Tag Archives: berkeley

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

The Sessions Gets Under the Skin of Sexual Surrogacy, Slightly

Clever camera angles play down John Hawkes‘ enormous wide honker in the new dramedy The Sessions, hence playing up Hawkes’ resemblance to Robert Downey, Jr., which is of course part of director/writers Ben Lewin‘s game plan. As polio victim Mark O’Brien, who’s down (on a gurney) but not out, Hawkes has a naturalistic game to play and plays it through. We know this is a Hollywood version of naturalism because we never see Hawkes having to go to the bathroom and none of his attendants ever lose their shit at the nice man who’s paralyzed from the neck down.

The sex surrogate chosen to relieve Mark of his virginity is played by Helen Hunt, who got boldly naked for a paralyzed man twenty years ago in The Waterdance and goes considerably futher skin-wise here. We know this is a Hollywood movie because “boldly” means we get to see every inch of Helen Hunt, while we never see John Hawkes below the very top of the groin, hence preserving a time-honored double standard involving the penis as the final taboo. The movie makes warmly comic hay out of the societal fixation on penile vaginal penetration as the one true sex, hence setting up Mark O’Brien’s hangups as well as reinforcing them as long-held societal hangups. But in a movie set in Berkeley, you’d hope for more questioning of authority. Even authority of ideas.

I don’t mean to sound entirely grumpy at this film. Hawkes and and Hunt seem so utterly plausible as implausible people that they deserve all the praise; it’s three for three if you add William H. Macy as a priest who actually makes Catholicism seem warm and non-condemning.

I do recommend O’Brien’s original autobiographical article, which you’ll find here, and which gives a story messier, sadder, and more oddly touching than Lewin’s screenplay. O’Brien confesses his anxieties, his sexual disappointments in body, mind, and spirit–but also his urge to recite Shakespeare to his surrogate.  “Our culture values youth, health, and good looks, along with instant solutions,” he quite rightly writes, “… I fear getting nothing but rejections. But I also fear being accepted and loved. For this latter happens, I will curse myself for all the time and life that I have wasted.” The film could have put some more of that in its pipe to smoke.

As a final aside, I’ll mention that O’Brien died on the Fourth of July, 1999, age 49, after a life and career filled with grunting frustration and poetic insight. His surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, is still alive and practicing, although she’s lucky enough to live in an area where surrogacy is approved of.

Education, News, Politics

Will Control of Tuition Save Washington’s Public Universities?

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"One Way Philosophy" was taken in the University District, by our Flickr pool's Photocoyote.

At long last, Washington State has agreed to relinquish its hold on the tuition purse strings of the state’s five public universities and The Evergreen State College. It was a particularly hard position to defend as state funding of the schools has fallen below 50 percent, and the Governor and Legislature want to cut slash higher-education funding by “as much as $642 million over the next two years,” as the Seattle Times reports.

House Bill 1795 passed by wide margins in the House and Senate, and Governor Gregoire has said she’ll sign it. For the next four years, from 2011-12 to 2015-16, the schools will be able to set tuition as they see fit. The bill does require the schools to provide financial aid to lower-income students, paid for out of the tuition increases, and sets a minimum of 4,000 students for the University of Washington’s in-state freshman enrollment, beginning 2012-13. It also allows the schools to price degrees differently, to account for the disparity between the cost of a liberal arts major and any field that will allow you pay back student loans.

Interestingly, the bill has a goal of “increasing the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by Washington’s resident students from the 2009-10 academic year levels by at least six thousand degrees completed or by twenty-seven percent”–per the task force finding that raising tuition rates will yield higher graduation rates.

What does this mean in tuition dollars? Well, the rocket ride continues, despite tuition being forced out of any real relationship with expected income upon graduation. The Times runs the numbers:

Students at the state’s three big universities are already paying almost 30 percent more in tuition than they did in 2008-09 because of state funding cutbacks. If the Senate’s version of the bill passes, students at the UW, Washington State University and Western Washington University will see tuition climb by nearly 35 percent more over the next two years.

For those of you in search of round numbers, that’s UW tuition of $11,567 by 2012. Proponents of tuition increases insist that’s a “bargain,” since in-state tuition at UC Berkeley will set you back $13,360 in 2011-12. If you’re from out of state, be prepared to cough up an extra $22,000 per year.

Now in a purely numbers-to-numbers comparison, there’s not much to carp about then. The University of Washington is a major research university with a worldwide reputation, and there is probably some truth to the notion that you can raise graduation rates by dismissing that tier of students who want “to go to college” because that’s what everyone else in their high school senior class is doing, and the UW is such a great deal.

Conversely, from a numbers-to-numbers comparison, it seems reasonable for lemmings to jump off a cliff together. It is troubling to find ourselves using California as a model, since the state is shorter on funds than even Washington (though for similarly conflicted reasons), and so has turned to cannibalizing its world-renowned higher education sooner.

If you think the recession only spurred on a slow-motion education funding crisis, there’s not much optimism to be gleaned from a four-year plan to test the limits of the affordability of a Bachelor’s degree. To advance that viewpoint, here are a few data points from an article I wrote earlier:

…in the U.S., higher education costs have risen 439 percent since 1982, which is more than medical care (251 percent) and certainly more than the Consumer Price Index (106 percent). In contrast, the median family income rose 107 percent in the same time period, and from 1997 to 2006, the number of students borrowing via Stafford loans grew by 33 percent (total loan dollars doubled).

It’s that last point that’s most disturbing, because the higher education bubble relies upon finding students who can and will buy into our age’s indentured servitude.

So when Washington State agrees to let public universities raise tuition only if some goes to financial aid, that’s more enabling than compassionate. Note the way the aid is even structured: Under the new legislation, a family of four making over $54,500 (70 percent of the median family income) is eligible for aid, yes, but on just 50 percent of that $11,500.

While the schools celebrate their new tuition autonomy, and decide how much more than seven percent per year tuition will rise, it’s worth remembering that median Washington household income for 2010 was projected to fall by $1,000 to $55,379.