What will be the state of the UC in five to 10 years?

Yours truly was asked by the Daily Bruin (5-26-11) to respond to the following question:

What will be the state of the UC in five to 10 years?

Below is my response:

DANIEL J.B. MITCHELL, Professor Emeritus at the Anderson School of Management and the Luskin School of Public Affairs

“Never (make) forecasts, especially about the future,” advised Sam Goldwyn (the G in media company MGM). I will take his advice and instead suggest two scenarios. I don’t know which one UCLA, and the larger UC, will follow. But I know which one I prefer.

The first scenario is an attempt at all levels of the UC, including UCLA, to muddle through the current state budget crisis in the hope that economic recovery will resolve the state’s fiscal problem and, therefore, the university’s. It is quite plausible that the campus and UC administrations will elect that approach since it is the easiest path to follow.

Unfortunately, it is less plausible that economic recovery in California will actually resolve the university’s long-term budgetary problems. The state has fiscal woes that economic recovery will only partially alleviate. California will not be willing to support the UC adequately even after recovery, whenever that comes.

Nonetheless, UC and UCLA administrators are mainly following the muddle-through approach and hoping things will somehow work out. The current muddling through takes various forms. There are short-term measures, such as furloughs and reactive increases in tuition. There is grasping at technological fixes, such as online education.

But there is also a subtle shift in rhetoric. UCs are now described as great public universities rather than great universities. That shift suggests that UC is separating gradually from the great private universities with which it once compared itself.

What would UCLA become if muddling through continues? Some professional schools will maintain quality by quasi-privatizing. But many components of UCLA, especially in the College of Letters and Science, will slide toward a kind of California State University, Westwood.

The other scenario is to recognize that the state cannot afford a great university. So the top administration of the university needs to sit down with the governor, legislative leaders and key interest groups and work out a contingent arrangement for funding and access.

Because the state is an unreliable partner, the deal cannot be a one-side commitment by the university. A contingent deal would instead say to the state, if you give us X, we will do Y. But for every dollar less than X, we will reduce Y accordingly. Bluntly, reductions in X will lead to higher tuition and fewer admissions of in-state students.

Negotiating a contingent deal would be more risky and unpleasant than muddling through. The payoff in terms of protecting the quality of the university would be mainly achieved after the current crop of UC and UCLA administrators are no longer in the scene.

But there is a different payoff for those at the top. Clark Kerr, the UC president who negotiated the 1960 Master Plan, remains well known in academic circles for his achievement. No one remembers his successor. There is a difference between leadership and administration.

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The item above is one of several responses. For the full set, see http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2011/05/on_the_record