if it is at all worth doing.

If they cut out our hearts fully, what will we be left with? We will all just be machines after that.

More, the direction this university is taking is entirely related to attempting to create us all in the image of the ídeal human. We natural-born folks are being remade in the image of a machine, of a SOLDIER in the army of colonialist global expansion, marching forever onwards into a destiny where we are disconnected from all save the most remote sources of life. We are shaped in ways entirely contrary to our own innate sense of self, our own innate ability to exist as People. We are then told this reshaping process of 'becoming adults' is the natural one, that whatever was there before is useless or is dangerously animal-like and must be excised or extracted or suffocated into near oblivion.

Programs like E squared, like community studies and like LALS are the most innovative, creative and life-giving programs on this campus. [meanwhile, of course, it is no accident that the status of programs like feminist studies and american studies--equally innovative perhaps in their own ways--remains somewhat unclear as well. At any rate, the Dean of Social Sciences is facing the unenviable task of cutting funding from one program or another. One might wonder whether the increasing division of the sciences into specialized programs that teach students very little practical connect-the-dots ability to get their own research in the context of other folks' "discoveries" while carrying on the colonialist war-driven direction of science is actually at all useful to a society struggling to survive the fallout [in every sense of the word] of a not-quite-finished-yet nuclear age. Or whether we need a new gaming major. Or why students can't just go study sociology at some other equally large and even more prestigious university, as I am somewhat ashamed to admit to thinking. One wonders many things in these days.]

Meanwhile these cuts seem to prove as yet more evidence that the UC Regents and legislators are far more interested in their own profits from nuclear weapons manufacturing, than they are in giving students a quality education.

Students know what students need. Either the Regents are criminally negligent, or they just don't give a damn. Either way, there is no reason I've seen anyway why they should be able to determine what students can or cannot study so long as there are teachers willing to teach, aside from, oh yah, corporate profit, capitalism, nuclear warfare and the general urge to blow up the planet if that is what it takes to regain "security" for the very few.

Of course, this 'security' comes at the price--apparently--of deliberately continuing to pursue at the very least the capability to thoroughly annihilate every living being on the face of this planet, but hey. At least maybe then legislators, Regents and other folks making hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year will be able to sleep soundly at night in their concrete bunkers and thousand dollar mattresses.

After all, as far as I know anyway, plans to continue to reconfigure every nuclear weapon the U.S. government owns are designated to continue. Prison funding remains high, and the money spent to "control" the border is increasing, it seems. ICE is certainly not receiving pay cuts [though one wonders if those folks are so convinced of the bullshit ideas they've been fed all their lives that they would probably work for free at this point]. [read: pay men with guns to ride horses across the border between the U.S. and Mexico to make sure that anyone who does cross without waiting years for their paperwork to be approved is duly terrified and won't stir up any bad feelings or start a revolution or anything.] yáll I Keep thinking more and more we gotta reach out to as many folks from diverse everythings as possible, we gotta fight however we can, whatever that means to us...

We gotta face the facts, here--this Chancellor like every other are essentially paid by the folks at the top to run this university according to these values. Doesn't mean the Chancellor or anybody else are 'bad people', just means that probably we could maybe do a better job at running a university not bent on pursuing a militaristic and technology-driven future where urban planning is designed arounds the needs of cars not people.

The university is moving to be part of an increasingly militaristic culture that values technological "progress", comfort, and control over our emotions at the cost of our actual emotional and pyschological health, and offers to sell the select few a sense of security that advertising and cultural beliefs convince these folks are more important than anything else, while the rest of us all suffer.

It's a nasty cycle, n it's not gonna end till we recognize the system we're all trapped in--it's capitalism, it's not us, we're not crazy, and also, community studies will not be the last beloved program to be cut before this is through. The educations we're getting offered are designed to make us cogs not people.

Community studies teaches students we are powerful and we have a right to be free to act. UC finds this threatening.

They have this crazy idea students might revolt and refuse to cooperate with attempts to enforce our silent participation with the government's active or collusion in war profiteering, or something. Where would anyone get this idea....?

We follow our own terrors about using alchemy, turning our rage into passion to ACT and then doing it because the threat of punishment, of God hating us, of the community turning its backs on us if we start disobeying, have all been drilled into our heads throughout our entire lives.

Meanwhile we are already in prison, we are already being tortured into silent and complicit obedience, then told our addictions--our ability to hurt ourselves and get told we're more desirable to others for doing so--are worth the price obedience extracts out of our personal integrity. We're told if we obey, sooner or later we will get what we 'want', which is supposedly 'safety' from whatever évil threat or conspiracy the government and mainstream media have collaborated in creating most recently.

We might as well recognize where we are and start trying to organize, or fight back, or speak out, or do anything we can do in order to stop ourselves from falling silent into the murky muddled black hole of helplessness sometimes inspired by the acknowledgment that much as we might wish otherwise, there is no way out of our addiction to sacrificing growth for safety, inspiration to the gods of militarism, and life to the machinery of death until we first admit we have a problem.