Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins wrote an op ed on the UC budget
in the Sacramento Bee which you can read at:
However, here is a multi-handed summary of the op ed
courtesy of yours truly:
UC is currently meeting
the Master Plan notion of admitting the top 12.5% of high school students. But
on the other hand, many of those admitted don’t actually attend. On the other
hand, UC is admitting more out of state students which makes sense from a
budgetary viewpoint because they pay more tuition and thus subsidize
Californians. On the other hand, the Californians who are admitted are
increasingly channeled to UC-Merced where they don’t want to go. On the other
hand, that diversion makes sense since Merced is the newest campus. But on the
other hand, the legislature isn’t happy about the diversion and about high
executive pay. So the legislature will engage in zero-based budgeting.
To which we can add one more hand: If the legislature really
gave UC a zero budget, the system would end up totally privatized with high
tuition and still fewer Californians.
We can be sympathetic with Speaker Atkins’ attempt to insert
herself more fully into the process. After all, it is the legislature that
enacts the state budget. But here is the real problem. The current UC
tuition/budget dispute, and for that matter the longstanding debate about UC
funding, has been handled in an uncoordinated fashion. There is the discussion
with the governor via the Committee of Two. There are separate legislative
hearings in which complaints are aired by legislators and defenses are mounted
by UC reps. The Regents debate the issue with limited faculty and student input.
A better result would occur if the various interests could
be put together in a forum in which the various options were laid out. It would
be a slow and painful process since “interests” include not just the governor,
legislature, Regents, faculty, and students, but also include such groups as
business and labor that matter in this state’s political decisions. For such a
forum to be created, however, there would need to be support from the governor.
The current Committee of Two arrangement actually is the product of a proposal
by the governor at a Regents meeting. So at this point, he clearly favors a
very narrow forum which he tightly controls. The Committee of Two format might “work”
for this year’s budget decision – and even that result is not assured. But it
won’t produce a long-term accord. It won’t produce anything like the Master
Plan.
It’s interesting that we are still talking about the 1960
Master Plan (which expired in 1975). The reason that old Plan still has life is
that the governor’s dad, Gov. Pat Brown, did not insist that he and then UC
president Clark Kerr would work things out all by themselves. The Master Plan
was produced through a messy political process with the governor certainly
prodding, but not insisting on total control. The elder governor Brown also
didn’t have the personal agenda with regard to UC that his son seems to have. He
didn’t need to show in public that he had a more profound view of how academia (and
the world in general) should work than anyone else in the room. The elder Brown
basically wanted to bring some order to the state’s higher ed agenda, i.e.,
good administration. But he ended by establishing a true legacy. It seems
unlikely, in contrast, that 55 years from now, folks in California will be
talking about the Committee of Two.
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