PLANS A, B, C, and D
PLANS A, B, C and D
by Charlie Schwartz, UC Berkeley, February 18, 2009
Here are some thoughts about the future of the University of California, addressed primarily to my faculty colleagues. I want to sketch four lines of thinking about this.
PLAN A: Get the people and the government of California to return to the generous habit of public funding that made this University system so great in earlier decades.
This is the most commonly spoken of plan by UC leaders and by many individuals throughout the campuses. The President’s Office, with support from the regents, has some major public relations programs underway. Alumni and student groups are also involved in various programs of public advocacy and lobbying. I am sure that faculty can join in those efforts and would be welcomed. Whether you want to do this through the Academic Senate, through some other organization, or individually is open for everyone’s consideration.
The systemwide Committee on Planning and Budget has done some good quantitative studies on this general topic: The Futures Report; The Cuts Report (http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/committees/ucpb/reports.html ). A few people have written OpEds and Letters to newspapers on this topic.
There are plans to coordinate such a campaign with other sectors of higher education in California, and perhaps with all of education. Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, who sits as a UC Regent and also as a CSU Trustee, has made such efforts a large part of his own political agenda.
PLAN B: There are some people who have decided that Plan A will fail, indeed has been failing for a number of years as state appropriations for UC fall farther and farther behind what UC leaders say they need to maintain the quality of this university. They believe they have a “realistic” view of the political landscape: tax increases needed to achieve Plan A are most unlikely. Therefore, they think we should move intelligently to find/construct alternative funding models for UC.
I believe a number of Regents and Chancellors and others have privately adopted this view, although most avoid saying so in public. Their alternative vision is what we generally call Privatization – although the exact form this might take is an open question. If some of the best features of Public Higher Education are lost in that transformation, it is regrettable but that is somebody else’s fault.
PLAN C: My thoughts are that we can, and should, consider some serious alterations in how we manage things (money and time) at the university in order to maintain the traditions of student access and affordability as well as the research prominence that goes by the word “quality.” My own analyses of university finances, laid out in many small papers posted on my web site, point to some potent possibilities, but they are not easy. They are in fact quite scary to the establishment – and by that I mean not only the administrative hierarchy but also the faculty itself. The problems I address are not unique to UC; they apply to all research universities and they are rooted in a long history. The recent piece I posted, “What Do the Faculty Want?”, was intended to loosen up peoples’ minds about where we might go.
My proposals would start with the principle that undergraduate student fees should never exceed the actual per-student cost of providing undergraduate education. That measure is treated dishonestly by universities today; my calculations show that we are now about to cross that threshold. In consequence of this principle, states will have to accept the full financial burden for faculty research and related graduate programs; and faculty members will have to develop a more flexible approach to the balance of teaching and research work. Next, we need to scour the bloated administrative bureaucracies that have grown around our campuses: I have shown some data that makes this problem clear. Also, I believe there needs to be a sharp renormalization of executive compensation in our universities: this is a disease that comes from Boards of Regents or Trustees whose model of leadership is the corporate CEO.
In the future I plan be more specific about these ideas, and hope to elicit additional ideas from other people.
PLAN D: Well, this isn’t exactly anybody’s plan but it is an idea about likely future developments for higher education to consider. (This line of thinking comes from a close friend of mine, who is now outside of academia.)
Higher education has been sold as a necessary path for social/economic advancement of young people throughout modern society. Families have bought this idea, saved and scrimped to have the money to support their children through the best colleges available to them. And what has been their reward? Nowadays it looks rather bleak. Many college graduates are being thrown about, thrown out of good jobs, thrown out of the prospects of a life better than their parents had; and all that on top of a large burden of debt. This is partly due to the immediate economic depression, but it was also so before and may be seen beyond this immediate pit.
What then are people going to think about the value of higher education? Were they sold a bill of goods? By whom? What should be done about it? Those are nasty questions. They may have nasty answers in the not-too-distant political future.
Higher education should consider these negative options as it considers whether to undertake significant reforms, as suggested above.
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