Cuts to Higher Ed in CA

As the entire UC system looks to cut its faculty salaries by 8% as of August 1, 2009, we are looking at the dismantling of one of the best public Universities in the world. When Clark Kerr drew up his ambitious Master Plan, he worked with a governor, Pat Brown and a state legislature willing to commit to providing the best possible public university to the citizens of the Golden State. Of course, their motivation was not completely idealistic: Cold War anxieties about competitiveness with the Soviet Union certainly shaped the liberal consensus about the importance of accessible higher education. Governor Schwarzenegger and this legislature will have the dishonor of undoing the UC: the are applying the shock doctrine along to California’s university, forcing the UC administration to raise tuition 9.3% while lowering faculty salaries by 8%.

According to Josh Keller's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "California's 'Gold Standard" for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times," it seems that nearly all of California's educational policy wonks dismiss the Master Plan as hopelessly obsolete, applicable only to 1960, when 90% of the state was white and "coffers were full." But rather than reformulating a plan that could galvanize public opinion and promote commonly shared goals - to address the needs of the state's growing Hispanic population and to improve the dismal place California now occupies in comparative educational capital (it ranks 25th among states in the proportion of its residents age 26-34 who hold bachelor's degrees, well behind New York, Illinois and Virginia), the leadership of the State has refused to do what is necessary to guarantee access and excellence to today’s students.

At UCI, some of our most brilliant students come from rural California, or coastal immigrant enclaves: they are first generation college students who are at least in part economically responsible for hard-working multi-generational families. What do we say to them about their job prospects in a state that devalues the very education for which they have struggled? As higher education cuts sink in, you will see the demographics of the Ph.D. pipeline become even less diverse. You will see lower income undergraduates struggle ever harder to pay their bills while attaining high levels of academic achievement. You will see the flight of top ranking professors from their posts to private universities, leaving our best students behind. One of the historically specific mandates of the UC in recent years is to hire and educate graduate students so that the California industry and culture of the future will be able to reflect the demographics of this rapidly changing state. By cutting the UC system to this degree, this goal is implicitly abandoned. How can faculty as a group honestly encourage our most outstanding working students and/or students of color to pursue Ph.D.'s?

Looking at other public universities in financially beleaguered Sun Belt states, it is worth noting that salary cuts are not being implemented - Florida's higher education is being cut 10.5% but without salary cuts (Chronicle of Higher Education May 29); Arizona seems focused on administrative efficiency and limited program closures, again not resorting to salary cuts (CHE March 27); Nevada cut 12.5%, but even there, salary cuts won't go above the 5-6% proposed for other state workers. UC alone appears to be hell-bent on the anti-stimulus of cutting pay for the state's workforce.

One of the major issues at work here is inability of the UC, the Cal States and the Community Colleges to work together to force California's dysfunctional legislature to support higher education. This is the dark side of Kerr's Master Plan: a clear educational hierarchy. However, post-secondary education in California cannot afford competition between these interests for an ever shrinking part of state funding. There are critical and distinct roles for research universities and Cal States as well as Community Colleges to play in educating students, and promoting a healthy civic and public culture in our state. Higher education cuts in the state of California do direct damage to the condition of our democracy. Democracy and education, as John Dewey once suggested, are intimately related, their fates inextricably entwined.

In the meantime, years of poorly framed public policy have made it possible for for-profit outfits like University of Phoenix to tap into public and federal funding in order to provide their students with on-line courses taught by contingent faculty. This for-profit model of higher education stands to benefit from the undermining of the UC system, where central administrators, in a dive for the bottom, are suggesting we standardize all our courses and give them on-line.

Californians have chosen to invest in bubbles while shrinking government and public services. The time for that is past. Joan Didion deplored the destructive short sightedness of her beloved home state's institutions and politics, which always lagged far behind the state's changing demographics and its shifting needs. We are at a critical juncture in the history of public higher education: we can either rewrite a new master plan to educate not just a fantastically diverse workforce, but a truly diverse citizenry, or we can decide to destroy a public good that has been the envy of the world.