Mad as Hell in California, and Students Should Be, Too

[mike_c]

http://chronicle.com/article/Mad-as-Hell-in-California-and/127760/

June 5, 2011
Mad as Hell in California, and Students Should Be, Too

By Tom Lutz

I spent most of my academic career doing what most of us do—teaching, reading in my field, doing research, writing books and articles, reading graduate applications and theses, holding office hours. I didn't pay much attention to the university and its administration. None of us has that luxury anymore. Budget cut after budget cut after budget cut have left us all painfully aware of how the sausage is made, or not made.

Having served in administrative posts for most of the past five years at the University of California at Riverside, I have come to know the budget issues very well. The University of California system, once the envy of the world, is on a rapid downhill slide that will have profound effects for our state, our families, our country, and our world. As of this budget cycle, we are past the tipping point.

In the space of less than a single lifetime, the University of California at Riverside went from being a small agricultural experiment station to one of the top 100 universities in the country. A dense and elaborate web of specialists across all fields of scholarship, science, and the arts was developed, and it took enormous efforts over those years to make it happen: countless hours in search-committee meetings followed by hundreds of thousands of hours of mentoring and reviewing; getting junior faculty financed; and, through tenure, building departments person by person, career by career. The best energies of thousands of people, year in and year out for 50 years.

In less than the four years that it used to take to graduate, this accomplishment is being destroyed.

more@link

This is an awesome article describing the demise of one of the greatest university systems on Earth, happening as we speak in order to protect the profits of wealthy, greedy individuals and corporations. If I may be permitted one further paragraph from this excellent article:

Today's legislators have adopted a drawbridge position—we got ours, and now we're closing the gates—for a variety of stated reasons, but it is clear that the real reason many do not protect the colleges and universities that made possible their livelihoods and careers is simply this: If they do, they will suffer a flow of conservative attacks and Tea Party racism, the standard price, now, if one stands up for anything that is directly devoted to the commonweal.

[msongs]

1. hmm I can see UC Riverside, a mile from my house. sure is packed these days nt

[mike_c]

3. not sure about the UC, but my institution, the CSU, turned down 40.000...

...qualified Californian applicants last year, I believe for the first time in its history. Student demand is WAY up-- my classes are always packed to the rafters, but the legislature and now the governor keep cutting our budgets. For the last five or six years we've been "contracting" on my campus, cutting services, dropping classes and whole programs, eliminating labs, not rehiring faculty and staff who leave (my dept is down by more than a third), not buying books for the library, and generally delivering less and less to students while charging them more and more. Last year we started denying entry to qualified students because there simply are not resources to educate them any longer. This has happened in the course of just a few years, and it's on-going.

My department once had one of the most respected organismal biology programs in the west, if not the nation. I'm not exaggerating. I was part of it. During the last five or six years I've watched that program systematically destroyed by the university administration, almost universally in response to downward budget pressure. Classes eliminated on the basis of per student cost or faculty to student enrollment ratios, eliminating most of our specialty courses in the interest of "efficiency," faculty representing whole disciplines not rehired when they retire or leave, eliminating whole swaths from our catalog and from the research opportunities available to our students, the decimation of our graduate program through elimination of nearly all required graduate courses (they don't fill lecture halls). We've been left with the shell of our program-- reasonably solid, though damaged and much less accessible to students who now compete for access to large and impersonal lecture sections and without any of the specialty courses, the stuff that made us unique and truly outstanding (and the outstanding faculty who taught them), which were eliminated as uneconomical, leaving something much closer to cookie-cutter mediocrity and much further from the excellence we project in university advertising. It's a damned shame.

[Tikki]

2. Yuck...I hate to read this...

I agree UC Riverside is a great institution. Do you see this downward spiral
along all UC's?

What about Berkeley and UCSB and UCLA? I just recently sat down with a HS graduate who was
sharing with me all the classes he'll be attending in the fall at UCSB.
The fall quarter catalog appeared to have more classes across the majors than when I attended the same
University 16 years ago.

Young ones come from the World over to attend higher education institutions in California.


Tikki

[KansDem]

4. "...we got ours, and now we're closing the gates"

Sounds like my experience looking for college and university position following the granting of my PhD.

It got to the point I could no longer be a "junior faculty." -- :(

[saras]

5. "we got ours, and now we're closing the gates" - until we take it back

And they're not going to give it back for words, but for superior power.

[Igel]

6. There were instances of deterioration at UCLA in the '90s.

Same problem: The budget provided by the state was being reduced. There were a lot of programs that nobody wanted to cut; there were programs that could be cut. The UC and CSU system were programs that could be cut, so they were cut.

Prisons is Lutz' bugabear. He points to how it is that the budget distribution isn't what it was 35 years ago. Then he says that in the space of a lifetime--most of those 35 years--UC-Riverside mushroomed in size and importance.

This would seem to be a conundrum: Even as the budget decreased UC-Riverside increased, and now to make sure that the increase is sustainable we have to go back to a budget distribution that supported a mediocre UC-Riverside.

Of course, the budget is much larger now, so those percentages don't mean much. "My budget is $1000, here's 10%", i.e., $100, versus "My budget is $1 million, here's 1%," which is to say, $10,000. It's also true that UC-Riverside brings in much more non-state money, which he's hardly likely to want to give up.

California's a different place from what it was 35 years ago, 1976. I'm sure part of what he doesn't like is the budget distortions provided by the ballot measure process, once hailed as one of the more direct forms of democracy but which has fallen out of favor as the demos "kratein" themselves in ways that some disapproved of. The people have largely chosen--and we can write it off as kowtowing to the corporations, or corporate manipulation, or find some other class or ideological enemy to pin the blame on. The fact is when you go into a voting booth the massive Ur-corporation isn't there compelling your hand to move as it wants.

People want free education, free health care, a good social safety net, good parks, roads, efficient government, a good police and prison system and court system, and taxes low until the taxpayer's income is "rich"--defined as what you earn + perhaps $10,000 (which is the salary increase you think you'll get in the next decade or so). The numbers might even work out--assuming that the "rich" don't adjust their behavior in year 2 and bring the entire enterprise crashing to the ground.