Remaking the University
March 4th At UCLA
By Tobias Higbie
Students, staff, faculty and community members participated in multi-focal protests on the UCLA campus on March 4th. The day's events began at 7:30am with picket lines at several entrances to campus and ended with a late afternoon rally and march that brought K-12 teachers, students and other supporters of public education to the campus. Campus police were well behaved.
A diverse group of students began marching around and through classroom buildings at 11:15am urging fellow students to walk out and join the protest. One protester pulled a sound system strapped to his bike trailer booming out music. By 11:45 this group had grown to about 100 and marched toward the Bruin Plaza rally.
A separate rally organized by MEChA was gathering steam near the undergraduate library. For a moment it looked like the two groups would join together as cheers of solidarity went up. But that was not to be. From what I saw, the MEChA rally drew 100-150 students, and like the other group they marched throughout north campus, finally dispersing around 2pm.
The noon-hour rally on Bruin Plaza drew hundreds of students, union members, lecturers, librarians and a faculty. The Daily Bruin reported the size of the crowd as 300. I would say it was well over 500 at its peak, shrinking as union members headed back to their jobs. In a bizarre twist, two men from the LaRouche organization had set up their literature table in the middle of the plaza before the protest began. During the rally they carried signs depicting President Obama with a Hitler mustache, and there were a few tense moments as others tried to block those signs with Day of Action picket signs.
At the close of the rally, a large group marched up the hill toward main part of campus. They entered the Murphy Administration building without police resistance and went directly to the Chancellor's office. I arrived as the tail end of this march entered Murphy Hall. There were a number of union members, a handful of faculty, and many, many students (Daily Bruin reported 300). After much chanting and a musical/dance performance by students from the World Arts and Cultures program, one of the organizers announced that students were sitting in and had delivered demands to the Chancellor. Participants in the sit-in made themselves comfortable on the floor, and re-branded the women's bathroom in the corridor a "gender neutral" facility.
For the next hour or so, students and staff took turns with the bullhorn. It was a diverse group: Latina/o, Asian, black and white. The overwhelming majority appeared to be students, along with perhaps 10 non-student union members & staff. Some told their personal stories of how the fee hike would hurt them or prevent their younger siblings from attending the UC. Others gave their own political analysis of the budget situation, or spoke about how activism in the past had brought about positive changes on campus (e.g., ethnic studies). Regular updates from protests around the state and country were read to the assembly. Two students arrived with petitions for the California Democracy Act, took a turn at the bullhorn, and then collected signatures. Another student sang a Mexican folk song, receiving much applause. The mood was upbeat but serious. Although this was not billed as a "Teach In," it had the feel of participatory education. I would estimate at least 70 people were present for this part of the Sit In.
At some point, student leaders emerged from the Chancellor's office to report on their meeting with a Vice Chancellor. The report was that the Chancellor would not meet with students, and didn't need to give a reason why (here I'm paraphrasing the students' words).
At 3pm there was a formal Teach-In in front of the undergraduate library, attended by about 150 people. When that ended, many participants marched back over to Murphy Hall to join the Sit In. When I visited Sit In at about 4:30pm there were still at least 50 people sitting down in the corridor, 4 UCPD guarding the door to the chancellor's office, and a few NLG legal observers. As Bob Samuels reports, at 4:30pm a second rally drew K-12 educators to the campus, and they too marched up the hill to join the sit in. However, by this time UCPD were blocking entrance to the building. After some time, according to a Twitter post last night, organizers cleared the Sit-In and joined the rally outside Murphy Hall to end the Day of Action.
UC police were notably low key. No riot gear. No provocative confrontations or weaponry (that I saw). An article in the Daily Bruin quotes the police spokeswoman saying UCPD had met with the NLG in recent days to discuss their protest policies.
Finally, I would say the organizers pulled off a very successful day of protest that dominated the main areas of campus for most of the day, and made the budget crisis very visible. Where September and November seemed like one-time, do-or-die events, March 4 feels like the beginning of something. The students here at UCLA better organized now, even if they are not quite united. They are linking their struggle nationally across college campuses, and out into the community via K-12 teachers and students. These nascent coalitions may be the best way to turn around the politics of privatization at the state and national levels.
More photos of March 4 at UCI
I don't know why it's always referred to as a "sleepy campus," but Neon Tommy has photos and video of protest action yesterday at UCI.
UCI Day Of Action/Photos
Quick wrap up: 12 noon rally at the flagpoles-- very good speakers, articulate, impressive, able to address a wide range of issues from the poverty draft, to undocumented students financial aid, library cut-backs and lay-offs and tuition hikes for graduate students, lay-offs of workers, crippling student loan debt..the admin's false equation of civil disobedience with "racism and incivility." The crowd was angry, motivated and a bit at a loss as to what to do after circling Aldrich Park, trying to encourage by-standers and others to join it. A few leaders at the front led the hundreds onto Campus Avenue, stopping traffic at the footbridge. Some protesters were overturning garbage cans and putting them in the street. At 3 pm, students were back in front of Langson Library, still chanting. That's when I had to go home. This is the culmination of three days of rallies and actions at UCI.
There were only three Irvine PD officers following the stream of protesters through Aldrich Park, but my students told me that police were on campus since 6 am yesterday morning. We are going to be editing together a short film of this week's events, and I will link to it here...The noontime flagpole rally saw well over 1500 in attendance -- the OC Register put the number at 800.
Talking Points for Bollocks-Free Protesting: No On Fees
Some higher education leaders are trying to head off protests by saying high tuition is good for poor folks because it means high financial aid. The San Jose Mercury News greeted Protest Day by finding a few people to sing the praises of high tuition as a Robin Hood "soak the rich" scheme to save low-income students from the injustice of low tuition.
This Kool-Aid is going to take a long time to drain from the bloodstream of the body politic. I had some fun trying when UCOP injected its version during the protests of the 32% fee hikes last November, and here's a quick recap and extension of that analysis:
This Kool-Aid is going to take a long time to drain from the bloodstream of the body politic. I had some fun trying when UCOP injected its version during the protests of the 32% fee hikes last November, and here's a quick recap and extension of that analysis:
- High tuition/high aid isn't a new system: it's the system that got us here (more students working 30 hours a week in school, booming debt etc to meet annual tuition hikes 4x the rate of inflation), and California is trying to catch up.
- High aid never covers the total cost of attendance. Students don't just pay fees. Even UC's numbers show an $11,000 gap for low-income students. A uniquely detailed statistical study found that low-income students have higher grants, and ongoing financial gaps, and higher loans, and larger loans with each additional year in school (Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson, ch 9).
- Fee hikes cause further public funding cuts: doubters should read the Legislative Analyst Office's report, which states that fee revenue means last years cuts need not be reversed.
- Public funding cuts mean poorer universities. Fee hikes replace only 1/3 of lost state money (Regent Gould's estimate), or 2% of current cuts to core operations (my estimate).
- Poorer universities mean lower educational levels. The most exhaustive statistical analysis of 100 years of US educational trends showed that after 1980 US attainment rates grew at half the rate that it had during the previous 30 years - exactly when "high tuition/high aid" took over private universities and many flagship publics (Goldin and Katz, e.g pp. 19, 334).
- Lower educational levels mean lower productivity growth, more inequality, more social problems. Sound familiar? We've already been to the promised land of high tuition and high inequality. Now we're trying to get out.
- The US had the best educated population for the first 3/4ths of the 20th century because its schooling was egalitarian. It rested on public funding, public provision, decentralization, gender neutral, open, and "forgiving" (Goldin and Katz, ch 4). Renewed egalitarianism is the only way out and up.
A Very White Day at the University of California
David Theo Goldberg
University of California, Irvine
Recent events across the University of California—at UCSD, at UC Irvine, at Berkeley, and perhaps even more broadly at UCLA, at Riverside, at Santa Cruz, have been lumped together by top university administrators, even if the events are linked together in ways completely belying the administrative default position. Of late, the Muslim student protest against Israeli Ambassador Oren at UCI has been equated with the racist expressions by three separate groups of students at UCSD.
For the University leaders, protest itself appears to have become incivility, disruptive of dominant institutional arrangements and even at times, for some criminalizable. And free speech is to be upheld only when expressing certain positions but not others, disrupting the peace—a criminal misdemeanor—a characterization of an activity reductively in the case of speaking truth to power but not in invoking power to fix or sustain a regime of truth. And pretty much all of the expressions in question are collapsed as “uncivilized” and “despicable” no matter their very different objects of criticism and genealogies of initiation. Where the university should stand for careful distinction it has opted largely for totalization, where it should be committed to nuance and thoughtful consideration it has opted for a blunt bludgeon, where it should stand against racism and stand up for vigorous free expression and critique it has generally ignored the latter save in moments of unusually public pronunciation (such as the current events at UCSD) and undercut the former.
Instead of addressing the critical issues the University has characteristically bundled them all together, infantilized the criticism and soft-pedaled on the racism, criminalizing protest and reducing racism as if it were the mere expression of epithets rather than a historical medium of power and subordination. In short, the University once again diminishes racisms to the more or less innocent ignorance of youthful indiscretion, individualizing the transgression once again as the work of a bad apple or two. It has shown far more concern for the public relations fall than with the social conditions under which students of color—those who continue to attend UC despite the repeated demonstration of inhospitability—continue to exist. UCI has just thrown limited resources at the questionable PR firm, Alan Hilburg and Co, to ensure its image is not tarnished by these events rather than using the funds to maintain staff in the face of demoralizing budget cuts or to create thoughtful programming around the issues in question. The crisis at the University of California is as much one of leadership as it is of the budget cuts we continue to suffer through.
There are four sets of recent events across UC that are worth distinguishing. The first concerns student protests, including sit-ins, regarding the fee increases and budget cuts. Here Berkeley has been the focus campus even if other campuses have seen significant action too. Second, there is the case of protesting a speech of Israeli Ambassador Oren by members and UCR supporters of the UCI Muslim Students Union, repeatedly disrupting but not preventing him from completing his speech. Third, there is the case of racist expression at UCSD, involving members of a fraternity, a campus supported student radio, the hanging of a noose in the Geisel Library on campus by a senior and at least two of her accomplices, and as recently as yesterday a pillow-case shaped as a KKK hood placed over a statue’s head outside the Library. And fourth--I want to insist that this is a separate consideration—the significant protests among UCSD students, staff, and faculty of the long trajectory of racial conditions on campus. It remains to be seen whether this latter movement—which insists on connecting the campus racism to the budget crisis, linking budgetary transparency with demands for racial equity, public access, and the public good—can sustain itself.
TEXT CONTINUES
University of California, Irvine
Recent events across the University of California—at UCSD, at UC Irvine, at Berkeley, and perhaps even more broadly at UCLA, at Riverside, at Santa Cruz, have been lumped together by top university administrators, even if the events are linked together in ways completely belying the administrative default position. Of late, the Muslim student protest against Israeli Ambassador Oren at UCI has been equated with the racist expressions by three separate groups of students at UCSD.
For the University leaders, protest itself appears to have become incivility, disruptive of dominant institutional arrangements and even at times, for some criminalizable. And free speech is to be upheld only when expressing certain positions but not others, disrupting the peace—a criminal misdemeanor—a characterization of an activity reductively in the case of speaking truth to power but not in invoking power to fix or sustain a regime of truth. And pretty much all of the expressions in question are collapsed as “uncivilized” and “despicable” no matter their very different objects of criticism and genealogies of initiation. Where the university should stand for careful distinction it has opted largely for totalization, where it should be committed to nuance and thoughtful consideration it has opted for a blunt bludgeon, where it should stand against racism and stand up for vigorous free expression and critique it has generally ignored the latter save in moments of unusually public pronunciation (such as the current events at UCSD) and undercut the former.
Instead of addressing the critical issues the University has characteristically bundled them all together, infantilized the criticism and soft-pedaled on the racism, criminalizing protest and reducing racism as if it were the mere expression of epithets rather than a historical medium of power and subordination. In short, the University once again diminishes racisms to the more or less innocent ignorance of youthful indiscretion, individualizing the transgression once again as the work of a bad apple or two. It has shown far more concern for the public relations fall than with the social conditions under which students of color—those who continue to attend UC despite the repeated demonstration of inhospitability—continue to exist. UCI has just thrown limited resources at the questionable PR firm, Alan Hilburg and Co, to ensure its image is not tarnished by these events rather than using the funds to maintain staff in the face of demoralizing budget cuts or to create thoughtful programming around the issues in question. The crisis at the University of California is as much one of leadership as it is of the budget cuts we continue to suffer through.
There are four sets of recent events across UC that are worth distinguishing. The first concerns student protests, including sit-ins, regarding the fee increases and budget cuts. Here Berkeley has been the focus campus even if other campuses have seen significant action too. Second, there is the case of protesting a speech of Israeli Ambassador Oren by members and UCR supporters of the UCI Muslim Students Union, repeatedly disrupting but not preventing him from completing his speech. Third, there is the case of racist expression at UCSD, involving members of a fraternity, a campus supported student radio, the hanging of a noose in the Geisel Library on campus by a senior and at least two of her accomplices, and as recently as yesterday a pillow-case shaped as a KKK hood placed over a statue’s head outside the Library. And fourth--I want to insist that this is a separate consideration—the significant protests among UCSD students, staff, and faculty of the long trajectory of racial conditions on campus. It remains to be seen whether this latter movement—which insists on connecting the campus racism to the budget crisis, linking budgetary transparency with demands for racial equity, public access, and the public good—can sustain itself.
TEXT CONTINUES
The Administration's Time, Place, and Manner
By Michael Meranze
The Official Statement of President Yudof, the Chancellors and the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Academic Senate is a puzzle. The statement refers to “recent events at a few of our campuses” and “condemn[s] all acts of racism, intolerance, and incivility.” “Regardless of how such offences are rationalized, or what free speech rights they purport to express” the statement continues, “the acts we have witnessed are unacceptable.” In part, the President, Chancellors, and Senate Officials are referring to the hanging of a noose at UCSD’s Geisel library following a series of racist actions by students on campus. But given President Yudof’s far more forceful statement on the noose incident it is unclear what the joint statement really contributes. What is added by this collective expression?
I am not privy to the inner workings of the UC leadership of course. But in the movement from Yudof’s “Last night a noose was found hanging from a light fixture in the Geisel Library on the University of California, San Diego campus…Whatever the intent of the authors of this act, it was a despicable expression of racial hatred,” to “recent events at a few of our campuses” the administration introduced a critical vagueness into its official statements and thus threatens to set up a very dangerous and false equivalency between disparate events. One UC spokesman reportedly explained that the more general statement referred to events that “included the recent carving of a swastika on the dorm room door of a Jewish student at UC Davis.” But that “included” only clarifies so much.
Here is the question: in light of President Yudof’s earlier equation of students protesting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UCI with the “Compton Cookout” party at UCSD, is the studied vagueness of the Chancellors’ statement with its equation of “racism, intolerance, and incivility” setting up an equivalency between the act of challenging Ambassador Oren and the leaving of a noose or the carving of a swastika? I was not at the Irvine event so I watched a youtube video of the UCI protest. It was uncomfortable to be sure. But the students each seized a moment to challenge the Ambassador and then were led off by officers. Michael Oren was discomfited to be sure, but it appeared that as much time was used up by hectoring from the podium and the efforts of other audience members to shout down the protesters as was used up by the protesters themselves. And whatever one thinks of the tactic of protesting inside the auditorium, the protesters were involved in political speech. When the 11 finished their supporters left the auditorium; the Ambassador finished his speech. Ambassador Oren was representing his government; this was not a case of a disrupted classroom or lecture hall but a political speech by a state actor. Are we really to consider this event in the same category as carving swastikas or hanging nooses?
If the University Administration is not suggesting that these are equivalent actions it is easy enough to clarify the issue: they merely need to say so. And I hope people insist that they do so. This issue is not one of violence—no one has alleged there was violence involved. It is an issue of the University’s time, place, and manner restrictions. One can get a sense of the stakes through UCI Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s Los Angeles Times opinion piece on the incident. Chemerinsky—a distinguished legal scholar—moves from the truism that under law there are no absolute rights to free speech to an argument that the case of the UCI students raises no difficult free speech issues. In making this claim he points to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ indication in Schenk v. United States that “[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” But let’s unpack this logic. Are we to assume that the student protesters were “shouting fire” or “causing a panic”? Holmes’ famous statement is about statements that have the element of “force” as he put it—not statements that make the audience or speaker uncomfortable. Chemerinsky could respond, of course, that he was only using Holmes to indicate that there are no absolute free speech privileges. But that simply dodges the question. For the question here is the reasonableness of the university’s restrictions and also the equation of incivility in political theater with “shouting fire in a theatre.” The language deployed by the Chancellors or in Dean Chemerinsky’s opinion piece implies that these restrictions and equations are beyond debate and are self-evident. They imply that incivility and causing a panic are the same. It is up to the University leadership to recognize that in their claims to protect open debate they may actually close it off.
To be sure, there are questions concerning the rights and responsibilities of civil disobedience. Again, I am not talking about violence here but about the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience. Traditionally, individuals engaging in civil disobedience have recognized the possibility of arrest and punishment. The point of the civil disobedience, after all, is to call into question the self-evidence of the rules in play. In turn, the duty of those in authority is to truly weigh, what if any damage the act of civil disobedience really caused. Chemerinsky suggests that nothing be done to the protesters at UCI that would be “so severe as to ruin these students' educational careers.” That seems to me to be a minimum—personally I have not seen anything to indicate that they should be punished further.
But, ultimately what is at stake here is not only speech but power. The UCI protesters were members of a minority who protested the actions and claims of a representative of a powerful nation-state. Whoever carved a swastika or hung a noose repeated acts that historically have demeaned and demoralized the vulnerable and less-powerful—and that are known to do so. At issue here is not some mistaken claim to absolute free speech; it is a question of how far speech should be limited. At issue here is not a question of civility or incivility; it is a question of whether the University truly thinks that temporarily challenging a political speaker (not preventing him from speaking) is equivalent to hanging a noose in a racially charged moment or carving a swastika in a student’s dorm room. Put another way: do UCOP, the Chancellors, and the System-wide Academic Senate truly think that the measure of acceptable speech is that it does not challenge or discomfort the powerful? And do they truly think they should punish protesters when it does?
The Official Statement of President Yudof, the Chancellors and the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Academic Senate is a puzzle. The statement refers to “recent events at a few of our campuses” and “condemn[s] all acts of racism, intolerance, and incivility.” “Regardless of how such offences are rationalized, or what free speech rights they purport to express” the statement continues, “the acts we have witnessed are unacceptable.” In part, the President, Chancellors, and Senate Officials are referring to the hanging of a noose at UCSD’s Geisel library following a series of racist actions by students on campus. But given President Yudof’s far more forceful statement on the noose incident it is unclear what the joint statement really contributes. What is added by this collective expression?
I am not privy to the inner workings of the UC leadership of course. But in the movement from Yudof’s “Last night a noose was found hanging from a light fixture in the Geisel Library on the University of California, San Diego campus…Whatever the intent of the authors of this act, it was a despicable expression of racial hatred,” to “recent events at a few of our campuses” the administration introduced a critical vagueness into its official statements and thus threatens to set up a very dangerous and false equivalency between disparate events. One UC spokesman reportedly explained that the more general statement referred to events that “included the recent carving of a swastika on the dorm room door of a Jewish student at UC Davis.” But that “included” only clarifies so much.
Here is the question: in light of President Yudof’s earlier equation of students protesting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UCI with the “Compton Cookout” party at UCSD, is the studied vagueness of the Chancellors’ statement with its equation of “racism, intolerance, and incivility” setting up an equivalency between the act of challenging Ambassador Oren and the leaving of a noose or the carving of a swastika? I was not at the Irvine event so I watched a youtube video of the UCI protest. It was uncomfortable to be sure. But the students each seized a moment to challenge the Ambassador and then were led off by officers. Michael Oren was discomfited to be sure, but it appeared that as much time was used up by hectoring from the podium and the efforts of other audience members to shout down the protesters as was used up by the protesters themselves. And whatever one thinks of the tactic of protesting inside the auditorium, the protesters were involved in political speech. When the 11 finished their supporters left the auditorium; the Ambassador finished his speech. Ambassador Oren was representing his government; this was not a case of a disrupted classroom or lecture hall but a political speech by a state actor. Are we really to consider this event in the same category as carving swastikas or hanging nooses?
If the University Administration is not suggesting that these are equivalent actions it is easy enough to clarify the issue: they merely need to say so. And I hope people insist that they do so. This issue is not one of violence—no one has alleged there was violence involved. It is an issue of the University’s time, place, and manner restrictions. One can get a sense of the stakes through UCI Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s Los Angeles Times opinion piece on the incident. Chemerinsky—a distinguished legal scholar—moves from the truism that under law there are no absolute rights to free speech to an argument that the case of the UCI students raises no difficult free speech issues. In making this claim he points to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ indication in Schenk v. United States that “[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” But let’s unpack this logic. Are we to assume that the student protesters were “shouting fire” or “causing a panic”? Holmes’ famous statement is about statements that have the element of “force” as he put it—not statements that make the audience or speaker uncomfortable. Chemerinsky could respond, of course, that he was only using Holmes to indicate that there are no absolute free speech privileges. But that simply dodges the question. For the question here is the reasonableness of the university’s restrictions and also the equation of incivility in political theater with “shouting fire in a theatre.” The language deployed by the Chancellors or in Dean Chemerinsky’s opinion piece implies that these restrictions and equations are beyond debate and are self-evident. They imply that incivility and causing a panic are the same. It is up to the University leadership to recognize that in their claims to protect open debate they may actually close it off.
To be sure, there are questions concerning the rights and responsibilities of civil disobedience. Again, I am not talking about violence here but about the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience. Traditionally, individuals engaging in civil disobedience have recognized the possibility of arrest and punishment. The point of the civil disobedience, after all, is to call into question the self-evidence of the rules in play. In turn, the duty of those in authority is to truly weigh, what if any damage the act of civil disobedience really caused. Chemerinsky suggests that nothing be done to the protesters at UCI that would be “so severe as to ruin these students' educational careers.” That seems to me to be a minimum—personally I have not seen anything to indicate that they should be punished further.
But, ultimately what is at stake here is not only speech but power. The UCI protesters were members of a minority who protested the actions and claims of a representative of a powerful nation-state. Whoever carved a swastika or hung a noose repeated acts that historically have demeaned and demoralized the vulnerable and less-powerful—and that are known to do so. At issue here is not some mistaken claim to absolute free speech; it is a question of how far speech should be limited. At issue here is not a question of civility or incivility; it is a question of whether the University truly thinks that temporarily challenging a political speaker (not preventing him from speaking) is equivalent to hanging a noose in a racially charged moment or carving a swastika in a student’s dorm room. Put another way: do UCOP, the Chancellors, and the System-wide Academic Senate truly think that the measure of acceptable speech is that it does not challenge or discomfort the powerful? And do they truly think they should punish protesters when it does?
Lesson Number Three, and My Beef with Bob
I've argued that 2009 brought potentially epochal shifts in perception about higher education, both in California and elsewhere. The first two public lessons of the year were that major cuts in funding are bad for educational quality, and that students will not accept the usual (and sadly incomplete) attempt to cover these cuts, which is higher fees.
The third lesson was that good public universities have and will continue to depend on good public funding. Public funding is also extremely efficient. A study at Keep California's Promise showed that "good public funding" will cost the median California taxpayer a total of 32 additional dollars per year. I can't understand why the sheer affordability of a restabilized high-quality public university has not been picked up and broadcast everywhere by UCOP, the Regents, and the Governor's office.
The high cost of not defending public funding has been demonstrated yet again in a new poll by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (ppt version).
In the poll, more people that ever think that a college education is essential for a person to be successful in today's work world. This percentage has nearly doubled to 55% in the last ten years - a truly meteoric rise. On the other hand, the percentage of those who think that "the vast majority of qualified, motivated students have opportunity to attend college" has fallen from 45% to 29% over the same period. Nearly three quarters of Americans believe that high college costs prevent more than just some qualified, motivated students from attending college.
If high tuition is a problem for the public, so is its supposedly redemptive twin, "high aid." Although they realize that there are many aid programs for college students, "more than 8 out of 10 Americans believe that students have to borrow too much to pay for their education."
This puts higher ed up a box canyon that we now know pretty well. College completion is essential, but college is too expensive for most students. At the same time, students and their families are getting tired of borrowing to pay ever rising costs.
Here's where the third lesson comes in: the only way to achieve the "master plan"'s desired combination of high quality and mass access is to restore tax-based public funding to appropriate levels. The urgency of getting there is hard to overstate - prosperity, democracy, racial equality, social integration, energy decarbonization, among other things will all be greatly assisted by reversing the current contraction of higher education completion. But the essential element in all this - public funding - does not currently enjoy majority public support. By a 54 to 40 majority, respondents felt that "colleges could spend less and still maintain a high-quality education."
40% is a lot better than nothing - the glass is almost half-full. So how do we get to 60% or 70% in favor?
The most obvious method is budget transparency, or clear accountability. How else can higher ed convince skeptics that it isn't wasting the money it already has? UCOP has a long way to go on this. State Sen. Leland Yee just got the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to request -- unanimously -- an audit of UC's use of public funds. (Note that this audit is distinct from Sen. Yee's 2009 proposal to reduce UC's constitutional independence from the legislature.) UCOP is likely to stonewall, judging from past practice as well as recent statements, such as CFO Peter Taylor's bizarre claim that the audit CUCFA requested of the fund sources of bond repayments rested on a misinformation campaign that was the enemy of excellence and progress. UC should request legislative funding for the significant additional costs of such an audit, but to refuse it would compound a continuing strategic mistake that I will return to below.
The second way to increase support for public funding is to stop raising privately-paid tuition. The funding model of the last three decades has assumed tuition increases of 2-4x the consumer price index year in year out, rain or shine, boom or bust. Families paying ever-growing tuition for education don't want to pay higher taxes for education. They see that as the kind of "double taxation" that George W. Bush made a household word. At the same time, the general public can't see how an institution that increases its charges 7-10% a year, like UC under the Compact, could possibly be hurting for money. At least two generations of higher ed leaders have helped shaft the case for public funding with their annual recourse to tuition hikes. Foregoing increases in a crisis will be extremely painful, but we have to bite the bullet on this one.
The third way to increase support for public funding is to reconnect university research to burning social needs. The PPHE poll asked a very interesting question that got at the heart of this deficiency.
Many academics have been concerned about the weakening of the university's public mission under financial temptation and threat alike. This poll finds a real effect: by nearly 2:1, respondents think that universities don't have a public mission -- at least one that is stronger than the desire to make money. Why would this 2/3rds of the public ever support give universities, which they see as oriented towards private gain, a bigger piece of hard-earned public funds?
The respondent's answers constitute an indictment of the high-tuition / high-aid model that elite private universities made the American standard, and that public university leaders have sought to imitate. University leaders have spent decades trying to prove their loyalty to the values and practices of the business and donor communities. The result has been real success in private fundraising, but increasingly disastrous costs to public funding. The whole university community is going to have to pull together on this, including the researchers and program heads who have done extremely well with the systems of private side funding on a public infrastructure base.
Here's where we get to my beef with Bob Samuels. In a recent piece on the Huffington Post, Bob calls quite rightly for budgetary transparency, so that "parents, students, and taxpayers should know where their money is actually going, and everyone should be concerned about the quality of undergraduate education." But he frames his discussion with the incorrect statement that "it does not matter how much money these institutions get from the government or even from tuition-paying parents and students; what matters is how universities and colleges spend their money." In fact, both things matter enormously - fair and effective expenditures, but also publicly-supported revenues. I have written to Bob in the past to express my dismay at this binary approach, and I don't understand either the analytical or the tactical basis for continuing it.
The same must be said for the way Bob in this piece sets up teaching and research in opposition to each other. He writes, for example, "by making students and their parents pay for faculty research, the quality of education is reduced; for the simple truth is that the more professors are rewarded for their research, the less they often value teaching." This is an untrue generalization, and in the disciplines I know best there is a "promotion trap" that works in the opposite direction: tenured faculty spend so much time on teaching and university service that their research gets bogged down. Some of the most successful researchers I know are as driven to disseminate and explain their knowledge as they are to create it. The non-teaching public needs to understand that in the real world, discovery and communication, teaching and learning, are two sides of the same coin. Bob is himself a perfect example of this, being a teacher whose pedagogical virtues have been sung to me by some students we have shared, even as he is the author of several scholarly books, including a recent one on new media and critical theory, not to mention his long and impressive series of commentaries on higher education and UC.
The math in Bob's piece should, in my view, be used to make a somewhat different point than he does. He intends it to show that overall undergrads are getting the crumbs from the budgetary table. His methodology of one average salary and class sizes is bound to be misleading, and it is better to use the aggregate instructional expenditure calculations developed by Charles Schwartz that Bob cites. Schwartz's more intricate calculations lead him to the conclusion that "the final cost to UC for undergraduate education (2006-07) is between $6,711 and $7,311 per student," including academic support and related overhead expenditures. This is in contrast to UCOP's statements that instruction costs around $20,000 per year, which is consistent over several years (2006-07, 2007-08 slide 9, 2008-09).
I have several comments here. The first is that the UCOP Budget Office figure of $20,000 is instruction over all types of students, including doctoral candidates, M.B.A. students, and medical students. Medical students receive over $20,000 each in General Fund monies, and in 2008-09 received about $85,000 each in overall instructional expenses. The cost for undergraduates is much lower, and in my experience the Schwartz figures are reasonably close to what is spent on most but not all undergraduates - many receive substantially less, and others more, a topic I leave aside here.
The deeper question is whether this is a bad thing in itself. In fact it is not bad on its face. The money that goes to things other than undergraduate instruction goes toward creating the university as a whole. Undergraduates get many indirect benefits from research, even at professional schools to which they have no direct access. In economics these are called spillovers, and the value received by undergraduates from the university overall exceeds direct and indirect expenditures on instruction. This includes the advantages of being taught by active researchers like Bob Samuels, or helped by student service staff who have also worked in electrical engineering laboratories, and so on.
At the same time, there may be unjust underspending in these figures, just as there certainly is in staff salaries. I have expressed strong support for Bob Samuels, Charlie Schwartz, and other budget commentators for shedding light on what is spent on whom, and for trying to start a rational and open discussion of budgeting, cross-subsidies, and the financial governance of our shared institutions. We all need to continue this effort.
Pursuing justice and effectiveness in expenditures doesn't require telling the public that research at a research university undermines undergraduate education. Poor funding, declining facilities, understaffing, and overwork undermine education. To repeat what I said above, we are all going to have to pull together to give the public a clear explanation of how in reality research, including the cultural kind Bob and I practice, is a crucial public interest.
The third lesson was that good public universities have and will continue to depend on good public funding. Public funding is also extremely efficient. A study at Keep California's Promise showed that "good public funding" will cost the median California taxpayer a total of 32 additional dollars per year. I can't understand why the sheer affordability of a restabilized high-quality public university has not been picked up and broadcast everywhere by UCOP, the Regents, and the Governor's office.
The high cost of not defending public funding has been demonstrated yet again in a new poll by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (ppt version).
In the poll, more people that ever think that a college education is essential for a person to be successful in today's work world. This percentage has nearly doubled to 55% in the last ten years - a truly meteoric rise. On the other hand, the percentage of those who think that "the vast majority of qualified, motivated students have opportunity to attend college" has fallen from 45% to 29% over the same period. Nearly three quarters of Americans believe that high college costs prevent more than just some qualified, motivated students from attending college.
If high tuition is a problem for the public, so is its supposedly redemptive twin, "high aid." Although they realize that there are many aid programs for college students, "more than 8 out of 10 Americans believe that students have to borrow too much to pay for their education."
This puts higher ed up a box canyon that we now know pretty well. College completion is essential, but college is too expensive for most students. At the same time, students and their families are getting tired of borrowing to pay ever rising costs.
Here's where the third lesson comes in: the only way to achieve the "master plan"'s desired combination of high quality and mass access is to restore tax-based public funding to appropriate levels. The urgency of getting there is hard to overstate - prosperity, democracy, racial equality, social integration, energy decarbonization, among other things will all be greatly assisted by reversing the current contraction of higher education completion. But the essential element in all this - public funding - does not currently enjoy majority public support. By a 54 to 40 majority, respondents felt that "colleges could spend less and still maintain a high-quality education."
40% is a lot better than nothing - the glass is almost half-full. So how do we get to 60% or 70% in favor?
The most obvious method is budget transparency, or clear accountability. How else can higher ed convince skeptics that it isn't wasting the money it already has? UCOP has a long way to go on this. State Sen. Leland Yee just got the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to request -- unanimously -- an audit of UC's use of public funds. (Note that this audit is distinct from Sen. Yee's 2009 proposal to reduce UC's constitutional independence from the legislature.) UCOP is likely to stonewall, judging from past practice as well as recent statements, such as CFO Peter Taylor's bizarre claim that the audit CUCFA requested of the fund sources of bond repayments rested on a misinformation campaign that was the enemy of excellence and progress. UC should request legislative funding for the significant additional costs of such an audit, but to refuse it would compound a continuing strategic mistake that I will return to below.
The second way to increase support for public funding is to stop raising privately-paid tuition. The funding model of the last three decades has assumed tuition increases of 2-4x the consumer price index year in year out, rain or shine, boom or bust. Families paying ever-growing tuition for education don't want to pay higher taxes for education. They see that as the kind of "double taxation" that George W. Bush made a household word. At the same time, the general public can't see how an institution that increases its charges 7-10% a year, like UC under the Compact, could possibly be hurting for money. At least two generations of higher ed leaders have helped shaft the case for public funding with their annual recourse to tuition hikes. Foregoing increases in a crisis will be extremely painful, but we have to bite the bullet on this one.
The third way to increase support for public funding is to reconnect university research to burning social needs. The PPHE poll asked a very interesting question that got at the heart of this deficiency.
Many academics have been concerned about the weakening of the university's public mission under financial temptation and threat alike. This poll finds a real effect: by nearly 2:1, respondents think that universities don't have a public mission -- at least one that is stronger than the desire to make money. Why would this 2/3rds of the public ever support give universities, which they see as oriented towards private gain, a bigger piece of hard-earned public funds?
The respondent's answers constitute an indictment of the high-tuition / high-aid model that elite private universities made the American standard, and that public university leaders have sought to imitate. University leaders have spent decades trying to prove their loyalty to the values and practices of the business and donor communities. The result has been real success in private fundraising, but increasingly disastrous costs to public funding. The whole university community is going to have to pull together on this, including the researchers and program heads who have done extremely well with the systems of private side funding on a public infrastructure base.
Here's where we get to my beef with Bob Samuels. In a recent piece on the Huffington Post, Bob calls quite rightly for budgetary transparency, so that "parents, students, and taxpayers should know where their money is actually going, and everyone should be concerned about the quality of undergraduate education." But he frames his discussion with the incorrect statement that "it does not matter how much money these institutions get from the government or even from tuition-paying parents and students; what matters is how universities and colleges spend their money." In fact, both things matter enormously - fair and effective expenditures, but also publicly-supported revenues. I have written to Bob in the past to express my dismay at this binary approach, and I don't understand either the analytical or the tactical basis for continuing it.
The same must be said for the way Bob in this piece sets up teaching and research in opposition to each other. He writes, for example, "by making students and their parents pay for faculty research, the quality of education is reduced; for the simple truth is that the more professors are rewarded for their research, the less they often value teaching." This is an untrue generalization, and in the disciplines I know best there is a "promotion trap" that works in the opposite direction: tenured faculty spend so much time on teaching and university service that their research gets bogged down. Some of the most successful researchers I know are as driven to disseminate and explain their knowledge as they are to create it. The non-teaching public needs to understand that in the real world, discovery and communication, teaching and learning, are two sides of the same coin. Bob is himself a perfect example of this, being a teacher whose pedagogical virtues have been sung to me by some students we have shared, even as he is the author of several scholarly books, including a recent one on new media and critical theory, not to mention his long and impressive series of commentaries on higher education and UC.
The math in Bob's piece should, in my view, be used to make a somewhat different point than he does. He intends it to show that overall undergrads are getting the crumbs from the budgetary table. His methodology of one average salary and class sizes is bound to be misleading, and it is better to use the aggregate instructional expenditure calculations developed by Charles Schwartz that Bob cites. Schwartz's more intricate calculations lead him to the conclusion that "the final cost to UC for undergraduate education (2006-07) is between $6,711 and $7,311 per student," including academic support and related overhead expenditures. This is in contrast to UCOP's statements that instruction costs around $20,000 per year, which is consistent over several years (2006-07, 2007-08 slide 9, 2008-09).
I have several comments here. The first is that the UCOP Budget Office figure of $20,000 is instruction over all types of students, including doctoral candidates, M.B.A. students, and medical students. Medical students receive over $20,000 each in General Fund monies, and in 2008-09 received about $85,000 each in overall instructional expenses. The cost for undergraduates is much lower, and in my experience the Schwartz figures are reasonably close to what is spent on most but not all undergraduates - many receive substantially less, and others more, a topic I leave aside here.
The deeper question is whether this is a bad thing in itself. In fact it is not bad on its face. The money that goes to things other than undergraduate instruction goes toward creating the university as a whole. Undergraduates get many indirect benefits from research, even at professional schools to which they have no direct access. In economics these are called spillovers, and the value received by undergraduates from the university overall exceeds direct and indirect expenditures on instruction. This includes the advantages of being taught by active researchers like Bob Samuels, or helped by student service staff who have also worked in electrical engineering laboratories, and so on.
At the same time, there may be unjust underspending in these figures, just as there certainly is in staff salaries. I have expressed strong support for Bob Samuels, Charlie Schwartz, and other budget commentators for shedding light on what is spent on whom, and for trying to start a rational and open discussion of budgeting, cross-subsidies, and the financial governance of our shared institutions. We all need to continue this effort.
Pursuing justice and effectiveness in expenditures doesn't require telling the public that research at a research university undermines undergraduate education. Poor funding, declining facilities, understaffing, and overwork undermine education. To repeat what I said above, we are all going to have to pull together to give the public a clear explanation of how in reality research, including the cultural kind Bob and I practice, is a crucial public interest.
UC Riverside Academic Senate Calls for Greater Transparency, Shared Government and a Recommitment to the Master Plan
In a forceful effort, the UCR Academic Senate has passed a series of resolutions calling for greater transparency, equity, and a renewed commitment to the Master Plan. In particular they have taken a strong stand against the overriding of shared governance involved in the Regents' Grant of Emergency Powers to President Yudof, insisted on greater fiscal transparency, called for a suspension of cuts to programs and staff until there is a genuine evaluation of their effects on the educational mission of the University, and called for the State, the Regents, and UCOP to a renewed effort to preserve the Master Plan for Higher Education. We have posted the Resolutions at Chris's Archives. You can also get more information at the UCR Senate Page that has the results of the email ballot.
Congratulations to those who worked on making these resolutions happen.
Congratulations to those who worked on making these resolutions happen.
Budget Lessons for 2010
The good news in 2009 was that a few truths went public. Today I'll start with two cats in particular that got out of the UCOP bag:
Repeated and severe state funding cuts force UCOP and the Regents to be desperately willing to raise student fees, as structurally the only alternative revenue stream large enough to replace even part of the lost general funds. But in November, students raised the political cost of fee hikes. Hikes will continue, but much more cautiously, and the Regents will need to be creative in looking elsewhere.
Where?
The federal government is source number 1. Schwarzenegger's proposed state budget relies on future federal money for 35% of his deficit reduction. UC officials have started calling on the feds to begin direct support of basic operations at selected state universities.
The plan was already unlikely, since the federal government decided four decades ago to support higher education through research funding, student grants and loans, and other major outlays (Pell Grants alone are around $20 billion per year) as a cost-sharing partnership with the states. In addition, President Obama's State of the Union message has just promised a 3-year freeze on all non-military discretionary federal spending. There is a report that some education programs like Pell Grants would be spared, but Wednesday night Obama killed any chance for important new educational programs and for a second stimulus.
The second non-student revenue source is increased state revenues. This week, Oregonians got these by defying conventional wisdom and voting for tax increases, specifically to avoid further cuts in public education. The opposite is happening in California: the Governor proposed no new money now in exchange for promises of future money later, if the voters modify the state constitution to force it.
Even if Governor Schwarzenegger's proposal were to pass, it would move higher ed funding from 7.5% to 10% of a state general fund base that has just shrunk 20%. A meaningful future promise would have been rooted in real dollar outlays to UC and CSU corrected for inflation. This is how actual revenue needs and expenditures are calculated, and how the baselines in ours and other budget reports are measured. The Governor is promising only a low "new normal," with the hook being that the higher ed low would at least be higher than that of the prison system.
None of this is going to happen for years, if ever. In the meantime, were Governor Schwarzenegger to make good on his recent discovery that universities produce more social value than do overcrowded prisons, he would reverse the cuts that he himself imposed on UC and CSU last year. He would grant the Regents's budget request for an additional $913 million over last year's slashed base. Instead, he is proposing the restoration of 40% of the Regents modest restoration request, or about the same amount as the one-time February 2009 cut, leaving the new low baseline intact.
The Governor has absolutely no political reason to do any better than this. UCOP and the Senate's Top Two immediately lined up behind his proposal for better funding in the future. This removed any pressure on the Governor to produce better funding now.
In a better world -- for example the state of Oregon -- the higher education establishment would be hammering the capitol for the kind of tax increases and tax rationalization that would put the state's public services on the level that basic Keynesian recovery requires, to say nothing of future growth. This would mostly involve reversing Arnold's own foolish tax cuts, and plugging new corporate loopholes opened as recently as last year.
But with UC's leadership publicly back in Arnold's camp, there is no united higher ed front pushing for immediate, decisive, stimulus-producing public funding. UC faculty, staff, and students are forced back in the position of pushing well beyond their own leadership, and state hooverizing, stagnating and downsizing can continue as envisioned and implemented by minority Republican rule for the past 30 years.
This minority has no idea what to do with the eclectically brilliant internationally multiracial California that we actually have -- other than to cut public sector capacities and increase inequality. So in 2010 it will be up to us to represent UC and CSU financial needs that make universities central actors in the rebuilding of California society.
- Major cuts in public funding are bad for UC. This seems obvious, but UCOP minimized or denied the problem for years. Less than a year ago, UC's President Yudof thanked the governor for cuts that were not "disproportionate" and that "helped to protect the university’s base budget from potentially even deeper cuts." It was progress when Yudof began to publicize the state's long-term disinvestment in UC and CSU, and then at the September Regents meeting to call the state an "unreliable partner." UCOP has in effect adopted the Futures Report's notion of "core campus funds" in debunking the myth that the state cuts are just a small part of UC overall budget, so don't matter much.
- Students object to major fee increases. For years, UC has been boiling the student-fee frog slowly enough to keep the frog in the pot. The Compact for Higher Education built in 7-10% annual fee increases year after year. The 32% increase voted in November changed all this, and the student protests on most UC campuses got impressively sympathetic coverage in the press (see this blog's section on "November 2009 Regents Meeting"). The Governor's chief of staff claimed that the student protests were the "tipping point" in pushing the Governor's office to now call calling for better higher ed support.
Repeated and severe state funding cuts force UCOP and the Regents to be desperately willing to raise student fees, as structurally the only alternative revenue stream large enough to replace even part of the lost general funds. But in November, students raised the political cost of fee hikes. Hikes will continue, but much more cautiously, and the Regents will need to be creative in looking elsewhere.
Where?
The federal government is source number 1. Schwarzenegger's proposed state budget relies on future federal money for 35% of his deficit reduction. UC officials have started calling on the feds to begin direct support of basic operations at selected state universities.
The plan was already unlikely, since the federal government decided four decades ago to support higher education through research funding, student grants and loans, and other major outlays (Pell Grants alone are around $20 billion per year) as a cost-sharing partnership with the states. In addition, President Obama's State of the Union message has just promised a 3-year freeze on all non-military discretionary federal spending. There is a report that some education programs like Pell Grants would be spared, but Wednesday night Obama killed any chance for important new educational programs and for a second stimulus.
The second non-student revenue source is increased state revenues. This week, Oregonians got these by defying conventional wisdom and voting for tax increases, specifically to avoid further cuts in public education. The opposite is happening in California: the Governor proposed no new money now in exchange for promises of future money later, if the voters modify the state constitution to force it.
Even if Governor Schwarzenegger's proposal were to pass, it would move higher ed funding from 7.5% to 10% of a state general fund base that has just shrunk 20%. A meaningful future promise would have been rooted in real dollar outlays to UC and CSU corrected for inflation. This is how actual revenue needs and expenditures are calculated, and how the baselines in ours and other budget reports are measured. The Governor is promising only a low "new normal," with the hook being that the higher ed low would at least be higher than that of the prison system.
None of this is going to happen for years, if ever. In the meantime, were Governor Schwarzenegger to make good on his recent discovery that universities produce more social value than do overcrowded prisons, he would reverse the cuts that he himself imposed on UC and CSU last year. He would grant the Regents's budget request for an additional $913 million over last year's slashed base. Instead, he is proposing the restoration of 40% of the Regents modest restoration request, or about the same amount as the one-time February 2009 cut, leaving the new low baseline intact.
The Governor has absolutely no political reason to do any better than this. UCOP and the Senate's Top Two immediately lined up behind his proposal for better funding in the future. This removed any pressure on the Governor to produce better funding now.
In a better world -- for example the state of Oregon -- the higher education establishment would be hammering the capitol for the kind of tax increases and tax rationalization that would put the state's public services on the level that basic Keynesian recovery requires, to say nothing of future growth. This would mostly involve reversing Arnold's own foolish tax cuts, and plugging new corporate loopholes opened as recently as last year.
But with UC's leadership publicly back in Arnold's camp, there is no united higher ed front pushing for immediate, decisive, stimulus-producing public funding. UC faculty, staff, and students are forced back in the position of pushing well beyond their own leadership, and state hooverizing, stagnating and downsizing can continue as envisioned and implemented by minority Republican rule for the past 30 years.
This minority has no idea what to do with the eclectically brilliant internationally multiracial California that we actually have -- other than to cut public sector capacities and increase inequality. So in 2010 it will be up to us to represent UC and CSU financial needs that make universities central actors in the rebuilding of California society.
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's Bob and Charlie
While I have been grossly neglecting our Bizarro World Gov, various budgetary dreamworks, and the Regents meetings - I plead four simultaneous paper deadlines - others thankfully have not. Charlie Schwartz addressed the Regents on apparent lapses in oversight of their bond indebtedness. Bob Samuels fired away at the "latest list of the approved exceptions to the UC’s own compensation policies," among other things.
There are so many unanswered questions. In the great tradition of academic investigation, Bob and Charlie are continuing in the pursuit until the data are relatively complete and things make actual sense. I have argued with both of them on various points, but the core fact is that these are two of the heroes of the current UC crisis. They are both trying to expose budgetary incoherence and oppose bad policies that hurt the university and its people. Charlie Schwartz has been doing this for nearly twenty years, offering a long, exhaustive series of detailed financial analyses of various aspect of university operations. I am unaware of anything like it in the United States. This series of reports, along with the efforts of Bob Samuels, Bob Meister, Stan Glantz and Eric Hays, among others on this blog and elsewhere, are crucial contributions to budgetary enlightenment and to university reconstruction.
Schwartz should get some kind of distinguished service medal from the university administration on whom he has lavished so much intelligent attention. That's not going to happen, so let me pause for a moment to honor these folks who obviously love the University of California and the University as a humane, generative ideal and who fight for it with all the skills they can bring to bear. I am thanking you.
Which also reminds me of this piece about UCI's Medical Center finances by Jessie Lee, whom I believe is an undergraduate journalism student at Irvine. Has there been anything this good on the Med centers produced by regular staff with access to 25% of base compensation bumps from participation in the Clinical Enterprise Management Recognition Program?
An organization is only as good as its ability to honor the greatness of the people who make it up. How are we doing?
Thanks to one and all for this fabulous work.
There are so many unanswered questions. In the great tradition of academic investigation, Bob and Charlie are continuing in the pursuit until the data are relatively complete and things make actual sense. I have argued with both of them on various points, but the core fact is that these are two of the heroes of the current UC crisis. They are both trying to expose budgetary incoherence and oppose bad policies that hurt the university and its people. Charlie Schwartz has been doing this for nearly twenty years, offering a long, exhaustive series of detailed financial analyses of various aspect of university operations. I am unaware of anything like it in the United States. This series of reports, along with the efforts of Bob Samuels, Bob Meister, Stan Glantz and Eric Hays, among others on this blog and elsewhere, are crucial contributions to budgetary enlightenment and to university reconstruction.
Schwartz should get some kind of distinguished service medal from the university administration on whom he has lavished so much intelligent attention. That's not going to happen, so let me pause for a moment to honor these folks who obviously love the University of California and the University as a humane, generative ideal and who fight for it with all the skills they can bring to bear. I am thanking you.
Which also reminds me of this piece about UCI's Medical Center finances by Jessie Lee, whom I believe is an undergraduate journalism student at Irvine. Has there been anything this good on the Med centers produced by regular staff with access to 25% of base compensation bumps from participation in the Clinical Enterprise Management Recognition Program?
An organization is only as good as its ability to honor the greatness of the people who make it up. How are we doing?
Thanks to one and all for this fabulous work.
One Way Forward
Charles Scwhartz has a new proposal for how faculty and others might respond to the State of the State and Arnold's proposed budget up at his blog universityprobe.org. In it he outlines a variety of ideas and arguments to further both funding and reform of the UC system. Given the productive debate that followed Gerry Barnett's recent post on Charlie's new model for UC we thought that we would alert everyone to Charlie's proposal, encourage you to check it out, and to open up a space here to discuss it. Please feel free to comment here or at universityprobe.
A Method to the Madness?
By Michael Meranze
While it is too soon to tell the true implications of the Governor’s State of the State and his proposed 2010-2011 budget certain strategies seem clear and they should give pause to any enthusiasm that might have greeted Arnold’s general statements about shifting priorities from punishment to education. I think that we need to try to seize the rhetorical opening that the State of the State provided while challenging the ways that Schwarzenegger frames the problem and proposes to solve it.
There were positive elements to this week’s policy announcements. When Arnold declared that “The priorities have become out of whack over the years. … 30 years ago 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and three percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education. Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future. What does it say about our state? What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns? It simply is not healthy” he opened up a space to challenge one of the most devastating policy trends of the last several decades—not just in California but throughout the nation. The shift from social investment to mass incarceration has been a fundamental moment in the growth of inequality since the 1980s. This recognition of the need to alter public priorities, along with his promise to protect CSU and UC from further cuts is something to be taken up and pressed.
But as the Governor’s elaboration of his vision (both in a supplementary statement and in his budget) makes clear, we need to resist his strategy to reverse this trend. Although this is beyond the direct question of higher education, the Governor’s proposal depends on reforming corrections not by reforming sentencing but by contracting out inmate care to corporate prisons. In doing so, the Governor aims to sidestep the demands placed on the prison system by federal courts and strike another blow against labor costs while avoiding a real re-consideration of the policy of mass incarceration itself. It is the costs that he is concerned about. In effect, the Governor would be engaging in a subsidization (to use Aranye Fradenburg’s phrase) of corporate prisons in order to slow down the privatization of higher education (as is marked by the rise in student fees).
These problems become clearer in the Governor’s actual budget proposals. The Governor’s proposal depends on the arrival of large numbers of federal funds. For that reason alone it is probably not long for this world. But more striking is the distribution of actual cuts. While the State of the State placed great emphasis on the relationship of punishment to education, in the proposed budget the really deep cuts will be coming out of transportation, the protection of natural resources, and health and human services. If the rhetoric is that of education vs. punishment (and it is true that there are some proposed cuts to corrections) the real tradeoffs seem to be between education and services for the poor, the sick, and the elderly. (BudgetSummary, 13) While the Governor is presuming that he can gain additional funds from the Federal Government he is refusing to consider expanding the state’s revenues.
It is the logic of the zero-sum game that the Governor is playing. He has steadfastly refused to consider new sources of revenues or any fundamental revision of our regressive tax system (note that while he proposes increased off-shore drilling but no mention of an oil-extraction tax). Once again he is urging legislators to take up the Parsky Commission suggestions which not only will make the tax system more regressive but probably will lower revenues in the long-run. Under the welcome rhetoric of a shift in the state’s priorities from punishment to education, he is proposing to further strip those in greatest need without discomforting those with the greatest resources. Susan Kennedy’s fascinating comment that “Those protests on the U.C. campuses were the tipping point,” indicated not only that the fall’s protests made a real difference but how much remains to be done. Personally, I don’t want to fund higher education at the expense of the poor and the sick. We need to make sure that we make our commitments to higher education and our commitments to a wider shift in the priorities of the state clear. The Governor’s State of the State opened up a new space to make that argument—we should do all we can to prevent his budget from closing it off.
While it is too soon to tell the true implications of the Governor’s State of the State and his proposed 2010-2011 budget certain strategies seem clear and they should give pause to any enthusiasm that might have greeted Arnold’s general statements about shifting priorities from punishment to education. I think that we need to try to seize the rhetorical opening that the State of the State provided while challenging the ways that Schwarzenegger frames the problem and proposes to solve it.
There were positive elements to this week’s policy announcements. When Arnold declared that “The priorities have become out of whack over the years. … 30 years ago 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and three percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education. Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future. What does it say about our state? What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns? It simply is not healthy” he opened up a space to challenge one of the most devastating policy trends of the last several decades—not just in California but throughout the nation. The shift from social investment to mass incarceration has been a fundamental moment in the growth of inequality since the 1980s. This recognition of the need to alter public priorities, along with his promise to protect CSU and UC from further cuts is something to be taken up and pressed.
But as the Governor’s elaboration of his vision (both in a supplementary statement and in his budget) makes clear, we need to resist his strategy to reverse this trend. Although this is beyond the direct question of higher education, the Governor’s proposal depends on reforming corrections not by reforming sentencing but by contracting out inmate care to corporate prisons. In doing so, the Governor aims to sidestep the demands placed on the prison system by federal courts and strike another blow against labor costs while avoiding a real re-consideration of the policy of mass incarceration itself. It is the costs that he is concerned about. In effect, the Governor would be engaging in a subsidization (to use Aranye Fradenburg’s phrase) of corporate prisons in order to slow down the privatization of higher education (as is marked by the rise in student fees).
These problems become clearer in the Governor’s actual budget proposals. The Governor’s proposal depends on the arrival of large numbers of federal funds. For that reason alone it is probably not long for this world. But more striking is the distribution of actual cuts. While the State of the State placed great emphasis on the relationship of punishment to education, in the proposed budget the really deep cuts will be coming out of transportation, the protection of natural resources, and health and human services. If the rhetoric is that of education vs. punishment (and it is true that there are some proposed cuts to corrections) the real tradeoffs seem to be between education and services for the poor, the sick, and the elderly. (BudgetSummary, 13) While the Governor is presuming that he can gain additional funds from the Federal Government he is refusing to consider expanding the state’s revenues.
It is the logic of the zero-sum game that the Governor is playing. He has steadfastly refused to consider new sources of revenues or any fundamental revision of our regressive tax system (note that while he proposes increased off-shore drilling but no mention of an oil-extraction tax). Once again he is urging legislators to take up the Parsky Commission suggestions which not only will make the tax system more regressive but probably will lower revenues in the long-run. Under the welcome rhetoric of a shift in the state’s priorities from punishment to education, he is proposing to further strip those in greatest need without discomforting those with the greatest resources. Susan Kennedy’s fascinating comment that “Those protests on the U.C. campuses were the tipping point,” indicated not only that the fall’s protests made a real difference but how much remains to be done. Personally, I don’t want to fund higher education at the expense of the poor and the sick. We need to make sure that we make our commitments to higher education and our commitments to a wider shift in the priorities of the state clear. The Governor’s State of the State opened up a new space to make that argument—we should do all we can to prevent his budget from closing it off.
Fixing the Research Funding Structure
Gerald Barnett and I have a piece in today's Chronicle of Higher Education that combines some of this blog's consistent themes: full costing, budgetary transparency, the value of research, and matching public funding to our actual public ambitions. The article also ties in with recent posts and commentary on the position of science in public higher ed. Subscribers can find it here, and here's a temporary link. Comments are more than welcome, our place or theirs.
A View from a Science Department: Parts 3 and 4
This post continues Part 1 and Part 2
Part 3: Does extramural research pay for itself?
Extramurally funded research has sometimes been described as "revenue generating". In fact, the leaders of our research unit have argued to higher administrators that we should not suffer further budget cuts because we provide a large amount of indirect cost recovery (ICR) to UC (so far this argument has not been successful). Does extramurally funded research actually pay for itself? My guess is that the answer depends on how costs are counted and what is considered to be a payoff. It turns out that our research unit currently generates more ICR for UC per year than we receive from UC in core funding per year, so by that limited measure extramurally funded research does come out positive. But does it pay for itself when ALL costs are considered, such as building construction and maintenance, libraries, staff to do the contracts and grants paperwork, etc.? That seems less likely.
Even if extramurally funded research were a net financial positive for UC, I doubt that it could be a long-term benefit to the general budget. Faculty who bring in considerable outside funding do not do so to subsidize the rest of the system -- if they are squeezed too much, they will leave for another institution that provides more resources. Moreover, it seems that those faculty members who are effective at getting more funding from sources outside UC also happen to be quite effective at getting more discretionary funding from within UC. For this reason, I think the question of whether extramurally funded research is a net positive or negative is immaterial -- any positive can never be of general benefit, except in the short term. What really matters is whether the research is worth the cost to UC in the long term.
Of course, it would be beneficial if UC could raise the indirect cost rate on federally funded research above ~54% (but at least that is considerably higher than the 10% rate I've received for state funded research). It would be interesting to know why private research universities are able to negotiate higher indirect rates than public universities. I calculate that UC income from federal research would increase by 8% if we were to receive the Harvard indirect cost rate (67%), corresponding to an additional $180 million for UC, thus filling in a large portion of the cut in state funding. On the other hand, it will be difficult for UC to argue for a higher indirect rate to cover the full cost of research when UC is currently using a substantial fraction of ICR as discretionary funds rather than reimbursing the actual indirect costs of research. The return of only one third of ICR to our research unit is not sufficient to maintain the infrastructure, but at least one third is higher than the fraction we used to receive.
If there is no direct financial payoff to extramurally funded research, why is everyone, including historically teaching-only institutions, trying to do more of it? Extramural funding has a perceived indirect payoff in that it is reputation-enhancing, both by direct measure of the funding level and by the increased research that it supports. Institutions with greater reputations can attract more private donations and find more students willing to pay higher tuition. This system of seeking after ever more extramural funding is not sustainable, however. The number of institutions, PIs, and grant proposals increases faster than the federal science budget, thus yielding diminishing returns on invested time and effort. There will be a big crunch the next time the federal science budget goes flat.
Part 4: Privatization?
There has been much talk about the "privatization" of UC (e.g., substitution of student tuition for state support). Our research unit is explicitly following that path, except that we are attempting to substitute private philanthropy for state support. Our long-term goal is to become as well endowed as other research institutions in our discipline that were built up without previous years of generous state support. It's true that the market goes down at times, but at least it comes back up again. State support, especially for research, only goes down. For example, when UC finally managed to get the legislature to restore a cut in state research funding several years ago, it was line-item vetoed by the governor.
Increases in UC tuition do not affect our graduate students because their tuition is paid by grants and a few other sources. Tuition increases are a slight burden on grants, especially when they unexpectedly occur midcycle, but we have been able to handle it so far. Since the tuition paid for our graduate students does not return to us, we have no incentive to raise it, aside from the fact that it will increase revenue to UC overall.
Some faculty have expressed the desire to somehow disaffiliate from UC, reasoning that we would be better off alone because the ICR we generate for UC exceeds the core funding UC provides to us. Considering all the factors, though, I'm not certain the numbers would work out in the black (putting aside the issue of ownership of the land and buildings). But this sentiment does illustrate the deep dissatisfaction over the low level of service and infrastructure maintenance we receive for all the ICR we provide to UC. UCOP is especially disliked since it skims off a large amount of money without providing much obvious value in return.
From what I've heard, our faculty support the values of "maintaining excellence" and "encouraging entrepreneurship" because they believe our unit will fare better under those criteria. We've been disappointed, however, that the reality has not yet matched the rhetoric and that cuts have been applied across the board at the system-wide and campus level rather than selectively directed at particular units (other than ourselves). Our fear is that cuts will be applied to our unit at a rate faster than we can accommodate and that we will lose our excellence in research -- followed by loss of top-notch colleagues and high-quality graduate students and diminishing extramural funding and private donations.
Part 3: Does extramural research pay for itself?
Extramurally funded research has sometimes been described as "revenue generating". In fact, the leaders of our research unit have argued to higher administrators that we should not suffer further budget cuts because we provide a large amount of indirect cost recovery (ICR) to UC (so far this argument has not been successful). Does extramurally funded research actually pay for itself? My guess is that the answer depends on how costs are counted and what is considered to be a payoff. It turns out that our research unit currently generates more ICR for UC per year than we receive from UC in core funding per year, so by that limited measure extramurally funded research does come out positive. But does it pay for itself when ALL costs are considered, such as building construction and maintenance, libraries, staff to do the contracts and grants paperwork, etc.? That seems less likely.
Even if extramurally funded research were a net financial positive for UC, I doubt that it could be a long-term benefit to the general budget. Faculty who bring in considerable outside funding do not do so to subsidize the rest of the system -- if they are squeezed too much, they will leave for another institution that provides more resources. Moreover, it seems that those faculty members who are effective at getting more funding from sources outside UC also happen to be quite effective at getting more discretionary funding from within UC. For this reason, I think the question of whether extramurally funded research is a net positive or negative is immaterial -- any positive can never be of general benefit, except in the short term. What really matters is whether the research is worth the cost to UC in the long term.
Of course, it would be beneficial if UC could raise the indirect cost rate on federally funded research above ~54% (but at least that is considerably higher than the 10% rate I've received for state funded research). It would be interesting to know why private research universities are able to negotiate higher indirect rates than public universities. I calculate that UC income from federal research would increase by 8% if we were to receive the Harvard indirect cost rate (67%), corresponding to an additional $180 million for UC, thus filling in a large portion of the cut in state funding. On the other hand, it will be difficult for UC to argue for a higher indirect rate to cover the full cost of research when UC is currently using a substantial fraction of ICR as discretionary funds rather than reimbursing the actual indirect costs of research. The return of only one third of ICR to our research unit is not sufficient to maintain the infrastructure, but at least one third is higher than the fraction we used to receive.
If there is no direct financial payoff to extramurally funded research, why is everyone, including historically teaching-only institutions, trying to do more of it? Extramural funding has a perceived indirect payoff in that it is reputation-enhancing, both by direct measure of the funding level and by the increased research that it supports. Institutions with greater reputations can attract more private donations and find more students willing to pay higher tuition. This system of seeking after ever more extramural funding is not sustainable, however. The number of institutions, PIs, and grant proposals increases faster than the federal science budget, thus yielding diminishing returns on invested time and effort. There will be a big crunch the next time the federal science budget goes flat.
Part 4: Privatization?
There has been much talk about the "privatization" of UC (e.g., substitution of student tuition for state support). Our research unit is explicitly following that path, except that we are attempting to substitute private philanthropy for state support. Our long-term goal is to become as well endowed as other research institutions in our discipline that were built up without previous years of generous state support. It's true that the market goes down at times, but at least it comes back up again. State support, especially for research, only goes down. For example, when UC finally managed to get the legislature to restore a cut in state research funding several years ago, it was line-item vetoed by the governor.
Increases in UC tuition do not affect our graduate students because their tuition is paid by grants and a few other sources. Tuition increases are a slight burden on grants, especially when they unexpectedly occur midcycle, but we have been able to handle it so far. Since the tuition paid for our graduate students does not return to us, we have no incentive to raise it, aside from the fact that it will increase revenue to UC overall.
Some faculty have expressed the desire to somehow disaffiliate from UC, reasoning that we would be better off alone because the ICR we generate for UC exceeds the core funding UC provides to us. Considering all the factors, though, I'm not certain the numbers would work out in the black (putting aside the issue of ownership of the land and buildings). But this sentiment does illustrate the deep dissatisfaction over the low level of service and infrastructure maintenance we receive for all the ICR we provide to UC. UCOP is especially disliked since it skims off a large amount of money without providing much obvious value in return.
From what I've heard, our faculty support the values of "maintaining excellence" and "encouraging entrepreneurship" because they believe our unit will fare better under those criteria. We've been disappointed, however, that the reality has not yet matched the rhetoric and that cuts have been applied across the board at the system-wide and campus level rather than selectively directed at particular units (other than ourselves). Our fear is that cuts will be applied to our unit at a rate faster than we can accommodate and that we will lose our excellence in research -- followed by loss of top-notch colleagues and high-quality graduate students and diminishing extramural funding and private donations.
A View from a Science Department: Part 2
by Anonymous, continuing Part 1
Response to future cuts
The leadership of our research unit is responding to UC budget reductions by seeking to increase revenue and cut costs. Beyond what has already been done, one near-term cost-cutting plan is the elimination of all non-SOE lecturers, thus requiring ladder-rank faculty to teach more (a rumor suggests faculty will be allowed to "buy out" from teaching). Another strong possibility is that research-series faculty, who currently receive half of their salaries from institutional funds and half from their own grants, will have the institutional component of their salaries cut. A third cost-cutting measure is stronger encouragement for older faculty to retire (and go RTAD if they are still productive). We may also expand our small and technically self-supporting professional masters program since that returns some money directly to our department. Obviously, anything and everything that can possibly be charged directly to extramural sources will no longer be supported by institutional funding (except for short-term start-up packages for new appointees). In the long term, our leadership expects to substantially reduce the number of faculty in our unit (primarily through attrition of research faculty) since faculty salaries are the largest part of our continuously decreasing core UC funding.
Apart from a restoration of UC core funding, the most desired revenue-enhancing measure is to have a greater fraction of the indirect cost recovery (ICR) we generate from extramural funding returned to us rather than diverted elsewhere in the UC system, but this plan has met with little success with the campus administration and UCOP. Since we do get a third of our ICR returned, we are nonetheless striving to increase the amount of our extramural funding to an even higher level. Private fundraising makes a small contribution, although this has fallen off in the current economic climate. The leadership of our unit also plans to increase the faculty teaching load and is encouraging professors to develop new large-enrollment undergraduate classes. Considered alone, these actions would be revenue enhancing because we receive funding through the campus partially on the basis of the number of undergraduate students taught and the number of graduate students enrolled.
It remains to be seen, however, whether any additional teaching pays off since we may merely cannibalize students from our current courses. Moreover, every hour spent by a professor on teaching is an hour not spent on preparing a grant proposal. In terms of incentives for individual faculty and payoff for our unit, additional extramural funding is much more remunerative than additional teaching. This is the case even though only a third of our ICR is returned and only about 30% of grant proposals in our discipline are successful (a percentage nevertheless higher than that for almost any other discipline). Our leadership has acknowledged that the faculty cannot indefinitely continue doing more with less, but they hope we have not yet reached the breaking point.
While we have been able to temporarily substitute federal funding for some of the shortfall in state funding, this is only a short-term solution. Start-up packages still need to be offered, matching funds from the institution may be required, and maintenance of facilities cannot be directly charged to a grant. Science faculty may ride out a brief crisis by paying themselves from extramural funds, but in the long term they will leave and go to an institution that provides more hard-money support. Extramural funds cannot replace core funds; they merely leverage core funds to support a greater amount of research.
Response to future cuts
The leadership of our research unit is responding to UC budget reductions by seeking to increase revenue and cut costs. Beyond what has already been done, one near-term cost-cutting plan is the elimination of all non-SOE lecturers, thus requiring ladder-rank faculty to teach more (a rumor suggests faculty will be allowed to "buy out" from teaching). Another strong possibility is that research-series faculty, who currently receive half of their salaries from institutional funds and half from their own grants, will have the institutional component of their salaries cut. A third cost-cutting measure is stronger encouragement for older faculty to retire (and go RTAD if they are still productive). We may also expand our small and technically self-supporting professional masters program since that returns some money directly to our department. Obviously, anything and everything that can possibly be charged directly to extramural sources will no longer be supported by institutional funding (except for short-term start-up packages for new appointees). In the long term, our leadership expects to substantially reduce the number of faculty in our unit (primarily through attrition of research faculty) since faculty salaries are the largest part of our continuously decreasing core UC funding.
Apart from a restoration of UC core funding, the most desired revenue-enhancing measure is to have a greater fraction of the indirect cost recovery (ICR) we generate from extramural funding returned to us rather than diverted elsewhere in the UC system, but this plan has met with little success with the campus administration and UCOP. Since we do get a third of our ICR returned, we are nonetheless striving to increase the amount of our extramural funding to an even higher level. Private fundraising makes a small contribution, although this has fallen off in the current economic climate. The leadership of our unit also plans to increase the faculty teaching load and is encouraging professors to develop new large-enrollment undergraduate classes. Considered alone, these actions would be revenue enhancing because we receive funding through the campus partially on the basis of the number of undergraduate students taught and the number of graduate students enrolled.
It remains to be seen, however, whether any additional teaching pays off since we may merely cannibalize students from our current courses. Moreover, every hour spent by a professor on teaching is an hour not spent on preparing a grant proposal. In terms of incentives for individual faculty and payoff for our unit, additional extramural funding is much more remunerative than additional teaching. This is the case even though only a third of our ICR is returned and only about 30% of grant proposals in our discipline are successful (a percentage nevertheless higher than that for almost any other discipline). Our leadership has acknowledged that the faculty cannot indefinitely continue doing more with less, but they hope we have not yet reached the breaking point.
While we have been able to temporarily substitute federal funding for some of the shortfall in state funding, this is only a short-term solution. Start-up packages still need to be offered, matching funds from the institution may be required, and maintenance of facilities cannot be directly charged to a grant. Science faculty may ride out a brief crisis by paying themselves from extramural funds, but in the long term they will leave and go to an institution that provides more hard-money support. Extramural funds cannot replace core funds; they merely leverage core funds to support a greater amount of research.
Saving Public Higher Ed: Cheaper than Christmas Shopping
The folks at Keep California's Promise have written an important Working Paper on fixing public funding for California higher ed. Its results are shocking -- and pleasantly so, for a change.
The authors, Stanton Glantz of UCSF and Eric Hays, CUCFA Director of Research, take 2000-01 as a baseline, and quantify subsequent fee increases and state funding cuts for all three segments - the Community College system, the California State University system, and the University of California. (Disclosure: Glantz and I were two of the authors of the Futures Report, and have worked together on various Academic Senate projects involving university budgets and funding.)
Glantz and Hays then calculate how much it would cost in taxpayer funds to return all three segments to 2000-2001 levels of (inflation-adjusted) educational resources. They also calculate the fee levels required to recover 2000-01 funding levels. This is important because higher ed officials haven't actually raised fees enough to avoid cuts to operations, so they have been raising fees and cutting education at the same time.
There are a couple of interesting twists. Glantz and Hays return to a 2000-01 pathway that includes fee rollbacks to their earlier levels. This is a kind of worst case for taxpayers - who then don't get to have high student fees subsidizing their lower public investment - and a best case for students and their families.
The real breakthrough here is that Glantz and Hays move the budget discussion beyond aggregate amounts by calculating the cost to the median individual California taxpayer of an advance toward a near- Master Plan level of affordability. The results are amazing. To have 2000-01 levels of investment in students, with reduced 2000-01 level fees (increased for inflation) would cost the median taxpayer . .. thirty-two dollars ($32). That's about the same as a holiday bottle of single-malt scotch.
They also provide an income calculator to identify the cost at different income levels. At the $70,000 cutoff for UC's Blue and Gold plan, which is close to the median family income in California, the tax outlay would be about $200 a year, or about a third of the mid-year fee increase at UC.
The crucial point here is that the Working Paper adds further evidence that robust public higher education is affordable. We don't need to shrink it or privatize it or water it down because California has no money. Most Californians have 32 dollars. They also have no way of arguing that they don't individually get 32 dollars of annual value from all three segments of California higher education put together.
I'm tempted to expound on the miracle of mutualization that spreads risks and costs and makes public funding more efficient than private funding for most kinds of goods. Similar arguments could be made for other sectors of California's public infrastructure so that taxpayers could see what they get for their money. I'm also tempted to link this report to the excellent commentaries on the Schwartz Plan, transparency projects, and other ideas for internal university improvement and reform. But I will restrain myself and simply say:
The authors, Stanton Glantz of UCSF and Eric Hays, CUCFA Director of Research, take 2000-01 as a baseline, and quantify subsequent fee increases and state funding cuts for all three segments - the Community College system, the California State University system, and the University of California. (Disclosure: Glantz and I were two of the authors of the Futures Report, and have worked together on various Academic Senate projects involving university budgets and funding.)
Glantz and Hays then calculate how much it would cost in taxpayer funds to return all three segments to 2000-2001 levels of (inflation-adjusted) educational resources. They also calculate the fee levels required to recover 2000-01 funding levels. This is important because higher ed officials haven't actually raised fees enough to avoid cuts to operations, so they have been raising fees and cutting education at the same time.
There are a couple of interesting twists. Glantz and Hays return to a 2000-01 pathway that includes fee rollbacks to their earlier levels. This is a kind of worst case for taxpayers - who then don't get to have high student fees subsidizing their lower public investment - and a best case for students and their families.
The real breakthrough here is that Glantz and Hays move the budget discussion beyond aggregate amounts by calculating the cost to the median individual California taxpayer of an advance toward a near- Master Plan level of affordability. The results are amazing. To have 2000-01 levels of investment in students, with reduced 2000-01 level fees (increased for inflation) would cost the median taxpayer . .. thirty-two dollars ($32). That's about the same as a holiday bottle of single-malt scotch.
They also provide an income calculator to identify the cost at different income levels. At the $70,000 cutoff for UC's Blue and Gold plan, which is close to the median family income in California, the tax outlay would be about $200 a year, or about a third of the mid-year fee increase at UC.
The crucial point here is that the Working Paper adds further evidence that robust public higher education is affordable. We don't need to shrink it or privatize it or water it down because California has no money. Most Californians have 32 dollars. They also have no way of arguing that they don't individually get 32 dollars of annual value from all three segments of California higher education put together.
I'm tempted to expound on the miracle of mutualization that spreads risks and costs and makes public funding more efficient than private funding for most kinds of goods. Similar arguments could be made for other sectors of California's public infrastructure so that taxpayers could see what they get for their money. I'm also tempted to link this report to the excellent commentaries on the Schwartz Plan, transparency projects, and other ideas for internal university improvement and reform. But I will restrain myself and simply say:
- please read this report
- if it seems sound to you, please write the head of your California public university and ask him or her to critique, revise, endorse, adapt, and distribute the Working Paper to the public.
2009: A tough year
It has been a tough year, but I think it might be good for us to review the sequence of events that have brought us to a moment of crisis and paralysis in the UC....This is an impressionistic review of the on the ground experience. I am sure others have harder numbers and administrative time lines available to them. in March, the financial panic of the previous Fall on Wall Street seemed to have caught up with our friends and family in New York City. In the UC, we were still fairly sheltered from the devastation -- although foreclosures and plummeting home values were ominous signs for the budget ahead. I remember a junior colleague being reassured that there would be no pay cuts and perhaps even no furloughs. Two of our most valued senior staff members were laid off. The Visual Resources Lab at UCI was closed. Latin American Studies was put on hiatus, the Film and Video Center largely stripped of its support. At the senior staff person's retirement party, we were told that we couldn't make speeches, because we would go on and on and we all needed to get back to work. Then the furloughs were announced, but I remember being reassured that the Academic Senate would fight for professors' rights to take some of the furlough on instructional days so that we would not be looking at pay cuts. Furloughs, we were reassured, were the best solution, as they would provide a way for us to "bounce back" and preserve our retirement benefits. In the middle of the summer, we finally heard that UCOP had decided that there were not going to be furlough days on teaching days for professors. This was due to something called "optics," which is admin speak I guess for public relations with a disgruntled and suspicious public. Then came the walkout of 9-24-09 -- where a massive effort was made to forge links of solidarity with union members and students affected by the UCI cuts. All summer, we had been waiting for news of staff layoffs -- and the consolidation of programs in the School of Humanities. One of best staff members left for a more lucrative job in the Law School. We moved into our new building in between all this, but we had to scrounge for furniture for the new offices. I went to UCI salvage only to watch another Humanities Prof loading office furniture onto his minivan. More power to him. Recently, I heard that the board of the Council for Humanities Institutes and Centers had their annual board meeting in Bellagio, after holding their annual meeting in Edinburgh, which I did not attend since we didn't know what our budget situation was going to be like. I have been asked more than once recently, by students and administrators what the effects of the budget cuts have been. It has been hard to encapsulate or summarize. Furthermore, I think that as much as we are suffering, the academic programs in the CSU's are being devastated to a much greater degree. They serve more students, and more economically marginal students. I have been advising two transfer students from the CSU's recently. Both are brilliant. Both want to get Ph.D.'s. They should -- one is a Latina, the other from a working class family in the area. Both cannot imagine doing anything else with their lives. Both have deep roots in CA. Will there be jobs for them here? What are we doing to their futures? We have lost countless faculty this year, either to retirement or to other jobs. They are not being replaced. FTE are empty placeholders, there are no funds to finance new hires. What are going to be our priorities in the months and years ahead? How is UCOF going to define and defend our mission? Will direct action and activism provide a way out of the present situation? Will the economy bounce back? Will a local Chinese government with cash to spare buy UC's brand? These are questions that will haunt me in the new year, but happy holidays to all the great bloggers and provocative commentators. Thanks to Chris for maintaining the blog!
Analysis of Charles Schwartz Plan for UC
by Gerald Barnett, University of Washington
Here is my summary of Charles Schwartz's plan. It is worth considering. I apologize if I bungle stuff here. I’m aiming to draw out some of the points in the plan that recommend it to my thinking. I recast the plan’s points under 3 major heads and rearrange the parts somewhat to help me get it clear.
Open Budget
Make budget and policy discussions open
Use language proper to education and scholarship
Lead the Regents and nation on these matters
Undergraduate Commitment
Account separately for undergraduate education costs
Cap total resident undergraduate fees at the total undergraduate education costs
State subsidizes undergraduate costs for the needed, and generally as it is able
Research & Administration Reassessment
Justify or eliminate $600m/yr in recent administrative growth
Cap executive compensation at 2x average the compensation of full professors
State commits to reliable funding for core research (faculty, grad students, and overhead)
This approach opens two dialogues with the state--one for undergraduates and one for research/graduate education /administration. Doing so allows UC to argue for funding elements separately that may have different bases of political support. If there are state concerns about one of these elements but not the other, then the problematic one is holding the other one hostage. Disaggregating the two will allow UC to see if this is so. This step might be iterated for elements in the research dialogue as well, giving the state an opportunity to show where the support is stronger or weaker for various elements. This step ought to be done regardless of anything else. If both funding streams lack support, there will be no difference in the overall outcomes of state funding. But if undergraduate education has the stronger support, then at least the undergraduate component can be taken care of, and attention turned to what is needed, politically, to make a case for the rest of the funding.
Following Prof. Schwartz’s analysis, undergraduate fees appear to cover their costs. If this is the case, then there is no cash flow problem for undergraduate education but for UC administration *making it part of the problem*. This would be an expected “budget trick” for working the legislature in typical times. UC doesn’t have that now, however, so a new approach is called for. A clear, open accounting by UC would confirm or qualify whether undergraduate fees cover the costs of undergraduate education. The state is asked to help needy students and provide a general subsidy for undergraduates as it can. That's something the state can do within the present funding to UC. This approach makes a clear proposal for the state: will you support these talented students? Whatever the state comes up with is “on the margin” and is passed on as a direct benefit to students, both needy and generally. It’s the best proposition UC can offer the legislature with regard to undergraduates. Certainly it is better than raising tuition by 30% now, and no doubt more later, in some sort of crisis-bound administrative lupus attack on students and families.
The bargain over research and graduate education is a separate issue. This is a deeper challenge. There is more going on here than with undergraduate education, with a greater range of budgets and inter-relationships. Also, it is where the status of UC would appear to rest, where the strategic importance to the state in training graduate students gets sounded out, and with it the distinctive position UC has within the California higher education scheme in the conduct of research. The plan takes the form of a bargain. It is a true bargain, not just “compact” that UC will have business as usual and the state will throw money at it, but that each must commit to something of value to the other. Whatever happens, a plan with a bargain in it—one that UC can show to the public—provides traction. For this bargain, UC must first account for its own administrative growth in terms of positions and compensation. At least $600m is in play here. Without a complete, open, intellectually honest accounting, one might argue that UC supporters in state government have little leverage to work on UC's behalf. There will have to be cuts for this bargain to work—of positions, of salaries, of layers of organization. One might even expect that the more UC trims, the more likely there will be support for what is strategically important to the state in what’s left. Again, there is an easy “budget trick” of threatening to lop off something valuable or noisy (a journalism department makes good noise this way, historically), or both, and then use that available rallying energy to bring the legislature around. This budget trick also has to go. The stuff to trim off is the stuff no one really needs in a time of crisis. It’s not faculty or academic programs. At least not until the administrative part is made right. I do not know of anyone outside of UC administration that is willing to make the case that UC administration is hunky dory and its something else that has to go. That’s a political reality, whatever the self-rationalizations that might go on. If there’s going to be a fight, let’s have it be over what parts of administration we don’t need in a crisis, rather than pitting science faculty against humanities, or core faculty against professional programs, or campuses with higher rankings in some Chinese university or popular magazine-compiled list against campuses that are lower on such lists. The Schwartz plan brilliantly ends these skirmishes and places the burden on administration first.
If there is to be UC contraction, it must start with administrative positions, organization, and compensation. If there is less of UC—and there already clearly is that—then there needs to be a lot less of the administrative component. This is sad for individuals involved. I don’t wish anything ill on them. We are talking about tails and dogs, however, and honestly, administration is nearer the tail end. In a time of crisis, that’s what needs to go. If various administrative positions are unproductive relative to the new economic realities of UC, then these need to go first, not be drawn into an extra administrative burden of deciding what academic programs to cut and how to manage, say, faculty furloughs and respond to student protests. Finally, if UC compensation is a problem, then if there are going to be losses due to reductions in salary as people take better offers elsewhere, these should start with the administrative side of the house. If these adjustments are unacceptable, then new leaders should be identified. If there is going to be a brain drain, then it will start with the administrative brains. One might add: administration is not management. Management is not the brains of the operation; faculty are not the labor. Administration serves the faculty in the proper order of things, and in a financial crisis it serves the faculty by sacrificing its convenience and privileges. The public expects this. The public is waiting for UC administration to admit it. There will be no leverage in the legislature until it is done. ‘Twere good that it is done quickly, then.
The state support for this core budget beyond undergraduate education also opens up a discussion of the role of UC in providing research for the state. It’s one thing to have a generally wonderful world stature. It’s another to be able to show a direct interest in the research needs and advanced degree training needs of California communities, industry, and local governments. This is a key part the land grant ethos, as well as part of the founding instruments for the University of California. In assessing priorities for funding, UC might expect that the general reputation of campuses (such as “rankings”) might not be nearly so compelling to the people of the state as showing that UC expertise and significant research efforts the state is asked to fund have direct benefits for the state. Perhaps an open, intellectually honest accounting for these efforts would also go some way toward giving the state reasons to argue for funding the state component of the research budget, especially if the university has cleaned house with regard to multiple layers of administration.
These are not easy things to do, but then nothing is these days. Contraction of administrative and state research elements rather than contraction of the whole at the expense of undergraduate education appears to have a lot of merit as the place to make the bargain clear. Make a commitment to the undergraduates, the most vulnerable of people in the whole arrangement. Then work out how the rest of the state supported work will be funded. For that, there won’t be any movement without a miracle or a bargain, and as the former does not admit of planning, one might think the latter has much to commend it.
Here is my summary of Charles Schwartz's plan. It is worth considering. I apologize if I bungle stuff here. I’m aiming to draw out some of the points in the plan that recommend it to my thinking. I recast the plan’s points under 3 major heads and rearrange the parts somewhat to help me get it clear.
Open Budget
Make budget and policy discussions open
Use language proper to education and scholarship
Lead the Regents and nation on these matters
Undergraduate Commitment
Account separately for undergraduate education costs
Cap total resident undergraduate fees at the total undergraduate education costs
State subsidizes undergraduate costs for the needed, and generally as it is able
Research & Administration Reassessment
Justify or eliminate $600m/yr in recent administrative growth
Cap executive compensation at 2x average the compensation of full professors
State commits to reliable funding for core research (faculty, grad students, and overhead)
This approach opens two dialogues with the state--one for undergraduates and one for research/graduate education /administration. Doing so allows UC to argue for funding elements separately that may have different bases of political support. If there are state concerns about one of these elements but not the other, then the problematic one is holding the other one hostage. Disaggregating the two will allow UC to see if this is so. This step might be iterated for elements in the research dialogue as well, giving the state an opportunity to show where the support is stronger or weaker for various elements. This step ought to be done regardless of anything else. If both funding streams lack support, there will be no difference in the overall outcomes of state funding. But if undergraduate education has the stronger support, then at least the undergraduate component can be taken care of, and attention turned to what is needed, politically, to make a case for the rest of the funding.
Following Prof. Schwartz’s analysis, undergraduate fees appear to cover their costs. If this is the case, then there is no cash flow problem for undergraduate education but for UC administration *making it part of the problem*. This would be an expected “budget trick” for working the legislature in typical times. UC doesn’t have that now, however, so a new approach is called for. A clear, open accounting by UC would confirm or qualify whether undergraduate fees cover the costs of undergraduate education. The state is asked to help needy students and provide a general subsidy for undergraduates as it can. That's something the state can do within the present funding to UC. This approach makes a clear proposal for the state: will you support these talented students? Whatever the state comes up with is “on the margin” and is passed on as a direct benefit to students, both needy and generally. It’s the best proposition UC can offer the legislature with regard to undergraduates. Certainly it is better than raising tuition by 30% now, and no doubt more later, in some sort of crisis-bound administrative lupus attack on students and families.
The bargain over research and graduate education is a separate issue. This is a deeper challenge. There is more going on here than with undergraduate education, with a greater range of budgets and inter-relationships. Also, it is where the status of UC would appear to rest, where the strategic importance to the state in training graduate students gets sounded out, and with it the distinctive position UC has within the California higher education scheme in the conduct of research. The plan takes the form of a bargain. It is a true bargain, not just “compact” that UC will have business as usual and the state will throw money at it, but that each must commit to something of value to the other. Whatever happens, a plan with a bargain in it—one that UC can show to the public—provides traction. For this bargain, UC must first account for its own administrative growth in terms of positions and compensation. At least $600m is in play here. Without a complete, open, intellectually honest accounting, one might argue that UC supporters in state government have little leverage to work on UC's behalf. There will have to be cuts for this bargain to work—of positions, of salaries, of layers of organization. One might even expect that the more UC trims, the more likely there will be support for what is strategically important to the state in what’s left. Again, there is an easy “budget trick” of threatening to lop off something valuable or noisy (a journalism department makes good noise this way, historically), or both, and then use that available rallying energy to bring the legislature around. This budget trick also has to go. The stuff to trim off is the stuff no one really needs in a time of crisis. It’s not faculty or academic programs. At least not until the administrative part is made right. I do not know of anyone outside of UC administration that is willing to make the case that UC administration is hunky dory and its something else that has to go. That’s a political reality, whatever the self-rationalizations that might go on. If there’s going to be a fight, let’s have it be over what parts of administration we don’t need in a crisis, rather than pitting science faculty against humanities, or core faculty against professional programs, or campuses with higher rankings in some Chinese university or popular magazine-compiled list against campuses that are lower on such lists. The Schwartz plan brilliantly ends these skirmishes and places the burden on administration first.
If there is to be UC contraction, it must start with administrative positions, organization, and compensation. If there is less of UC—and there already clearly is that—then there needs to be a lot less of the administrative component. This is sad for individuals involved. I don’t wish anything ill on them. We are talking about tails and dogs, however, and honestly, administration is nearer the tail end. In a time of crisis, that’s what needs to go. If various administrative positions are unproductive relative to the new economic realities of UC, then these need to go first, not be drawn into an extra administrative burden of deciding what academic programs to cut and how to manage, say, faculty furloughs and respond to student protests. Finally, if UC compensation is a problem, then if there are going to be losses due to reductions in salary as people take better offers elsewhere, these should start with the administrative side of the house. If these adjustments are unacceptable, then new leaders should be identified. If there is going to be a brain drain, then it will start with the administrative brains. One might add: administration is not management. Management is not the brains of the operation; faculty are not the labor. Administration serves the faculty in the proper order of things, and in a financial crisis it serves the faculty by sacrificing its convenience and privileges. The public expects this. The public is waiting for UC administration to admit it. There will be no leverage in the legislature until it is done. ‘Twere good that it is done quickly, then.
The state support for this core budget beyond undergraduate education also opens up a discussion of the role of UC in providing research for the state. It’s one thing to have a generally wonderful world stature. It’s another to be able to show a direct interest in the research needs and advanced degree training needs of California communities, industry, and local governments. This is a key part the land grant ethos, as well as part of the founding instruments for the University of California. In assessing priorities for funding, UC might expect that the general reputation of campuses (such as “rankings”) might not be nearly so compelling to the people of the state as showing that UC expertise and significant research efforts the state is asked to fund have direct benefits for the state. Perhaps an open, intellectually honest accounting for these efforts would also go some way toward giving the state reasons to argue for funding the state component of the research budget, especially if the university has cleaned house with regard to multiple layers of administration.
These are not easy things to do, but then nothing is these days. Contraction of administrative and state research elements rather than contraction of the whole at the expense of undergraduate education appears to have a lot of merit as the place to make the bargain clear. Make a commitment to the undergraduates, the most vulnerable of people in the whole arrangement. Then work out how the rest of the state supported work will be funded. For that, there won’t be any movement without a miracle or a bargain, and as the former does not admit of planning, one might think the latter has much to commend it.
Growth Trends in UC Administration
by Ákos Róna-Tas, UCSD
Here are several charts.
The first shows the number of ladder rank faculty vs. senior managers at UCSD. This ratio dropped from 5 to 2 to 1 to 1 in the last 15 years.
The second shows the same trend systemwide.
The third shows the size of UCOP over time. (It is not UCOP that caused the enormous systemwide rise in the size of the senior administration.)
The fourth shows that the drop is uniform across all campuses.
Therefore it is unlikely that anything unique to UCSD (such as its large medical establishment) would explain this. Campus specific factors may explain the differences in a given year across campuses but not the change for a particular campus across time.
The numbers of the senior administration that UCOP reports include two groups: the Senior Management Group (SMG) and the Management and Senior Professional (MSP) group. I have just received an email from UCOP that says that the SMG group has been fluctuating between 275 and 305. So, it seems that most of the growth is due to the MSP group. MSPs are no small fry (most MSOs are not MSPs but Professional and Support Staff or PSSs). MSPs have a pay-scale that stretches from 100K to 248K (207K if you exclude Medical Centers), so my guess is that the average MSP pay is probably above the average pay of the ladder rank faculty (albeit keep in mind that they are paid on an 11 month schedule). This MSP group grew faster not just than ladder rank faculty, but faster
than most other categories.
further detail here
Here are several charts.
The first shows the number of ladder rank faculty vs. senior managers at UCSD. This ratio dropped from 5 to 2 to 1 to 1 in the last 15 years.
The second shows the same trend systemwide.
The third shows the size of UCOP over time. (It is not UCOP that caused the enormous systemwide rise in the size of the senior administration.)
The fourth shows that the drop is uniform across all campuses.
Therefore it is unlikely that anything unique to UCSD (such as its large medical establishment) would explain this. Campus specific factors may explain the differences in a given year across campuses but not the change for a particular campus across time.
The numbers of the senior administration that UCOP reports include two groups: the Senior Management Group (SMG) and the Management and Senior Professional (MSP) group. I have just received an email from UCOP that says that the SMG group has been fluctuating between 275 and 305. So, it seems that most of the growth is due to the MSP group. MSPs are no small fry (most MSOs are not MSPs but Professional and Support Staff or PSSs). MSPs have a pay-scale that stretches from 100K to 248K (207K if you exclude Medical Centers), so my guess is that the average MSP pay is probably above the average pay of the ladder rank faculty (albeit keep in mind that they are paid on an 11 month schedule). This MSP group grew faster not just than ladder rank faculty, but faster
than most other categories.
further detail here