Students plan to rally against privatization

Students will rally today at noon at the Memorial Union (MU) to speak about “blowing the whistle” on privatization and to address the alleged ongoing privatization of the University of California.

Students for a Democratic UC encourage students to call the whistleblowing hotline for all UC campuses today to report on what they call the various abuses and violations of the UC Regents and administrators.

“As with all actions of this kind, awareness is always the first goal, and then, hopefully, inspiration to act — we want the students and people of California to realize that public education is in the process of being destroyed, and unless we resist this transformation, we will soon be living in a society without even decent institutions of public higher learning to enrich our lives and educate our citizens,” said Robin Marie Averbeck, U.S. history graduate student and member of Students for a Democratic UC.

“If we do not seriously reverse track, we are going to end up with a system of higher education public only in name — because fees will be so high that more and more students will be unable to afford to attend, lest they want to go into even more outrageous debt than many currently are in. By taking this action, we are refusing to be commodified.”

According to the UC whistleblowing page, the hotline service allows students to report various incidents, including economic waste or misuse of university resources, conflicts of interest, public health and safety, retaliation, discrimination or harassment and more.

Brooke Converse, University of California Office of the President media specialist, said the University has no comment at this time.

The UC whistleblowing hotline is (800) 403-4744. Students report confidentially and can choose to report anonymously.

STEPHANIE B. NGUYEN can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.