As collateral damage during the current recession, public universities have been forced to increase tuition as state funds have diminished. We’ve seen an extreme version of this in England, where, up until 1997, students paid no tuition at all. Now they are faced with a tripling of the current $4,800 yearly fee. British students are not pleased by this tuition explosion. During November, there were protest marches, sit-ins and building occupations; the largest gathering had participation estimates ranging from 10,000 to 50,000. Even Radcliffe Camera, directly behind the college where, for the past two summers, I’ve stayed with George Mason University students studying at Oxford, was home to 300 protesters who occupied it for a day before police removed them.

Concurrent with the demonstrations in England have been protests at the University of California, where tuition increased 32 percent this year and will increase 8 percent for 2011-2012. When the University of California Board of Regents met in November, it was the second year in a row that student demonstrators, 13 of whom were arrested, disrupted their meetings.