Why do I occupy?

By Max Anderson, Documentarian and member of Occupy Texas State

When I was a young boy I was told that I could be anything I wanted to be as long as I set my mind to it.  The possibilities were endless: a doctor, a lawyer, an astronaut, a paleontologist (I really wanted to be a paleontologist), even the president.  Being the optimistic kid that I was I believed them; I set my expectations high.  I longed for the great pie in the sky.

As I grew older reality set in and I realized that this was not the great country I had once imagined.  Before I was even old enough to work millions of jobs had been shipped overseas with the passage of NAFTA.  America no longer produced goods, we just consumed them.  At the age of 12, terrorists wreaked havoc on America and sent us into a decade long war that costs taxpayers trillions of dollars.  With the start of theWar On Terror, so too did the encroachment on our civil liberties.  In 2008, the financial crisis seemingly shut down Wall Street and left millions wondering what the future would bring.  All of these factors have left me with a lack of faith in America.

And what of my fellow countrymen?  When I look around all I see is an apathetic populace and a culture that is obsessed with entertainment, celebrities, sex, violence, video games, sports, and reality television.  What should I expect from my fellow countrymen when they only care about the big issues as long as they can press a Like button?  How could I expect them to be the watchdogs of freedom when all of the media is controlled by the 1%, the corporations.  (Fox News is owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation; CNN is owned by Time Warner; MSNBC is currently part of NBCUniversal, a joint venture of Comcast and General Electric; ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Company.)  These companies do not have a vested interest in informing the mass of the public, why that would be unprofitable.  Instead the mainstream media divide people on hyper-partisan issues. I cannot expect the average joe to sift through all the misinformation, chatter, and noise and come to a reasonable, logical conclusion.

I do not have much faith in the future of America.  This once shinning beacon of freedom and liberty has mortgaged away its future.  I am of the generation that will not see prosperity and peace, instead we will face a mountain of debt and endless war.  A generation with millions in prison and even more in poverty.  A generation of uninsured and uninspired.  A lost generation.

The Occupy Movement gives me hope, because I know that I am not the only person that is pissed off with the current state of affairs.  It gives me hope, because the people are finally standing up to the status quo and making their voices heard.  “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” “End corporate welfare.” “Money for schools and education, not for greed and corporations.” We are the 99%, and together We can make a difference.

 

Education Is A Necessity Not A Privilege

by Joshua Christopher Harvey

On June 9, 1963 then Vice President of the United States (and our universities greatest alumnus) Lyndon Baines Johnson, stated that we had “entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others” but rather  “a necessity without which a person is defenseless”  in a complex and industrialized society. Indeed, our university was established to strengthen the foundation of education in our state and, since 1899, it has risen to be among Texas’s leaders in the number of new educators for the state. But ours is a state in which, despite the job growth and economic clout touted by Governor Perry, has cut and continues to cut education funding.

According to a survey of school districts representing 39 percent of the state by the school finance consultant Moak, Casey & Associates, more than 60 percent of Texas school districts can expect further staffing reductions next year as they grapple with state budget reductions. These reduction come after those districts reported a loss of 9,586 school district jobs — one-third of which were classroom teachers despite those same districts serving 17,593 more students than in the 2010‐11 academic year. Applying these figures across the state would mean there are roughly 32,000 fewer school employees in Texas, including 12,000 fewer teachers.

During its 82nd session the Texas Legislature eliminated a host of grant programs  and slashed grants for higher education. These cuts totaled $5.4 billion. Schools through out the state were underfunded a further  $4 billion in basic aid and cut $1.3 billion from grant programs that paid for full-day prekindergarten and assisted students struggling to pass state standardized tests. These cuts would have been more drastic for the 2010-2011 academic year had Texas not received a one‐time grant of $820 million in federal education jobs funds to mitigate the impact of the state cuts. But the one-time grant was a double edged knife for the state – more jobs are expected to be lost during the 2012-2013 academic year because schools are relying on the one-time federal money to prop up their budgets this year and some districts will lose additional state aid next year.

Cuts to grants and funding mean increased tuition rates for us as students. Due to cuts by the 82nd legislative session, funding to Texas State University was reduced $10 million. This led to a decision by our nine-member Texas State University System Board of Regents to approve a tuition raise to be implemented  in January 2012.  We will now spend and additional $16 per credit hour for a total of $167. This tuition hike will only generate about $6.7 million for the university in general revenue which is the main source of state funding for the university. Overall, our university has lost about 3.6 percent of the 28 percent in state funds of the total university budget in the educational and general portion.

Bill Nance, vice president for Finance and Support Services said these cuts have led to the record enrollment that has led to the housing strain on the campus this year. “Given the progress we’re trying to make at the university, we just didn’t feel like we could go in and start cutting things like degree programs,” Nance said. “When you increase enrollment it puts stress on the workload of our existing faculty and staff. We don’t like having to do that, but it’s what we had to do to survive the cuts.”  Our enrollment increased 4.7 percent from 32,572 in fall 2010 to 34,113 for fall 2011.

In 2008 the College Board’s “Trends in College Pricing” reported that in the ten years prior the public college costs have risen at an average rate of 6.9 percent per year and four-year private college costs have risen at an average rate of 5.8 percent per year. As we grapple with high student loan payments for the first few decades of our adult lives, we will have less money to spend and invest in our nation and her industries where it would have been spent in future years. Unlike our parents, we might not be able to spend and invest enough to allow great economic growth to occur. It is vital to our survival as an economically competitive nation to hold education as a necessity and a fundamental cornerstone to our democracy.

Public education and higher education is for the whole of society and to fund both it to invest in our future. Without adequate funding many of the gains our schools and universities have worked so hard to realize will fall short in the growing face of international education and business competition. Even our own corporations see this as they continue to divest in our nation, ship jobs overseas and charge us more back home to cover their costs. The argument that education is a privilege not a right advocates a selfish society in which the American dream can never flourish. It is an argument that justifies a class system and allows for greater disparity in opportunity. For us to rise on the wings of a stable economy, attract back jobs and foreign companies and elevate our society we must not cut funding to education.

The structure and bureaucracy that exists within the educational superstructure itself hinders our progress and must also be addressed and combated. But first and foremost, if Texas is to succeed economically and, to quote President Eisenhower from a 1958 speech – “if the United States is to maintain its position of leadership and if we are to further enhance the quality of our society, we must see to it that today’s people are prepared to contribute the maximum to our future progress and strength” and the only way to do that is if  “we achieve the highest possible excellence in our education.”

Save our teachers, save our schools, save our grants and our future will prosper.

Occupy Texas State Profiled by Inside Higher Ed

Photo by Lori Alaniz

Occupy Texas State 

By Allie Grasgreen

The students at Texas State University at San Marcos who protested in Thursday’s second nationally coordinated campus event in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street dispute the oft-repeated charges that the movement’s participants are lazy, unfocused and un-American. And they have the ideas to prove it.

When the time comes to carry out their plans – which address such pervasive student issues as loan repayment and the poor job market – they plan to actually do most of the legwork themselves. They want to attend city council meetings and lobby for bills in the Legislature. They’re going to work with local businesses to establish more scholarships for students. And they plan to get more students registered to vote and active in local and state politics, so they can have a say in where the money goes.

That leaves them with one major obstacle to overcome in the meantime: getting everyone else to care. While protests in New York City and other major cities have attracted thousands, many of them students, the Texas State students are speaking out without a broad movement of local support.

Photo by Lori Alaniz

“In my mind at least, and I think in a lot of other people’s minds, at this point of the movement I think the main focus is raising awareness. We’re doing this and people are like, ‘Why are you protesting?’ And we explain it to them and half the people look at us like they don’t know what we’re talking about,” says Matt Barnes, a mass communications major who is documenting on video the activities of Occupy Texas State as well as Occupy San Marcos. Barnes will graduate from the university this year – $50,000 in debt. “The response that I hear is, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do’…. It’s apathy, but it’s apathy that has been created by a broken system.”

It’s a system, students say, that has resulted in rising tuition, the gutting of state grants meant for low-income students, and a general blocking out of young and disenfranchised voices.

They raised their voices with others across the country Thursday at 4:30 p.m. EDT, though not without resistance. The 40 or so protesters encountered a few hecklers – students and professors alike – during their march from the Texas State campus quad to the city courthouse rally. Many yelled at the protesters to “get a job” – though most of them already have one. Not all the encounters ended with the protesters getting the middle finger, though; one courthouse heckler with a sign calling the protesters communists and idiots, after an educational conversation, put down his sign and joined them.

Photo by Lori Alaniz

While word of other protests was harder to come across this week than last, students did assemble at a number of campuses that didn’t make the news last week, among them California State University at Bakersfield, Iowa State University at Campanile, New Mexico State and San Francisco State Universities, and others. And in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities, students are central to large, ongoing protests.

Last week’s nationwide walkouts on at least 75 campuses enjoyed varying levels of success but exploded on Facebook and Twitter (which is how most of them organized in just a few days) and in the news. While twice that many campuses told the national organizers they would participate on Thursday – meaning, at least one person submitted basic information online — it appears that last week’s occupation gave many of these students the jumping-off point they needed to get things going locally.

Joshua Christopher Harvey is a Texas State junior majoring in international studies, who served in the Air Force as a Russian linguist but was discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the since-repealed federal policy banning openly gay people from serving in the military. Harvey organized the first Occupy Texas State event last week, which about 20 people attended after it was hastily planned in two days, and since then he and dozens of others have drafted a group declaration and begun forming a list of demands. The specificity of their plans makes them more organized than most small groups.

Texas State’s declaration is similar to that of Occupy Wall Street’s, with a few tweaks; it calls on students to peacefully assemble against, among other things, a 63-percent tuition increase over the past decade and a 40-percent decrease in state grants over the past year.

Photo by Lori Alaniz

The demands are not final, and their burden is shared between the university, the city and state, and the students themselves. At this point, the demands include extending the six-month grace period during which students must begin paying back their loans; reducing costs on textbooks sold through the university, as well as the “influence of marketing firms” on institutional operations like dining and other areas such as website design where students could be filling jobs; raising and creating new scholarships for Texas State students active in civic life; getting more students registered to vote; and student monitoring of the university’s budget, redirecting funds toward grants when possible.

“We just want to be able to create solutions and not just a list of demands,” says Harvey, who hopes to continue the work as part of a formal group with weekly meetings. “To express our anger through these protests and then, once we get the attention from the media and from the community, to say, ‘Here are our problems, we do have some solutions, and are you willing to work with us to achieve those solutions?’ ”

In addition to helping with that, Jamila Bell, a freshman studying psychology at Texas State, is trying to figure out how she’s going to pay back $3,000 in loans by November. Since the state cut her grant, it’s been an endless cycle of repayment after repayment, each time with a fleeting relief followed by another notification that more money is due – even when she thought it was already taken care of.

“One day I have a grant and the next it’s gone. Every time a paying period comes up something new happens – literally. Is it even worth it?” Bell says. She’s not sure yet, but if things don’t become more stable, she might have to transfer to a community college or a less expensive university, even though her father – who, while supporting Bell, is paying off his own loans for the master’s degree he’s pursuing – is a Texas State alumnus and they both wanted her to go there.

So for Bell, Occupy Texas State is really about showing other students that this all affects them, too; every dollar that goes to a bank instead of a grant is a dollar that one of them will have to pay back.

“Paying off loans – that’s going to be my future. It won’t be having a house or a nice car or anything. I’m going to be paying off loans for the rest of my life,” Bell says. “This movement can open up people’s eyes, and since we do have a voice we can try to help people get grants … and show them we’re all struggling, no matter what class, we’re all college students.”

Photo by Lori Alaniz

While also lobbying for more grants and scholarships from local businesses and state government, the protesters want to make and sell their own clothing, the profits from which will go into a fund for local kids to attend college. A common lament among the protesters is that despite growing up having been told anything was possible – and working hard to make sure it was – they now face nothing but barriers.

“You have an economy with no job market, you have a six-month grace period to pay back loans, you have to somehow find a job in six months after you graduate that pays you enough interest to not only take care of yourself and your basic needs, but to start paying back your loans plus interest,” Harvey says. “We just want a movement for change.”

Nicholas Cubides, a Texas State senior who is also running for San Marcos City Council, has registered more than 2,000 students to vote – and if they all turn out and back him in the election, he’ll win hands-down. But whether they do remains to be seen; many have said that, even if they register, they won’t vote.

“It’s really sad. It’s really sad,” Cubides says. “It’s sad to see that this is my generation of people … and the people we need to create massive sweeping changes with the occupy movement, but they have zero interest in doing that.”

So all they can do is try to educate. As Harvey puts it, “My goal is to change this from a moment to a movement.”

Like the one happening in New York.

“I think everything we do, we act in solidarity with other Occupy movements. It’s all one national movement starting at Occupy Wall Street,” says Matthew Molnar, a Texas State freshman studying political science. “I think that the sheer humanity that I’ve witnessed through this movement has been really, I guess, touching. The way that complete strangers can come together and become family through these common grievances, take something negative and turn it into something positive, it’s really amazing; it’s inspiring. It gives me hope.”

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/14/occupy-texas-