http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlUC4R-9AfA
info:
VIDEO INFO:
I was at the MJC Budget Cuts meeting last night in Modesto, CA, shooting all of it for an upcoming video, and this happened.
I got full permission from Isaac and his friend, Matthew Obenzo to put this video up.
All night long the Board of Trustees had been shutting down people who needed just a few more seconds to speak, talking over the students/teachers who had heartfelt pleas, so on.
Isaac had had enough of it and decided to exercise his rights, basically.
The budget cuts involved cutting multiple departments entirely including Film, Television, Journalism, Radio, Culinary, Communication Graphics, Dental Assisting, Architecture, Engineering, Photography, and large portions of Art.
Lowenstein (the head of all of this) also had very blatantly not researched many facts on the situation and used shallow means to measure the worthiness of programs, as was demonstrated with facts and hard numbers, multiple times during the event.
Many of the teachers/students were fed up with the fact that the teachers offered to take paycuts, had alternative solutions in mind that apparently would have worked on paper, and yet Lowenstein flat out refused to let the teachers take pay cuts.
For example, thanks to these cuts, the building that the taxpayers paid millions for that houses the Film, Television and Radio departments among others is now going to basically be defunct outside of Theatre.
This means that millions of dollars of media equipment is now useless.
Millions of dollars of communication graphics equipment, as well.
Same goes for culinary equipment, dental assisting equipment, architecture equipment, engineering equipment, and much more, all of which was very new, would not have broken down for years and was very current technology.
A far better solution would have been to sell the majority of the equipment from these disciplines which would have garnered millions of dollars alone, save at least some of the disciplines/classes and not do a full cut, trim down the class size massively and have the teachers go with the paycut they all said they would accept.
Also take into account that the Dental Assisting building is still being built: now, there is no reason to finish it, even more money down the train and a building left unfinished.
All of the above is why the faculty and students are frustrated with the decision to cut all the classes, among other reasons.
Sorry for the shaky camerawork at times, I didn't have a tripod with me and I was trying to get reaction shots of the crowd and Board of Trustees along with Isaac's speech.
Finally, this is in the Education category because the entire back story here is about the classes being cut at a college, as well as many other aspects involving education of college students and how faculty members are being affected as well.
