By Celeste Langan

On Sunday, April 7, 2013, the Daily Californian ran a story with the headline, “Campus announces plans to construct new aquatics center.”  It’s unclear from the story just when this announcement might be said to have taken place, since a public hearing on the proposal was held in Berkeley on April 3.  Presumably at least those who organized the meeting knew of the proposal in advance.  Still, it’s fair to say that the proposal came as a complete surprise to most of the Daily Cal’s readership—that is to say, faculty, staff, and students.  An announcement has yet to appear in the Berkeleyan or on the UC Berkeley website.

We’re told by Intercollegiate Athletics that the proposed Aquatics Center, to be built on what’s currently a parking lot adjacent to the Tang Student Health Center, is an “extremely generous” proposal on the part of private donors (referred to as “Cal Aquatic Legends”), who have engaged to raise all necessary money.  We’re told that Berkeley’s pool facilities pale in comparison with Stanford’s, and that the pool facilities we have are too crowded.  Forced to share Spieker Pool with other students, faculty, and community members, the swimmers and divers who compete for Berkeley on an intercollegiate level can only practice at certain times, which limits their opportunity to elect certain major fields of study. 

Why should we look this gift horse in the mouth?

With the new Aquatics Center, intercollegiate athletes would no longer have to share.  We’re told that the proposed new facility would be for the exclusive use of intercollegiate athletes and certain illustrious alumni.  Thus the proposal is parallel in concept to the recently completed High Performance Athletic Center near Memorial Stadium and Memorial Grove.  When that project was first proposed, the Cal community was also promised that it would be funded entirely through private donations; in 2006, we were told that $90 million was “in the bank.”  We know now that only $29 million was raised through private donations.  Instead, the University is in debt for that facility alone (not counting Memorial Stadium) to the tune of $124 million.

It’s probably true that better facilities and resources aid performance.  But shouldn’t we be applying that principle first to the 99% of Berkeley students who are not intercollegiate athletes, and to the object of academic performance?  Instead, a valuable public resource (the land granted to the university to educate California’s citizens) would be diverted to serve the interests of only a few.  Even if the construction costs of the proposed Aquatics Center are entirely covered by private donations, the plans for the building effectively monopolize that space, excluding 99% of the Berkeley community from its usufruct.

Wherever we turn today, we read that the “bricks and mortar” university is no longer viable; that it’s too costly and denies access to high-quality education.  At Berkeley we’re all too familiar with the crumbling of bricks and mortar; after nearly every winter rainstorm one can find pieces of mortar or peeling paint, along with puddles, in some of the campus’ most historic buildings, including the hallways and locker rooms of Hearst Gymnasium, the poor but beautiful elder sister of the Spieker complex.  Faculty try to teach and conduct research in deteriorating classrooms and laboratories. Donors, we are told, have no interest in funding the repair of existing facilities, in upgrading and greening the heating and plumbing systems.  And the state’s declining support for the UC system makes even everyday maintenance a financial challenge.  To respond to these challenges, the administration tries to find ways to cut costs—diminished library hours, fewer books bought, class enrollments capped to accommodate available classroom space and diminished numbers of ladder-rank faculty.

In this context, it’s not just the prospect of turning a parking lot into an athletic facility that galls.  It’s the fact that the new facility will be for the exclusive use of a small number of intercollegiate athletes, some of whom already receive support in the form of athletic scholarships.  The rest of the student body, as well as the faculty and the community, will still have access to existing facilities.  But what’s to guarantee that “access” will actually be any more extensive?  Where is the plan to provide more hours for recreational swimming, to pay for the requisite lifeguards and staff? Will the “Aquatic Legends” continue to foot the bill for the new Center’s operating costs, or will the University now have to divert some of the funds dedicated to Spieker and Hearst (to say nothing of classroom maintenance) to pay for heat, light, and staff at the Aquatics Center? 

It’s true that the Aquatics Center is planned for a space that’s currently a parking lot—hardly an inspired use of precious space (unless one considers the disinvestment in public transportation, which makes it difficult for many students, faculty, and staff who live far from BART to get to campus except by car).  But it’s not as if the University has worked with Alameda County to improve bus service, or on its own to develop a shuttle service, despite the fact that available parking for faculty, staff, and students has been seriously diminished by recent UCB building projects.  Moreover, the Environmental Impact Report filed for the Aquatics Center acknowledges that the project “conflicts with the existing applicable land use plan” as laid out in both the 2020 Long Range Development Plan and the South Side Plan.

Consider what’s happening here.  It’s a perfect case of what’s called “the privatization of public resources.”  Often “privatization” is represented as a benefit, the assumption being that “private enterprise” operates more efficiently than public entities, which serve a larger constituency, and often conform to a greater number of regulations.  (Kind of like the difference between a car and a bus.) But we need to remember to ask who benefits from these supposed efficiencies.  In the case of the Aquatics Center, UC Berkeley would be ceding land use—granted by the state for the benefit of all Californians—to a tiny fraction of athletes.  Given past history, it is likely that students and taxpayers would end up financing a good portion of the costs. 

And what of the net psychic costs?  Although universities are imperfect institutions, traversed by all the economic, social, and cultural inequalities of their historical moment, they also have their utopian aspect:  the “oneness” implicit in the name; the sense that the accumulated resources of a university, intellectual and physical, are shared my all members of its community.  That’s why a university’s libraries, grounds, and buildings—its “bricks and mortar”—are still important, because they provide a space for the exchange of knowledge as a common good, and remind us that education is, at its best, a res publica, a public thing. 

We should therefore ask the Administration to halt planning/construction on the Aquatics Center until they demonstrate to the public and formally to the Senate that it is a) actually, truly fully paid for by donors, and b) that it is a good use of collective public University resources at the present time, given that it will be used by a small fraction of the UCB community for a nonacademic mission.

Senator Darrell Steinberg, after push back from higher education figures, has offered up an amended version of his Senate Bill 520.  Although it shifts authority for approving online courses from the California Open Access Resources Council (COERC)  to the administrations of the public higher education segments (in consultation with their Senates), it sharpens Steinberg's effort to compel the three segments to subsidize the growth of private online course providers.  Instead of addressing the long-standing underfunding of the three segments, Steinberg is seeking to compel California Higher Education to depend upon alliances with venture capital.

One fundamental change in the amended bill is its elimination of any role for COERC in the new online course system.  As I indicated in a previous post Steinberg had originally tied his push for online courses to his previous push for a system for producing digital textbooks.  This part of SB520 garnered the most vociferous push back because it removed authority over curricula from the Academic Senates at the three segments and struck most obviously at faculty authority.  In response to that push-back, SB520 now commands that the new California Student Access Platform "shall be developed and administered by the President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments."  He has also added a clause that each online course must have "associated with it a faculty sponsor who is a member of the faculty of the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges" if it wants approval.  There remain ambiguities here, most especially concerning the respective authority granted to the administrations and senates of the Community Colleges, CSU, and UC.  But Steinberg has made that a problem for the segments rather than seeming to attack faculty authority directly.

Secondly, Steinberg has restricted access to the Online Platform, perhaps in response to the manifold questions that surround MOOCs and their educational value.  In the revised version, Steinberg now declares that the Platform will only serve students matriculated either at one of the three segments or at a California High School.   As before, the Platform is designed to focus on lower-division courses that have histories of over-enrollment.

But in modifying these sections of the Bill, Steinberg has only intensified its major implications.  Whatever Steinberg's motivations, the amended version of the Bill makes clear that the heart of the legislation is mandating that California Public Higher Education shift course creation to private providers and guarantee private online providers a market in credentials and an educational legitimacy that they have been unable to generate on their own. 

SB520 states as a principle that:

California could significantly benefit from 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. 

 Indeed, the Platform itself:

shall solicit, develop, and promote appropriate partnerships between online course providers and faculty members of the University of California, California State University, and the California Community Colleges for the development and deployment of high-quality online options for strategically selected lower division courses.

And lest we miss the point, SB520 also commands that:

(2) (A) For each of the 50 courses identified under paragraph (1), solicit and promote appropriate partnerships between online course technology providers and faculty of the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges which, by the fall term of the 2014–15 academic year, shall result in the availability of multiple high-quality online course options in which students may enroll in that term.

(B) An online course developed pursuant to this paragraph shall be deemed to meet the lower division transfer and degree requirements for the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges.

Apparently, Senator Steinberg has sought to appease faculty opposition by shifting authority over the courses to the 3 segments and by insisting that each course be linked to a faculty "sponsor."  But these changes do nothing to the central effect of the Bill: to secure a subsidized market for for-profit online companies.

If this conclusion seems harsh, it is only necessary to look at Marty Block's alternative bill SB547.  I discussed Block's bill and its problems earlier, but one clear difference is that Block does not require public institutions of higher education to partner with for-profit online companies.  Steinberg's SB520 on the other hand, commands that partnering as its very essence.

It is not clear why Steinberg thinks that this is a good solution. Obviously, it allows the Legislature to avoid confronting their own role in underfunding higher education.  Perhaps his thinking has been shaped by the lobbying of people such as Sebastian Thrun (whose Udacity seems to be basing its future on precisely this sort of captured public market) or Steinberg's former colleague Dean Flores of 20 Million Minds.  Flores, who has been pushing online providers across the nation recently told Inside Higher Education that “I think every professor in the nation starts with, ‘I think online education is going to ruin higher education,’ " he said. "What I think every professor is saying is, ‘Online learning is going to significantly disrupt the way I’ve been doing things."

Higher Ed administrators and Senate leaders may think that the proposed changes are enough to make the bill palatable.  But this would be a mistake.  In its stripped down version, SB520 continues to forward an agenda of insufficient public funding and a desire to force public institutions to serve private interests.

The latest version of SB520 needs to be opposed.  But even more than that, Higher Education needs to do a far better job of explaining what actually goes on in campuses and systems and how universities and colleges in California actually work.  Or Steinberg's trojan horse will not be the last.

By Anonymous

Yesterday was the first day of the IU-system wide strike. "IU on Strike" reports that 15 picket teams were sent across the Bloomington campus to spread the strike – to dorms, workplaces, the major academic buildings, cafeterias, and bus stops. Teach-ins and alternate classes, organized by undergrads, grad students and faculty and open to all, were held in the heart of campus. More than 300 people left the starting point of the strike demo, snaking across campus, and were joined by more than 100 along the way. Many support staff (whose contracts include a no-strike clause) stood in the doorways of buildings to watch.

Later in the day, a group of 150 protested the Board of Trustees meeting which was held behind closed doors. Small numbers of people were allowed into the meetings, in groups of five. The vast majority of the protesters remained outside, chanting, sharing stories of debt, and making noise. The Board of Trustees meeting is traditionally open to the public.

"IU on Strike" assesses that hundreds of people participated in the movement for the first time. Many academic buildings were half-abandoned. Solidarity actions were also reported at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Michigan, while statements were received from many more schools across the country.

The strikers declared the first day of the strike a success, in making it clear to the Trustees that the political costs for cutting public education have gone up, and laying the groundwork for the larger movement and disruption necessary to turn the university around. Strikers demands focus on reducing tuition and fees, stopping privatization, improving wages for workers, and issues of diversity.

Chris here.  Meanwhile in Portugal, the Constitutional Tribunal's ruling that the 2013 state budget contained 1.3 billion Euros of unconstitutional cuts to public employees, unemployed people, and pensioners.  In response, the Minister of Finance has frozen "non-basic" spending, which includes education. The photo was taken at a protest in March 2012. The sign reads, "If education were a bank, it would be rescued."

In response, the Rector of the Universidade de Lisboa, António Sampaio da Nóvoa, issued a statement condemning the "intolerable measures" and promising resistance. H/t to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who also provides the translation below.


"Closing the country does not resolve the country's problems"

1. In an order from the Minister of Finance, dated 8 April 2013, the Government decided to close the country and impede the functioning of public institutions: ministries, local administrative units, universities, etc. The order is a form of reaction against the Constitutional Tribunal's decision, as is explained early in the first sentence. The Government adopts the policy of "the worse, the better". In a restrictive and difficult situation, whoever has been trying to secure normal institutional functions feels tricked by this blind measure that is against the country's interests.

2. We all know that we are in the midst of an extremely grave crisis. But it is precisely such situations that require clarity in policies and direction - economizing as much as possible, but searching, to the extent possible, for ways that institutions continue to function without major disruptions. The Minister of Finance's order produces the opposite effect, hurling disruption and chaos with no practical result.

3. It is an unwise and unacceptable gesture, that doesn't resolve any problem and that seriously endangers the future of Portugal and its institutions. The Government uses the worst authority to suspend the State of Rights and install a State of exception. Taken literally, the Minister of Finance blocks the simplest expenses, no matter their purpose. Just three examples among thousands. We are forbidden to obtain ordinary things for our laboratories, food for our cafeterias, or paper for our students' diplomas. Is this the way Portugal's problems are solved?

4. In the case of the university, there are also important engagements involved -- particularly international and research projects that will be blocked, without any savings for the State, but with enormous damage on the institutional, scientific, and financial level.

At the University of Lisbon we will know how to rise to this occasion and resist intolerable measures that have neither compass nor destination, and are absurd. There is no worse policy than the policy of the worst.

Lisbon, 9 April, 2013
António Sampaio da Nóvoa
Rector, University of Lisbon

By Anonymous

Students at Indiana University are striking on April 11-12th. The strike coincides with the meeting of the university’s Board of Trustees. Six of the nine members of the Board are appointed by the state’s governor.

Strikers’ concerns focus on tuition and fees; the privatization and outsourcing of services; and a wage policy that has severely affected the lowest paid members of the university. Twenty years ago, IU-Bloomington received about 50% of its funding from the state. Between 2008 and 2013, state spending per university student fell more than 17%, and total state funding for IU’s budget has hit a new low of 18%
.
The most recent data suggests that the average IU student graduates with a debt of $28,434.

Strike demands also call on the university to honor its promise to double the enrollment of African-American students, as well as to support the abolition of HB1402 (which prevents undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition) and SB590 (an immigration law enforcement bill styled after Arizona’s SB1070.)

The strike has been organized by open assemblies. The emphasis is on laying the groundwork for a longer struggle to defend the public university.

Support staff currently work under a “no-strike clause.” Faculty were initially told they may be in violation of university policy in discussing the strike over email, but this suggestion was retracted after protests about academic freedom.  The administration insists that “faculty and staff have a duty to provide the classes and services” for which students attend.

UPDATE: The Nation has a petition in support of the Strikers.  You can find it here.

Morten Watkins

On March 29th, students at University of Sussex who had been protesting the privatization of the University were evicted from Bramber Hall after eight weeks of occupation.  Students arrested at these protests will be going on trial later in April.  Protests will continue however.  You can find out more information at Sussex Against Privatization.  The Independent has more coverage of where things are heading.

On this side of the Atlantic, students at Indiana University are planning a strike for this week (to coincide the meeting of their University Regents).  Students there are protesting the ongoing and deeply entrenched austerity which has not only driven up student tuition but also imposed inadequate wages and benefits on staff.  You can find out more information at IU on Strike.  Some Coverage can be found as well at The Nation.

These are both ongoing actions and we will try to keep you abreast of new information.  We would welcome people from either Indiana or Sussex who want to use the comments to provide updates.  Feel free to sign in as anonymous if you feel the need to.

On Wednesday, April 10 the Senate Committee on Education will hold hearings on both Darell Steinberg's SB520 and Marty Block's SB547.  These two bills are the most prominent of the flurry of activity in the Legislature concerning Higher Education, “bottleneck” courses, and online activities.  As with other bills out there neither SB520 nor SB547 grapples with the systemic issues confronting California Higher Education (especially for the severely under-resourced CSU and CCC) but instead attempt to ride the MOOC wave to address the issue of access to courses.

Steinberg's SB520 has garnered the most attention and is the most complicated.  SB520 builds upon Steinberg’s previous legislation (SB1052 and 1053) passed in 2011-12.  These laws established a framework for the production of online textbooks for lower division courses across the three systems.  SB 1052 and 1053, created a California Digital Open Source Library and a California Open Education Resources Council.  Under SB1052, the COERC (I suppose pronounced "coerce") is required to, among other things, ensure the:

• "[d]evelopment of a list of 50 strategically selected lower division courses in the public postsecondary segments for which high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials shall be developed or acquired pursuant to this section." 
• "creation and administration of a standardized, rigorous review and approval process for open source textbooks and related materials developed or acquired pursuant to this section."
• and "establish a competitive request for proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties may apply for funds to produce the 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials in 2013."

The Council would be made up of 9 faculty representatives from the 3 systems (each system sending 3). 

There are legitimate concerns raised about expecting 9 faculty to be able to manage this function.  Still, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they could, in fact, identify the most important bottleneck lower-division courses and determine those courses where the basic textbooks seem to be the same.  Given that the proposed textbooks would be modular in form, faculty in courses would retain control over the materials used in their classes.  Moreover, Steinberg appears here to be trying to use public pressure to encourage private textbook providers to lower price.  Whether the state should be providing funds for private publishers to produce these books is something that could be debated.  Still it seems that Steinberg fashioned a focused tool that may help students with an obvious problem: the costs of their lower-division textbooks.

SB520, on the other hand, relies on digital providers to manage a series of disparate issues.  First, it proposes to extend and modify the California Virtual Campus (originally established in 1999).  The CVC was designed both as a repository for existing online courses (it serves as a sort of portal for students) and also as a mechanism to bring together "stakeholders" in higher education together "to facilitate ongoing collaboration and joint efforts relating to the use of technology resources and high-speed Internet connectivity to support teaching, learning, workforce development, and research."  Steinberg proposes to extend the term of its legal basis from 2014 to 2017

But he also proposes to do much more.

The heart of SB520 is the linkage of the California Virtual Campus  to a new California Online Student Access Platform overseen by the California Open Education Resources Council.  Under Steinberg's proposed legislation the Open Education Resources Council would identify the 50 lower-division courses (across the three segments) that are "consistently impacted" and oversee a process by which online courses would be reviewed and approved and then placed in the California Online Student Access Platform.  At that point the legislation declares:

Students taking an online course available in the California Student Access Course Pool and achieving a passing score on the course examination shall be awarded full academic credit for the comparable course at the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges.

SB520 also declares as a legislative finding that "California could significantly benefit from a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework allowing students in online courses in strategically selected lower division majors and general education fields to be awarded credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems" and commands the COERC to offer "an efficient statewide mechanism for online course providers to offer transferable courses for credit."  

The creation of a "statutorily enacted" online platform through which private providers can secure a public market for their courses does at least two things.  First it removes control over the curriculum from the Senates of the three public sectors; second it effectively leverages public resources to secure the investments of private venture capital.   As Chris and Bob Meister have recently pointed out, SB520 not only falsely implies that MOOCs can compensate for the decline in public funding for Higher Education but follows a classic pattern of venture capital reshaping public institutions by using them to secure protected entry into a particular market.  

Indeed, SB520 is a venture capitalist's dream: it opens up a potentially never ending public market for their wares and provides needed legitimacy for their products.  Online providers will be able to concentrate on producing individual courses that will meet whatever standards that COERC may approve.  They will not have to undertake either the process of ongoing evaluation (that will be provided by COERC) or manage the insertion of their courses into larger programs and general education systems (that cost will be borne by public higher education).  Moreover, by insisting that these courses be MOOCs ("open to any interested person.") SB520 encourages the development of a secondary market for the MOOC providers while effectively eliminating courses geared to specific campus populations.  In effect, SB520 provides public funding to minimize costs for private providers; it is another transfer of funds from the state to corporations.

Most of the attention on SB520 has been on the threat to the authority of the Senates (Steinberg seems to have thought that having Senate appointees to the California Open Education Resources Council would prevent that issue from arising).  And that threat has led to a good deal of push-back ranging from the faculty petition organized by the Berkeley Faculty Association to the critical letter offered by the system-wide Academic Council.   One danger of this emphasis on the authority of the Senates rather than on the legislative interference in the form of teaching is the potential for complacence in response to Marty Block's SB547.

SB547, to be sure, avoids some of the problems of SB520 because it is much simpler:  it commands the Academic Senates of the three segments to identify "high demand transferable lower division courses under the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum" and to develop online versions of those courses to be offered in 2014.   It suggests that funding will be provided in the annual budget (although there is no command about how much that funding will be or what costs will be included).

But as with SB520, Block's proposal insists on the rapid deployment of a teaching medium that, initial studies suggest is profoundly unsuitable for students without previous academic success (see studies on Virginia and Washington.  MOOC proponents will, of course, insist that the medium is experimental and that the technology will enable them to improve their ability to teach all students.  That may well be true.  But the future possibility does not justify the present commitment of resources and legitimation of a particular vision of education.  That it is also a remarkable political intrusion into the nature of teaching (with potentially the same effects on the classroom as the introduction of the testing regime has had in K-12) cannot be ignored.  Although I do not doubt the good intentions of either Steinberg or Block, their proposals subordinate the integrity of the curriculum in the interests of the venture capitalists behind Udacity, Coursera, and other digital start-ups. 

Locking in online courses as the only possible solution to the problem not only avoids confronting the larger crises brought about by state disinvestment in higher education but also institutionalizes a particular form of online classes. 

It is encouraging that both Senator Steinberg and Senator Block are attempting to address the real financial pressures facing students and their families.  It is also important that they recognize the importance of improving transfer rates and helping the CCC resume its important role in fostering social mobility in California.  But their approach through the mandated production of online courses misses the boat.  Steinberg's bill will undermine public education by entrenching private capital; Block's overestimates the educational effectiveness of online for its target population and therefore helps foreclose more imaginative uses of the digital and the allocation of necessary resources to the CCC and the CSU.  It also allows the Legislature to avoid confronting the question of why bottlenecks have grown.  It would be good if Steinberg and Block turned their attention to that issue.  They might find that it led them back to the crucial problem that the State has created: the continual under-investment in California Higher Education.

UPDATE: The hearing on SB520 and SB547 has been postponed till April 24.  I'll keep you posted if anything else changes.  (h/t Eric Hays)

By Robert Meister, UCSC

After a decade of skyrocketing tuition, Sacramento politicians have seized on a new gimmick to avoid paying for the kind of low-cost, high quality college education California used to guarantee all its students.

SB520, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Steinberg, proposes to "solve” the problem of over-enrolled gateway courses at California’s public universities and community colleges by requiring them to grant “full academic credit” for “comparable” courses completed on new  for-profit online platforms (such as Coursera and Udacity) and existing for-profit schools (such as Kaplan and Straighterline).

This solution appears to be a zero-cost proposition for California’s taxpayers and students because many of the new online courses are presently free, except for the cost of providing certificates of completion.

The problem with this too-good-to-be true solution is that it is too good to be true.

As soon as SB520 becomes law, sellers of certificates of completion for online courses would find themselves in the new—legislatively-created—business of selling guaranteed transfer credits redeemable at any public university or college that admits the student to a degree program.

SB520 places no limits on what these for-profit providers could charge for these certificates despite the fact that the universities or colleges would have to honor them.  At the same time, as budget cuts make access to gateway courses scarcer (particularly at the community colleges), SB520 would create windfall profits for the private sector that will not be burdened with the infrastructure or quality controls that have made public university and community college degrees valuable.

The long term result will be higher costs for students and a continuing decline in the quality of their publicly-funded education, all in the name of removing bottlenecks in lower division required courses that cuts in state funds have created.

SB520 would establish for the first time anywhere a system of legislatively-mandated transfer credits between a public higher education system and the for-profit sector of education providers. This hasty and ill-conceived bill is a legislative giveaway to a growing private industry with no commensurate public benefit or regulation.

Our public leaders should instead concentrate on restoring the promise of the low cost and high quality public higher education that built California.