A report released last week by UC Berkeley students, reveal the staggering human costs of University of California’s interest rate swaps and debt-driven profit strategies. Entitled Swapping our Future: How Students and Taxpayers are Funding Risky UC Borrowing and Wall Street Profits, the report shows that UC management has doubled university debt from $6.9 billion [...]

Paul Harris, from The Observer, January 30, 2011 Academic [and sociologist] Frances Fox Piven has been relentlessly targeted by Glenn Beck as a threat to the American way of life. Frances Fox Piven is not going into hiding. Not yet. The 78-year-old leftwing academic is the latest hate figure for Fox News host Glenn Beck and his [...]

By Zsuzsa Gille, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign  As we continue expressing our critique of how the University of Illinois deals with its fiscal crisis, it is important to see this move as part of a longer and larger project, so that we can choose the target of our political activism more precisely. I am no [...]

By Michael Burawoy, University of California,  Berkeley This semester at Berkeley has been one of the most tumultuous since the early1970s when the campus was regularly overtaken by civil rights and anti-war protests. The factor precipitating today’s protests is the economic crisis which hit California deeply, but especially its system of public education.  Once the pride of [...]