Aristotle once said, “Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
Most people are driven to take action to achieve some sort of sensual pleasure. As humans, it is our goal to be prosperous in the mind, health and experience. But we become so focused on an individual enterprise we fail to place our successes in perspective. The first assumption of economics is humans act rationally, but herein lays the fallacy. There are far too many parameters to our decisions to know what rational choice even is.
Students tend to be idealists. In our perfect world, there is no war, there is no crime, there is no debate.
As a society on the other hand, we tend to be dualistic. In the home we have a husband and wife, in politics we have liberal and conservative, and in the marketplace we have the buyer and the seller. Neither one of these are perfect, but then again there is no way to quantify the differences in cultures. But when it comes to students facing an imperfect situation, we almost always shy away from the issue.
A lot has been made about the protests at University of California campuses during the past several years. The University of California system slowly developed a budget shortfall of $1.2 billion. As a result, system officials increased fees 32 percent anticipating almost an additional $505 million in revenue.
Predictably, students were outraged. Across the state, students organized mass protests.
Walkouts and sleep-ins became commonplace as police were forced to intervene. Two weeks ago, on Nov. 20, students at the UC Berkeley campus took over Wheeler Hall, preventing several hundred students from attending class. But the real story came when 185 police officers came in full riot gear only to batter protesting students with batons and pepper spray.
Across the country, students are trying to understand what the fee hikes in California will mean to them, and I will address it here as well. While one theory indicates the UC case is an isolated instance, another states massive fee increases will be commonplace. The truth is that the consequences of UC’s fee increases are entirely unpredictable.
California administrators applied simple economics to their dilemma, meeting supply with demand. The textbook tells us that eager students would justify the increasing fees, but not surprisingly the students acted — what they believed was — rationally. University officials had to have expected students to take to the streets and were ready for the pressure.
But they failed to let the students’ protest simply dissolve. Students have short attention spans; one complaint only lasts as long as it takes for the next subject to emerge. No, Berkeley ordered the protests come to a halt, forcing the alleged “police brutality” and further strengthening the students’ sympathies.
As a general rule, tuition and fee increases are completely necessary. Universities, public and private, have become a multi-billion dollar business. Tuition and fees have increased 180 percent at state universities since 1982.
Fortunately, here in Texas we don’t face a billion-dollar budget deficit. A few weeks ago, the University of Texas Tuition Advisory Committee recommended an 8 percent tuition increase during the next two years. At Tech, with rising enrollment and research, we have no reason to believe tuition and fees will increase more than 5 percent per year during the next several years.
The University of California faced a difficult situation and made a difficult decision. Everything that happened after that was, like most things, just chaos. The UC system will live through this episode. Some students may be forced out of school, some officials may even lose their jobs. But for now, we can look at this episode as another example of the randomness of human response.
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