I met Gabriela MaciasFootnote ² a few months ago in an undergraduate class in history that I teach to prospective high school teachers. A diminutive middle-aged woman, Gabriela was watchful in class and seemed indifferent to my attempts to reach through her stony silences. But a couple of weeks into the class, I made a breakthrough. We had been discussing the role of passion in education. I had started the discussion by insisting that unless teachers feel a real sense of commitment to the student body and feel passionate about empowering students with knowledge and ideas, they have no business being in the classroom. In retrospect, my statements seemed a little extreme, but it is hard to entice students to enter the teaching profession by the prospect of tests, more state-administered tests, and even more standardized examinations! When Gabriela started speaking, the class fell silent. But it was not her eloquence that silenced us; it was her accent. Her accent was impenetrable! I am troubled by this public admission and even considered omitting this sentence from this essay. As an immigrant from India, I find people often have trouble understanding the stubborn Indian cadences that litter my superficially Americanized speech. But that day we all strained to understand Gabriela.

This is Los Angeles, gateway to the world, a place that every nationality on the planet calls home. We are used to diversity; in fact, we represent the new cohort of global cities that are postdiverse in their very inattention to traditional notions of race and ethnicity as markers of identity. And even within the twenty-three-campus-strong California State University (CSU) system, the Los Angeles campus has a particularly multiethnic population, an exciting frontier land where new social dispositions and political alliances are formed around transnational clusters of ideas and ideologies. Our classrooms are social laboratories where people from different parts of the world try to understand one another's accents, and more importantly one another's values and visions of the good life. I, an immigrant from India, teach Russian and Soviet history to an audience inordinately curious about anarchism, capitalism, Marxism, globalization, and the politics of culture and subjectivity. My graduate class meetings routinely go beyond the prescribed four-hour time limit, and my students, hungry for learning and passionate about ideas, grapple with difficult monographs and dense literary texts with enviable energy and enthusiasm.

Gabriela realized that her audience was having trouble understanding her, but before she could reach back into silence, Brandon Pozefsky, a young Anglo student, reached over and said something softly in Spanish. I still do not know what it was he said, but it prevented Gabriela from relapsing into her customary silence. She started speaking more slowly and more distinctly, and we realized that we were hearing the authentic voice of a passionate teacher: one who knew firsthand the harsh reality of young lives in the barrios of Los Angeles but nonetheless believed that education could level the playing field somewhat and give the youngsters a few escape routes. Gabriela seemed to have made a mental breakthrough that day, and subsequently she participated actively in class. She voiced her opinions freely and gave outstanding presentations on lesson plans. Over time, Gabriela's command of the English language improved dramatically, and we soon realized that she used her accent as a shield to protect herself from possible rejection. But midway into the quarter, Gabriela disappeared. She ignored my repeated phone messages as well as my e-mails, and I had almost crossed her off my list. One day I found her at my office door, in tears.

Gabriela had fled El Salvador during the height of the Civil War after a paramilitary group shot her husband in front of her eyes. She showed me a left hand that had been disfigured by a stray bullet. But in her version of the story, she was one of the lucky ones who successfully made the trek to El Norte, with her two small children in tow. Hers was a classic American story of immigration: of hope, of optimism, and of the promise of moving up into the middle class. While cleaning houses, Gabriela managed to educate her children and herself. She received the equivalent of a high school diploma and married a middle-class professional. It had taken Gabriela all her natural courage to enroll in the Teaching Credential Program in History at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), crossing the invisible but powerful line that separates the manual workers from the knowledge workers. But the recession struck, her husband's salary was significantly reduced, and he had recently been diagnosed with a painful and debilitating disease.

Gabriela has dropped out of school and gone back to doing odd jobs to make ends meet while caring for her ill husband. She is just another statistic in the recession that is devastating California. Although official unemployment statistics are at 12.8 percent, unofficially many working-class communities in Los Angeles are seeing unemployment numbers as high as twenty percent. Contrary to economic trends, educational institutions typically thrive when the economy is battered. Many people use this opportunity to polish their résumés, and some workers even take out loans to get a college education, hoping that their investment will pay off when the economy returns to normal. The CSU system, since its creation in the 1950s, has served as an efficient conduit of social mobility in California. Enterprising students from working-class homes have used the CSU schools to escape from agricultural farms, garment factories, and small retail stores where most of their family members continue to labor. A large majority of our students are the first members in their family to receive a college education. Also, many of the students at our university are nontraditional students who choose to return to school after years in the workforce. CSULA offers people a second chance in life, and with its open-enrollment policy and modest fees, it has huge appeal among the diverse populations of East Los Angeles. Our students are mature and complex individuals who bring a wealth of experience and hard-won wisdom into our classrooms. They are committed to serving the working-class neighborhoods they come from and have the necessary cultural intelligence to work effectively as nurses, schoolteachers, and social workers in these disenfranchised communities. As a faculty, we teach educational skills, but it is our students who teach us the real meaning of history, social mobility, and historical progress.

People such as Gabriela are being hit twice by the recession. Not only are jobs being lost in record numbers, but because of the budget crisis, the California legislature has also significantly decreased funding for the CSU and the University of California systems.Footnote ³ Constant fee increases, as high as thirty-two percent in this year alone, are pushing vulnerable sections of our student body out of the educational system. We are being asked to adopt the model of private institutions: tightening admission standards, raising our fees, and thereby significantly reducing the number of students that we have traditionally educated. There is an enrollment freeze for the 2009–2010 academic year, and many educational programs in the arts, humanities, and languages are being slated for eradication on many California campuses. As a house cleaner, Gabriela pays a modest amount in state taxes, but as a creative and committed teacher, she would be a substantial asset to the state of California.

Frederick Cooper is a playwright, a journalist, and an educator in Los Angeles. A native resident of Compton, he feels strongly about investing in this beleaguered community and has taken a series of jobs in both the Los Angeles Unified School District and the new charter schools operating there. Frederick has chosen to empower underprivileged students, one child at a time. He uses old-fashioned words such as honesty, discipline, and self-respect and insists that students must respect themselves first and take responsibility for their own actions. While Frederick is teaching, he is also discovering his own identity and history. As an African American, Frederick is deeply interested in the history of Africa and is dismayed by the fact that the continent figures so infrequently in our collective consciousness. Frederick realizes that even African American students express little interest in Africa and often sport the stereotypical conceptions about the “backwardness” of this vast continent.

Frederick is on a one-man mission to correct this ignorance in schools; at the same time, he is engaged in an exciting intellectual enterprise. He is researching the politics of the creation of African studies programs in American universities. What impelled the founding fathers of this discipline to construct the subject matter in particular ways? How have the internal politics of the field shaped historical questions and research agendas? How have the achievements of the Civil Rights era affected this field? Frederick's first essay, based on his copious research, was published in a peer-reviewed student journal at our university. In recognition of his exceptional scholarly potential, Frederick was recently admitted into a doctoral program in history at a prestigious state university. I hope that Frederick will come back to teach in the CSU system someday, but will we have a job for him? If we become a professional school, will we still hire academics trained in the humanities? What is the material value of a department of Pan-African Studies, and can we accurately calculate the long-term impact of these programs in the currency of the present? Scholars in the humanities are sustained by curiosity and the pleasures of intellectual exchange. But we also have a shared commitment to social justice. We teach students how to think critically, to probe beneath the superficial and the facile, and to discern the workings of power in myriad social and political locations. Students of the humanities sustain our collective cultural heritage, our philosophical experiments, and our memories of an equitable society.

Between 2010 and 2011, the CSU system will educate 40,000 fewer students than it has in the previous years, and deeper cuts are on the horizon! We need to tighten academic standards, we need better-educated teachers, and in this new, globalized economy we need skilled workers who can compete with their counterparts in China and Singapore. We need to ask more from our students, but we can only do so within the open borders of the university. In an age when corporations such as Microsoft are trying to transform their knowledge factories into universities so as to unlock the creative money-making potential of dreamers and scholars, why is the California legislature dismantling our educational system?

And why is the public so conspicuously silent? In the past, California has had many farsighted leaders, and the California Master Plan of 1960 promised to make higher education available to all. The UC, CSU, and community college systems that were created in this state were the most advanced and the most democratic in the country. The California system of higher education offered a comprehensive model to the rest of the world. But funding for education has been cut significantly, hurting both the economy and the aspirations of its citizens. While higher education can never be a universal right in the state of California, affordable higher education should be a privilege and a reward for intellectually motivated and hard-working students. If students in the secondary school level take up President Obama's challenge to “Race to the Top” will they upon graduation find that the doors to affordable universities and community colleges are closed and shuttered?