Earlier this year, students protested an unelected board for ignoring their demands for affordable and open education as police looked on.
This scene played out at the UNC Board of Governor’s February meeting at UNC-Charlotte and has now been repeated at a meeting of the Board of Regents of the University of California system.
On both coasts of the U.S., students are advocating for accessible education, and administrators are looking away. To secure a democratized future for higher education, this dynamic must be upended.
At the UC Board of Regents meeting, Board President Janet Napolitano was recorded saying, “We don’t have to listen to this crap” in regard to students protesting proposed tuition hikes.
Though Napolitano later apologized for the remark, her words and the setting in which they occurred, much like the results of the UNC Board of Governor’s meeting, demonstrate how little these unelected bodies are accountable for listening to student voices.
Napolitano and California Gov. Jerry Brown are the only two members of a committee that will recommend changes to the system’s operating budget.
These rallies have shown that, above all, students desire accountability when administrators make decisions that will affect thousands. Unfortunately for students, the results of the meetings described above equally and clearly offer little indication that these boards are listening at all.
