Mayor wants college students to pay for police state.

Budget shortfalls be damned! Our police state will continue to grow and we'll get college students to pay for it! 

Morgantown, W.Va. - Upset by the riotous behavior that erupted in Morgantown Saturday night after yet another Mountaineers victory, Mayor Jim Manilla said he is considering levying a new student fee to increase the city's first responder ranks.

Speaking with a reporter hours after hundreds of revelers set fires and attacked police officers, Manilla said efforts to tone down the post-game party atmosphere have failed. 
"Whatever good has been done in the past has been all wiped out," he said. "We're getting close to an injury or loss of life.
"I know we need more police officers," Manilla said. "It's pretty obvious at this point."  Manilla said he has been thinking about bringing the idea of a "student impact fee" to Morgantown City Council. If a $20 fee is assessed for each WVU student each semester, he said enough money would be raised to pay for extra public employees.
With an enrollment of nearly 30,000, that would equal about $1.2 million in revenue for the city annually. http://dailymail.com/policebrfs/201210070118 
It's all just a smoke screen to pay for added police presence. 
  In March 2009 the Virginia Fusion Center issued a terrorism threat assessment that described the state’s universities and colleges as “nodes for radicalization” and characterized the “diversity” surrounding a Virginia military base and the state’s “historically black” colleges as possible threats.
http://www.examiner.com/article/fusion-centers-invading-your-privacy-at-your-expense

Fusion center declares nation's oldest universities possible terror threat.
RAW STORY has published the entirety of the 215 page report, 2009 Virginia Threat Assessment (pdf.)

From page 17:

A wide variety of terror or extremist groups have links to [a highlighted area of Virginia]. This area not only has a diverse population due to the strong military presence, but it is also the site of several universities.

While most of these universities are considered urban, two are designated as a Historically Black Colleges and Universities, while Regent University is a private, evangelical Christian institution. While the majority of individuals associated with educational institutions do not engage in activities of interest to the VFC, it is important to note that University-based students groups are recognized as a radicalization node for almost every type of extremist group.

Though the report singles out "historically black colleges" early on, it also contains an extensive list of peaceful American and International activist groups from nearly all cross-sections of political engagement, placing them side-by-side with groups that have long been known for resorting to violence.

"If we are to believe this exaggerated threat assessment, Virginia's learning and religious institutions must be hotbeds of terrorist activity,' said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, in an advisory. "This document and its authors have displayed a fundamental disregard for our constitutional rights of free expression and association. Unfortunately, it's not the first time we've seen such an indifference to these basic rights from local fusion centers. Congress must take the necessary steps to institute real and thorough oversight mechanisms at fusion centers before we reach a point where we are all considered potential suspects."

“There is an appalling lack of oversight at these fusion centers and they are becoming – as the ACLU has repeatedly warned – a breeding ground for overzealous police intelligence activities,” said Michael German, ACLU Policy Counsel and former FBI Agent. “The Virginia threat assessment isn’t just disturbing for encouraging police to treat education and religious practices with suspicion, it’s bad law enforcement. Lawmakers from all levels of government need to enact legislation to protect against these spying activities that threaten our democracy while doing nothing to improve security.”
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Virginia_terror_assessment_targets_enormous_crosssection_0406.html  
http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fusion-center-declares-nation-s-oldest-universities-possible-terrorist-threat 

How higher education in the US was destroyed in 5 basic steps.

Anna Victoria, writing in Pluck Magazine , discusses this issue in a review of Christopher Newfield’s book, Unmaking the Public University : “In 1971, Lewis Powell (before assuming his post as a Supreme Court Justice) authored a memo, now known as the Powell Memorandum, and sent it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The title of the memo was “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” and in it he called on corporate America to take an increased role in shaping politics, law, and education in the United States.” How would they do that? One, by increased lobbying and pressure on legislators to change their priorities. “Funding for public universities comes from, as the term suggests, the state and federal government. Yet starting in the early 1980s, shifting state priorities forced public universities to increasingly rely on other sources of revenue. For example, in the University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011.” That’s a loss of more than a third of its public funding. But why this shift in priorities? U.C. Berkeley English professor Christopher Newfield, in his new book Unmaking the Public University posits that conservative elites have worked to defund higher education explicitly because of its function in creating a more empowered, democratic, and multiracial middle class. His theory is one that blames explicit cultural concern, not financial woes, for the current decreases in funding. He cites the fact that California public universities were forced to reject 300,000 applicants because of lack of funding. Newfield explains that much of the motive behind conservative advocacy for defunding of public education is racial, pro-corporate and anti-protest in nature.
Again, from Anna Victoria:

“The ultimate objective, as outlined in the (Lewis Powell) memo, was to purge respectable institutions such as the media, arts, sciences, as well as college campus themselves of left-wing thoughts. At the time, college campuses were seen as 'springboards for dissent,' as Newfield terms it, and were therefore viewed as publicly funded sources of opposition to the interests of the establishment. While it is impossible to know the extent to which this memo influenced the conservative political strategy over the coming decades, it is extraordinary to see how far the principles outlined in his memo have been adopted.”

Another argument used to attack the humanities was “…their so-called promotion of anti-establishment sentiment. Gradually, these arguments translated into real -- and often deep -- cuts into the budgets of state university systems,” especially in those most undesirable areas that the establishment found to run counter to their ability to control the population’s thoughts and behavior. The idea of “manufactured consent” should be talked about here – because if you remove the classes and the disciplines that are the strongest in their ability to develop higher level intellectual rigor, the result is a more easily manipulated citizenry, less capable of deep interrogation and investigation of the establishment “message.”  
 http://www.alternet.org/how-higher-education-us-was-destroyed-5-basic-steps?page=0%2C1