From the Classroom to the Office, Big Brother Wants to Shackle Our Brains to Our Desks...

Submitted By Guest Blogger Nida Chowdhry

The Homeland Security Campus: Repress U
by Michael Gould-Wartofsky

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.
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2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames.

Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."
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3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
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4. Mine student records. Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."
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5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the database.
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6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."
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7. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining--it's big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a sixfold increase over 2000.) Not surprisingly, then, universities have in recent years established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. DHS's on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and direction," according to its chair.

Full Story: Center for Research on Globalization

I found this article utterly creepy, but it is not in the least unexpected. Considering the constant encouragement for our generations to be "peaceful" i.e. apathetic, and the fear that is instilled in us of "terrorism" (i.e. opposition on any level to anything the good ole' US government does), I am not in the least surprised that university students are being monitored to this extent. University students are given tools to think critically and to analyze the world around us. I just wish we would all think beyond the classroom and make connections with reality; maybe we'll all get out of our armchairs one day and dare to make a change in our own lives to start with...

Student-Led Initiative to Fight Fee Hikes

(Can I get a Takbeer?)

Students in the CSU system have to brace themselves for an inevitable 10 percent increase amounting to about $277 for undergrads for the upcoming academic year, as well as similar spikes planned into the next decade.
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Well, here we are, boys and girls. Something new has emerged and we encourage all students concerned with current and future debt to get involved.

A student-based group called Students and Families for Tuition Relief Now recently formed to fight the dark cloud hovering over our educational horizons. The organization is seeking to freeze undergraduate tuition increases for the next five years through a first-ever student-led ballot initiative.

Thus far, students in the organization are bonding throughout the 30 CSU and University of California campuses, attempting to collect "43,000 signatures by April in order for the initiative to appear on next year's November ballot," according to the new organization's website.

As part of Tuition Relief Now's hoped-for initiative, "The law will raise new revenue specifically for the cost of educating UC and CSU students through a one percent tax on millionaires' income over $1 million."
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Although the CSU Board of Trustees won't make a final decision until March, the writing is on the wall. The CSU is crying broke, showing its pockets are inside-out with a $10-billion deficit and clamoring for the "$73 million they estimate is needed to avoid the fee increase."

Even though the 10 percent jump might not seem like much to an uninformed observer, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, an ex-officio CSU trustee and UC Board of Regents member, pointed out that "fees have gone up more than 90 percent" for the two systems since 2002, far exceeding the state's inflation index during the same time span.

With the CSU management's ongoing trend of overspending and lackadaisical fiscal habits, the university doors are being kicked open for predatory loan companies. More and more, students will be forced to work multiple menial jobs to take fewer classes toward degrees.

By raising a unified objection, students can force the system to stop dumping their bad financial habits in our laps.

Full Story: Daily 49er

Fees Are Going UP: Thru The ROOF

DAVIS, Calif. -- The University of California Board of Regents approved a three-year plan Thursday for major fee increases at 34 professional schools that would push the cost of some law and business schools to $40,000 a year by 2010.

The increases will take effect next year and range from about 7% at most of the schools to a high of 15% at UC Berkeley's law and business schools. The board voted to enact similar raises in the following two years but agreed that it would ratify them separately each year.
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Under the regents' plan, fees would go up roughly 7% each year at 24 professional schools, including UCLA's medical and dental schools, and the UC Irvine and UC San Diego medical schools. UC Riverside's medical school, once it opens in 2012, would have more modest increases starting at 4.3%.

At UCLA, annual fees at the law school would rise to $39,727 by 2010, an increase of 47% over this year; and the fees at the business school would increase to $39,965, a hike of 41%.

Full story: LA Times

So much for keeping the California Promise and upholding the Master Plan. If it wasn't already, higher education in the UC will definitely become more privilege than right status in the coming years. I can see this helping with their alleged "minority" recruitment programs, can't you?