To distract yourself from the California meltdown, read UK Universities Minister David Willetts take to the Guardian defend the multi-year elimination of nearly all direct public funding, among his other measures. See Willetts sophistically claim that government investment has not been cut because student loans are really the same as grants.
This weekend the New York Times magazine had several good pieces on education. See in particular What if the Secret to Success Is Failure, which is about the role of education in building personalities that can sustain effort, insight, creativity, and success -- all depending on the kind of individualizing environment that budget cuts are wrecking at the public college level.
Salt Lake's Deseret News seems to be one of the few dailies that noticed the US slipping again in the OECD's international rankings of student attainment, this time from 12th to 16th. Paul Glastris attributes national compacency to US News's annual parade of elite privates, which he says suggests the U.S. is still on top.
But there's a deeper dynamic at work, something more weirdly self-destructive within American policy today. For example, Paul Krugman writes what must be his 50th denunciation of irrational Hooverist austerity that torpodoes the economy -- or, in today's metaphor, that applies leeches to bleed an already enfeebled patient. Closer to hope, I am nearly done listening to a recording of last Thursday's UC Regent's Committee on Finance discussion of UCOP's idea of presenting Sacramento with a simple tradeoff between increased state support and tuition hikes. There is no consensus among the Regents about what the legislature thinks of UC, and thus nothing close to a strategy. I'll say more about this meeting later, but a mysterious vortex is pulling at everyone.
Many Regents returned to the old standby solution of increased private fundraising, this time with more emphasis on scholarships to preserve access. At the same time, coverage of Moody's new report on higher education begins, "Public and private universities across the United States have been struggling with endowment losses, thin liquidity, declining gifts, reduced state help and resistance to tuition hikes since 2008." Fundraising was flat in 2010, and the decline in megagifts implies that the costs of fundraising are increasing faster than the returns themselves. The Regental debate suggests skepticism towards philanthropy on the Board as well.
UC's New Approach to Labor Relations - Part 4
2 hours ago
2 comments:
The Terminator's cyborg UC regent majority are stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to create a plan forward. They can go to their right wing republican political base in Sacramento who are against all tax increases period.... ask for more money and not get it. Or they can raise tuition......likely- but still won't fulfill the entire amount needed to truly run the UC properly. Or they can create a new way to make billions of dollars each year, (which last I checked is pretty hard to do part time while running multimillion dollar companies fulltime). Or they can (fail) at raising the funds that they have been seeking from donors but not always really getting in a major economic recession. Which then leads to desperation private sector style cost cutting brutality. The regents and president's hiring of Bain was like inviting a republican werewolf into a democratic lambs den on a full moon. This type of management massacre tends to be most effectively practiced on the staff employees (fungible in cyber regent thought and as 85% of the workforce staff represent the majority of the UC's cost-after all no mortgage, no rent, no property taxes and only 10% of staff are now the better paid (consistant large raises every 3 years) and therefore pensioned faculty). Increasingly the payment system at the UC is kind of like on Wall Street, but at a private college that used to be a public college. Besides everyone of those fungible staff suckers chased off during their first 5 years does not get a pension and pays a 10% of salary payment each year to repair the underfunded pension fund that the cyborg regents gambled away when they were betting the surplus pension farm as a failed means of funding the UC. As employees clearly we are not all in this together as financial equals at this point. Lifeboat ethics are afloat and they don't really encourage cross sector employee equality, unity and resistance. But we had better equally unite, resist and impeach these cyber regents soon if we want to save the UC as we know it. If the regents are unable to craft a plan, then we should democratically elect a group of stakeholders to do it ASAP. The current regents almost seem hell bent on taking this plane into the tarmac- through inaction, inability and incompetence. Gov. Moonbeam needs to get off the fence and prove he shares the same values as his father. If not he is another Terminator cyber clone content to watch the death spiral of California's higher education system.
alas Gov Jerry's career is in large part about not being his father.
although I try to find movement among the regents in today's post I agree that the Rs generally represent other economic and social forces that have designs on UC rather than representing UC, particular the campuses to which they have almost no relation other than the one a couple got degrees from. the gov. appointment system is medieval and simply doesn't produce the educational experience or representativeness that would make for good decisions. The treatment of staff at the rabble-izing public comment periods and the silence commanded presence of the chancellors is telling. The marginality of the 3 Chancellors' statements last thursday was striking -- they pleaded for the framework as providing some funding predictability and didn't receive a single question from the Board, who treat them in such sessions as though they were line supervisors from one of the local factories. It all seems too mediocre to continue even though it always has
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