Going around the law

A couple years back, the Republicans and other conservatives in Washington State used the Citizens Initiative process to put an initiative on the ballot that removed all affirmative action requirements from all government hiring and contracts as well as admissions to state schools.

It was titled I-200 and it passed with 64% support.

Last year, as he was vying for the Presidency of the University of Washignton position, since he was leaving the Governor’s Masion, Gary ‘Gridlocke’ Locke tried to get the legislature to tweak I-200 so that the ‘racial quotas in schools’ portion would go away. He desperately wanted the University President position. So much so that he also tried to put in a new tax (on, I believe, gasoline) so as to get the schools, namely the universitites, more money to play around with.

Thankfully, he failed miserably, just as he did in most other things.

But now the University of Washington believes they may have found a way around the lowly citizens voices.

The University of Washington has quietly met with state lawmakers and Gov. Christine Gregoire to talk about becoming more like a private university — and charging much higher tuition.

The idea would be to increase financial aid to students on a sliding scale based on income to help offset a large increase in tuition.

There are skeptics wary of such a move, but university officials pitch it as a kind of Robin Hood plan, where the families of rich students pay more to help subsidize tuition for students from middle- and low-income families.

I guess progressive taxation isn’t enough for the socialists running the UW, they now want to punish those families who make more money by charging them and their children double tuition.

Forget nuking Berkley, nuke the U-Dub.