"So Reagan Has Won"

"New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Stiglitz’s tag-team partner on the economic left, chimed in this week with a related argument. When the ideologues of austerity piously refuse to invest in jobs, infrastructure or education while wrapping themselves in the mantle of fiscal responsibility, he wrote, they’re actually inflicting irreparable long-term damage on the economy. Krugman’s focus in that column was primarily on job creation, but his lesson clearly applies to Wiseman’s depiction of a legendary state university that has long been considered on the same level as Harvard and Oxford and MIT and Stanford but that also, within living memory, charged no tuition at all to California high school graduates who qualified for admission.
"Appropriately enough, it was Ronald Reagan who did away with all that. The onetime B-movie icon ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley,' and I can’t help wondering whether Wiseman’s title is a sly reference to that famous slogan. Reagan of course meant the Free Speech Movement and organized student opposition to the Vietnam War, which was still widely popular among the public. Once he took office in Sacramento (after defeating Democratic incumbent Pat Brown, a godfather of the University of California system and the father of current Gov. Jerry Brown), Reagan demanded that the UC regents start charging student fees for the first time. (The word 'tuition' was initially avoided.) He also proposed cutting the university budget by 10 percent across the board–a sequester, as we might say today–and suggested that the regents could make up the shortfall by selling off the rare books collection in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.
"No Gutenberg Bibles or first-edition Shakespeare folios were auctioned off to pay the bills at Berkeley, but that sounds an awful lot like Tea Party anti-government rhetoric circa 2013, doesn’t it?"

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon connects Frederick Wiseman's new documentary, At Berkeley, to decades of neoliberalism.