Post-Election 2: Laying the Base for University Recovery

What comes next for universities after the Democratic "shellacking"?  Michael has laid out the basic issues, and it's worth adding that the public is going to get what they didn't actually want, and then asking how to make the case for something better.

First of all, the Democrats failed to make a case for a major innovation boom, one based on a serious increase in public funding.  They left public spending in the twilight zone of the last-resort safety net, and now a repositioning will come too late. The Financial Times reported that the Republican victory killed flagship elements of Obama’s innovation policy for at least for the next two years. In “Corporate America welcomes power shift" (print title), the FT observes that cap-and-trade and net neutrality are gone, to be replaced by coal-and-oil and the cable cartels.  The same goes for defense conversion, which would have helped research-and-development funding of the kind conducted at universities. The New York Times' Frank Rich has pointed out that neither party offered a coherent storyline in which clear solutions follow well-described problems. In spite of its favorable stance towards science, the Obama Administration does not have a serious innovation policy that aims at supporting the creation of both knowledge and middle-class jobs. And neither party has a plan for supporting and expanding public universities.

Is this what people voted for? There is no popular support for the abandonment of renewable energy, or for the economic inefficiencies of the inequality boom, or for a recovery limited to the top end of the financial industry, or for a recovery based on the Fed reinflating asset bubbles, or for tuition increases at double to quadruple the consumer price index.

 The shift from Democrats was not a shift to Republicans. The center-right  “Blue Dogs” had half their members voted out while the Progressive Caucus lost only a few (Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-AZ). Most losing Democrats were crushed by plunges in Democratic turnout (Rep. Alan Grayson, D-FL).  The Tea Party movement that allegedly signaled a shift to the right away from Obama's big government socialism was as disgusted with Republican financial manipulation as any progressive (Chris Littleton, head of a Tea Party umbrella organization, around 14")  Democrats were damaged when the national leadership lost its 2008 base with futile attempts to appease its moderates with mediocre policies that bored everyone and did nothing. Obama’s inability to support even band-aid measures like a mortgage moratorium in the wake of the “robo-signing” scandal cost the party its remaining reputation for fighting for what's right, or even for what's obvious, at a time when people are still losing houses at 25% above last year’s rate to banks who don’t seem to have title to them. When the Democratic president seems to believe that economic recovery depends on supporting the discounted sale of houses that were repossessed illegally, the party stands for nothing and has no ideas left.

University leaders should also learn a few things from this. First, when you cooperate in an economic squeeze, you get no support. If you want votes, you need to put up a passionate, effective fight. The UC Regents are about to robo-raise tuition on the wake of the last 32% stroke of genius that turned the media against UC leadership and solved no budgetary problems at all. UC's proposed 8% tuition increase for next year is actually 9 times the August-to-August 09-10 California consumer price index inflation rate of 0.87%.  Deliberately applying financial pressure guarantees that when push comes to shove, the public won’t fight for UC.

Second, when you don’t rally your strongest “outside groups” to do battle with theirs, you will die. The Obama Adminstration bullied its progressive wing and herded it into the “veal pen” over banking reform, health care, you name it. Meanwhile, the Republicans found their most fire-breathing dire-hards to spearhead their latest astro-turf social movement (real grievances wrongly channelled by their fabulous national media-school board-church group complex). Universities need to sic their most committed advocates for the core missions on the public, the legislature, and legitimize them. Instead, right-wing culture warriors have encouraged them, through persistence, bullying and intimidation, to send forth only their most docile compromisers who admire business’s every move. Score: Low-tax defunders 10, Universities 0. We are dying from message control.

Third, when you forget your operating principles, people walk away. Post-Depression Democrats knew two things. For one, general funding iis more just and more effective than private fees. If everyone pays a little for public goods like freeways, health care, and education, major users do not pay a lot. Truckers, sick children, and great future artists, managers, and engineers aren’t deterred by cost, and everyone benefits. In other words, individual benefit is also a social benefit, and vice versa. This whole debate – is college a personal good or a public one? - would have seened phony and ridiculous to my New Deal L.A. grandparents. Hospitals, schools, etc  were obviously both.
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Obama Democrats, like the Clintonites before them, the DCL folks, the Blue Dogs, etc etc - they have never granted constructive agency to public services or endowed government with creative life.  The public remains passive beneficiaries of the entrepreneurial wisdom of top business leaders, and on this point they are exactly like the Republicans.  How can the public look to Democrats to develop imaginative public services that are effective and enhance personal and national life at the same time, when that public that needs or wants or can do creative things with public services is regarded, by the former party of the working masses, as remedial recipients of privately-created largess?  There is no autonomous sphere of action proper to government, no spirit of common life in this several decades of national Democrats, no felt sense of the public sphere as performing functions the private sector never will.

This is why,  in his post-election press conference,  Obama did not pay tribute to the value of the public sector to a restored economy.  He  needed to say, “our country desperately needs higher wages, better health care, and more education. Markets have been known to fail to deliver these things, and they have failed to do this for us.  We can count on the Republicans to advocate for the strengths of markets, and while you know I am a fan of business, it is my job to make sure we understand that governments must not only make ground rules and monitor self-interest but build infrastucture, orchestrate our common activities, inspire higher thought and action." Obama did not come close to this. He said instead, “I’ve got to take responsibility in terms of making sure that I make clear to the busines community . . . that the most important thing we can do is to boost and encourage our busines sector and make sure they’re hiring.” He has encouraged them all too well - to believe that his administration will continue to use public money to reinflate asset bubbles and turn a blind eye to highly-leveraged speculative trades that do nothing for the real economy and jobs.

To deserve any return to power at all, the Dems will need to explain the effectiveness of broad public funding, identify and celebrate public needs and goods, go to bat the integrity of the public funding system. And they need a lot of help from a public university sector, whose most visible leaders have been silent on the subject.  President Mark Yudof's Open Letter to California (HuffPo version) offers an interesting case study that I will take up in my next post.