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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