From CalMatters Capitol reporter Alexei Koseff:

As campus tensions escalate over student encampments to protest the war in Gaza — with canceled classes, violent clashes and mass arrests in recent days — Republican leaders in the California Legislature are calling for the state to use its upcoming budget process to punish demonstrators who they say have gone too far.

Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones of San Diego and Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher of Chico announced Thursday that they would push to strip state financial aid from protesters found to have committed violent or criminal acts or violated other students’ rights.

They did not offer a formal proposal with details, but Jones and Gallagher said at a press conference that students who assault, harass and intimidate their peers or physically block them from attending class — as reportedly happened to Jewish students at UCLA this week — did not deserve to benefit from the Cal Grant program.

• Jones: “You have to earn those. We ought to be rewarding the students that want to use those Cal Grants to go to school, get educated and become productive members of society.”

Jones and Gallagher focused their ire on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, whose aggressive tactics they said have left Jewish students feeling unsafe and completely derailed some campuses, including Cal Poly Humboldt, which closed for the rest of the semester after protestors occupied an academic and administrative building. They largely sidestepped the attack earlier this week by pro-Israeli counter-demonstrators on the encampment at UCLA, which was dismantled by police early Thursday.

The Republican leaders blamed university administrators across the state for not shutting down encampments sooner and Gov. Gavin Newsom for not intervening. They said they would also seek to withhold funding in the upcoming budget from University of California and California State University campuses that did not respond adequately to the protests — perhaps an amount equal to state resources spent on providing law enforcement and cleaning up damage.

• Gallagher: “It’s outrageous and it’s unacceptable that we’ve allowed this chaos to ensue over weeks. There does need to be accountability. Some people need to be fired.”

Any budget plans will require support from the Legislature’s Democratic majority, which did not immediately jump on board with Jones and Gallagher’s ideas.

Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, an Encino Democrat who leads the Assembly budget committee and serves as co-chairperson of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, said he did not want to comment until he saw their proposals.

Read more in the story.

The GOP event followed a night of unrest on the UCLA campus. In the wee hours Thursday, police tore down the encampment and arrested more than 200 protesters. CalMatters’ Sergio Olmos was there and recorded video that showed police forming a perimeter at the edges of the encampment, firing “impact munitions” into crowds and pushing demonstrators with batons. 

In other related developments Thursday:

Assemblymember Rick Zbur, whose district includes UCLA, called for a federal civil rights investigation into demonstrators possibly “engaging in dangerous, discriminatory practices.”

• Zbur, in the letter: “I am alarmed and extraordinarily disappointed that the University has allowed the situation to deteriorate with seemingly little regard for Jewish and Israeli-American students’ personal safety and their civil rights as enrolled students.”

President Joe Biden addressed the campus protests, saying from the White House that while peaceful protest is part of America’s tradition, violence, disruption of classes and commencements and hate speech are not. 

• Biden: “There is a right to protest. But there is not a right to cause chaos.”

From CalMatters housing reporter Ben Christopher:

With rents high, home prices higher and an increasing number of state residents just struggling to get by or pining for Reno, what should California do to address its housing crisis?

Let’s ask California voters.

In a paper published this week, researchers from UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara and Tulane University asked urban and suburban voters nationwide which housing policies they prefer.

The results:

• Voters are big fans of policies that cap rents and property taxes, subsidize first-time homebuyers, restrict Wall Street investors from buying homes and boost the production of housing set aside for lower income households.
• Less popular: Policies that promote more market-rate housing

At CalMatters’ request, Chris Elmendorf, one of the paper’s authors, looked specifically at the Californians’ responses. There didn’t seem to be much of a difference. Price controls, affordable housing and buyer subsidies are political winners. Boosting luxury apartments, not so much.

The results are a bit of a bummer for California’s Yes In My Backyard activists — the people who have been aggressively pushing state policymakers to allow more housing of all kinds to build our way out of the affordability crisis. That includes the authors of the paper, themselves. 

• The paper: Given ever-rising rents and prices, “one might think these circumstances would fan the flames of YIMBYism and spread it nationwide. Our results paint a rather more sobering picture.”

The survey results also offer a near mirror image of the response you’d likely get if you put these questions to a panel of economists and other housing experts. The ivory tower generally treats rent control, corporate landlord bans and requirements on developers to set aside units for lower income residents with ambivalence, if not skepticism.

But there may be a political lesson in these results. Since 2017, state lawmakers have passed a slew of bills aimed at incentivizing more housing production. Many have added requirements to set aside some units for lower income residents. 

• Elmendorf: “If what you’re trying to do is get more housing built, they’re a kind of sweetener that, at least by this evidence, makes requirements that local governments approve a lot more denser housing much more popular.”

If all those bills are going to end the state’s affordability crisis, they have a long way to go. The Newsom administration has given itself the goal of building 2.5 million new homes between 2022 and 2030. That works out to 312,500 every year.

According to new demographic data published by the state on Tuesday, California’s overall housing stock grew at a pace higher than the recent average last year: It added 115,933 units.

Come November, California voters may get a chance to approve a new financial literacy requirement for high school students. But allowing the public to decide what students learn in school has some education experts worried, writes CalMatters K-12 education reporter Carolyn Jones.

California’s Secretary of State is expected in June to decide whether the California Personal Finance Act is eligible for the Nov. 5 ballot. The proposal would add a one-semester financial literacy class to high school graduation requirements, starting with the class of 2030. Students would learn about paying for college, taxes, budgeting, retirement accounts and more. 

Most curriculum in California is developed by the Instructional Quality Commission, which is made up of teachers and subject matter professionals. But sometimes the Legislature steps in — the state’s new ethnic studies and media literacy graduation requirements, for example. A current bill would also add computer science courses.

While the proposed initiative has no formal opposition so far, Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California, argues that it could set a dangerous precedent. Hypothetically, if voters or legislators required religious or anti-LGBTQ courses, for instance, the state’s education department could get tangled in costly and lengthy lawsuits. 

• Polikoff: “Most voters don’t know much about education policy, and having them decide what can be taught in schools is a bad idea.”

Learn more about the financial literacy ballot initiative in Carolyn’s story.

At a recent legislative hearing, Democratic Sen. Caroline Menjivar of Van Nuys got teary about potential budget cuts to a specific program. Find out which one from Wendy Fry of CalMatters’ California Divide team.