In early November, UC President Janet Napolitano announced a 5 percent per year tuition increase plan to be voted on Wednesday’s UC Regents meeting. As the Chair of the Graduate Student Association, I am writing to express our opposition to the tuition increases and highlight how tuition increases will affect UC Davis’s graduate and professional students.

Graduate and professional students are a lynchpin of education and research at UC Davis, and our output is one of the foundations of excellence at our campus. We are teaching assistants, associate instructors, graduate student researchers and contributors of our education. We substantially advance the humanities, arts, sciences and engineering during our educational tenure at UC Davis and often translate those advancements into social and economic gain for the state of California.

Graduate and professional students are financially supported with both tuition remissions and stipends through a wide variety of funding sources: university employment as teaching assistants, associate instructors, graduate student researchers, research grants, endowments and private sources which include student loans. These sources will be hard-pressed to maintain the current number of supported students if they must also absorb tuition increases. While graduate students see more support from the previously mentioned funding sources, the majority of professional students fund their own education and already go tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Further increasing professional student fees is not fair and equitable to our future doctors, veterinarians, nurses, teachers, lawyers and professionals. It is not within our best interests as an institution to price graduate and professional education out of the reach of qualified applicants, especially when demand for these graduates outstrips supply in our society.

Increasing tuition will affect recruitment and retention of our outstanding graduate and professional students by reducing the amount of competitive offers our departments and programs make to new students or through not having enough funding to support our current students. It will also impact quality of teaching and research at our institution. By reducing the number of students we can support, we reduce the number of teaching assistants, associate instructors and graduate student researchers who are integral to advancing excellence at UC Davis. The outcomes when current funding sources reduce support are graduate and professional students who are pushed into more private funding sources — or pushed out of a graduate degree when it becomes too costly. When we exclude students based on ability to pay for an education, we diminish UC Davis’s ability to achieve excellence.

By increasing tuition, the University of California creates an access barrier to higher education. We cannot build a diverse and inclusive institution by excluding certain groups based on their ability to pay or their perception that a UC education is out of their reach. We need diverse viewpoints to drive education within the classroom and advancement of the arts, humanities, science and engineering.

I enjoin all stakeholders in this issue to find an alternative that does not inequitably place the burden on students — who, without this education, will not be able to be part of the equation that drives social and economic change within our state.

Sincerely,

Erica Vonasek

Chair, UC Davis Graduate Student Association

Ph.D Candidate

Biological Systems Engineering

As proven by the sudden abundance of scraggly beards and hair just long enough to pull into man buns, No-Shave November is officially in full swing. In addition to raising cancer awareness, this month-long event has another side effect. Hair – whether it’s on your head, your face, or your body – can be as much of a fashion statement as the clothes you choose to wear. On the other hand, if individuals choose to defy the gender binary and either keep or remove hair from places that it’s generally expected to be, there may be other implications that are largely related to socially constructed gender stereotypes.

If women participate in No-Shave November, for example, it can become less of a fashion statement and more of a social commentary about how rigid and confining gender roles can be. The same goes for men who choose to remove hair from places like their legs, armpits, etc. The choice to go against the norm when it comes to one’s own body hair – whether or not it’s out of a conscious effort to make any kind of statement at all – is an inherent refusal to participate in a heteronormative stereotype that largely influences our society.

It has somehow become commonplace, at least in North America, to relate the absence of hair to femininity and the appearance of hair to masculinity. But it’s important to address the idea that this is just a socially constructed concept. Women are not born wishing for smooth, hairless bodies, nor are men born dreaming of the ability to grow full beards or hairy chests. Rather, these notions only come about after years of exposure to all kinds of normative influences, which make up a kind of collective dialogue about gender roles. The problem with this is that many people might participate in this dialogue without necessarily being critical of why that is.

For example, most girls I know, myself included, began shaving their legs and armpits around the age of 12, which is way before I even knew what the hell a gender role was. So was I removing my body hair because I had some kind of ingrained hatred for it? Not at all — it was more about doing what was expected of me. All of my friends were doing it, the women in magazines were doing it, even my mom was doing it — so why wouldn’t I? That’s a question that may not be asked very frequently. As a result of that, expectations about gender are misconstrued as natural, validating the stereotypes that make up gender roles.

In the case of body hair, these stereotypes revolve around the idea of perfectly hairless (and perfectly altered) bodies for women and affluently hairy bodies for men. I’ve talked to girls who say they shave because it feels “cleaner” and boys who say they would never shave because hair feels “manlier,” which seems to indicate a pretty big divergence between the ways women and men perceive their own bodies. While women typically view their hair as a negative, dirty aspect of themselves, men view theirs as a positive, desirable one — and if either gender chooses to transgress that perspective, it becomes scandalous.

That stigma around hairy women and hairless men implies obligations for both genders to maintain. Furthermore, it creates a dichotomous perception of gender, which is extremely constricting. So this No-Shave November, I urge you to participate with a mindset that accepts all types of gender expression — hairy or not.

To reach CHELSEA SPILLER, email her at ctspiller@ucdavis.edu.

There is something healthy about having a crush on a teacher. For me, it was first grade, forlornly asking Ms. L why we hadn’t recited the Pledge of Allegiance. As a 6-year-old patriot, I could give less of a damn about the pledge, and more about being a good-boy for her. I love teachers. Unlike Calvin, I would hate to see them on the streets. Professional teaching comes with a plethora of responsibility, and current trends in education make it harder for teachers to do their job. This column will deal mainly with teaching at the primary and secondary education levels. It is easiest to identify the root causes of common issues teachers face at this level.

Teachers complain a lot, which may help explain why I feel so akin to them. But unlike me, they have good reason. With growing class sizes, tech-driven curriculum and increasing pressure to abide by state standards, teachers find constraints in a field that can be much more creative. And beyond these societal phenomena, teachers’ lives are made tougher through underappreciation, frequent criticism, and, perhaps to the greatest extent, kids. Teaching is not easy, and students like Calvin don’t make it better.

But let’s start with society, because I’m a big thinker. Class sizes become a problem when schools are understaffed and over-enrolled. Given a reduced capacity for teacher-student engagement and an increased workload, educators will naturally defer efficiency in teaching and getting out the material. From the student side, this is incredibly boring. And while learning shouldn’t always be fun, we have created a situation in which fun is becoming impossible.

The solution may be in having students work in groups that the teacher could manage more easily. These groups might not even be assigned with any specific task other than helping each other beyond the classroom and having a system to report difficulties to an educator. When crowds get large, communication is stifled. Smaller groups would help prevent this.

The ubiquity of technology has also created a new dilemma for teachers. In a profession where style can widely vary, using new technology can be seen more as a risk. For our purposes, we will not talk about websites that deal with administrative concerns (think SmartSite), but online assignments, quizzes and tests. The immediate concern is of distraction: The internet certainly takes away from the continuity required to absorb information. But the real effect of technology will be seen in form — specifically, the book versus internet argument. Teachers often use a given textbook because it generally reflects a form and pace that they would like to follow throughout the year. For the most part, developing a curriculum around internet sources would likely be more disorganized and less focused on traditional material. This may be why, in my experience, teachers only recommend the internet for articles, scholarly and not.

The internet is a great tool for learning, but we need to develop a structure around it. As it continues to increase in popularity, this structure must not take the form of a simple e-book, which can be tedious to use. Rather, there should be a system of interaction. Perhaps a rough guideline of topics that link to specific resources the teacher would like to cover. This allows educators freedom to teach what they want, without having to depend on a school-issued text. This may be the best solution as society increases its dependence on web-based technology.

The most poignant effect of this type of interaction would be its ability to go against the largely negative culture of standardized testing: curricula would be unique to each teacher, and assessing students would shift drastically. This might result in teachers receiving even more complaints of their unfairness in grading. But the student ultimately benefits when a teacher is more engaged with the material. As much as I can appreciate a teacher, the worst ones in my experience have been those who seem largely indifferent to their subjects.

It almost goes without saying that teachers are not paid nearly enough for the job they do. It’s startling at times to think that investment in an educated population (a signal of a strong economy) is given so little credence among policymakers. Part of the issue, at least on a popular scale, is that it can be hard to see how education helps in the long term.

This is why I’m often surprised by Calvin. He simultaneously criticizes others, but in his own vanity, is too blind to see that potential solutions lay in the streets, where he has put the teacher. Oh, I love him.

To share your childhood teacher fantasies, you can reach ELI FLESCH at ekflesch@ucdavis.edu or tweet him @eliflesch.