As you know, the California Legislature --following negotiations with the Governor--passed the 2013-14 budget and follow up bills this weekend.  In the end there were few real surprises (although Jerry does possess a line item veto so stay tuned).  There were a few highlights concerning both the CSU and UC budgets that are worth noting.

1) Each segment will receive the proposed $250M conditional on foregoing tuition increases for the year.  In practice this condition means that the overall increase in higher education budgets will be somewhat less than $250M since a sizable portion is a buyout for the tuition.  But the State's contribution to the UC and CSU budgets are going up and students will receive some relief from the seemingly continuously increasing financial burdens of attending either of the segments.

2) Brown backed off on his demands that funding increases be tied to a series of mechanical metrics that he and his staff had proposed.  Both UC and CSU administrators and faculty spoke out against these metrics and their concerns were echoed by leaders in both the State Senate and Assembly.  That the Brown administration was attempting to increase burdens on Higher Education at a moment when the budget is--at best--backfilling several lost years of funding was not lost on the legislature.  As the LAT reported, Susan Bonilla, who Chairs the Assembly's budget oversight of Higher Education took the lead in questioning Brown's logic:

Bonilla said she was concerned that Brown's higher-education proposal was generated by number crunchers without enough input from educators. During an April hearing, she said the governor made it sound "like we're talking about a factory" rather than a university.
And universities are in a rebuilding phase, she said: "I don't think that's the time to say we're going to withhold your money."

 3) AB94, Speaker Perez's proposal to create a "Middle Class Scholarship Fund." passed both houses.  Perez's Bill will establish--starting in 2014--a fund through which California Residents students whose family incomes are less than $150,000 a year will be eligible for scholarships of up to 40% of their mandated tuition.  Certain restrictions--concerning GPA, application for other grants, percentage of total scholarship counting other grants, etc--will be put into place.  But the Bill recognizes that, despite the claims of the Segments to provide sufficient aid to ease the burden on lower and middle-class students, the State's turn to a higher tuition/higher aid model has placed tremendous burdens on the majority of students and their families.

These developments followed, of course, a less positive example of Sacramento politics: the passage of Senator Steinberg's SB520 by the Senate.  Despite the growing evidence that Coursera and Udacity do not, in fact, offer a smart option for public higher education, Steinberg has continued to offer one version after another of his effort to find ways to press universities to partner with for-profit ed-tech companies.  I have offered analyses of 520 and its ever changing contents here, here, and here.  As I have indicated throughout, SB520 is a bad idea, displaying a remarkable ignorance of the way higher education actually functions and serving more to provide the appearance of tackling the problem of access and achievement than to actually do something meaningful for access and achievement. 

But I want to make a different point here.

As bad a proposal as SB520 remains, it was much more destructive in its earlier forms.  Steinberg has been pushed to drop many of the worst elements of his bill and to lessen, if not eliminate, the more intrusive and onerous mechanisms to open up a new market for Silicon Valley venture capitalists.  And while it is clear that the Administrators of the 3 segments played a part in pushing back against Steinberg, it is worth stressing that faculty organizations applied continual and effective pressure against 520.  I am less knowledgeable about the faculty efforts in CSU and CCC but in UC, the Academic Senate, The Council of University of California Faculty Associations, and The UC-American Federation of Teachers all organized against the Bill, met with legislators, wrote critiques, and in many cases testified against it (and Jerry's metrics proposals) in Sacramento.  Although they were not able to stop its passage in the Senate (where Steinberg dominates proceedings) they were able get significant changes. 

In addition, the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (the only FA with collective bargaining rights) was able to use its status to demand collective bargaining over any contract that UCSC sought to sign with Coursera.  Given that the administration had been proceeding with the contract negotiations with little, if any, faculty oversight this was a significant achievement.  

I do not want to overstate things here.   520 did pass out of the State Senate and administrators in both UC and CSU continue to pursue connections with Coursera and Udacity.   But the effect of the efforts of faculty organizations suggests that they are not as marginal as we sometimes fear.  Indeed, now is the time to build upon their success and deepen their effectiveness.  In the short term, 520 still has not passed the Assembly or been signed by the Governor--effective opposition may prevent it from becoming law.  More demands for oversight over contracts with online providers is a logical and necessary component of faculty commitment to the curriculum.   It is time to increase these efforts and increase the strength of these institutions.  They remain our best counter-balance to those who would redefine higher education.  Or at least they will be if we use them that way.

In Part I, I described MOOCs as a symptom of the absence of educational ambition among politicians. Since then, the MOOC situation on the ground has been shifting day by day.  It's been driven by major deal announcements and by the first real studies of neo-MOOC learning patterns. It will likely be driven in the weeks to come by the revelation of the National Security Administrations's Prism program to use companies like Google to gather in secret all communications metadata on pretty much everybody.  I'll address the first of these issues in this post.

In May, Udacity and Coursera described what were at first greeted as landmark partnerships with major universities.  The press take on the Coursera contracts with "ten public institutions" was that

Under the new deals, Coursera is recasting itself as a platform for credit-bearing courses that would be offered to students enrolled at multiple campuses within a public-university system.

 The cognoscenti's view was that Coursera had "jumped the shark":

Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead.

. . . Coursera has simply never had a coherent plan to generate revenue.  Oh sure, it had a bunch of ideas about how to do it, which were outlined in this leaked MOU with the University of Michigan, but few seem to have panned out.  The only thing we’ve heard from Coursera is that their idea for charging people for certificates of completion netted $220,000 in Q1 of this year.  Given that Coursera’s annual burn rate seems to be in the neighbourhood of $10M (that’s on top of their partners spending $50K/course to place it on the Coursera platform), this is peanuts. 

In the UK, Martin Weller announced that "You Can Stop Worrying about MOOCs Now." Noting Coursera's intention to explore "MOOC based learning on campus," he asked,

what does that even mean? That's blended learning, or e-learning, and again, not exactly new.  If you take the MOO out of MOOC you're left with just a C, and no-one's that interested in just a C. This follows on the back of Georgia Tech's not free, online Masters MOOC, which looks awfully like a not very well supported elearning course.

Back in the edu-consultancy world, University Ventures described the Udacity-Georgia Tech deal as a case study for Bad Judgment magazine:

The first instance of bad judgment is the University’s announcement that it will be hiring only eight new instructors to teach as many as 10,000 new students and may rely in part on peer grading. The “massive” component of the masters degree stems from its origin: a meeting between the Georgia Tech Dean and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity. As one of the three horsemen of the MOOC movement, Udacity is banking on “massive” despite the fact that the more Udacity tailors its approach to approximate existing online programs (with instructors and interaction, as with its partnership with San Jose State), the more it seems to gain traction. 

The reality is that (1) instruction and interaction are critical to successful student outcomes and (2) the cost of instruction and interaction is not what makes higher education unaffordable.

There have been a group of us, including for example Bob Samuels, that has been making these same two points for quite some time.  Last week, I wrote a couple thousand words about the Udacity-Georgia Tech budget projections that I'm hoping CHE will get around to publishing sometime soon.  Suffice to say that major cost savings cannot be the rationale for the Georgia Tech arrangement. In the ramp-up period, terribly high per-MOOC costs could be justified by mass enrollments, but unfortunately from the VC point of view the masses take these courses for free. These production costs also collide with increasing awareness of large faculty time inputs: Duke's Dan Ariely and Cathy Davidson report 150 hours of their time per hour of "actual MOOC."  Prof. Davidson's phrase in a subsequent post is "insanely labor intensive"  -- in exchange for a $10,000 stipend that she spent entirely on assistants. Many MOOC watchers are now concluding, as she does, that MOOCs do not have a way of making up for massive public funding cuts.

Unfortunately, the idea of exponential cost savings based on zero marginal cost per additional student, as Coursera's Daphne Koller promised, has never been credible. As we exit the marketing phase and start looking at real cost performance, this news will move up the administrative and political food chain.

We need to get back to fixing huge budget shortfalls before we lose another couple of budget years. The spring's new cost discussions have been a help.

By Jorge Mariscal (UCSD)

During the same week that the President’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, & Inclusion met in Oakland, a meeting where “community” representatives presented out-going UC President Mark Yudof with an award for “his commitment to our issues,” the UC Associated Students issued a statement that lamented the hostile environment across the UC system.

The “Resolution Recognizing and Condemning the Acts ofAnti-Black Racism and Racial Prejudices at the University of California Irvineand San Diego, while Affirming Support for the Black Student Unions at UCI andUCSD” begins with a sentiment few on the President’s Climate Council wanted to hear:  “Whereas, instances of Anti-Black racism are common on all UC campuses, yet [the] administration continues to not adequately address these incidences and carry out adequate measures against those who enact anti-Black rhetoric and actions.”

The irony was clear to anyone who was paying attention.  The Climate Council had come into being in 2010 shortly after UC San Diego was shaken by a series of events known as the “Cookout/noose” episode.  Now, three years later, awards were being handed out at the Council’s final meeting just days after viral videos captured members of the UC Irvine chapter of the Lambda Theta Delta fraternity cavorting in Blackface.  Things had come full circle and nothing of substance had changed.

The mission of the original Council was “to identify, evaluate, and share best practices in order to ensure a welcoming, inclusive, and nurturing environment across UC’s ten campuses.”  Local councils were mandated for each campus. They developed randomly according to existing campus structures.  Some were effective; some were a complete waste of time because they recycled existing approaches that were ineffectual. The system-wide Council began on a positive note with guest speakers such as Sylvia Hurtado from UCLA explaining to Council members the close connection between diversity and campus climate. 

It wasn’t long, however, before the attention of the system-wide Council was diverted away from the recent traumatic events.  Former Provost Larry Pitts announced that he did not want the climate Council to be a diversity council (guess he missed Hurtado’s presentation).  Council members then learned that the next meeting would not be held at UCOP offices. Instead we would meet in Los Angeles at the Museum of Tolerance where we would take a tour of the exhibits.

Clearly, the Council’s business had been caught up in a hazy notion of tolerance that more often than not, as Wendy Brown has taught us, “iterates the normalcy of the powerful [and] regulates the presence of the Other.”  (Regulating Aversion, 8) The hard work of trying to understand campus climate on the ground would not be encouraged.  The outright hostility some student groups had recently experienced and still had to cope with on a daily basis on UC campuses was washed away in a flood of feel-good “can’t we all get along” liberalism.

Through the efforts of a small group of Council members, an attempt was made to tackle real issues.  With the support of Dean Chris Edley, working groups were formed on faculty diversity, the status of LGBT communities, and other pressing issues.  Working group members dedicated dozens of pro-bono hours preparing reports that, as is most often the case, were submitted, circulated through Senate circles, commented upon, and filed away for the edification of some future scholar.  Minor recommendations were accepted at some campuses, but overall the Council’s impact was minimal.  The climate had not changed.

Just five days after President Yudof received his commendation on May 2, a Black student at UC Irvine reached into her bag and found a note that read, “Go back 2 Africa slave.”  UCI administrators reacted with appropriate horror and “we will not tolerate such behavior” pronouncements.  Racism and sexism on UC campuses seemed to be caught in a never-ending loop of the film Ground Hog Day.

No one, not even the students who wrote the AS resolution, would argue that administrators have the power to stop racist or even garden-variety stupidity.  But clearly something has to change.  What can be done?  No “climate” or “diversity” commission can hope to improve that situation until faculty members are educated about what their women and minority students experience outside of the classroom and lab.  No student will be dissuaded from staging a racist and sexist “cookout” until campus demographics include more students, faculty, and administrators from historically underrepresented communities.  No campus will make progress on any equity issue without strong and fearless advocacy emanating from the top of the administrative chain.

Yesterday, I attended a meeting of more than a dozen departmental representatives who had been asked to poll their colleagues about “diversity” issues.  The most repeated comment was “We don’t know what diversity means.” The psych and anthro folks offered arcane definitions from within their disciplines; one engineer laughed and asked if a candidate who grew up with five sisters could list that fact as part of his contributions to diversity.  No one in the room seemed to know that there is an elaborate scholarly bibliography about what diversity means in higher education, how it affects the campus environment, and how it can function to either impede or improve student academic success. 

In order to avoid a heated debate, the “diversity officers” who ran the meeting declined to clarify their language.  No one pointed out that until diversity and equity are understood in an historical frame that reminds us that for decades specific groups were excluded from higher education we will continue to have pointless meetings like this one.  In the meantime, random incidents of racism, sexism, and homophobia will break out periodically, temperatures will rise across the UC system, and climate change will continue to be a hoax perpetrated by the keepers of the status quo.

In response to all of the push-back he has received Senator Steinberg has offered yet another version of his attempt to appear to champion the interests of California's college students.  His latest iteration lightens the direct hand of legislative intrusion into curriculum without solving any of the underlying problems that continue to beset his vision.  Moreover, his continued acceptance of the rhetoric of for-profit online providers blinds him to the real costs of his proposals and to engaging in a serious consideration of alternative ways of improving access in higher education.

Still, Steinberg is proposing significant changes to SB520 and it is important to recognize them.

1) Steinberg has moved from putting into place a structured "framework" to drive the segments into relation with online providers to creating a system of "grant programs" for intensifying reliance on online programs and providers.  You will recall that in April he sought to establish "a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework that increases partnerships between faculty and online course technology providers aimed at allowing students in strategically selected lower division areas to take online courses for credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems."  Now, according to his latest amendments, he has shifted to legislating "incentive grant programs" (one in each segement) to help "faculty and individual campuses within the UC, CSU, and CCC systems to provide students increased opportunities to take strategically selected lower division courses online."

With this change, Steinberg has shifted his rhetoric from creating the "California Online Student Access Platform" to creating the "California Online Student Access Incentive Grant programs."  Under his new proposal, the state will provide funding to faculty for the purpose of increasing the numbers of lower-division online courses that will allegedly move students move more quickly either within a segment or between segments.  The heads of the Systems, "in consultation" with their Senates of course, will disburse incentive grants to individual faculty or groups of faculty. 

2) Despite changing his approach from the stick to the carrot, Steinberg is actually increasing the demands placed on the system.  Whereas in April he had required the segments "jointly" to identify up to 50 courses that served as important bottlenecks for students, he is now instructing "each segment" to identify up to 20 "high-demand lower division courses" and for up to 15 of those courses provide "incentive grants" to faculty to encourage them to enter into "15 appropriate partnerships" either within the segments or with "online course technology providers" to "significantly increase online options for matriculated students and high school pupils for the fall terms of the 2014-15 academic year."

3) Although Steinberg continues to insist that all courses created with incentive grant funding be put in the California Virtual Campus, he has softened his language on the State's direct claim to online intellectual property.   Whereas in April he declared that "the state shall retain all appropriate rights to intellectual property it creates or develops in the implementation of this section" he is now placing the question of intellectual property back within the systems themselves by insisting that "intellectual property created or developed by a segment in the implementation of this act shall be owned and managed by that segment according to its existing policies pursuant to applicable provisions of this code." 

These are clearly genuine changes in his approach.  But the question remains whether they can overcome the fundamental flaws of his earlier version?  And do they truly point out a way to an educationally desirable solution to the genuine problems of access?  The answer to both questions is no.

For one thing, as much as Steinberg may wish not to confront it, his proposals do entail a decision to spend money in one way rather than another.  None of this will be free and the funds spend through the incentive grants and the platform is money that could be spent elsewhere (say on faculty).  As the Senate Appropriations Committee Staff Analysis of Steinberg's April Version indicated, these costs are considerable.  The Staff pointed out that the CCC estimated initial course creation costs from $50,000 to $100,000 with costs higher at CSU and UC, considerable staff time and costs "to develop and approve them." Each year the costs of providing the accompanying services and administering the courses could range into the millions (although the Staff was analyzing the costs of the Online Platform its elimination will not get rid of the costs but simply transfer them directly onto the Segments).  To make the system work through the California Virtual Campus, the staff predicted that there would be the need for a common Learning Management System for the CCC alone would be $13M in the first year and over $7M in each subsequent year.  If the other systems are involved the costs would be much greater.  Steinberg is proposing to impose upon the three segments millions of dollars of new costs.  Even if the State does provide funding for these costs that money could be spent in other less speculative ways.  Far more likely is that the Segments will be driven into partnerships with online providers so as to share the upfront costs of meeting Steinberg's timetable.

These costs lead to the another problem of Steinberg's (revised) framework: the relationship between faculty intellectual property and venture capital.   Steinberg's devices to assure that neither public funding nor faculty intellectual property are diverted to "any private aspect" of alliances with for-profit online providers are weak tea indeed.  In concrete terms they do not exist.  Once placed within the California Virtual Campus it is difficult to see how faculty will retain any control over the use of their course materials or the marketing and distribution of the courses.  Steinberg's concern, understandably,  is to ensure that no student matriculated in any of the three segments or a California High School not be denied course credit for one of his online courses.  He is not concerned to control the reuse of the materials beyond the CVC without permission of faculty.  In fact there is no limitation placed on that at all.  Moreover, as anyone familiar with the debates going on within UC over defining intellectual property rights in UC sponsored online courses can attest, the property interests of the segments and those of the faculty are not necessarily aligned.

Nor is there any means set up to assure that no public funds are spent on private interests.  Should the segments enter into partnerships with the online providers, they will likely contract out services and use public funds to pay for them.  Despite the rhetoric of social justice, venture capital will demand a profitable return on its investments.  Moreover, as the for-profit MOOC providers have demonstrated, their business is information and they claim that the information they gather on students is their property.  I see no way around the notion that public funds will indeed be diverted to "private aspects" of the partnerships.

Ultimately, the drive to push through SB520 is a drive to avoid a serious discussion about reinvesting in California's educational system.  Pursuing the will o' wisp of technophilia allows the Legislature (and the Governor in his own way) to appear to be solving problems of their own making without engaging in a serious public debate over the future educational needs of the state (from K-16).  They won't overcome the pressing educational challenges facing California.

By Bob Samuels, UCLA and editor of Changing Universities.

People in higher education now know that over 70% of the faculty are working outside of the tenure system.  It has also been documented that most of these “contingent” faculty members earn less than fast food workers, and they have no job protections or benefits.  What needs to be articulated is how to resolve these issues, and fortunately, the labor conditions at the University of California can serve as an existing model for academic justice for non-tenure-track teachers. 

In the UC system, lecturers represented by UC-AFT (University Council of the American Federation of Teachers) have a clear pathway to job security with relatively high pay and full benefits (including pensions).  These teachers also at times have a strong role in departmental governance and curricular development and have their academic freedom protected.  Although, there is still plenty of room for improvement, at one of the largest   public university system in the country, activism and organization have led to a model that should and can be replicated throughout the United States. 

In 2012, the average annual salary for the over 3,000 UC non-tenure-track faculty was $62,000 with an average full course load of six courses on semester campuses.  This means that the per course pay was over $10,000, while the national average appears to be around $3,000.  Moreover, unlike most other faculty working outside of the tenure system, UC lecturers who work more than 50% time have full medical, dental, and vision care, and they participate in a defined benefits pension plan. 

This model of labor justice is protected by a very detailed contract, which protects many of the faculty against job insecurity.  Similar to the traditional tenure-track career path, non-tenure-track faculty in the UC system go up for a comprehensive review in their sixth year of teaching, and if they are deemed excellent, they are given a continuing appointment, which means that they can only be let go for just cause or a proven lack of instructional need.

A key aspect to the contract regulating these faculty members is that it recognizes the diverse employment needs of contingent faculty members.  Except for benefits, all rights and salary policies apply to all faculty members regardless if they teach a single course or a full load.  By basing compensation on a percentage appointment, the university is able to cater to its particular needs, while the union is able to provide for a just and fair wage and work level.  While a third of these teachers work full time, another third teach only one or two courses a year. 

The reason why this type of appointment system is so important is that one of the biggest obstacles to treating non-tenure-track faculty in a fair and equitable way is that there are many different employment contexts for these types of positions, and some part-time faculty members do not want to be full time.  In fact, in the UC system, the majority of the lecturers working less than 50% may have other jobs inside and outside of the university.  Some of these lecturers are fully employed lawyers, doctors, and artists who only teach one or two courses a year.  These professionals help to bring expertise to particular programs, and the union has recognized the need to allow the university the ability to employ these people without giving them benefits or requiring them to do departmental service.  However, the union also has to  constantly fight cost-cutting administrators who circumvent the contract and try to exploit non-tenure-track faculty by paying them as little as possible.  

While the UC-AFT contract provides a clear pathway to job security, only a third of the current employees have passed their six-year reviews.  It is also the case that many lecturers only teach once in a while, so they never reach their sixth year.  Furthermore, since lecturers have to go through a thorough review to gain continuing appointments, many leave or are not rehired before their sixth year.

Since our contract does allow for a wide variety of employment situations, university administrators cannot say that they need non-tenure-track faculty to provide administrative flexibility.  Moreover, due to the high level of turnover in the first six years, departments are able to adjust to real changes in enrollment and instructional needs.  However, the union contract prohibits departments from not rehiring lecturers simply to prevent them from gaining continuing appointments or to replace them with less expensive lecturers.

Another vital aspect of this contract is that it stops departments from using student evaluations as the main criteria for judging lecturers. This means that departments have to develop robust methods of assessment, which are centered on the peer review of instruction and professional development. In fact, lecturers are required to show their knowledge of their field, and they are able to apply for professional development funding to stay current.    Furthermore, lecturers are often given course credit and pay for doing extensive departmental or university service.  For example, many of the UC writing programs are staffed by full-time lecturers who teach most of the courses and do most of the administration.  While the full-time maximum course load is nine courses for the campuses on the quarter system, a course load of eight courses is considered a 100% appointment for teachers of writing and languages.  The contract also provides a method for faculty to petition for course credit for non-required duties, such as proctoring exams and external outreach.

It should be pointed out that the UC-AFT contract is very detailed and defensive because it has been developed in response to the many different ways administrators have tried to go against the intent and language of the regulations.  Thus, an effective grievance process has been required to stop departments from trying to prevent lecturers from gaining continuing appointments.  We also have had many cases where departments have not followed their own policies when they review lecturers, and therefore it has been important to closely monitor and enforce the contract.

In fact, during the fiscal crisis of 2008-9, some campuses did try to lay off many lecturers with continuing appointments.  Through political activism and difficult grievance work, we were able to save virtually all of these jobs.  For instance after UCLA issued one-year layoff notices to almost all of the continuing appointments, our union worked with students and other concerned faculty groups to protest against the potential loss of hundreds of classes and a rapid expansion of class size.  We also met with many university officials to show them that lecturers were teaching a majority of the required undergraduate courses, and there was no one else qualified to teach these needed classes. 

Since lecturers play such a central role in undergraduate instruction, we have been able to use our contract to protect the funding and quality of undergraduate education in the UC system.  Part of this work has required us going to the state legislature and pushing for audits on workload and campus funding.  One of the results of these audits was that the university has completely changed how it funds the campuses and what it does with student tuition and state funding.  Amazingly, until we helped to reveal the truth, parents sending their kids to UCSB did not know that their tuition was actually being sent to the central Office of the President where it was then being redistributed to the wealthier campuses.  In 2012, partially as a result of the state audit we initiated, the system moved to a structure where the ten UC campuses keep all of their tuition funding.

One of our challenges has been to get the university to provide a more transparent budget.  Like many other universities and colleges, the UC engages in many different types of hidden cross-subsidizations.  Undergraduate tuition is often used for graduate education, and instructional funds find their way into research budgets.  In order to correct this situation, we have lobbied hard in Sacramento for increased budget transparency because we know that the defunding of undergraduate budgets not only hurts lecturers, but it also downgrades the quality of undergraduate instruction.

One of the keys to our success is a recognition that research professors are often focused on graduate and professional education, while the bulk of the undergraduate classes are handled by non-tenure-track faculty.  Although, some may say that we have helped to institutionalized a two-tier system, we would respond that we have made the current system much more fair and just as we have also protected undergraduate education from unstable funding. 

Having a union with required membership fees and a connection to a statewide and national organization has allowed us the opportunity to challenge our administration on a whole host of issues ranging from online education to pension funding.  We have also worked with a coalition of the different unions within the university to fight administrative growth, salary inequities, and benefit reductions.  In other words, politics and organization infuse everything we do. 

 

by Jennifer Ruth, Portland State University

I am part of an unofficial group of tenured faculty at a state institution that relies on many non-tenure-track faculty, but we are not the tenured faculty Ivan Evans refers to in his piece “When the Adjunct Faculty are the Tenure-track’s Untouchables.”

When we went on the market, getting a tenure-track job already meant you were the one person standing in the rubble-strewn city of your profession. There was no denying the corpses. At the very least, we understood that luck played a bigger role in our fate than merit had. We hadn’t earned something so much as been spared something else—namely, the miserable life of the freeway flyer. And we drew the obvious conclusion from this, the survivor’s-guilt conclusion: we would prove worthy of these tenure-track jobs only if we dedicated ourselves to creating more of them for others. We would fight the neoliberal adjunctifcation of the professoriate in the name of our no less talented but less fortunate friends.

And so we did. Before we were tenured, we began working together on our campus to overcome the defeatism pervasive at the time – the defeatism that said, the erosion of tenure is bigger than us, it’s bigger than academia, it’s the post-70s outsourcing economy. To fight it would be to drown ourselves trying to swim upstream. For months, every other week, three of us would invite a new handful of people we considered influential on campus to have drinks– tenured faculty and chairs, people who were positioned to do something about the problem. It’s not that we were excluding non-tenure-track faculty – far from being our untouchables, they were our friends with whom we had coffees, lunches, dinners; with whose kids our kids shared playdates—but rather we took seriously what some of them were saying, which was You guys have the power, and thus the responsibility, to reverse this trend. We don’t.

The work of the group we formed exceeded our expectations. Here’s a few of the things we did:

1) We introduced two motions into faculty senate: the first motion establishing a committee to rethink the Senate so that it could exercise a stronger voice in shared governance with administration; the second motion to shift our percentage of tenure-line to off-tenure-line instruction to 70/30 in 5 years. The first motion passed; the second was tabled.

2) We lobbied the administration to redefine about 20 jobs that were originally advertised as non-tenure-track to tenure-track.

3) One of our group, who was chair of her department, organized chairs-only meetings for chairs to strategize on the issue (all the meetings heretofore had been in the Dean’s presence).

4) We showed graphs at Faculty Senate meetings that demonstrated the magnitude of the problem. We drew what we called a “line of shame” through one such graph, with those departments that had grown the most through off-tenure-line labor falling below the line and those that had resisted the temptation above the line.

And when we got tenure, we stepped up our game by assuming positions in our departments. As department chair and directors of programs, those of us in the English department  created two new tenure lines and converted a fixed-term position when someone retired into a tenure-track position. Within two years, we had three new tenure lines that were not simply replacing retiring tenure-track faculty. During a period of budget cuts when retirement-replacement searches in other departments were being cancelled (and the lost SCH surely made up through contingent labor), we made sure that we never lost a search. In other words, we lost no ground. Instead, we made practical and considerable advances. 

How?

1) The Director of Literary Studies Amy Greenstadt re-arranged classes so that we had fewer that were under-enrolled, buying us cultural capital with the Dean.

2) I refused to sign some adjunct contracts and made it clear that we wanted to help the College meet its SCH (student credit hour) goals but not by adding any more adjuncts or full-time, non-tenure-track faculty – only by adding tenure-track faculty.

3) We encouraged, cajoled—and in one case, brought in a lawyer to convince—a few of our faculty who had gotten sweetheart deals over the years to give up these deals and return to the course-loads the rest of us carried.

Over a period of two years, through careful scheduling and fewer course releases, we increased our SCH by 2% while using fewer adjuncts. We also improved our graduate programs by offering more grad-only small classes. We made sure the Dean knew all these things so that he understood that we were accountable, that if he provided us the resources to hire tenure track faculty those resources would not be squandered.

I remember sitting in the office of the chair of the philosophy department and crowing about a success. We had received permission from the Dean to make two tenure-track hires rather than one out of an already-progressing search. It had been a dramatic couple of weeks. My office staff had helped me develop graphs and tables, and my directors and I had composed arguments and timelines (lines per SCH, budget numbers, hiring trends over the years, etc.), all of which I presented to the Dean and his staff.

I thought I had a fail-safe case for new tenure lines to accommodate the growth in the student body we’d experienced over the years. When I finished, the dean said, “We’re not giving you any more tenure lines.” I don’t remember what I said or did, but I do remember that the dean’s secretary called me later that day and said, “That grand exit was a little over the top.”

Over the next week or so, I wondered if she was right. But when Amy, the Director of Literary Studies, gave me something more specific to propose– a way to turn one replacement tenure-track search into two lines, saving money on the search—I knocked on the Dean’s door. He agreed that if we continued to work with the college on its initiatives and were careful budget-wise, he’d work with us towards our goal. Telling the philosophy chair about it that day, I suddenly felt silly. All that drama for one line! One miniscule drop in the national bucket! Was I foolish to get so worked up over something so relatively small? The philosophy chair said, “It’s not small to the person who gets the job you guys created.” Right, I thought.


A few people made the connection between the work we were doing and the amazing new colleagues walking our halls but many did not. The new hires themselves were coming in the right way and, thus, were rightly feeling obliged to nobody.

We could with confidence claim a whole army of new enemies, however. Weirdly enough, none of these enemies were administrators. Administrators knew we were trying to improve our department and, even when we aggravated the hell out of them, most of them had the grace to acknowledge that what we were doing was only what we in fact should be doing.

No, the people who now disliked us were some of the people who’d once been our closest friends: those people whose sweetheart deals no longer existed; the tenure-track faculty whose under-enrolled classes were now fully enrolled so they had 35 papers to grade instead of 20; the man whose program relied on adjuncts and so was always, if only temporarily, imperiled by my resistance to signing adjunct contracts; full-time, non-tenure-track faculty who understandably felt that my commitment to growing tenure lines implicitly jeopardized their job security (it didn’t but it’s easy to imagine how they’d feel it might); non-tenure-track faculty serving on Faculty Senate (at our institution, non-tenure-track faculty are involved in governance) during the year we introduced the “line of shame”; tenure-track faculty who had joined the profession to—god forbid—write books and teach, not to take on the Sisyphean task of rebuilding the profession, but who felt a little guilty about this. Many of these people hated our guts.

In the beginning what we were doing felt good. We were listening to our non-tenure-track colleagues and we understood what it meant for them to be without academic freedom, without job security. We were not quislings! We were on the side of the righteous!

But after a while, as the political skirmishes got uglier, our reasons for why we were doing what we were doing began to change. We began to care less about the terrible circumstances of our non-tenure-track colleagues. We began to care less about doing “the right thing” by the next generation. By the end we were fighting for the quality of our own jobs. It sucks when non-tenure-track people feel threatened when you feel you have proven your commitment to them, it sucks to have tenure-track people mad at you when you won’t create a non-tenure-track job for their spouse, it sucks to sit in a meeting in which a non-tenure-track faculty member openly uses his or her job security as a reason for making a curricular change to our major requirements instead of citing reasons intrinsic to the discipline or our pedagogical goals.

By the end, we just wanted to sit in a room of peers (fellow tenured faculty) and apprentice-peers (tenure-track) with whom we could debate ideas and feel like we were all on a reasonably even playing field. If we won an argument, we knew it was because we’d actually made sense not because someone felt subtly coerced. If we all fought bitterly about the curricular area of our next hire, nobody afterwards could claim that they were scared we’d retaliate against them for disagreeing with us by not rehiring them the next quarter. We could call each other all kinds of names for being so benighted as to think we needed a modernist when we obviously needed a medievalist but we couldn’t call each other “neoliberal managers” or pull out the trump card of “retaliation” when our feelings got hurt.

In his history of academic freedom in America The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand writes, “Coercion is natural; freedom is artificial.” The tenure system is an elaborate construction. The hiring process is ridiculously strenuous but that’s what keeps it from being a system based on patronage. By the time you get your job and then achieve tenure—after interviewing, having many people read your work and references, giving a job talk in front of a dept., undergoing evaluations by committees and external reviewers—you feel legitimate. Even when you know chance played a big part, you nonetheless don’t feel you owe your luck to any particular person. That’s often not the case when hiring off the tenure-track. When we hire off the tenure track, we create complex networks of obligation; we create potential fiefdoms. At the very least, we make our world more vulnerable to corruption: I protect your job security, you vote for me. I give your girlfriend these adjunct sections, you feel indebted to me. Hiring on the tenure track has its opportunities for patronage, of course, but there are more steps, more bureaucracy, more people involved at every stage. As a result, the kind of direct-unmediated power of boss-employee is diffused in a way that it isn’t with off-track hiring.

By the time we’d finished our terms as chair and directors, we were fighting because we’d come to understand how valuable the tenure system is for the culture in which we wanted to work. We didn’t want to work within a new old boy’s club, where people got jobs because of who they knew or whose back they scratched. We wanted to work with people who could say “no” to us when they disagreed with us without then feeling resentfully defensive with us. We wanted to work with people who could say what they really thought without worrying that someone else’s job security might be indirectly affected by their opinions. We wanted the preciousness of a world different from most workplaces, a world of peers who make decisions together and argue with one another in the context of academic freedom.

I sympathize with Ivan Evans’s despair. The lack of collective will among TTF in what is a struggle that affects us all is deeply frustrating. But what if we got a better handle on the multiple variables involved? The national statistics are the outcome of numerous interactions between non-tenure-track faculty, tenure-track faculty, chairs, deans, and provosts. If we don’t want the future that inertia is busy building or even if we want to protect the vestiges of academic freedom we have left, TTF are going to have to grapple honestly with the compromised culture that has already developed with non-tenure-track hiring as well as with the financial problems administrators face--at least at institutions like my own which rely almost entirely on tuition and have lost state support over the years.

We don’t deserve to all be adjunctifed—if only because universities without academic freedom translates to a less free society—but I worry that we are more likely to be if we let the few sadistic professors and knife-twisting administrators distract us from the much more difficult, because more intimate and more ethically complex, politics of painstakingly changing what is in many places now our status quo.

Chris here, introducing a post by Ivan Evans, professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi's opinion piece, "The Neoliberal Assault on Academia," produced a long discussion on several lists because of its claim that faculty have played a central role in shifting their universities towards revenue metrics and managerial assessments of intellectual value.  His example is the arrival of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, which has molted into the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  

Though pushed by the Thatcher government, the RAE was accepted and applied by the UK professoriat. Its successor, the five-yearly REF," Prof. Barkawi writes, "completely dominates UK academic life. It determines hiring patterns, career progression, and status and duties within departments. It organises the research projects of individual scholars so as to meet arbitrary deadlines. It has created space for a whole class of paid consultants who rank scholarship and assist in putting together REF returns. UK academics regularly talk about each other's work in terms of whether this or that book or article is 'three star' or 'four star'."

Prof. Barkawi argues that UK universities are now run by managers who see their jobs not as furnishing resources needed for academic work, but as the continuous monitoring and non-expert assessment of research and teaching that winds up justifying resource restriction and permanent reorganization.  Shifting audit to management, he argues, undermines "the entire point of university research," which "is conversation and contestation over what is true and right. In the natural sciences, as in the social sciences and humanities, one person's truth is another person's tosh, and valid knowledge emerges from the clash of many different perspectives." This complex, internally regulated, expertize-driven debate is being in large part replaced by audit mechanisms. "Meanwhile," Prof. Barkawi concludes, "all those adjunct faculty are far more subject to managerial control and regulation than are tenured professors. Aside from their low cost, that is one of the principal reasons why they are so attractive to university managers."

Prof. Evans extends this remark about adjucts below.

I strongly agree with Tarkawi's conclusion that faculty are far more complicit in the sacking of public higher education than we are prepared to acknowledge. One of the best indexes of this is the arrogance that ladder-rank faculty display towards adjunct/part-time faculty/"lecturers" in our own departments. As with the caste system, there are so many categories for them, all of which serve the purpose of the Brahmins in the Academic Senate.  

We--and here am I tempted to specifically include you [on the list] alongside myself in this condemnation, but won't  because there's always a small chance that some of you/us are exempt from these generalizations--in fact appear to take some pride in treating adjuncts as an inferior caste. It is the norm for adjuncts to be excluded from faculty meetings and to be deprived of any say in the management of departments. Instead of resisting the "adjunctification" of the professoriat by incorporating these colleagues--because they are colleagues--into the university and our respective departments, we tolerate them as useful proof of our Brahmin status. They are our untouchables. 

And we treat them accordingly. 

I have recently asked my colleagues at UCSD questions such as: How many adjunct/contingent/non-tenure track faculty are there in your department? Can you name them? Have you met any adjuncts for coffee or lunch on campus? Are they invited to the homes of ladder rank faculty? Do they have office space? Do they have any voting rights in your department? Should they? Do you know how they are evaluated? Should they be rewarded for publishing? Should ladder-rank faculty with poor teaching evaluations be assigned to courses ahead of adjunct colleague with excellent teaching evaluations? Should campus charters be changed to extend representation to adjuncts in the Senate?

The results of the informal survey have been so depressing that I would like to survey faculty at UCSD to draw attention to the cooperation that ladder-rank faculty give to the corporatizaton of their home institutions. We should be forging firm bonds with the fastest-growing category in our midst instead of setting ourselves apart from and above them. We are all aware that our fate is tied to the fate of adjuncts and that our separate futures would be far more pleasant if we stand firm with them now. But I think we know that we will not. Better to burnish our progressive self-image by baying at the moon (on this and other list servs) even as we help campus administrators slip the dagger between our collective ribs.

Truth is that ladder-rank faculty are growing old and we are not prepared to pick this important fight with our administrations or UCOP. We are edging towards retirement, counting our beans in our pension funds, and just holding on until we escape amidst encircling doom. Safe in retirement, many of us will tut-tut and speak of the halcyon days when ladder rank faculty were little gods with real rights. 

I am much more apprised of the unflattering assessment that adjuncts/non-tenure track/contingent faculty have of ladder-rank faculty because several of them sit on the Steering Committee of the CA-AAUP. I have become acutely aware of, and grown very ashamed of, the way ladder-ranks treat the nameless Other. As Stuart Hall summarized an analogous arrogance back in the '80s, it's "The West versus the rest". 

Consider this: One adjunct on the Steering Committee teaches 6-9 courses per quarter at a bewildering array of campuses in the Bay Area. I do not have a good enough grasp of the geography of that region to understand exactly why: 

• she hits the road at 5:30 am to make her first class;  
• teachers non-stop from 8am - 5 pm (including travel time as she whizzes at breakneck speed from one campus to another) 
• takes her first and only break from 5-7pm 
• teaches again from 7-9pm 
• holds her office hour from 9-10pm (yes, that's PM) 
• checks in at a $49 /night motel on Highway 101 (in a town called Gilroy); and
• repeats this schedule three times per week.

On a "good day", she remains in the Berkeley area where she resides and teaches at 2-3 colleges. No contract, no benefits, no representation in the Senate. At the beginning of the Winter quarter, she was informed that one course had just been re-assigned to another adjunct "who needs the course more." Just like that, income that she is so vitally dependent on, and in fact cannot survive without, was taken away--by email, without prior notification and for a reason that is as inscrutable as it is uncontestable. 

Re-read this list again to grasp the full dimensions of what I can only call its horror. It is unspeakably appalling. And I am ashamed that our preponderant collective interest in matters such as SB 520, MOOCs, etc. is: "what's in it for the ladder ranks?" "How dare they strip away our rights", etc

This is the price others pay to keep us ladder ranks in clover. The results of my still informal survey at UCSD leave no doubt that  ladder ranks would club adjuncts into oblivion rather than be amalgamated with them. The arrogance, and fear of being lumped together with the Untouchable Other remains and perhaps increases even as the once-venerable ladder rank category shrinks with each passing year.

In fact, it is best to not mention a category of fellow workers and colleagues--humans and good people all--who now account for 76% of the academic workforce.

Absent a UC faculty union with real teeth, I cannot see faculty mounting anything close to meaningful opposition to the gutting of UC. What would make a difference is an alliance of faculty, regardless of rank, at all three levels of the Master Plan. (Yes, there are other two other levels). But that will not happen, mostly because UC faculty are aghast at the idea of rubbing shoulders with the Untouchables both amongst them and those who labor in recondite places without darkening the views from Sather Gate or scenic La Jolla.

I now feel that we shall deserve what we get.

There are two ways to read the important document, “Academic Performance Indicators at the University of California.”  I’ll call them Jekyll and Hyde.

Jekyll

This report is a breakthrough for the administrative recognition of faculty labor.  Among other things, it notes that:

• Contrary to nationwide claims that faculty have shifted out of teaching, UC faculty teach 13% more student credit hours (SCH) today than twenty years ago, with most of that increase coming since 2005-06.
• Budget cuts mean that student-faculty ratio increased 17.5% in the past twenty years, and is slated to increase another 7.7%, for a 25% increase overall.
• These increases occur on a base of a typical faculty workweek of 61.3 hours (6). 42% of that is spent on instruction (not 54.3% as stated in the report; h/t Charles Schwartz). If we assumed that salaries cover a forty-hour week, one third of faculty workload is performed as unpaid overtime. If faculty worked a forty-hour week, the university would lose a third of its faculty output.

The study on which UCOP bases the 61.3-hour workweek is almost thirty years old. It was conducted during what turned out to be the waning years of full-scale Master Plan funding.  Given subsequent increases in the student-faculty ratio and in SCHs taught per instructor, very crude arithmetic would get total faculty hours to something closer to 65 today, assuming (dubiously) that not too much of the additional student workload was passed on to TAs or computers.

That fits with my experience and the anecdotal evidence. A normal faculty workweek is, for example, 5 ten-hour days per week (say 8am to 6 pm) plus another 6 hours on Saturday (perhaps 8 to 2, or all afternoon), plus another 10 hours per week via 2 hours Monday through Thursday evenings (e.g. of email), and at least a couple of hours on Sunday to get ready for the week.

That’s a routine week.  Grant deadlines, midterms and finals grading, membership on a search committee or grad admissions, problems with a course—these kinds of things can spike hours well beyond the 60+ norm.  Also, this is a typical professor, not a blue-chip PI of the type discussed in my post about the UCLA neuro-imaging lab, who must organize many simultaneous projects and a large staff, or a professor who throughout the academic year travels one to three times a month to lecture, as has been happening to me.

If you think about changes in research since the mid-1980s, current overall hours may be higher than 61. For example, grant acceptance rates have fallen below below 20% in many STEM fields and below 10% in others.  A PI needs to submit between 5 and 10 applications per grant received. There is more unfunded administrative reporting and compliance.  If we continued like this we could get the weekly average for a grant-active STEM professor, or a self-funded researcher in the humanities doing all research as an overload on while teaching 300-500 students a year, into 70 hours a week fairly quickly.

The report also makes a good effort to tie UC research to instructional quality.

Ladder faculty research also provides an important foundation for the entire undergraduate curriculum. UC undergraduates learn not only the basics of a field but also the big questions, the latest findings, and the methods by which scholarship is carried out. Not as well known is the fact that an increasing number of undergraduates participate directly in research.  As of 2010-11, according to the 2012 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), 56 percent of seniors had done some kind of research or creative project with faculty and 54 percent had taken at least one student research course. These experiences help develop the critical thinking, communication, and problem solving skills, as well as domain-specific knowledge, that employers are looking for and that are useful across many different careers, many different life circumstances, and in all areas of citizenship.  (7)

This is a good starter description of the baseline “creativity learning” that public universities need to offer their students in the 21st century.  Routine white-collar work is increasingly hard to find, and undergrad teaching needs an upgrade, not an austerity-driven, ongoing demotion. “Research learning” is a key to the upgrade.

Finally, UC faculty’s “degree productivity” is double that of private institutions in the Association of American of Universities (AAU), a high-end research group (Display 7). If you reduce education to crude accountability metrics, you get the same story that you do if you evaluate research content: UC faculty members are extremely productive. They are, if anything, over-productive.  And excessively self-exploiting.

Hyde

But there is a second way to read this report:  as a justification for turning UC into an undergraduate school, and a mid-level one at that.

The first problem is UCOP’s time-honored claim that state funding cuts haven’t hurt quality.  The opening paragraph is a nice tribute to the extra efforts undertaken by UC faculty, staff, and students. But since all this has “enabled UC campuses to maintain excellence in the educational enterprise while reducing costs,” who’s to say the cuts were a problem?  And why not cut public funds even more? Won’t it just force faculty and students to become even more efficient?

To head off this interpretation, this Academic Performance report would need to offer some evaluation of UC educational quality, beyond output metrics like percentages who obtain degrees after X years of enrollment.  The higher ed world has made this shift from looking just at outputs to trying to assess learning. One milestone in this shift was the 2011 book, Academically Adrift, which used results from a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to estimate that after four years of college, over one third of college students show no gains in writing, complex reading, or critical thinking.  The culprit was a lack of rigor in many college programs, combined with a lack of student seriousness about their studies. (An often-omitted detail is that majors in the liberal arts and sciences did much better than this.)

UCOP doesn’t try to show that UC degrees are at least as rigorous as before, but shows that they are even more numerous.  The report doesn’t even raise this issue of quality and rigor.  Anyone familiar with current issues of student learning will be disappointed by this quantitative approach—as will anyone who struggles in underfunded UC classrooms to offer rigor on a mass scale.

In addition, the section on graduation education is underdeveloped. The takeaway is that UC is average in doctoral productivity.  There is no argument here for the longstanding ambition of the younger campuses to increase their proportion of PhD students.  They are slated in the report to remain near the bottom of the AAU in this measure. UCOP should have mentioned that shrinking doctoral programs will hurt the research ecology and undergraduates at the same time, since grad students do much front-line teaching.  There’s no case made here for starting with average productivity and then investing in order to do new and special things with public university doctoral programs.

Having not asked the question of whether state cuts have undermined educational rigor at either the B.A. or Ph.D. level, the report ends with a series of efficiency strategies that could make B.A. degrees cheaper--and less rigorous.  The efficiencies are familiar: simplify (and reduce) B.A. requirements, use more online courses, and improve transferability (pp 21-22).   But the report has already shown that UC B.A.s are cheap enough, and in reality are probably now too cheap.   There are no big new savings to be had here, because UC has been squeezing undergraduates for over 20 years.

Finally, here’s the report’s vision of the future:

Projections of student enrollments and total faculty numbers, as described earlier, indicate that faculty will be asked to increase their instructional workload over the next few years.  They will expect to do so. Based on current projections, SCH per ladder faculty member should grow by approximately ten percent over the next five years. Though not calibrated in courses per year, additional hours would represent a further increase in teaching effort.

Having shown that UC faculty teach more than ever—on a 60+ hour week--the report says they will be asked to teach even more.  It suggests for some unknown reason that faculty expect this, when in fact every faculty member I know opposes it.

The text then goes on to suggest that “UC must maintain an environment in which it can recruit and retain such pre-eminent faculty,” for the bizarre reason that such faculty “will work far beyond a 40-hour work week and devote about half their UC work time, and about two-thirds of a 40-hour work week, to instructional activities and carry them out very well.”  So the stated point of a having the best faculty is that they are best at overworking themselves!  UCOP seems to accept permanent operational austerity, which implies that faculty will spend more of their time on teaching but not be able to add much quality to the teaching they do.

What Jekyll gives here, Hyde takes away.   The presentation of the report, and any follow-ups, should make the following points:

• Budget cuts have hurt UC instructional quality (in spite of everyone’s heroic efforts)
• Instructional quality depends on adequate per-student outlays, which, given the cap on tuition, means significant public funding restoration
• The faculty’s professional responsibility is to increase rigor, not to water it down
• Quality and rigor, not quantity and output, is the real service to the public mission today--in research and instruction alike.

That said, it's great to see the general campuses at the center of the Regents' agenda.

There’s been much local coverage of two principal investigators switching from UCLA to USC, and taking with them an estimated 85 people from UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI).  The Los Angeles Times has run two stories about it, one of which received over 120 reader comments, and the story was Larry Mantle’s lead on his Airtalk show at KPCC, where he had one of the two departing faculty members as his guest. 

But beyond a big win for the Trojans over the Bruins, why should the public care?

The basics are that USC courted and successfully lured LONI’s director, Arthur Toga, and one of its nine listed faculty, Paul Thompson, along with what Larry Gordon and Eryn Brown report in the Los Angeles Times as most of the lab’s academic staff. As is usually the case in this kind of move:

• The academic domain is in one or more superhot areas of research, in this case, the intersection of neuroscience and big data.
• The principals are said to be among the best in the world, and their presence expected to be “transformative,” in the term of the USC president.
• The scientists need a new building.
• No one on either side will explain the business deal or talk financial specifics.
• Everyone praises competition as normal and good for science.  Prof. Thompson told Larry Mantle that UCLA would recruit great new people to replace those who depart. 
• The quoted public university official states that the loss is not related to cuts to public funding.
• Everyone else thinks the departure is related to cuts in public funding.

The Times reporters directly contradicted the UCLA official by citing Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, who told them, "This is a major problem for public higher education.” Similarly, one of the Times readers wrote,

everytime a public institution competes with private, the public one will always lose. They public will always equate anything public with greedy government workers and will resent money going to support what they consider unproductive and unaccountable bureaucrats. The public does not distinguish between productive government ventures and those that are a drain on taxpayers.  (“awunganyi” May 10)

In a follow-up story, the chair of the UC Academic Senate, Robert Powell, said that the exit has “reinforced my fears that Sacramento is not paying enough attention to the research mission of UC.”

True, Sacramento doesn’t pay enough attention to UC research. But no one has spelled out the loss to the public in this move of an excellent neuro-imaging lab.  What is the loss here exactly?

There’s a hit to the UCLA brand.  Brand matters to fundraising, to personnel recruitment, and to grant writing.  It is widely assumed that the best people with the most job offers will chose to go to the richest and scientifically hottest place. UCLA has some repair work to do.

There’s a hit to the status of UC and of public universities in general. This is a loss to the image of public universities as being as good as the best.  More people than ever assume that even UC is reverting to the mean in which public means mediocre and private means the best. 

But both of these losses are fairly easy to dismiss.  Universities are now ranked like sports teams, and UCLA will focus on winning the next game.  UCLA apparently didn’t even take the field for this last one—Profs. Toga and Thompson didn’t ask the UCLA department chair to make a counteroffer.   Prof. Thompson was eloquent on Airtalk about the benefits to the discipline overall to have a concentrated facility with a great infrastructure, and promised ongoing synergy with colleagues doing related work at UCLA. Any damage to research seems temporary at worst.  USC may have made a strategic long-term decision to be great in this area and to do what it takes, thus doing more for neuro-imagery than UCLA wants to do. And UCLA had already done quite a bit.  I don’t know LONI’s equipment and infrastructure issues at UCLA, but the only publicized financial information was of the leaders’ salaries: over $1 million / year for Prof Toga, over $420,000 for Prof. Thompson. A good number of highly qualified people will line up for jobs like these.

Here we get to a deeper loss: public understanding of the costs of science. The public salary numbers are the only thing Californians know about the money behind this deal.  When a UCSD lab moved to Rice University two years ago, one of the departing scientists helpfully explained that UC was facing a “support gap” in future years that would reduce the science they could do there.  But usually, and in this case, all the relevant facts about science funding are kept behind a veil of silence. 

(In 2007, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust told a BusinessWeek reporter that public universities would have a hard time keeping up in research financing. She was publicly rebuked by the Big 10 presidents. Since then, virtually no family financial business has been mentioned outside the family.)

Part I of the missing storyline is this.  Public research universities can no longer fully support all the science grants their excellent faculty can get. I get stories about absurd shortages of photocopier cartridges and arguments about phone charges from labs at every campus in the system.  They seem to me to be frequent and annoying enough to threaten productivity and morale.

Public universities can’t fully support their grants because extramural funding doesn’t cover the full cost of research.  Labs burn money like a jet burns fuel, which is what they are supposed to do.  LONI spent $12 million a year, as a case in point.  This is peanuts for JP Morgan or the military, but a lot for a university.   As I’ve noted in various posts, universities have to add in on average 25 cents of their “internal funds” for every dollar in extramural grants.  Public universities just don’t have the internal funds to do this like they used to.   The economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman calculated that public university expenditures have fallen from 70 cents on the dollar spent by their private peers 30 years ago to about 50 cents today (p 237-38).

In addition, these labs need advanced facilities and in some cases equipment that they can’t charge to grants. USC will build LONI a new building, one that will support other research as well.  In the case two years ago of a UCSD lab that moved to Rice University, Rice was providing space in a building that had cost it (and Texas taxpayers) north of $140 million.  USC is likely to be doing something similar.

On Airtalk, Prof. Thompson said that they must get one-third of their funding from non-governmental sources.  This puts additional strain on a public university fundraising operation that is also trying to find money for graduate fellowships to replace cut state funds. USC undoubtedly told Toga-Thompson that in contrast to UCLA, USC would put LONI at the head of the fundraising line. They may have named likely seven- and eight-figure donors were the lab to move. But labs like LONI depend on what falls from those trees. USC also charges three times the tuition that UCLA does, which is another source of funds. LONI is a big stick with which to beat the fundraising tree. Large public universities can’t fund the same level of background infrastructure or full-court fundraising for each and every one of its special projects.

The next part involves this comment about how USC is entrepreneurial and UCLA is bureaucratic. When Larry Mantle asked about this (about 16:00), Prof Thompson replied that in fact, “he didn’t see any bureaucracy: at UCLA, which is a wonderful place and gave him his career. What USC did have was a team with the “vision and experience” to manage the logistics for a complex move of 100 people.  Here’s my translation:

• USC has a central administration on campus. UCLA has UCOP in Oakland.
• USC had a bigger bureaucracy to throw at one lab, not a smaller one.
• USC was planning a move that was going to happen. UCLA was managing a large research ecosystem. (LONI wouldn’t make UCLA Medicine’s list of 10 biggest problems to solve today until it was approached with an offer, which it wasn’t.)

My four conclusions are these:

1. UCLA’s core problem is a funding shortage, not surplus bureaucracy. (UCLA is the wealthiest UC campus, so things only get worse from there). 

2. Public universities need to tell the truth about research funding.  This will include the facts that science loses money, that some portion of undergraduate tuition funds offset research costs, and that most funding doesn’t “produce” anything in the near-term, except findings more research along with a great deal of useful failure.

3. Public universities need to explain why research like LONI’s should be to some large extent at public universities.  Why does it matter to the science, to the public impact, to the education of the next generation of scientists? Perhaps there is more openness and accountability at publics, and therefore more innovation. Perhaps scientists at public universities have a better feel for public needs and do more useful research.  Perhaps public universities uniquely have the necessary scale to train the thousands and millions of researchers in all fields to solve our ever-mounting problems.  We now need a new theory of public universities, before things get even worse.




4. Universities both private and public need to open up  discussion of spending priorities to their academic communities.  Given rising costs and shrinking revenues, choices have to be made. They  need to involve the faculty, from all disciplines, and students of all levels.  This is as true of USC as of UCLA, which has a poor record of consultation and can only buy a limited number of LONI-type labs with (in part) student tuition and non-STEM cross-subsidies.  Privates can now raise tuition only so much. Academic choices need to come from a bottom-up debate of a kind that higher ed has never had.

If we can’t do (1), show public efficiency (poorer but smarter, more research with less money, more degrees for each faculty member [page 16]), the public has no reason to support rebuilt public funding.

If we can’t do (2), tell the truth about funding, the public will keep thinking that science supports itself and doesn't need state money. Funding will stay flat or fall, and the public university research ecology will get gradually weaker. 

If we can’t do (3), say why public is often better than private, the public will be happy to see high-end science like neuro-imaging as done by the 1% for the 1%, and expect the 0.01% to pay for it with charitable donations.



If we can't do (4), achieve common understanding of resource choices, most public university students and faculty won't miss the LONIs as much as they should.