Screening of “Starving the Beast”
The Departments of Cinema and Digital Media and Design are among the departments hosting a special screening of Starving the Beast on Thursday, April 13 at 4:30 p.m. The event takes place in Art Annex Room 112 and is free and open to the public.
The screening features filmmaker Steve Mims who will be on hand to answer questions and contribute to a conversation about the crisis facing higher education in the United States.
Starving the Beast tells the story of a potent one-two punch roiling public higher education right now: 35 years of systematic defunding and a well financed market oriented reform effort. It’s the story of a little known and misunderstood ideological fight, the outcome of which will change the future of public higher education.
The film reveals an historic philosophical shift that reframes public higher education as a ‘value proposition’ to be borne by the student as a consumer, rather than an investment in citizens as a ‘public good’. Financial winners and losers emerge in a struggle poised to profoundly change public higher education.
The film vividly illustrates these issues in unfolding dramas at six public research universities: University of Wisconsin, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, Louisiana State University, University of Texas, and Texas A&M.
Steve Mims works as a writer and director in Austin, Texas. His award-winning work includes fiction and non-fiction short and feature-length films, music videos and commercials that have screened internationally in festivals, theatrically and on television.
This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Cinema and Digital Media, French and Italian, Asian American Studies, Design, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and the Davis Faculty Association, the Center for Regional Change, and the Davis Humanities Institute.
