Remaking the University

Bob Samuels reflects on Mark Yudof's response to President Obama's education initiative.  Yudof seems to be making the rounds as he talks here as well.

Students at Berkeley Challenge Edley and Robinson:  Why Have an Armed Police Force on Campus?

The California Budget Project has a new study of the deep effects that the recession and budget cuts in California have had on women and families.

Catherine Liu was interviewed on Left Business Observer about her book American Idyll.


David Sirota points to reasons to doubt the "myth of the education crisis."

Claremont McKenna admits that it inflated its average SAT scores for several years.  Of course they are not the only ones who have tried to game the ranking system.

Controversy continues to swirl around Pomona College and its decision to fire immigrant workers without documents.

In California Republican registration continues to drop; Decline to State continues to Rise.

Both Florida and Georgia are debating legislation to limit opportunities for undocumented students.

New analysis suggests that online may work best when students are using it only part-time.

Indiana adds new anti-union law.

Even the IMF realizes that European austerity has gone too far.  Maybe more will notice the massive unemployment and demoralization of the austere.

UPDATES: Open letter from Occupy UCR, including statements of the humanistic social purposes of the university
Open letter to the UC Riverside chancellor from Prof. Jennifer Doyle from The Nation blog.

According to a faculty observer, on January 19 while the Regents met on the UC Riverside campus, hundreds of UC students and faculty gathered outside to protest further cuts to funding and demand a more transparent form of decision-making by the Regents. In response, they were met with police in full riot gear declaring their nonviolent gathering an "unlawful" assembly. Some of these students and faculty were eventually shoved to the ground, dragged across the pavement, attacked with batons, and shot with plastic pellets. This week, faculty, students and staff at UCR generated an "Open Letter" to Chancellor Tim White, demanding accountability for the exaggerated militarization and violence of the UC's response to these nonviolent protests.

Letter Below the Fold

Dear Chancellor White,

In light of the events of January 19, we felt it appropriate to issue our own letter asking for your response to some urgent questions. We are citizens of this community—students, faculty and staff—demanding answers for the troubling events of last Thursday.

Whose decision was it to militarize an unarmed, nonviolent protest on our campus on January 19, by calling in police in riot gear to threaten and assault a crowd of protesters who continually insisted loudly that their protest was intended to be peaceful?

Who decided that this peaceful protest was an “unlawful assembly,” as the police repeatedly announced over the PA system? On what basis was this determined?

Why did you (or whoever else was responsible) not come out to address the crowd and explain this decision? Did you hear them chanting, “Tell us why”? What makes a large crowd of dissatisfied people demanding dialogue with their representatives on their own campus an “unlawful assembly”? And don't those whose actions are unilaterally deemed “unlawful” deserve an explanation as to why?

Your Friday letter states that the behavior of a “small number of individuals... briefly and peacefully shut down the Regents meeting... Their actions, while making a point to disrupt and while remaining nonviolent, nonetheless prevented others from listening to the discussion by denying public access to the remainder of the meeting.”

If, as you acknowledge, the actions of that small group of students were nonviolent, why and how would the actions of a handful of disruptive students cause the entire protest to be deemed “unlawful assembly” and justify the threat of force and arrest against all of the other students and faculty members gathered?

Why has nonviolent disruption, assertiveness and defiance been equated with aggression, violence and threat on our campus, when Gandhi himself called for nonviolent disobedience to be forceful and confrontational, and when, from a first amendment perspective, “disruptive” and “dangerous” are two very different things?

You say in your most recent Friday letter that you needed to “use our police to ensure the safety of meeting participants as well as the majority of protest participants.” But is there any evidence that any of the protesters were threatening the Regents, rather than simply using disruptive—and potentially embarrassing—tactics to make their demands visible?

Even if it is still true that police presence was required, why did the police have to be armed with violent equipment, as though they were facing dangerous criminals? Could they not simply have been sent to observe and monitor the proceedings; why did they have to be armed to the hilt, and then escalate the situation with the threats and use of potentially lethal force?

Who, in this situation, was the real “threat” to our campus’ security: a group of dissatisfied but unarmed students and faculty chanting “peaceful protest!”, or a group of highly-armed police threatening to and willing to use force through batons, tear gas and rubber bullets (which have been known to kill people in other conflicts)?

Your Friday letter expresses concern about officers who “received minor injuries, as barricades were thrown at them and signs used as weapons.” But what we see in the following videos are police in full riot gear shoving unarmed students and faculty with batons, and then firing paint-filled bullets at them. Please see, among MANY others, the videos and reports of injuries to students and faculty from police violence:

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/01/20/uc-riverside-students-attacked-by-police-during-day-of-protest-for-education/

http://voiceforhumanrights.org/2012/01/21/students-at-uc-riverside-face-violence-during-protest-against-uc-regents-meeting/

http://antiimperialtheorizing.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/cops-and-cowards-reflections-on-the-recent-uc-regents-protest/

What we see on the following video clips are the protesters seizing the police barricades and trying to place them between themselves and the police. We do not see anyone using the barricades to attack the police. Meanwhile, the following video shows a protester being hit with rubber/paint pellets. That student is clearly in a great deal of pain and saying that he is having trouble breathing. He is carried away by a handful of other students who call out for water and help (skip to 4:30) You can also see from the videos that the response of the protesters was to chant, “peaceful protest, peaceful protest!”

How can rubber bullets and batons be considered a justifiable response to disruption and embarrassment that is not in any way physically dangerous? What evidence do we have that it was the protesters, and not the highly-armed and militarized police force, who escalated the violence?

What accounts for the tight, 1-minute so-called "comment period" provided at the Regents' meeting? Students and faculty were demanding an open forum that was NOT controlled by the Regents' own inadequate vision of what constitutes democratic dialogue and transparent decision-making. In light of this, why should their demand to be heard at such a forum be construed as a threat, justifying such escalated violence?

When fully-armed police are sent in to threaten, shove and physically assault unarmed people who are already frustrated, resentful and angry at being criminalized and having lost their voices, will this not inevitably escalate the level of violence?

So, in conclusion, Chancellor White, we are seeking answers for what happened on January 19, but are also deeply concerned with the implications of these events for the future of free speech on our campus. What makes a crowd of unarmed, peacefully dissenting people “unlawful” and “dangerous”? Who gets to decide, and on what basis? And, what forms of free, nonviolent speech and expression of dissent can be considered “lawful” on our campus, so that they are not met with met with exaggerated militarization, and the escalation of institutionally-authorized violence?

Sincerely,

Concerned Members of the UCR Community

A letter from Justice Cruz Reynoso indicates that the UC Davis Police Force is not cooperating with his investigation as they promised.

David Wittman has a recent post on how he got involved in Davis protests.  It is part of a new blog on how Faculty can support Students.  Check it out.

Victory at Kroeber Library.

CSU Trustees agree to limit pay increases for CSU Presidents. 


The PPIC is out with their latest polling on Californian's and their Government.  A lot of mixed messages: good for K-12, less for Higher Ed and social services;  Good for increasing the progressivity of taxes.  But still a lot of confusion.

The Nation has an analysis of Obama's Education Rhetoric.  They were no more impressed than I was.

Faculty at University of Oregon begin drive for Unionization.

Stanford rethinks their undergraduate education.

I think this is what they really mean when they talk about creative destruction.

Thanks to Cameron's austerity policies England now is in worse shape than at the equivalent point of the Great Depression.

A Letter from the London Review of Books points out:

Universities under Attack ‘If we can’t speak the language of our enemies, not only will they not listen to us,’ Michael Wood writes, ‘but they can’t’ (LRB, 15 December 2011). He is far too defeatist. Under New Labour, the arts were told that statements about value, quality and excellence were irrelevant and self-serving, and would be rejected out of hand by the Treasury. Unless the arts could demonstrate, numerically, their instrumental utility to society, the economy, the environment and social development, they would never get a decent hearing in Whitehall. For a decade, arts leaders demonstrated that they could run their organisations in ‘business-like ways’ – which is totally different from running them ‘like businesses’. The sector poured out instrumental indicators by the ton. But the arts never gave up their own language for describing the real nature of their activity.
The essential question for higher education is not ‘will they listen?’ It is ‘will we speak out?’
John Tusa
London N1

By Michael Meranze

As expected, President Obama previewed his election year populist pivot in last night's State of the Union address.  Between his opening and closing reminder to Republicans that he had carried out stealth warfare with greater efficiency than his predecessor, he articulated a domestic agenda that aimed to present himself as the candidate of a more caring domestic future. He also spent a good deal of time discussing education.


Playing on the growing anger about inequality, the President tried to define the question of fairness in terms of  the gaps between rich and poor as opposed to the Republican insistence that the poor and the elderly were the true fat-cats of our society.  And there were elements of his domestic agenda that might prove positive if he actually carries them out: initiatives to rearrange the tax code to discourage the off-shoring of jobs and manufacturing, to make sure that Corporations pay some sort of tax, to strengthen unemployment insurance and the safety net, to turn the money saved from bringing troops home into money spent on infrastructure, and to encourage new forms of energy.  He is setting up a new board to look into financial malfeasance (although since his DOJ could have been prosecuting people for the last 3 years this looks more like a fig leaf).

Unfortunately, this was still all phrased within the same language of debt reduction with its austerity that the President has employed since he first took office and, of course, there is no guarantee that he will actually fight for any of this stuff.

In this mix, education took a prominent role.  Like Jerry Brown in his recent State of the State address, President Obama pushed hard for the centrality of education in any flourishing American Society.  But where Brown expressed skepticism about the role of educational "reformers" and standardized testing in K-12, President Obama in the State of the Union and in his accompanying "Blueprint" doubled-down on both.

Under the buzzword of allowing more leeway to schools, the President sought to expand the range of testing and also--dangerous opening--to subject schools and teachers to greater market discipline.  As the blueprint puts it, the President is "Creating new career ladders for teachers to become more effective, and ensuring that earnings are tied more closely to performance" (5).

And despite the rhetoric of freeing teachers from "teaching to the test" the upshot would simply be more varied systems of testing. (5)  This is the administration of Arne Duncan after all, so caution is in order.  Obama hit the rhetorical notes of caring about education and teaching, but without evidence that he has overcome his fondness for market solutions in education (and there was none on display) it is hard to see how this rhetoric will do more than provide a cover for the ongoing undermining of public schools. 

The President's Higher Ed discussion was equally problematic.  On the one hand, Obama reasserted his convictions on the importance of higher ed and expressed his worries about the rising amount of student debt.  He also stressed the continuing importance of research and the need to fund it.

On the other hand, his proposals do little to secure the future of higher ed or help students.  His most prominent example of his vision lies in linking community colleges closer to businesses:

Model partnerships between businesses like Siemens and community colleges in places like Charlotte, Orlando, and Louisville are up and running. Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers - places that teach people skills that local businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.

But as the New York Times recently reported, these partnerships primarily help businesses--not students--by training students to work for specific companies rather than giving them an education and knowledge that can be transferred if the company goes under. 

Moreover, Obama's response to the reduction of State aid to public universities is to set up new audit requirements in the name of market efficiency in order to continue to receive student loan aid.  Even his proposal to expand his tax credit for college costs while helpful is so small (capped at $10,000 for 4 years) as to be risible in the current context.  The same can be said for his proposal to require more work-study jobs.

Insofar as our aim should be to allow students to focus on their studies without condemning themselves to huge amounts of debt, what is called for is Federal Direct Funding to enable tuition to be kept down and colleges to make the investments in faculty and infrastructure that would enable the sort of creative production to overcome the ongoing creative destruction that today's capitalism glories in.

In the end the President struck important notes about the fairness and importance of investing in the future (as opposed to investing in Hedge Funds); however, he--like most of the political class--seems unable to shake the notions that austerity is necessary (except around the margins) or that we can overcome the disasters of neo-liberalism by expanding the reach of market mechanisms.

Obama's vision is more human than any of his Republican opponents' but it remains a mis-statement of the Union.

Photo: Obama State of the Union - WhiteHouse.gov

Students at Riverside Protests offered the Regents a civics lesson on the right of assembly.

Of course that didn't stop police from arresting two and using plastic pellets on others.

For those of you who missed it, Nathan Brostrom and Patrick Lenz offered a power-point version of UCOP's analysis of the Budget at Last week's Regent's meeting.  Here is the more old-fashioned form.

The Regents got a report on Diversity at UC.  Spoilers:  Could be better.

Sign of the Times department:  UCSF offers its justification for its bid to get a new relationship with UC.   Apparently they only get 200M in base state support.


UC Plans to place new campus of Lawrence Berkeley lab in Richmond.

At Berkeley protesters succeed in getting administration to return to full hours at Anthropology Library.

The problems facing mid-year transfers this year continue to grow.

UCLA is planning on selling its Japanese Tea Garden and Cultural Center for some cash.

States are looking to cut support for higher education even further while tightening control.  State support for Higher Ed dropped nearly 8% last year.

And just so you know, Moody's says the financial outlook for colleges and universities is mixed.

Yves Smith wonders if the Obama administration is going to shift pension funds over to banks.

Dianne Ravitch discusses the assault on public education.

And while we are all enjoying our apple products...

Photo: UCR protesters link arms - KTLA-TV

Our start on eventual proper coverage

UCR Riverside protesters are attacked by police.

Bob Samuels has a helpful overview of the Regents issues along with his takedown of the worst idea of the week -- students' trading tuition in college for twenty years of debt.  This idea is being implemented in the UK as part of the Tory government's attempt to mitigate the obvious cost disaster they were imposing on British college students with their overnight tripling of fees to 9000 pounds. It would undoubtedly ease regular large tuition increases, since it would exploit people's inability to feel as upset about future costs as they are about present ones, and would solidify, in the world of education, our economy of debt.

UCSF's chancellor offered the other big surprise of the week by expressing a desire to leave the UC system-- sort of.  We will be looking into this, but the San Francisco Chronicle coverage implied that the motive was that UCSF could no longer afford to subsidize the UC system.  Chancellor Desmond-Hellmann mentioned a loss to UC of $49 million.  This is about 1% of UCSF's budget, but in any case is offset by the $186 million that UCSF receives in state general funds, which is over $52,000 per student or over five times the per student GF of Berkeley.  There are many more cash flows back and forth than I've just mentioned, but the main point is that a huge taboo has been broken. The main motive is probably a bad case of UCOP fatigue, and we may see a systemwide outbreak soon.

Photo: "Protest at UC Riverside" by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times

For the Latest in UCOP's position on the budget you can listen to Patrick Lenz' spiel on January 11th.  And here is the budget update for tomorrow's Regent's meeting.

The Regents are moving their May Meeting to Sacramento.  Promise to Protest Cuts to Higher Ed.

Brown delivers his State of the State.  He is continuing to push for austerity.

Think Long has pulled its tax initiative from the ballot.

"Neo-Racism" in southwestern education.


Even the NSF has sounded the alarm about the fact that states are cutting investment in research.  The fuller report can be found here. 

The NSF is also trying to encourage more research experience for students at community colleges.

University of Michigan Grad Student says she was dismissed because of her union activity.

Illinois Attorney General to sue for-profit college for misrepresentations to students.

The latest venture capitalist effort in Higher Ed.

Another reason not to get carried away by an emphasis on using standardized tests to evaluate teachers.

To criticize would just be envy:  Goldman Sachs to spend more on bonuses even though revenue is down.

Photo: Jennifer Dibbern by Melanie Maxwell/Associated Press

You'll recall that the California State Auditor released its audit of the University of California last July. In Part I of my analysis, I discussed the Bureau of State Audit's (BSA's) incomprehensible claim that student tuition money is public funding. Yet the audit compensated for its coverup of UC's revenue problem with a disturbing analysis of UC's internal distribution of funds among the campuses.  It noted two things: a rich man/ poor man inequality among campuses in educational resources, and an apparent racial pattern in which the poor campuses are those that have higher proportion of underrepresented racial or ethnic groups. 

I'll discuss these findings, and toward the end of this post will show charts that challenge the Office of the President's rebuttal of these findings.  Has UC's central administration been underdeveloping the University of California in part along racial lines?  In spite of OP's 's good intentions--and the audit's backpedaling on "inequity"--the current evidence says yes.  The unequal distribution of both underrepresented students and core funding poses a question about whether UC is willing and able to advance social development in a minority-majority state.

Here's the figure that summarizes the Audit's findings on racial disparity:


UC campuses have significant variation in their proportion of underrepresented racial groups, defined as "Hispanic, Black (non‐Hispanic), American Indian, and Alaskan Native."   The report separates them into two clusters on either side of their 18% systemwide average.  The averages for the two groups are 27% for the campuses with more students from underrepresented groups, and 15% for the campuses that have a higher proportion of students that are white and/or Asian American.  These latter campuses are Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, Irvine, and Davis. The more black-and-brown campuses are Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. 

The audit equally finds large variations in the per-student amount of state and tuition money that each campus receives from the Office of the President.

These variations are also large.  A student at the poorest campus, Santa Barbara, has 63 cents on the dollar received by a UCLA student down the road.  The auditors know that the difference has something  to do with the outsize per-capita sums spent on medical education -- hence their third column above, and San Francisco's $55k per student.  Comparing Santa Barbara to Berkeley, which also has no medical school, still puts Santa Barbara at 72 cents on the Berkeley dollar.  In spite of its placement with the better off campuses in Table 7, Irvine is a lower-middle income campus with a medical school, receiving 79 cents on the Davis dollar (another medical campus). 

The punch line is the Auditor's correlation between the poorer campuses and their higher enrollments of underrepresented minority students ( Table 7 again,  p 38).  The audit quantifies underfunding as something over $200 million a year for the four "minority" campuses.  $200 million would buy a lot of the individualized instruction that budget cuts are squeezing out right when the state of California needs instructional  upgrades instead. The audit puts the difference at about $3500 less per head at the lower-income campuses.  Since the average of all the campuses minus SF is just under $15,500, students at poorer campuses lose nearly a quarter of average UC resources by attending one of the them.

The Audit thus identifies two separable but interrelated issues with UC's budgetary structure:

1.The campuses are unequally funded.  Though some of the differences reflect different program mixtures (on this more below), it is very hard to justify charging all UC students the same tuition and then giving them very different resources at different campuses.  On its face, UC creates a clear inequity when it charges the same amount for different resources depending on the campus a UC student attends.

Similar arguments can be made for research: all UC activity is premised on UC being a balanced system of comparable quality everywhere.  To put it obnoxiously, the NSF doesn't fund grants at UCSB thinking that that campus will put in 63% of the intelligence or effort of a similarly funded grant at UCLA.  Indeed UCSB personnel and students put in 100%, yet without 100% of the matching resources. 

2. UCOP sends less money to campus with more underrepresented students.  The audit doesn't claim that UCOP sends less money because a campus is more black and brown, or that UCOP has any racist intent -- it goes out of its way to deny a causal connection and refuses the term "inequity" (see p 37).  Nonetheless, the BSA identifies racial disparities that correlate with funding inequalities.

Unequal resources for racial minorities is  a fundamental pattern in American society and schooling that decades if not centuries of struggle and countermeasures have not remedied.  UC is not above this history. Now the state audit lays a serious charge at UC's door.  How does UCOP respond to the audit's identification of these issues? 

UCOP makes two main points:

• Campus funding differentials reflect "150 years of strategic funding choices," different program mixes, and each campus's unique identity (pp 79-80). These differences do not reflect inequity, but instead the strategic flexibility that former UC president Clark Kerr described as a key to excellence.
• Regarding the racial pattern, UC has no biased intent and the BSA has no evidence of either intent or disparate outcomes.  The "BSA makes no investigation into or observation of disproportionate or inequitable treatment or outcomes for students at different campuses. The University of California has a firm commitment to diversity and an extraordinary record when it comes to the persistence and graduation of students from all California communities:" (p 81)

I have two thoughts about the first point. One is that UCOP shouldn't see Kerr-style excellence as expressed by a system that has turned out to have such unequally funded campuses.  It is true by definition that the poorer campuses have cheaper programs, which means they have fewer professional programs and graduate programs and the myriad intellectual activities that go with that. Since UC is a system of research campuses, why is it OK that at least four of them are funded more like undergraduate colleges?  We should instead take unequal funding as a sign that UC remains underdeveloped, more so at some campuses than others.  We should also read UCOP as saying that in a restricted funding environment, this underdevelopment has been intentional and strategic.

For some reason, the auditors deny they implied that funding differentials have a "potential for inequity" (87).  In fact UC officials have not only admitted resource inequity but said that it is deliberate and good.   In addition, they say they will oppose correcting it: the Office of the President "further stated [to the state's audit team]  that the university does not wish to jeopardize the achievements of the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses by shifting funds away to other campuses in an effort to provide an equal amount of the general funds and tuition budget per student" (36).   In a period of stagnant or declining funding, UCOP defines its job as protecting UC stratification rather than correcting it.

Secondly, funding differences aren't created by the presence of high-cost professional and medical programs (pp 32-33).  A fellow UCPB alum analyzed UC's audited financial statements and removed funding for the medical and other professional schools.  He did this for 2006-07, which was a fairly normal year after the cuts of 2002-05 and before those of 2008-2012.  This is a chart based on those calculations (excluding the all-medical campus of UCSF):
UCOP distributes both tuition and state general fund unequally, in a pattern similar to that the audit described.  (San Diego is sometimes called the "third flagship" but is funded as the system's average campus. Irvine is actually found among the poor.)  The crucial point is that differential campus funding remains even after the biggest program-based causes are removed.  The remaining differences derive from "historical variations" by campus in funding for undergraduates and academic graduate students.  This is the problem, not the justification of it.

On the racial pattern, UCOP pushes back hard.
[W]e strongly object to the BSA’s use of the variation in the race/ethnicity profiles of our campus student populations to further cast into doubt the integrity of the University’s allocation process. There is absolutely no basis – statistically, historically, or ethically – for drawing such a connection. Furthermore, the BSA makes no investigation into or observation of disproportionate or inequitable treatment or outcomes for students at different campuses. The University of California has a firm commitment to diversity and an extraordinary record when it comes to the persistence and graduation of students from all California communities. Four- and six-year graduation rates for all combinations of race/ethnicity and gender are higher at UC than at 21 public peer institutions.But UCOP's own 2009 report on campus differences does find inequitable outcomes - namely, significant variations in graduation rates. 
The audit's rich and poor campus correlate are those that have system's higher and lower graduation rates, respectively.  (UC's comparator universities show the same correlation.)

Although a race-based breakdown of graduation rates is beyond my scope here, we do have this evidence that UC's underfunded campuses have lower graduation rates that would negatively affect their higher proportion of underrepresented students.  In this case, UC's funding disparities places an extra burden on its underrepresented students.

The patterns I've discussed call into question UC's social relevance to a state which now has a solid minority majority in its student population and in most metropolitan areas.  Were UC to equalize graduation rates and academic attainment across racial groups, that would be remarkable and transformative, and something the state's majority would be likely to fund.  But if UC mostly reproduces racial hierarchies through a stratified system of unequal campuses, it does much less work for the state, and will have less interest to its population.   UC would by this logic of diminished public service receive less public funding.  If UC defines its accomplishments as damaged by equitable funding distribution around the system, as it does when it puts flagship funding first, these accomplishments will not attract broad public interest.

Finally, there has been some important internal rethinking of these funding patterns.  The faculty Senate's Academic Council has proposed the "rebenching" of base budgets, which I will discuss in another post.  In so doing, the Council offers this as its core principle: " UC is one university with one standard of excellence at its ten campuses, and the cost of a UC quality education is the same on every campus."  Council passed this principle unanimously.

Principles are free and can be adopted by anyone.   UCOP should adopt the principle of equal funding across campuses for each type of student (undergrad, grad, etc) . This would allow the UC system to accomplish it larger mission.

Senator Lieu proposes capping CSU Presidents' salaries.  Senator Yee proposes extending administrative salary cap to UC.

Brown proposes limiting access and benefits of Cal Grants.

Out-of-State and International Applications to UC are up dramatically.

California Leads Nation in Unaccredited schools.

K-12 Districts can't plan in face of Budget Uncertainties.

UT-Austin prepares to raise Tuition.

Texas Hopes to align Higher Ed closer to the job market.

East Coast Elite worries they are losing control over early admission process.

Romney Tries to Drum up Support for For-Profit College; Doesn't mention its cost or the fact that its head is one of his donors.

On Solitude and against the "New Groupthink."

Photos: (Jerry Brown) Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, (Mitt Romney) Joe Raedle/Getty Images

By Kelley Rees

When I returned to campus after the holidays the calls for resignation and protest seemed largely quieted by the month-long respite. I wasn’t there when police pepper-sprayed my fellow University of California, Davis students. I was wholly unaware. About an hour later I received a text message saying some students were pepper-sprayed. I don’t consider myself an activist, a reformist, a futurist. My initial thought was that the police were in the right, and the students in the wrong. Upon further inquiry I found photos and videos which set my early reactions straight.

morePrior to November 18th, I had seen the small encampment on the Quad but not paid much mind to its intent. I, like many others at the time, wasn’t entirely certain if their purpose was to show camaraderie with the Occupy Wall Street protesters or to begin their own movement focused on University of California tuition hikes. I will say though, that the actions of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, and the UC Davis Campus Police could not have better unified those whose chief emotion was indifference with those at the very heart of the movement. The large congregation that gathered as riot police closed in on those peacefully seated were not radicals, activists, or extremists of any kind. They were students on their way to classes and faculty on their way to work, interrupted from their daily goings-on – their learning and their employment – not by protestors but by those sent in to disband them.

In the first email Chancellor Katehi sent to those attending UC Davis following the events of November 18th, she affirmed, “We have a responsibility to our entire campus community, including the parents who have entrusted their students to us, to ensure that all can live, learn and work in a safe and secure environment.” However, it was not the protestors, but the actions of the police sent by Chancellor Katehi that disrupted this living, learning, and working. And suddenly the handful of students that had begun protesting an unclear ideology, or a greatly disparate class-structure, or a gross increase in tuition had become thousands of students, faculty, and staff with written objectives and a means of advancing them.

The general assembly held the week following the pepper spraying seemed to me a sort of call to arms. Many, myself included, who had days before walked by the tents without a second glance were now standing side by side fellow believers. Most were not believers in a radical ideology, but in a doctrine that founded our nation – believers in the “right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

I am proud to be part of the University of California but more so because of student actions and not those of the administration. During the general assembly students from other campuses came to speak and show their solidarity. The heads of unions spoke of their support. Dozens of professors and the entire English Department requested the resignation of Chancellor Katehi. Throughout everything students remained peaceful and patient. And it was students who quickly pacified any rare outburst that did occur. When Chancellor Katehi walked to the podium some began to boo. Others quickly silenced them with shushing and calls of “let her speak.” If a more extreme idea was proposed at some point in the assembly, such as the removal of police from the campus, much attention was given to explaining the rational, encouraging questions and debate, and allowing those with dissenting opinions to share their views. It was an ideal example of a democratic process, not the totalitarian tactics seen days earlier.

The mentality that the only fault of the University of California system is the recent police brutality at the Berkeley and the Davis campuses overlooks other significant failings. But from a student’s perspective at least, it seems as though the powers that be, including the Regents and the Chancellor of my own university, refuse to see and acknowledge this. Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (109) Something is out of place when this sentiment so perfectly applies to those leading an institute of higher learning.

Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

California Community College Board endorses huge changes to their organization and mission.  The changes may reduce access.

Assemblyman proposes state tax break to help middle-class families pay for increasing tuition.

Surprise!  The number of Californians with more than a million dollar incomes shot upwards last year.  So did their share of the income stream.

Brazil has passed California.  Now the state only has the 9th largest economy in the world.  I'm sure austerity will help improve that as much as it has helped in Europe.  At least there some of the technocrats may be realizing austerity has been a mistake.

According to Pew Report tensions between the rich and poor are now seen as the largest source of conflict in US.

Never before seen event: Connecticut decides to eliminate high-level university administrative positions because they aren't needed.

Illinois faculty protest Administration's attempt to influence deliberations through anonymous email.  See it as an effort to undermine shared governance.

A new report commissioned by the Department of Education calls for expanded education in democratic engagement by colleges and universities.  The whole report can be found here.

Google is now offering "virtual tours" of college campuses.

One person dies and 22 are injured as students struggle for limited enrollment spaces at the University of Johannesburg.

As you are all aware, the Governor released his proposed budget last week.  Analyses are starting to come in.  The picture they paint is not pretty.  Here is the California Budget Project's "First Impressions"  as well as a more thorough if still preliminary account that they are providing.

The California Faculty Association did what UCOP wouldn't: Respond in a forceful way to how damaging the budget would be.

Oh, and the LAO wants to have more say in how programs are developed and defined.

Jim Newton in the LAT asks why it is that no one is willing to recognize the damage that Proposition 13 is doing to the state.

More on the way that austerity is destroying the European economy (to say nothing about European society).  Not that American politicians and economists seem able to understand that.

Of course, states still seem to think that if they provide enough free stuff to businesses they will come in and save the economy.  Chris has more on this issue here.

I have a post on my other blog that continues last week's piece about the damage done by our version of publicly-subsidized capitalism. This one is about the high-tech industry that is supposed to save the California and American economies, and less about the university.

by Eric Hays, Executive Director, Council of UC Faculty Associations

The budget forecasts a hole of about $9.2 billion that will need to be addressed with cuts or tax increases. Brown is proposing to split the difference, with about half of the hole filled by cuts (mostly to social service programs) and half by his proposed tax increase (a temporary increase of the income tax on those making $250,000 or more a year and an half percent increase in the sales tax, increases that would expire by 2017). This year Brown is taking his tax proposal to the voters through a ballot initiative rather than try to get the legislature to pass a tax increase. There is another budget trigger in this year's budget that will fire if the voters do not approve the tax increase (more on that below).
The budget proposal treats the post-trigger 2010-11 state budget as the base, so the $100 million cut that UC just officially received last month is counted when calculating the base UC budget of $2.274 billion, the lowest funding UC has received from the state (when you count federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money) since the 1999-2000 budget, without even adjusting for inflation or considering the increases in enrollment that have occurred in the intervening years.

To this base, Brown proposes adding $90 million, which can be seen as an acknowledgement of the state's obligation to begin again contributing towards the UC Retirement Plan. The budget also eliminates almost all categoricals in UC's funding –- the language specifying specific programs the state expects UC to spend certain of the state budgeted money on -- which the Governor's budget characterizes as increasing UCOP's flexibility in how it manages recent cuts in state funding. But this includes no longer separately budgeting UC's capital costs, which is to "require the University to factor these costs into UC's overall fiscal outlook and decision making process."

The budget proposal makes major cuts to student financial aid that would eliminate funding for tens of thousands of students currently receiving financial aid.

If the Governor's tax proposal fails to pass and the trigger gets pulled, most of the cuts -- $4.8 billion – would be made to K-14, but UC and CSU would each be cut $200 million, which the budget anticipates would likely result in tuition increases at each system.

In a separate document, the Department of Finance has indicated that there is a plan to provide UC and CSU four percent increases in state funding each year starting with the 2013-14 fiscal year, assuming the Governor's tax proposal passes.

I have redone our traditional chart of UC's share of state general funds to reflect Gov Jerry Brown's proposal. The UC Regents agreed to request a $411 million increase on the heels of Brown's $750 million cut for 2011-12, leaving UC's general fund well under water looking only at the time since Brown took office.  Brown proposed a possible $300 million increase, to be reduced to a $100 million increase if tax increases are not approved by voters in a possible ballot resolution in November.  I have context and comments below the fold.



The final number for state general funds to UC is $2.273 billion, erasing any gains made in the past fifteen years (during which time enrollments grew 50%).  The UC Regents requested $411 million more next year, and Brown proposed $90 million in new general fund.

Some history will help explain this chart.  The Benchmark line (purple diamonds)  tracks UC general fund growth starting in 2000-2001 as if it were to grow at the same rate each year as state per capita income, which is what we used in the Futures Report as a measure of the state population's financial capacity.  While California's unemploymen ratet is very high, it's overall personal income has continued to grow. The current forecast is growth of 4.9% in 2011 (p 3).  Commentators are starting to notice that Brown's are cuts of choice, not necessity.  (I discussed Brown's decline from his already-weak "post-Democratic" 1970s semi-vision of social development in his current budget, and in broader terms earlier this week).

Why the diverging lines starting at 2005?  2005 marks the point in time when the Schwarzenegger administration and UC officials agreed to combine low growth in state funding (2-3% per year) with larger growth in tuition (7-10% per year). The 2001 Pathway shows what would have been required to build back the funding base to the 2001 benchmark. The same goes for the 1990 line.  The Funding Freeze was our 2006 worst case scenario, which the state has erratically achieved.

The chart shows that the University of California has been radically restructured in the past ten years: it is not $411 million or $1 billion but over $2 billion below where it would have been if the 2001 trend had not been interrupted by two cycles of massive cuts.  Financially speaking, we simply no longer have the "University of California."  What we still call UC is something else, which admin and faculty are of course reluctant to specify.

Further history: an attempt to avoid ending up exactly where we are right now, the Academic Senate produced three budget reports (via UC Planning and Budget).  Then Senate chair John Oakley and I made a presentation of the Futures Report findings to the Regents on May 17, 2007, showing both the public funding shortfall and the impossibility of using private fundraising and research revenues to fill in the gap.  No action was taken in response.

A year later, the Cuts Report came with explicit budgetary recommendations. On April 8, 2008, Academic Council recommended that the President
make a public commitment that, in the interest of avoiding yet another reduction to the current level of resources devoted to each UC student, the University will establish a minimum cost of instruction no lower than the current, already-reduced, 2007-08 level, and will take the necessary steps to sustain its public investment per student, adjusted annually to reflect actual costs The 2007-08 general fund level was about $3.2 billion, or one billion dollars above where were are in 2011-12.
No action was taken. There is no evidence that UCOP even mentioned the faculty recommendations to the Regents.

A year after that, Arnold Schwarzenegger abrogated the Compact and inflicted the first 20% cut to UC's general fund budget (see UCOP's chart p S-7).  The following year, federal stimulus funds back-filled the cuts on a one-time basis. 

In May 2010 UCOP announced that UC was going to find $500 million in administrative expenses. Six months after that, the new Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, proposed a cut of $500 million.  This is the cut that has now become $750 million,  or a cut of 25%.  This year's Jerry Brown cut has been larger than the catastrophe cut by Arnold Schwarzenegger. We learned this week that we will at best get 12% of that back, and may, if the November tax increases don't make it, lose $200 million more.

That's where we are now.  In response, UCOP has deployed a repetoire of three strategies: "balance sheet initiatives" run by the financial people, more on-line instruction, and a rapid increase in out-of-state students paying levels of tuition that are closing in on the levels at major private universities.  Of course, these are on top of the most fundamental policy of all: the repeated, massive tuition increases on in-state UC sudents -  up over 50% in the past 5 years (using 2007-08 as base).  Even these terrible tuition increases have not repaired UC revenues.  UC is set to receive $2.97 billion in student fees in 2012-13, while having about $2.43 billion in fees in 2007-08.  This means that it has grossed in student tuition revenues a bit more than half of what it has lost in state general funds. When we factor in financial aid (33% of new tuition dollars), increased subsidies of research's indirect costs, and other rising expenses, the shortfall is even worse. This is why UCOP is projection a remarkable $2.5 billion budget shortfall in 2015-16 (Display 7).

None of UCOP's non-tuition measures are going to fix the educational or budgetary holes.  And neither will its tuition measures, in spite of the hardships they cause, and of their gradual elimination of the distinctive nature of public universities.

This is all extremely sad, and could have been avoided --  could still be avoided -- were UC officials to fight tooth and nail for public funding This would require explaining the basic budget math, but also saying exactly why public funding is necessary to offer 21st century versions of high-quality learning at UC and CSU's mass scale to an unevenly educated, multinational, and extremely promising generation now in school.  Private money has never and will never built the infrastructure for this, and there are many many people at this university who could spell out why and how and what public money does.

But the official reflex at UC is for the self-destructive cover-up, and the profuse thanks for nothing.  I have often discussed this habit, (e.g. February 20, 2009), which makes rational sense only on the theory that UCOP is trying to reduce public funding and convert UC to a high-tuition model with enough financial aid to enable a steady stream of press conferences about the university's public mindedness.   But I am still unable to get myself to believe this.

So on the tattered theory that UCOP wants strong public funding for its public university, the  new UCOP statement is yet another example of perversity.   It says that the new money will go to cover pension costs rather than to instruction and research, so that the employees can take the fall for future fee hikes while the university lets the state off the hook for paying pension costs directly.  (Yes I realize UCOP may believe it is setting a precedent for the state paying for the pension, but that's not how the statement will be read.)

The statement again invokes administrative savings in the hundreds of millions, implying for the nth time that more state funding is really not that necessary.  And it says the university is "gratified" when it asks for $411 million and receives $90 million instead, suggesting more cuts, low-balling, and underfunding will, at UCOP, be not only tolerated, but welcomed with praise.  The effect of this kind of statement on both the public and the UC community can only be demobilization. There is no big problem here, no emergency, just the kind of business as usual that has led to an unbroken series of public funding cuts and huge tuition hikes. 

That is the simple logic that binds together UC's executive administration and the governor's office.   And I would like to know why the hundreds of thousands of us at UC are stuck year in year out with this losing strategy.  Why?

A final technical note: the numbers now out there do not add up.  The red line in the chart does not follow the Department of Finance 2011-12 figure for UC, which appears to reflect only the first $500 million cut and not the full $750m.  The DOF's historical tables do not square with this summer's state audit figures, but I haven't had time to figure out why.   UCLA's FA blog notes has a good brief discussion of the deficit issue.

As Chris noted yesterday, Jerry Brown has released his 2012-13 budget proposal.   It is heavy on cuts to welfare and social services and filled with threats to cut education in a devastating manner if he doesn't get his proposed tax increases.

The Higher Ed section of Brown's proposals can be found here.  While the Governor makes a lot of noise about increased funding for UC and CSU over last year, if you look at the 2007-2008 totals you will see that both systems are still down 700 Million in General Fund support. (3)  Predictably, UCOP rushed out a statement from Patrick Lenz doffing their caps and thanking the Governor for his generosity.  You do get the impression though that what makes them happiest is " the governor's willingness to grant UC leadership maximum flexibility in navigating these fiscal times" because nothing is more important to UC's future than that.


UCR has established a task-force to look into protest guidelines.  There is already protest about the Task-force's lack of transparency.

Oh, and UCR Chancellor White has decided to challenge UCOP for the University's "Highlight in Sycophancy Award" with his subtle comparison of Christopher Edley to Merlin in his second letter here.

New NIH Rules will make Universities cover more of researchers' salaries.

Bloomberg reports that UCSD's search for International Students is hurting admission possibilities for Asian-American residents of California.  HuffPo has more.  I'm sure that these developments will deepen public commitment to the University.

The Next Step in Higher Ed Efficiency?:  Hebrew University is requiring students grade their peers papers because the institution has so little money.

The US economy created 200,000 jobs last month.  But Dean Baker doesn't want anyone to get carried away by the news.

Eurozone unemployment on the other hand is up.   Merkozy are planning on making it worse through continued austerity measures.  Oh, and for those intellectual historians out there you might be interested in this discussion of the Continental version of Anglo Neo-Liberal thought.

Andrew Cuomo continues to govern New York as the financial industry wants him to:  buys into the educational reform mantras.  No details of course.

Same goes for welfare, child care aid, and K-12, as announced by Gov. Jerry Brown at his press conference on his 2012-13 budget.

By Bob Samuels
As the UC system increases its reliance on funding coming from undergraduate students, it must dedicate itself to paying more attention to undergraduate instruction. At UCLA, for example, a large increase in freshmen enrollments (1,200 additional students) has not been matched with a similar increase in faculty positions. As a result, classes and sections are getting larger, and fewer students will be able to graduate in four years. Other campuses are seeing similar growth. To reverse this situation, UCLA and other campuses should consider following the American Association of University Professors’ new endorsement of tenure for instructors. 
By dedicating permanent funding to faculty whose primary responsibility is undergraduate instruction, the university can make sure that students are given a high quality undergraduate education, and protect the research mission of the university. Since teachers with tenure will cost less than research professors, but will increase the focus on instruction, they will able to free up money for research professors as they provide more stable funding for required undergraduate courses. This change would also create more stability for the curriculum and would end the system of treating valued teachers as disposable labor.
As Gwen Brooks of the AAUP shows in “Instructor Tenure Proposals" universities across the country are developing new positions in order to provide tenure for faculty members whose main job is to teach undergraduate students. For instance, at Rutgers the faculty senate has endorsed converting many non-tenured positions into tenured positions because, in part, it wants these faculty members to participate in faculty governance and committee work. Since most non-tenured teachers are not able to vote in their faculty senates or serve in faculty committees, tenured professors are left doing more work. Moreover, as the number of non-tenured faculty members surpasses the number of professors with tenure, the majority of faculty who teach at American universities do not have their academic freedom protected.
While the University of California already has a form of tenure for instructors, which is called “Lecturers with Security of Employment” (LSOE), there are currently only 110 in the system, and they often suffer from a lack of clear definition. If parts of the lecturer contract dealing with academic freedom, merit review, and course load protections were applied to LSOE positions, they would become a good model for granting instructor tenure. Moreover, an increase in LSOE positions and a redefining of their rights and benefits could help UCLA and other campuses to fund more undergraduate courses through the use of permanent lines for tenured instructors that teach six courses a year.
By providing tenure for those whose primary responsibility is teaching, UC could also improve its methods of assessing quality instruction. Since, these positions would be given tenure and promotion based on their expertise in education and pedagogy, they would require a robust method of assessing quality instruction. These positions, which rely on expert knowledge in methods of instruction, could also help to improve the quality of instruction across the campuses. Moreover, if lecturers with continuing appointments were simply converted into LSOE positions, it would not cost the university any money; however, it would provide more stable funding for undergraduate courses.

Hope springs eternal in education like everywhere else.  Hope is the precondition of the long and intensive educational process. Hope is a major outcome of the intellectual and emotional transformations that show education has taken place. In 2011 many of us understandably turned back toward the daily pleasures of teaching and research, where problems really do get solved and progress happens.  Given everyone's desire to feel effective and useful, why woulodn't we in higher ed minimized our time with the various blockages of governance and educational policy.  But looking outward again, what can we hope for in 2012?

This is a long post about the public university and a fundamental problem with American economic practice. I've written it as part of a conversation that needs to be much more dynamic and widespread about the value of public, government-based investment in things like health, infrastructure, education and research.  For a while now I have felt real urgency about this.  If the US can't get over the hump and start spending real money through public institutions on social needs, our distored, inefficient private sector is going to keep suffocating public universities, not to mention the public and the economy overall.  The Occupy movement make millions of people feel like they could do something about a private sector that has stopped working for the vast majority of society.  My thoughts here are about how universities should react.

As we start 2012, neither the economy nor the political system promise improvement. The relationship between these two dimensions of U.S. society seems as benighted as it has ever been.  The presidential campaign is a perfect example, where the leading Republican candidate, the Harvard-educated investment banker Mitt Romney, routinely defines government as what takes things away from people, and his "opportunity nation" as negating government with liberty.  As of this writing, bookmakers are giving this guy a one in three chance of being the next president.

Our backward, benighted political discourse about collective action in general and public investment in particular has effects large and small.   On the state level they have been brutally squeezing anything like childhood health or schooling or whatever else looks like an investment in the collective future.   To take the obvious example, the University of California has lost about one-quarter of its state funding in the past year alone (e.g. Display 1).

We are often asked to pin this irrational destructiveness on Congress or on the Sacramento legislature, which in the latter case means blaming rabidly anti-tax Republican minorities and their lock-step Grover Norquist no-tax pledging.  But 2011 was the year in which Democrats stepped up to budget cutting on a Republican scale.  California Democrat governor Jerry Brown's higher ed cuts were as large as those of his Republican predecessor, and havoc has been created in the state of Washington's public ed sector in large part by a Democratic governor there.

We are confronting the "end of growth in the United States," the real possibility of two "zero decades" in a row, the looming death of the middle class, and a population that is nearly half poor or near-poor.   And yet 2011 saw the cementing of a bipartisan consensus in the US and Europe against expanding public investment. This blog opposed Hooverite austerity when it was Arnoldonomics and we oppose even more today, but this means we are now forced into full opposition to the party that has traditionally supported a counter-cyclical public sector to correct market expansion, but that no longer does.

This brings us to the deeper question of why are the Democrats so terrible on stimulus and development issues, so easily talked out of even ordinary support for them?

I. Theory FailureThe easy answer is that like the Republicans, the Democrats are bought and controlled by the finance industry.  Finance has indeed successfully persuaded the political class to transform huge amounts of private debt and bad assets into public debt.  This process of creating a gigantic overhang of sovereign debt to help banks continues to destabliize Europe and slowed if not blocked recovery in the U.S. Governments are now more likely to fail than are zombie banks, for the simple reason that "markets" will punish with very high borrowing costs any government that show an interest in forcing private parties to share loses on bad bets.  One recent book calls this the endgame to our "debt supercycle" in which the most likely outcome is depression spreading in the face of governments deprived of the resources to invest in their own people as either producers or consumers.  The housing and banking crises, coupled with continued bulk purchases by bansk of political influence, have finally managed to take out even the residual Keynesianism that offered some counter-cyclical pressure in the form of the Obama stimulus of 2009.

The deeper answer to the question of Democrat weakness is that they have no theory of public investment that would allow them to act differently from Republicans. This would require them to resist the sociopathic special pleading of banking heads, heed the mainstream moderate Keynesianism of Nobel prizewinners like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz,present to their constituents a national development agenda,  and rally popular support for a major rebuilding effort led by government as both coordinator and investor.  2011 showed that Democrats are as unable to command any of this as Republicans, with President Obama as unCommander-in-Chief.  The reason is that Obama, like the rest of the party, associates economic development entirely with the private sector.  "Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation," Obama said in his State of the Union Address last year.  The government's role is to give early-stage money to the private sector, and go away.

Our more local symptom of the Democrats' mental paralysis is Governor Jerry Brown, who spent his first year specializing in cuts to students and the disabled while expressing no overt support for public reinvestment, apparently thinking he could use additional state budget cuts to scare legislators into voting a tax increase measure onto the ballot. Legislators have no reason to care about cuts (Republicans have pledged to make cuts, and Dems, as I'm arguing, are too conflicted to know why cuts are fatal).  Brown's strategy failed with the legislature, but lacking a vision of social development, he now plans to use the same fear tactics on the public, to be coupled with the psuedo-sweetener of proposed cuts to public pensions.  He will probably fail with tax increases, and probably succeed with the pension cuts.

Lacking a theory of broad public investment, Democrats punt to the same faulty theory of private investment as the Republicans'.  This means accepting the orthodox and, indeed, formerly right-wing claim that if government stops interfering with capital markets, they will allocate capital with maximum efficiency, allowing the general welfare the fastest possible advance. This idea makes legions of Democrats into Eisenhower Republicans, as they join Republicans in putting budget cuts ahead of schools and highways and bullet trains and all the other "build America" programs that would still get them elected. In this view, society doesn't need to plan independently of its business interests, nor, through its elected officials, set its own priorities and tax itself to support its goals.  Venture capitalists and advanced firms can take care of all meaningful investment in technology once the early, high-risk stage has been completed. To help private capital, in this view, the best things government can do are (a) pony up early-stage funding to qualified high-tech parties, no strings attached, and (b) keep taxes low on investors, e.g. let them redefine their income as carried interest and tax it at only 15%.

The university boom rested on an older vision of general development as an explicit alternative to elite development: a society would be smarter and also richer if you spread knowledge broadly rather than showering all of the best on the heads of the Ivy League few.  The swan song of this Democrat-style vision was the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 ("Humphrey Hawkins), which instructed the government to intervene in markets and override or coordinate private firm decision-making for the sake of making the broadest use of the workforce.

In the 1990s, the university became part of a "new economy" that assumed wealth maximization meant unequal concentration of resources in the best financial and technical people.  Keynes was replaced by Schumpeter, and the university's research and clinical activities overshadowed instruction and public service even when the latter was instrumentalized as "human capital formation."  In a Regents meeting last year, Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau remarked that Silicon Valley gives to private universities like Stanford, but has done very little for the University of California.  Their position fits with the consensus logic: for private industry, government should be big enough to offer free R&D funding at the early high-risk stage, but small enough to take no piece of the financial action later on.

We can put the current consensus another way: government funding should go directly to the relatively small elites who will make the best use of it, and not be spread broadly around the population, most of whom will make little use of it.  Funds should be targeted carefully to go directly to the enterprise system through programs such as that for Small Business Innovation Research program (SBIR).  This is far different, in the current Democratic view, from "entitlements" in their much larger amounts.  Targeted tech investment is thought to create wealth and knowledge while general investment in human capability, which is one way to think of education and Medicare and Social Security, seems in this view to be  maintenance at best.  Put another way, tech investment forms a foundation for private capital, while entitlement spending mostly supports maintenance-oriented consumption.  Hence many Democrats, from Erskine Bowles to Barack Obama, are looking for politically-viable ways to cut "entitlements."

We are trapped in a Republocrat consensus view that public investment  is maintenance or waste, while private investment builds the infrastructure and new industries that we need for the future. The exception is the small portion of public funding that goes directly into the system of private capital. Over the past thirty years, university research has remade itself so as to appear as part of a private future-value chain. The logic of this model of small-public to enable large-private investment is that universites can survive on much less public money: the latter can be targeted to high-value activities like biotech or nanotech research, while lower-value activities for the masses, like undergraduate education or non-technological research, can be paid for on a discretionary basis by tuition.

In the UK, the Browne Report and Cameron government White Paper make the supremacy of private investment explicit, and one result is the coming elimination of the government support for teaching the arts and humanities in British universities.  In the UK and US alike, the alleged necessity of subordinating public to private investment enables the complacency towards public funding cuts that we see in Jerry Brown and many other Democrats, including well placed leaders of higher education.

In the US, the skew towards private control of the economy is a deep cultural bias, and difficult even to address.

II. Market Failure
And yet we must address it. Unfortunately, the idea that private capital produces general investment is false.  One way into the issue is the well-studied phenonemon of "market failure" -- markets fail to allocate resources efficiently in various senses, and they systematically underinvest in the creation of knowledge.  Mainstream research on the topic goes back at least to the 1950s (e.g. Kenneth Arrow's influential 1959 piece).  A key idea is that firms do not spend money on research or development where future returns cannot be calculated, as is the case with all early-stage research, or the benefit to the firm will be small (even if the likely social benefits are very large.)  Conservative economists like Milton Friedman did not deny market failure, but countered it with the claim of government failure, thus creating a stalemate with the market failure crew that became a clear policy advantage during the Reagan presidency. The result is that for decades our industry policy has consisted of giving public money as directly as possible to the private sector, very early in the development process, and of nothing else.

Education is a massive  bulwark against market failure in the sense that it makes invention and advancement possible everywhere in society.  But the kind of broad social development that education supports is exactly what within tech-based finance capitailsm is threatening to the business model.

Debates aside, we can chart the outcome of our private-uber-public model:  an investment decline that began before the crisis, around 2005, and that falls as readily as it rises during periods of declining marginal tax rates:

The Atlantic magazine has a chart telling the same story about job creation.  Not surprisingly, it turns turns out that rich people don't use their piled higher tax savings to create jobs.

The least we can say is that there is no obvious effectiveness in shifting capital allocation from public to private processes.  To the contrary, there's a correlation between the public control of funds through the tax process and ordinary measures of economic well-being.
III. Confronting Subsidy Capitalism
The irony of this bias against seeing the social value of public funding is that it reduces public funding to the status of a subsidy for the private sector.

One obvious example is the mind-boggling public support for the banking sector: CNN Money pegged it at $3 trillion by November 2009, and two years later estimates for a whole slew of non-transparent programs range from $7.7 trillion (Bloomberg) to $16 trillion (cumulative total from the GAO, same source) to an unbelievable $29 trillion.   The public subsidy structure appears in various ways, including free profits gained when a bank borrows from the Fed at 0.01% interest and loans it out at 4-5% 

Though the context, motives, outcomes and so on are different in banks and universities, the private disposal of public funding is similar. We could offer a range of examples from the university system, but I'll stick with just one, federally-funded research.  The National Science Foundation's 2010 Science and Engineering Indicators for 2010.  This chart (Figure 4-9) shows where federal R&D funding winds up -- industry, universities, and so on.


Universities have increased their share of federal R&D expenditures by a factor of 4 since the mid-1960s.  And yet the largest portion of public R&D spending continues to go to private industry, which uses about 80% of that money for "develoipment" rather than research (Figure 4-5) 

Subsidy capitalism means that the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time. A recent study by UC Davis researchers Fred Block and Matt Keller shows that high-value research is decreasingly done by large private firms and increasingly funded by government, and yet such research receives a minority of public funds, which flow mostly to the corporate sector.  Lacking direct voice over R&D directions, American society loses the capacity for public coordination or even to express common aims, and in compensation we exaggerate the genius of individual private sector leaders like the late Steve Jobs at Apple.

Public funding is not given credit for intelligence and foresight, and has become in our culture of captialism dumb money, an early-stage investor without management control.  There is a profound cultural limitation at work here: American leaders see the agencies responsible for social benefits as categorically less insightful than the financially self-interested private sector, even though the latter are focused entirely on their own advantage.  As it is now, the future emerges in erratic bursts from the secret development operations at companies like Google (e.g. this radio report on the sudden appearance over Silicon Valley of The Cloud).  We are having an increasingly difficult time imaginging a collective future that emerges from common activiity. And even direct donors to the university, about 98% of the time (at UC), restrict their donations so that their money will not flow into the general operating funds that support the generic educational activities of large masses of students. The latter, which has the greatest impact on the wealth and understanding of society, achieved its lofty post-war level of quality entirely through tax-based general funds. 

These public funds are exactly what are being withdrawn -- California is a national leader here (see for example this cuts post from Februrary 2009).   State and federal tax avoidance remains a central revenue strategy for American corporations. In California, business's share of state revenues is about half of what it was in 1981 (slide 36).  The effect on education has been dramatic: California hasn't simply traded in its top-10 advantage for mediocrity.  In many measures of expenditures in K-12, it is in a race for last.

Public universities can help build a better and more equitable economy if they start showing systematically that public investment needs now to take precedence over private.  If they don't, 2012 will be the first of many reruns of 2011, only worse!

By Joe Kiskis, assisted by Eric Hays

December 14, 2011

Joint informational hearing

Senate Committee on Education and Assembly Committee on Higher Education-- UC and CSU policies, Procedures, and Responses: Campus police and on campus Demonstrations

Chairs Senator Lowenthal and Assemblymember Block

The hearing was scheduled for two hours but lasted about four and a half hours---non-stop.

There were four panels and a public comment period. Please see the agenda for details.


Panel 1:

From the testimony of Michael Risher (ACLU), it seemed clear that there is plenty of established law concerning the police use of force and pepper spray. Permissible use of force in general and pepper spray in particular is supposed to be evaluated in relation to threat to officers, whether a felony or misdemeanor is suspected, and flight risk. He also emphasized that excessive use of force is intimidating to others and has a chilling effect on the legitimate exercise of free speech.

A counter-intuitive point made later by UC Council Charles Robinson is that in considering the level of justified force, linking arms is considered active (rather than passive) resistance on some campuses. (Why this should vary by campus is unclear to me.) Another later point that fits here is related to the legal basis for the use of pepper spray.

Tom Hayden was the first speaker in the public comment period. He emphasized that there has never been adequate research done to establish the safety of pepper spray, and that it became legal and widely accepted for both police and personal use through mis-steps in the legislative process.

Yudof promised to get UC to do any needed research.

Barbara Attard is a police practices consultant. She emphasized the benefits of transparent civilian review boards. Of UC campuses, only Berkeley has one. There was a comment to the effect that it may be a bit weaker than is typical because it is limited to generalities rather than specific instances.

A point made by Calvin Handy, former UCD chief of police, is that a primary responsibility of campus police is to protect the rights and assure the safety of demonstrators. In Handy's view, the pepper spraying at UCD was an "aberration" in an otherwise exemplary history of police behavior. This was later refuted by students who cited other well-publicized instances of excessive force being used by UC police.

Panel 2:

This included Yudof and Robinson from UC and from CSU EVC/CBO Quillian and Nate Johnson, Chief Law Enforcement Officer.

For the most part, Yudof repeated comments that he has already made in public. In answer to a direct question about possible conflicts of interest for Kroll, he was emphatic in saying that there "There are zip, zero conflicts, and I'm a lawyer." I can imagine that he might be correct in a narrow legal definition of conflict of interest. A better question might be whether Bratton/Kroll are burdened by an overweight bag of biases.

It's worth noting that as of the hearing day, CSU was not going to have the benefit of an outside investigation of the CSU board meeting. The CSU police guy gave an account of those events that was later sharply disputed by several speakers.

Panel 3:

During this panel, the attention of the committee and the press was focused on Chancellor Katehi. Much of her opening presentation is already in the public record. She reiterated that she did not order the use of force or of pepper spray. When asked if VC Meyer did so, she declined to answer. She emphasized that she plans to be more directly involved with student protesters in the future. Toward the end of her prepared remarks, she addressed the underlying issues.

"We will not do justice to our university or to our state if we allow the events of Nov. 18 to mask the reasons students have been protesting in the first place."

"While the images of pepper spray sparked justifiable outrage, the underlying issues go far beyond that one highly regrettable incident. Our students are increasingly frustrated and angry about reductions in state support for higher education. They are frustrated and angry about repeated tuition increases. They are worried about how they will repay their loans and find jobs when they graduate."

"They are justifiably frustrated and so am I."

"I do not mean to diminish the significance of the pepper spray incident, but we all need to work together to make higher education more affordable and accessible, or there will be continued frustration from students: Both from those who protest, and from those who only want to go to class without distraction."

I think this was the best statement by any of the segment representatives. In later testimony, the students were very strong and effective on the point.

When asked what she would do differently if she could go back in time to Nov. 18, she said that if she knew the tents could not be removed peacefully, she would not remove them. On the other hand, a series of questions from Senator Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar) implied he is worried that UC has been insufficiently prompt and consistent in enforcing rules, e.g. those prohibiting camping.

Panel 4:

This was the students. They were very effective and were even more direct than Chancellor Katehi in stating that unless there are improvements in university funding, student frustration, anger, and protest will continue. As already noted, they convincingly refuted the CSU version of events at the CSU board meeting. They also emphasized that the Governor's tax initiative contains no dedicated funding for CSU or UC.

Public comment:

In addition to Tom Hayden, there were about ten speakers. Several were students, who reiterated points made during the student panel. As the hour was very late, I just briefly stated faculty support for students, remarked on the futility of imagining that policy and procedure improvements will result in protests that follow the rule book, and repeated the theme that the problems can be effectively addressed only through restored funding for public higher education.

There were a number recurring themes during the hearing.

1) How the chain of command should work and what the role of a chancellor should be. Katehi was clear in stating that she does not believe that tactical decisions should be in the hands of chancellors, but if that were to become the expectation, then chancellors would need additional training. Handy's view was that the ultimate responsibility for police tactics lies with the campus chancellor.

2) Another question was whether rules for protest and for police engagement should be the same for students and non-students and on and off campus. A few committee members had a clear preference for uniformity. I do not recall that anyone argued the opposite side.

3) Should UC policy and procedures governing protest and police be uniform over the system or vary by campus? Yudof commented that more centralization might be desirable.

4) My sense was that the policy already in place may be carefully thought out, but is not as well understood as might be desirable on the highest and lowest links in the chain.

5) My sense was that many were looking for a set of civilized rules for protest that would define everyone's roles and would be willingly and consistently followed. To me, this seems like a wish for scripted, sanitized protest that becomes no protest at all.

6) Both Yudof and Katehi were pressed on the timeline for the various investigations. With regard to Kroll/Reynoso, both stuck to the expectation of Kroll finishing around Jan. 1 and Reynoso finishing by the end of Jan. I.e. they neither slipped the timeline nor inserted caveats. Since then, I have heard that the private word is otherwise, and that the timeline might slip substantially.

In raising questions about the timeline for investigations, committee members were clear in their intent to have at least one additional hearing after the reports are available. As another indicator of legislative engagement, Assemblyman Anthony Portantino (D-La Cañada) requested that UC meetings to discuss proposed policy changes be publicly noticed. Yudof agreed.

7) University funding: In their opening remarks, some of the committee members recognized that university underfunding was the underlying cause of student unrest. However, the hearing was about policy and procedure, and most of the discussion concerned those issues. After Katehi revisited the causes and then the students emphasized it, it received more focus. As nearly as I could tell, the view of the Democratic legislators was that increased funding for higher ed is contingent upon increased state revenues.