Restore the Majority

In 2010, Berkeley Common Cause supported a campaign called Restore the Majority, to help deal with ever increasing UC student fees and lower quality of education. We argued that the issue was not the UC Regents or UCBerkeley administrators, or even members of the state legislature, but rather California's broken system of government. This system required that budgets pass by a 2/3 supermajority vote, allowing a conservative 1/3 minority to rule through gridlock and prevent funding to key state programs, including higher education.

To that end, we campaigned on behalf of Prop 25, an initiative on the November 2010 ballot that reduced the requirement for passing a budget to a 50 percent simple majority. We called our campaign, “Restore the Majority, Restore the UC.” We sponsored an informational event, flyered regularly on Sproul Plaza and outside of large lectures, phone banked, and ran a Facebook campaign to reach as many students as possible before election day and ensure that they realized how important a dull issue of government procedure was to their education.

By taking control of spending decisions out of the hands of an entrenched minority that does not support public higher education and putting it back in the hands of the majority, we reinstated democracy in California, and we hope to see that with Prop 25's passage the UC system, the economic engine of our state, will continue to provide a world-class education at prices affordable to all students.