On Mon 28 Sep 2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
> [I'm becoming convinced that people who think that neoliberalism died from
> the financial crisis should do a serious rethink.]
>
> <http://beta.dailybruin.com/articles/2009/9/28/uc-debates-going-private/>
>
> UC forms commission to discuss going private
> By Ravi Doshi
> Sept. 28, 2009 at 4:42 a.m.
Neoliberalism may or may not have died; it's a very interesting question. But this particular privatization project doesn't seem like evidence of its continued vigor. It has neither a neoliberal motivation nor a neoliberal outcome. The reason the U of Cal system is considering this option is because of the astonishing and chronic California fiscal crisis. They don't have an ideology that state support is bad. Rather they'd love to have it but they're not getting it. And their bruited endpoint, the "Michigan model," is nothing like a neoliberal model. It's a proud public private mishmash. And by "private" they don't mean corporations but individual student tuitions.
Basically what is meant by privatization here is raising tuitions to deal with the fact that the money to subsidize them isn't coming through, and doesn't look like it's going to for the foreseeable future, thanks to the weird supermajority tax law voted in by Proposition 13 back in the Reagan era. This "starving the budget" strategy is literally the dead hand of that era still clutching. 25 years of juggling to avoid its consequences have finally run out in the current crisis and finally they are strangling in its grip.
So I'm not sure it's any kind of a bellwether. But you're certainly right to be looking out for them.
Michael