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Monday, January 19, 2015

Schrag on the UC-Governor Conflict

Peter Schrag, longtime journalist and author and commentator on the California scene reflects on the current UC-governor conflict over the UC tuition/funding plan:  [Excerpts]

...In fact, UC doesn't know exactly how it spends its money — and maybe it honestly can't know. Is the salary for a teaching assistant — who is also a doctoral candidate working in her mentor's lab — money for undergraduate instruction, for research or for graduate education? How do you distinguish a professor's teaching from his research on a spreadsheet? How do you allocate the budget for the library or for the custodians and groundskeepers?...

UC doesn't exist outside the rest of our corporate culture, in which the gaps between executives and the people who work for them get wider by the minute. If you don't pay your new budget guy or your personnel manager what he wants, will you lose him to Morgan Stanley or GE? How much will the quality of education be affected if you have to hire a second-choice provost, professor or dean? Although he's a Berkeley graduate, Brown, with his Jesuit seminarian's streak of austerity, was never known as a warm friend of the University of California — or probably of any other elite institution. In his first round as governor, starting in 1975, he was less generous in funding UC than Ronald Reagan, his predecessor, had been...

(Brown and Napolitano) may be able to resolve the immediate issue, because compared even with the inadequate $2.8 billion that the state kicks in this year, $120 million is peanuts. It ought to be an easy issue to compromise on. Nonetheless, like other major public universities, UC is inexorably privatizing, relying ever more on funding from sources other than the state...

Full op ed at http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-schrag-tuition-uc-jerry-brown-20150119-story.html

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