Dear Voter Registration and Mobilization Co-chairs:
First, thank you for volunteering
to coordinate this activity on your campus. Your
participation and that of your fellow faculty
members could well be the key to the future of
our community college funding. Second, please
don’t be put off by the number of attachments!
They represent our attempt to do as much of the
work for you as we can. The attachments constitute
the materials you need for an immediate launch
of our statewide
voter registration and student mobilization project.
They are:
(7) An HTML Web page containing
contact information for all county Registrars
of Voters. If your e-mail software won’t
open this page, the following link will take you
to it on the Web: http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_d.htm.
Both flyers have been vetted
by the state Chancellor’s Office. The one
for in-class distribution is politically “neutral,”
so can be distributed in class at the same time
that faculty urge students to register. The other
flyer advocates a specific course of political
action, so must be distributed outside of any
space and time involving professional contact
with students.
Please familiarize yourself with all the material,
as it may contain points
that will help you persuade your colleagues—should
any of them be
reluctant—to participate. Now, here’s
the larger picture within which this
drive is taking place.
Of course, we all want students to vote for the
facilities bond measure,
Proposition 47, as well as for any local facilities
bonds, and we would
guess that many faculty have already been urging
students to register for
this reason. The deadline for registration to
vote in the November 5th
election is October 21st.
Beyond this November, however, there continues
to lie the need to seek a
fundamental restructuring of our California Community
College funding, in
order that our students might at long last be
treated equitably with regard
to their educational opportunities. For this purpose,
registration by
October 21st and participation in November is
not so critical. What matters,
as the flyer points out, is that students register
and then contact their
legislators.
From the state level, we are engaged—with
the Chancellor’s Office and under
the direction of the Board of Governors—in
an analysis of “The Real Costs of
Community College Education,” through which
we intend to show that, if we
are to fulfill our multiple missions with first-rate
quality, we will
require substantially increased funding.
Thus our overall strategy is two-pronged: (1)
From the state level, we
present legislators with the “bill”
for a quality community college
education; (2) from every quarter of the state,
student voters tell their
legislators that they are aware of the unfair
pattern of funding that
discriminates against their opportunities, and
demand that the legislators
do something about it. We are hoping that this
will produce the political
will in Sacramento to make the requisite changes.
By the way, it is important to point out in all
of this that we are NOT
seeking a “redistribution of wealth”
among the public higher education
segments. That is, we are not suggesting that
the Legislature treat this as
a zero-sum game and reduce funding for the other
segments in order to
increase ours. We are not at all interested in
getting into a competition
for dollars with the other segments. Indeed, their
funding may be inadequate
as well. Our focus is on the real needs of our
system, and on motivating our
legislators and the Governor, and hence the people
of California, to meet
those needs.
A project such as this, on this sort of scale,
has never been attempted
before in this state. Thank you for participating
in this first-ever effort
to produce the funding needed to provide the resources
for a top-quality
education for our students.
