Santa Barbara's Continuing Housing Crunch and the Larger Issue

How many can you cram in?

The sad saga of the lack of sufficient housing for students at UC-Santa Barbara, both university-owned and privately-owned, continues. The Santa Barbara Independent yesterday profiled students who ended up being placed in local hotels, a solution that apparently ends in December. What then? Also included in the profile is a student living in a van that the campus allows to be parked overnight in a university lot. You can find the story at:

https://www.independent.com/2021/10/06/inside-ucsbs-hotel-housing/.

It might be noted that the student regent at the last board meeting - after discussion of a planned substantial expansion of UC enrollment - noted the importance of taking care of the enrollees we currently have:

https://archive.org/details/regents-board-9-30-21 (at about 4:48:30).

Blog readers will know that we have posted about this issue in the recent past. Example:

http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-more-merrier-part-7.html.

Here's the problem. The legislature tends to regard UC largely as an undergraduate processing machine which somehow confers more prestige on its enrollees than CSU. When constituents' kids don't get into UC, complaints end up at the legislature. What the legislature doesn't see is that the reason for that prestige largely comes out of the research and graduate education functions which - under the Master Plan - were largely left to UC. So, to grow UC to the target levels and keep the prestige element, you need to expand the non-undergraduate functions. Capacity is more than just a problem of building more undergraduate dorms. It's more than a matter of hiring lots of part-time lecturers to teach undergraduate courses. (Did the Regents connect the complaints of those lecturers in the public comment period to the issue of expansion? Nothing in the record suggests that they did.) 

Who will pay for the non-undergraduate function enlargement? Can you grow the non-undergraduate function components as fast as the planned undergraduate growth? Those questions were not discussed at the recent Regents meeting.

The Regents have an ambiguous and contradictory role in the UC system. On the one hand, they are ultimately political appointees (especially the ex officio members of the board). So, they are expected to make UC sensitive to the external political realities. On the other hand, they are supposed to provide a layer of insulation for UC from the political world, hence the long terms of office and the constitutional autonomy. Right now, the Regents are tilting toward the former and not the latter.