They came to me in the middle of the night. They were young and beautiful and dressed up like they were about to go out. I had about an hour’s warning, and their knock on the door was light so as to wake no one who wasn’t already up. When they got to my doorstep, I was ready. I knew it would be hasty and impromptu, but there’s no reason even a simple wedding can’t be beautiful.

We shared grapes and wine, and I told them that what begins as new and perfect fruit can end up a rich, fermented, much-changed substance that the vine might not recognize. They tasted both and said their vows, and we signed the paperwork. With a little help from their friends, they were married.

In the state of California, any recognized member of the church clergy can marry individuals to one another if the couple has a license. Over the years, I’ve married a handful of couples in the woods and in my living room. I’ve seen the state and the nation struggle over the definition of marriage, and I’ve seen it take many forms. I’ve heard the academic and feminist arguments that marriage was, for many centuries, a primarily economic arrangement to secure the merging and inheritance of property. Much about marriage has changed, but for the very rich and the very poor, the economic part remains the same.

The rich have assets to protect. They draw up contracts and agreements to ensure no one is seduced into a holy and blissful union by a heartless and calculating gold digger.

The poor have other arrangements to make. We are more likely to cohabitate to save money, whether it is appropriate for the relationship or not. In my life, I have known men and women who choose to stay with partners who are abusive or merely unsuited because breaking up means giving up a place to call home.

My friends who were married that night in my living room loved one another and probably would have chosen to marry at some point. The reason they came to me with so little notice, however, was not a pregnancy or a shotgun or even a romantic whim. It was the deadline for FAFSA submissions for the following academic year. Too young to be considered independent from their parents, they were desperate for enough financial aid to transfer to a four-year university. They were the children of vanishing middle class. On paper, their folks could afford to contribute to their tuition, but real life is complicated with gambling addictions and jobs that don’t offer health care.

It wasn’t young love. It wasn’t an impetuous gesture or an adherence to belief. It was a financial decision. Like many decisions forced upon us by poverty, it was a decision that puts the future in jeopardy — no money down, crippling credit terms down the road. The FAFSA considers married students independent and places a student in a wholly separate category for aid. Choosing to marry now to qualify for aid may result in a possibly messy and potentially expensive divorce later, but in the moment, we do what we must. In the meantime, we give one another the gift of an education otherwise out of reach.

Tuition has outpaced the cost of living, outpaced inflation and shows no sign of slowing. People all over are taking drastic measures to afford school, and at the University of California, we are no different. A recent discussion on the cost of housing led some of my classmates to speculate on the appearance of quad dorms with four bunks to a room and the feasibility of (not kidding) camping on the Glade and writing a blog called The Great Outdorms. The idea of getting married for mercenary causes may rankle the romantic soul, but in the scheme of desperation, it seems almost a tame solution.

In my tradition, couples being wed grasp hands and are gently tied together to symbolize their bond. When this couple was tied, I told them to remember that it’s only one hand they’ve given and that the other remains free. True of their marriage, this also became a symbol of their shared commitment to helping one another get through school, support one another’s dreams and be good partners; they were not entirely bound, but they were also not entirely free.

Marriage was never pure. It is sometimes undertaken in the spirit of perfect altruism and true love, but my friends’ practical decision was perfectly in line with the long and fraught history of this evolving institution. They might have given up, waited a few years or taken on crushing loans to move forward with their education. A license to marry costs $97 and takes effect the moment both people say “I do.” They’re responsible to one another and for one another, and they take that seriously. This year, they’ll both graduate from a UC school with their respective bachelor’s degrees.

I now pronounce you educated to the minimum degree necessary to get a decent job.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

The post For richer or for poorer appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Under Napolitano, the Department of Homeland Security instituted the federal program “Secure Communities,” which deports undocumented immigrant offenders from the United States with the support of local police agencies. The program is rife with controversy, as there have been many reports that immigrants have been deported due to minimal offenses. On the other hand, Napolitano has come out in support of the federal DREAM Act and has said she is in support of varied paths to citizenship. As head of a university with a fair number of Latino and minority students and an even larger Latino population statewide, Napolitano needs to be open to educating all types of students and recognize that some of them might be undocumented.

There is also apprehension about Napolitano’s handling of budget cuts to her department during the sequester and her role in overseeing more vigorous airport search practices. In light of the events of Occupy Cal and the pepper-spray incident at UC Davis, Napolitano needs to ensure UC police are not militarized.

Napolitano’s apparent lack of significant educational experience is also concerning, though as the former governor of Arizona, she has proven herself a proponent of that state’s higher education system. In that role, she expanded the state’s higher education budget in order to raise the capacity of students accepted to the state’s universities, bolster financial aid and provide raises to university faculty. Ideas she has presented as governor could make her an appealing choice — among those ideas are a four year fixed tuition rate and doubling the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by the end of the next decade. This type of innovative leadership is what the UC desperately needs right now.

Still, Napolitano is presented with the difficult task of learning the ins and outs of academia and how much of a role research plays in maintaining the university’s level of prestige. She should utilize the number of promising advisers at her disposal to help her along, including Aimee Dorr, the UC provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, who has committed herself to retaining the university’s academic excellence.

We believe choosing Napolitano is indicative of the UC Board of Regents preparing for a more privatized future with decreased reliance on the state. With her high profile political status, Napolitano brings connections that might prove useful when it comes to financial and political support on the federal level. Napolitano has also already recognized the priority of forming and maintaining university connections by immediately calling the president of the University of California Student Association after her selection was announced to discuss UC issues.

The selection of Napolitano has forever changed the trajectory of what types of candidates can be picked to run the UC system. Ultimately, Napolitano has to work to keep the priorities of UC students, faculty and staff, as well as those of the state of California, at the forefront of her agenda. We hope that her choice to resign as the leader of a powerful federal department and come to the UC system demonstrates her commitment to do that.

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Yi Zhong/Staff

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences report on the state of the humanities and social sciences, “The Heart of the Matter,” has the ring of a familiar lament, one that has reverberated at least since the 1960s. The boom experienced in the postwar era, which lifted many traditional ships and launched a number of new ones , was followed by a slow erosion of confidence in the value and mission of what could not be measured indirectly instrumental or monetary terms. Against the backdrop of diminished employment prospects in the unsettled aftermath of the Great Recession, that erosion has led to radically declining enrollments and the exhaustion of funding for many once-robust programs. As a result, it has seemed imperative to some to “make a case” for the humanities and social sciences, spreading the word about the beneficial functions they play in our society.

Lacking the space to address this question for both, let me focus only on the humanities, whose value may be less self-evident in our current climate. Some would have us believe — wrongly to my mind — that humanities faculty members are themselves responsible for falling enrollments in their own disciplines by challenging and revising the previously accepted, and highly restrictive, canon of “great works” and “great authors.” They not only rediscovered and included works by women and racial minorities in their courses but also developed new interpretative methods and controversial theoretical alternatives. Those who opposed these developments claimed that students were ignoring the classics, and they accused the innovators of devaluing the great works by paying too much attention to their historical contexts or exposing their complicity with prevailing hierarchies of power and privilege. This internal wrangling, which was fiercest in the 1980s, has left a suspicion among many outside the academy that the humanities have abandoned their elevated role as guardians of our cultural heritage and transmitter of our fundamental values.

It would, however, be questionable to correlate today’s falling enrollments with the last generation’s ferment, for during the period of vociferous disagreements in the humanities, large numbers of  students majored in departments devoted to literature, art history and other cultural phenomena.  Despite the reproaches of their critics, the humanities emerged from their internal debates in a far more robust intellectual position than they had previously held. Rather than being content to provide a patina of cultural literacy for a privileged few or smugly affirm the superiority of received traditions, they became more reflective about their role in society, more tough-minded in recognizing  the dark underside of cultural elitism and more determined to bare the devices that culture uses to console and mystify. No longer striving to turn out “well-rounded” personalities, they learned to nurture more jagged and unsettled ones with the ability to ask hard questions and scorn easy answers. With the German literary critic Walter Benjamin, they came to acknowledge the disturbing truth that “no document of culture is not also a document of barbarism.”  And yet at the same time, they’ve also managed to preserve the wonder, awe and admiration that the humanities have always felt toward the objects of their inquiry. They’ve developed what can be called an attitude of “tough love” toward the cultures of which they remain the custodians, proving that humanists still know how to cherish rather than simply debunk what they criticize. And at the same time, they have been able to reflect with often painful honesty on their own institutions and practices, unflinchingly chastising their flaws but also passionately defending their virtues.

How does this help answer the question of what the humanities are for? In addition to the often cited advantages of honed verbal skills, enhanced knowledge of other cultures and languages and augmented analytic abilities — all of which are explicitly sought by employers in an era of neo-liberal globalization —there is something both more intangible and more powerful at stake. Instead of serving us bland comfort food for the mind, leaving us unchanged by what we’ve experienced, the humanities can compel us to reflect on the premises we take too quickly for granted and the values we uncritically accept. The ruthless self-scrutiny of the last generation’s humanist disciplines, mentioned above, is an example of precisely this function. Although we may well conclude that there is much to conserve and transmit to posterity in our cultural heritage, there can also be an additional benefit on a personal level, which is captured in a letter Franz Kafka once wrote to a friend: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good god, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves … A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” The humanities, in short, help us read such remarkable books — and listen to such music, view such art and so on — with the attention and care they demand, and in so doing, they may well shatter the ice that has formed within our minds and souls. The humanities may not always help us make a prosperous living, although, to be sure, in many cases they do.  But what is more important, they can serve us mightily in our struggle to lead a meaningful life.

Martin Jay is a professor of history at UC Berkeley.

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My best friend’s parents both went to Cal. Some of her earliest memories are of the Campanile and the Cal Band performances, and she was very excited to come visit me when I started here. When we were preparing to graduate from high school, her parents really wanted her to follow in their footsteps and stay in California. She got into Cal, but she wanted to do something different from what they had done.

She got her letter from Georgetown University and took off across the country. I remember watching the whole process of her applications, her worrying and her excitement as acceptance letters came in. We were the same age, and I should have been doing the same thing. She and I are different in a lot of ways, and having two Cal alumni for parents is just one of the ways in which she had an advantage. After she left for Washington, D.C., I went to work and did what most people do when they don’t go to college. I learned the value of lost time the hard way, by punching a clock and sacrificing potential for survival. I did not figure out how to follow her for almost 10 years.

When I was new at UC Berkeley, I was really hoping to meet people who came from a life like I had come from. I remembered the statistics from CalSO about the percentage of students who received financial aid, and I thought I’d meet lots of people who had grown up poor. I thought about everyone who had stood when we were asked to stand if we were first-generation college students. Despite my expectations, many of the people I meet at Cal are like my best friend: Their parents went to college or at least stressed it to them early in life.

Sometime in the last year, I’ve stopped comparing my journey to theirs. I stopped wondering how things might have been different if I had been born to somebody else. What matters is what I’ve got and what I do with it now, because I can’t go back. Although my parents aren’t college graduates, I’ve inherited other gifts.

My mom is very smart. She is ultrasupportive of my siblings and me pursuing our educations. As I’ve grown up and learned and changed, she’s been my biggest fan. She understands the value of education — that’s not an issue. She can read a stranger’s face perfectly, and she makes business deals and handles money in a take-no-prisoners way that she’s always referred to as “Jesse James-ing.” She’s cunning and quick and very creative when she chooses to be. She did not, however, go to college. She dropped out of high school, like me. Unlike me, she immediately got pregnant and had three kids whom she had to support and raise almost totally on her own. The path of her life has not yet led back to school.

The difference of growing up poor and raised by people who didn’t go to college is one that is hard to communicate. My friend on Sproul Plaza was told her whole life about college, both as a concept and as a reality. Her parents told stories about it, derived who they are from it and probably expected her and her siblings to go without question. Growing up without those stories and that expectation is a disadvantage, no question.

However, the almost insurmountable obstacle comes from not knowing the process. Parents who did not go to college don’t know when you should take the SAT or how to fill out applications. They may or may not be willing or able to provide their kids with the information on income that they’ll need to apply for both admission and aid. They are far less likely to arrange campus field trips or even talk about where and how the process began. Counselors are overtaxed and underpaid in high schools all over the country.

So we fly blind.

Shortly after I went back to school, I brought home a friend for dinner. My mom is the most generous and welcoming of hostesses, and she was no less so to my new friend. Over dinner, my friend and I got into a spirited discussion on what we thought was the best treatment of the Arthurian legend in literature: “Le Morte d’Arthur” or “Idylls of the King.” We went back and forth for a long time, shutting everyone else out of the conversation. When she could get a word in, my mom interjected: “I like Ziggy — sometimes Calvin and Hobbes, but Ziggy is the best.” I realized then that keeping my mom in the conversation was not just something I needed to do to be polite. I was moving to a foreign country called Academia, and if I forgot how to speak the language we used at home, I’d lose her, too. Bridging the gap within my family between education levels isn’t easy. For people who come to UC Berkeley broke, sometimes the steepest learning curve is outside the classroom.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

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As our conditions of learning and living have been degraded, university administrators have increasingly shut their eyes to the realities of our lives and have walled themselves off from public scrutiny and input at critical moments — such as when they have decided to impose tuition increases or pension reductions on workers and students. Students, workers and community members have been able to hold some of these changes at bay, realizing a multi-year tuition freeze and ending caps on life-saving health care. They’ve done so by working together across sectoral lines and building broad-based movements for public education that have forced university administrators to take seriously the needs and desires of those who currently work and study on UC campuses as well as those who hope to in the future.

While UC students and workers have relatively few formal mechanisms through which to advance their interests or to shape administrators’ actions, various groups of workers on campus do have rights to bargain collectively with the university over their conditions of labor — rights won through past generations’ concerted unionization campaigns and strikes. At the moment, a number of campus unions are bargaining with the university, and health service workers represented by AFSCME 3299 recently went on strike in defense of quality patient care for the students and communities they serve. Another campus union, the UC Student-Workers Union, which represents more than 12,000 graduate student instructors, readers and undergraduate tutors throughout the UC system, is entering into bargaining this summer. These are the primary face-to-face academics whom students regularly encounter — particularly in their first few years. We are members of the bargaining team for the UC Student-Workers Union.

Last month, our union made public a list of contract demands that we think will improve the quality and accessibility of public education at the university. We are committed to realizing smaller class sizes for UC students, to ensuring that student workers who perform much of the primary teaching labor at the university are fairly compensated and to challenging the governor’s and regents’ rush to impose online-based education on our universities. Following the release of our demands, university management is legally required to hold a forum at which they respond to our demands. At this forum, members of the public are given the opportunity to comment on our upcoming negotiations. In order to encourage broad participation by affected students, teachers, workers and community members, our union offered to co-host a public forum at the UCLA campus in early June. Management refused our offer and instead tentatively scheduled a forum on the afternoon of June 6 at one of their large office complexes in downtown Oakland — away from any UC campus. Then, last week, management rescheduled the forum for a day earlier.

It seems that management would rather host a forum removed from UC students and workers — perhaps because they’d prefer that their proposals not be subjected to much public scrutiny. But given that the future possibilities of high school students around the state are shaped by what happens today at the university, that parents of UC students care about the quality of their children’s education and that people all over the state have demonstrated their commitment to quality, accessible public education for all, we are confident that no matter where UC administrators hold public forums or whether they switch dates at the last minute, people in surrounding communities will take time to share their views about what students and workers in California need from their public universities. For this reason, members of our union are coordinating with Bay Area community groups, teachers, high school and college students, campus workers, faculty members and others affected by UC administrators’ decisions to hold a people’s public forum on June 6 to demand that administrators listen to all those who are concerned with the state of public education in California. Together, we will shape a positive vision for the future of public education in our state and continue to help build broad-based movements to make this vision a reality.

If you would like to join us during the afternoon of June 6, please contact uc.student.worker.contract@gmail.com. We will gather at noon at Oscar Grant (Frank Ogawa) Plaza, march to Snow Park by 1 p.m. and hold the people’s public forum at the UCOP-Kaiser building in downtown Oakland. We hope you will consider joining us.

Amanda Armstrong is a graduate student instructor at UC Berkeley. Jessica Conte is a graduate student instructor at UC Irvine. Cody Trojan is a graduate student instructor at UC Los Angeles.

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ERIC CRAYPO/Courtesy

What do you get when you combine the efforts of the chief medical officer of the Beijing Olympics, a former professional soccer player turned Chancellor’s Public Scholar, a former Paralympic athlete, a coach from the Bay Area Outreach and Recreations Program, the director of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship program, a Haas scholar, an intern for Fitness for All and a handful of students having fun in the most extraordinary of circumstances?

Meet Cal’s Goalball. Having only finished its first semester, the sport is already making national news.

“UC Berkeley is the first university in America to offer Goalball as an academic class for credit,” Matt Grigorieff, the architect behind the project, proudly tells us. “And that is fantastic.”

The class is a two-unit supplement to “American Sport, Culture and Education,” a class that fulfills the campuswide AC requirement. Each session is split into half theory and half playtime. After students discuss their readings, they engage in a rousing game at the RSF’s Blue Gym, a massive indoor court on the third floor. The game pits two teams of three against each other, and players score by throwing  balls into the opposing team’s goal.

The catch?

All players wear blindfolds.

Playing on a different team

For junior Alec Sundly, D-1 center midfielder for Cal’s men’s soccer team, maintaining leadership on his side of the court is paramount for victory. He nods at his two teammates, completely confident in their game. But this is the first time either player has ever been to the RSF (to say nothing of the fact that neither teammate has never played a sport before in his life). Sundly grins. He whispers a quick strategy, stretches his legs and then leaps into position. He can already feel the win.

The two teams wait for the command from the referee: “Eyeshades down. Quiet, please! Center! Play!”

In a rapid exchange, the bell-containing ball is tossed from one end of the court. Players duck, jump and dive into each other in an effort to protect the goal. Special tape on the floor helps the crawling players to “feel” where they are in the absence of their eyesight. If the team succeeds in blocking a score, possession changes.

Sweat glistens. Lungs expand. In the final score, Sundly’s team edges a narrow triumph of seven points to six. For a varsity Golden Bear, Sundly has a particularly even game. He scores two points! His two teammates, self-described as “athletically challenged,” divide the five. On this court, the playing field is equal.

Fitness for all

Ann Kwong is the internal president for the Disabled Students Union. Unlike Sundly, Kwong is visually impaired and travels around with a cane. Before Berkeley, athletics were the last thing on her mind.

“When I was a child, I never really understood the fascination my sighted peers had with sports,” she admits. “I didn’t feel like I was able to connect with them.”

All of this changed in the past year. Members in the Disabled Student’s Union expressed discontent with being unable to participate in sports teams. From able-bodied basketball to football, disabled students readily acknowledged the lack of athletic opportunities available to them. Then came the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program’s support in establishing Goalball — Berkeley style.

Goalball player makes a pass. Notice the eyeshades.

Grigorieff and Jessica Adams, both sighted Cal seniors, paired up to organize the discussion part of the class. Teaming with two BORP Goalball coaches, Brandon Young (nonsighted) and Jonathan Newman (sighted), the four have worked to create the most inclusive athletics class in the university’s history. With the guidance of Professor Derek Van Rheenen, the class has attracted students of all abilities.

Kwong beams, “Now, I realize sports are fun. It’s something you have to experience firsthand to understand — the feeling of belonging when you are part of the team or the sense of achievement when you are able to score a goal.” Her voice softening, she adds, “That’s something that rarely happens in reality.”

Fighting stereotypes

Grigorieff incorporates scholarly texts regarding issues within the disabled community in regular discussion. Textbook problems, he has come to realize, are alive in society today.

“A lot of times people, with visual disabilities are sort of seen by the sighted world as a totally helpless person, but that’s not true,” he argues.

Adams adds, “We learned that society tends to polarize nonsightedness. They think it’s black and white. They don’t realize that blindness is a spectrum.”

According to Professor Rod Michalko of the University of Toronto, 97 percent of people with visual impairment can still see. A person is defined as legally blind if he or she cannot recognize the biggest E on an eye chart from 20 feet away.  In this manner, not passing the test really can change a person’s life, as nonsighted individuals undergo such marginalization. One function of Goalball is to address this social stigma head-on. By including input from the entire sight spectrum, participants in the class gain thought-provoking perspectives.

“I feel like it’s the nonsighted students who are teaching the class,” Adams says. “They teach the class by the way they relate to the text.”

Sundly agrees. Input from his nonsighted classmates has challenged his preconceptions and inspired him.

“You build more respect of what (nonsighted people) have to go through on a daily basis, (and) what society is doing is being too judgmental. You learn in playing Goalball that we are all human beings and that we are always equal.”

The feeling of equality is echoed by almost everyone. Kwong says, “I feel like the No. 1 thing I appreciate is everyone is on an equal playing field. I can participate in the same activity with the same ability. Instead focusing on “the strongest” or “the fastest,” goal ball (emphasizes) skills, practice and teamwork – which is a new way to think about sports.”

Sundly’s team blocking a shot

This is not to say that Goalball is not physically demanding. Nonsighted senior Erik Elveback warns against the misconception that Goalball is “easy.” Teammates must coordinate movements through foot-tapping to prevent players from going out of bounds or wandering off the court.

“This sport is very difficult for everybody that plays because for most students, they have never used hearing as the main method of playing a sport,” Adams explains.

Winning off and on the court

Sundly translates skills from Goalball into new techniques to improve his soccer performance. As a midfielder, he lists blocking farther and throwing harder as valuable interdisciplinary lessons Goalball has taught him. Because the ball used in Goalball is heavier than a soccer ball, Sundly has benefited from weight training in a completely unexpected manner. As for foot-tapping, Sundly points out that Goalball has taught him to position himself better on the soccer field as well as give clearer communication to teammates.

Soccer skills were not the only gifts players gained from Goalball. For Young, it is the scale of bonding that has been “mind-altering.” On the last day of practice, Goalball players celebrated with cheers and heartwarming hugs.

Newman points out that the camaraderie is a sign of the game’s success.

He explains, “What I really enjoyed about this class is how much they all liked Goalball. Every single one of them.”

“It creates new friendships that students hadn’t imagined before,” Adams expresses. “I think its true for everybody in the class.”

The future

For Grigorieff, Goalball is set to thrive. His far-reaching plans aim to help everybody involved.

Matt Grigorieff, the architect behind Goalball, with a player

“Some people are not included in sports, and that’s something we at UC Berkeley want to change,” he says. “I think Berkeley can lead the way to promote inclusion. Goalball is not only a class but could be a club team for the campus. One day, (it could) turn into a varsity sport with scholarships. We want inclusion at the highest level in varsity sports.”

In the fall semester, Goalball will be available for everyone to play. Many players this semester were so touched that they have indicated they are returning to grow a community.

“I love Goalball and I want to continue assisting it — I believe in the cause,” Adams says, firmly. Then, with a laugh, she admits: “Goalball is pretty tight.”

To see Goalball in action, check out the video here.

Image sources: Eric Craypo, courtesy.

Contact Alex Mabanta at amabanta@dailycal.org.

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Hundreds of Berkeley High School students skipped their last class Thursday, instead deciding to hold their own rally in support of the March 1 Day of Action just hours before local teachers gathered at the same spot.

Before joining the Berkeley Federation of Teachers demonstration at 4:30 p.m., high school students danced, sang and signed murals in front of Berkeley Unified School District’s administrative offices on 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way to show their support for public education while also speaking out against recurrent budget cuts at the state level.

Though the teachers’ union has held similar rallies in the last five years, the specific purpose of this year’s rally was to urge parents and faculty to sign petitions against Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed budget cuts, as well as push for the passage of the Millionaires Tax, which would tax the wealthiest Californians to fund the state’s schools and colleges.

“As a senior and child of poverty, I know how important it is to fight against budget cuts,” said Berkeley High School senior Jasmine Hain. “Especially the juniors and seniors feel the urgency … the fight is absolutely not over.”

Between 700 and 800 students were at the rally at its peak around 3 p.m., according to estimates from Berkeley Police Department.

Hain said the Occupy BHS club only had 10 members three weeks ago but has expanded due to the efforts of students coordinating with members of Occupy Cal at UC Berkeley. Hain said that after going class to class to make presentations, many more teachers and students members began expressing their support.

Though sympathetic to the cause, high school principal Pasquale Scuderi said in a message sent to the high school community earlier in the week that students who skipped class would be given an unexcused absence.

John Becker, an English teacher at the high school, was one of many of the district’s staff and administrators who came out to the afternoon rally and spoke, along with others including the district’s superintendent Bill Huyett and board director Beatriz Leyva-Cutler.

“I think (the students) could have joined us afterwards, but it is important for their voice to be heard,” Leyva-Cutler said.

Weiru Fang covers Berkeley communities.

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A former NBA basketball player and Cal alumnus, Johnson appeared as the weekly guest speaker for Political Science 179 — a class focusing on special topics in politics — taught by campus political science lecturer Alan Ross.

Johnson, who attended UC Berkeley on a basketball scholarship, recounted an incident his freshman year that made him realize how “woefully unprepared for college” he was. Not knowing what the word “euphemism” meant, it took Johnson just one confused class period to make the connection between socioeconomic status and quality of public education.

“I made a commitment that, if I was able to graduate from college and become successful, I would go back to my community and prepare those kids for college,” he said.

After retiring from the NBA and getting his bachelor’s degree in political science from campus, Johnson founded St. HOPE Academy — a nonprofit community development corporation that operates seven charter schools.

In a state with around 300,000 teachers and “no way to measure who the good and bad teachers are,” Johnson said he would like to see an increase in accountability in the public education system and that he values programs like AVID — a program that helps student prepare for college — and Teach for America.

As a way to measure teachers and reward those who are doing well, Johnson proposed paying the most successful teachers more money in exchange for having them train the least successful teachers.

Johnson also expressed support for having a “portfolio of schools” from which students could choose the high school best suited to their needs. Johnson said students should be able to select whether they want to go to schools with themed programs, charter schools and schools with the AVID program.

“I (feel) a responsibility to speak up for the destitute, the poor, the people who don’t have a voice,” he said.

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Levy Yun/Staff

Members of the UC Berkeley community were called to action at Tuesday’s forum on social inequality and social opportunity, urged by the panel of speakers to advocate for changes to state legislation that will make education more accessible.

The first of four events in a series called the “Campus Forum on the Future of Public Universities,” centered around the inequities that exist in California’s public education system — lack of consistent quality, lack of cooperation between the community colleges and four-year universities and lack of funding that drives up prices and limits access to students in the lower and middle socioeconomic classes.

The approximately 200 students, faculty and staff members at the forum heard from featured speakers Angela Glover Blackwell, Robert Reich and Peter Schrag, all of whom have expertise in the area of social policy and express interest in improving access to education as a key to closing the gap of wealth in both California and the rest of the United States.

“We’re in a vicious cycle where the wealthy and the upper-middle class have seceded to private institutions, leaving less political support for public goods and services,” said Reich, former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and UC Berkeley public policy professor.

According to Schrag, former editor and columnist for the Sacramento Bee and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies, California was once the model for the rest of the country, but it is now 46th in the nation in money spent per student, 50th in students per teacher, 49th in students per librarian, 49th in students per counselor and 46th in students per administrator.

While statewide advocacy campaigns like UC for California and campus-based demonstrations have failed to prevent the state’s disinvestment in public higher education — $650 million in cuts have been enacted this year alone — Reich said the public must express its displeasure to the legislators that represent it.

“Regardless of the quality of people you’ve got in government, nothing good happens unless people outside (of government) are mobilized, organized and energized to push the people inside (of government) to do the right thing,” Reich said. “An excellent university like this will not lose its excellence. It’ll lose its economic diversity, and that’s what would be the greatest shame.”

Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, said people should organize around the issue of academic equality and not rush out to an occupation like Occupy Wall Street without a specific goal.

“It takes a movement to do what’s right under these circumstances,” Blackwell said. “I want to see us as a nation make sure we’re providing support for low-income students; I want to see universities demonstrate that they’re making that commitment and I also want to see the public rising up and saying, ‘We want to have a fully equal society.’”

Reich presented a radical solution — students would not pay anything while attending school but would pay a percentage of their income after they graduate and begin full-time work — that would ensure all students admitted to the UC could afford it.

Schrag presented a simpler solution.

“People need to find politicians not afraid of using the T-word,” Schrag said. “Tax the rich.”

The forum was sponsored by the Council of Deans, campus Academic Senate, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Administration, Graduate Assembly and Berkeley Staff Assembly.

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