LETTERS

RE: ‘HOW A LANDMARK GREEN NEW DEAL VICTORY WAS WON’

Thanks, Dave [Anderson]. A major victory by DSA-NY, the New York Renews Coalition, which led the successful four-year campaign to pass the 2019 New York Climate Law (CLCPA), is a more comprehensive model for a statewide Green New Deal, vital while Congress is gridlocked. NY Renews is a broad coalition of some 360 organizations, including major unions and environmental groups, but also people of color community groups, faith and social justice organizations, including several [Democratic Socialists of America] chapters.

The Build Public Renewables Act was part of a legislative package NY Renews pushed this year, with mixed results. The DSA-led Public Power NY campaign did most of the work to get BPRA through the legislative gauntlet.

NYR’s principles of Unity (nyrenews.org/partners) are implicitly socialist, [in my opinion]. For example:

“2. We recognize climate change represents a serious threat to all and especially to vulnerable people such as workers, people of color, seniors, youth, and the poor. Governments at all levels need to act now because the warming planet puts prosperity out of reach for far too many.

3. We understand that unchecked corporate power jeopardizes a sustainable future. We support democratic and public control of the energy and finance sectors so that private interests never compromise the health and wellbeing of workers and our communities.

4. We can address both the climate crisis and the inequality crisis with the same set of policies. As the impacts of climate change mount, the crises of inequality and democracy will continue to grow.”

— Mark Schaeffer / Albany, NY

‘BOUTIQUE’ STUDENT HOUSING

[The property at] 2700 Baseline is a proposed “boutique” student housing project at the corner of 27th Way and Moorhead. Just what constitutes “boutique” student housing I discovered in attending a meeting at such a facility owned by the publicly traded American Campus Solutions.

In the lobby was a bank of Apple computers, multiple TV screens, and ping pong and pool tables. A swimming pool was behind the building. The meeting was intended to sway opinion in Martin Acres that the project would be a community asset in creating a park along Moorhead from Skunk Creek through the defunct car wash and Nick’s Auto. Boulder Gas, Grease Monkey, the abandoned Wendy’s and Baseline Liquor would be replaced by a student dormitory with the amenities of a private club. Traffic flow for the businesses on 27th Way and Moorhead currently is surprisingly fluid with multiple entrances and exits, but access and parking look to be a nightmare for the new building.

Having spent my sophomore year in the Lazy J Motel on Euclid Avenue and subsequent years in a succession of rooms in private homes on the Hill, the revelation of such a cocooned campus life was startling. Student housing in Boulder is a competitive and lucrative business with “in locus parentis” carried to an extreme. The site is zoned for neighborhood friendly retail and Martin Acres is designated single family residential, but our landlord-friendly City Council and libertarian Governor Jared Polis, in promoting unbridled development and density, are poised to run roughshod over such distinctions.

Resource conservation and affordable housing are of no concern in this project. Displacing four long-standing businesses for luxury housing and a small patch of greenery does nothing positive for the neighborhood.

— Robert Porath / Boulder

RE: ‘RESTORING THE LAND CAN FEEL LIKE A LOT OF FUN’

I loved reading Dr. Rick Knight’s recent article suggesting that ecological restoration could be a new form of outdoor recreation (Writers on the Range, “Restoring the land can feel like a lot of fun,” June 29, 2023). As the executive director of Wildlands Restoration Volunteers (WRV) — a Colorado nonprofit that engages volunteers in land restoration — I am obviously biased, but I would endorse the idea that this work can be a lot of fun!

At WRV, we say we have a dual mission. It’s succinctly described by our tagline: Healing the Land, Building Community. While Dr. Knight focused on the first part of that (thanks to Dr. Knight for acknowledging our work), I’d like to emphasize the importance of the second.

As social creatures, humans need community for plenty of reasons. In fact, recent research concludes that social connections are as basic as our need for food, water and shelter. But social connections also give life meaning and make it fun. Volunteers on WRV projects build relationships with the land, with themselves and with one another. It’s this last example that makes ecological restoration fun; you don’t do it alone but with others who care about the land. If you care about the land and like to have fun outdoors, join a WRV project this summer: wlrv.org

We trust you’ll have a good time!

— Katherine Postelli, Wildlands Restoration Volunteers / Longmont

Office concluded that less than 1% of student loan recipients defrauded creditors. No, this glut of debt was the result of orchestrated predation, not individual moral turpitude.

To appreciate the long game, travel further back to 1967. The justelected governor of California, Ronald Reagan, declared the state had “no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” He had campaigned against “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates” on college campuses as well as the professors and administrators who didn’t crack down on student dissent.

The purpose of universities started to change with Reagan’s speech, according to Dan Berrett in a 2015 piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education. The following week, editors of the Los Angeles Times warned that Reagan’s budget cuts and “tampering” with higher education threatened to create second-rate institutions.

“If a university is not a place where intellectual curiosity is to be encouraged, and subsidized,” the editorial board wrote, “then it is nothing.”

Berrett says Reagan “crystalized what has since become conventional wisdom about college. In the early 1970s, nearly three-quarters of freshmen said it was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. About a third felt the same about being very well off financially. Now those fractions have flipped. ... A farmer reading the classics or an industrial worker quoting Shakespeare was at one time an honorable character. Today’s news stories lament bartenders with chemistry degrees.”

After World War II, higher education became a public good as many more people were able to go to college. Universities had low or no tuition. Some 30 years later in California, Reagan was determined to end tuition-free higher education with help from his education adviser Roger A. Freeman.

A week before Reagan’s reelection as governor of California in 1970, the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Freeman saying, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

Political economist Julian Jacobs, writing in Jacobin, argues that young people today face a precarious future. There’s a large gap between the earnings of a high school educated worker and a worker with a bachelor’s degree. Increasingly, a college degree is necessary.

But you have to go into debt.

“The total tuition burden is far greater than available scholarship and grant funding,” Jacobs writes. “So as a simple question of resources, it is impossible for most students to avoid taking on debt when they attend college.”

Things are going to get much worse if there isn’t drastic change. Jacobs explains:

“...[T]uition prices have increased by over 500% since the 1980s, significantly outpacing income growth. For a majority of students, this increase in tuition has also outpaced growth in their returns on college degrees. And this manifests in a rising inability to pay off loans among each successive class of students. The result is that too many students are currently paying too much for programs that offer them far too little.”

In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) reintroduced their College for All Act, which would make community college and public vocational schools tuition-free for all students, while making any public college and university free for students from single-parent households making less than $125,000 or couples making less than $250,000.

The bill would increase federal funding to make tuition free for most students at universities that serve non-white groups, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

It would be paid for by taxing Wall Street speculators.

This is a step toward justice.

This opinion does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.