UC Needs New Leadership

The UC Regents have finally released Justice Moreno's Report into the allegations that UCOP interfered with last year's audit.  As Chris and I noted last spring (see here, here, here, and here) the damage caused by UCOP's handling of the audit has been considerable.  With the release of the audit, newspapers up and down the state have intensified their criticisms of UCOP and President Napolitano.  Although the Regents and others are trying to minimize the implications of the audit, the damage is real because the Moreno Report is so damning.

The State Auditor, Elaine Howle, had explicitly requested that the campuses send their survey responses directly to her office.  The surveys covered campus views of UCOP itself, and were thus not to be routed through UCOP.  As the report makes clear, President Napolitano approved a plan that required campuses to submit their evaluations of her office to her office before they were transmitted to the auditor.  Although there may not have been any illegality in UCOP officials asking to review the audit responses, it was a remarkable step to take: requiring that evaluations of a superior pass through that superior would obviously have a chilling effect on the responses.

UCOP insists that their intention was simply to make sure that the responses were appropriate to the audit and represented the view of the campus chancellor. But this claim isn't persuasive.  Justice Moreno and his team found numerous examples of the President's Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff pressing campuses to make their evaluations more positive (9-13).  The chancellor of the Santa Cruz campus reported receiving an angry phone call from President Napolitano because his campus had sent their responses in without being checked by UCOP.  After he recalled his responses and went over them in light of UCOP criticisms, UCOP again pressed him to make further changes (20).  President Napolitano has declared that she didn't know that her Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff were intervening on the micro level.  But she did approve a plan that, by its very nature, would stifle the free flow of knowledge and information upon which the audit (and indeed a healthy university) depends.

In order to explain its actions, UCOP claimed a "toxic" relationship between the University and the auditor and the sense that the audit itself was political.  And the Moreno Report does raise important questions about the behavior of the auditor's staff in intruding upon and surveilling UCOP staff members (5-6).  But while these facts may help explain the attitudes of UCOP, they do not justify their actions.  Most of the discussion of the relationship between the Auditor and UCOP has focused on the 2016 audit of non-resident students which caused open conflict between UCOP and the auditor.  But it is important to remember that the struggles go back at least as far as the 2011 audit that identified funding inequalities between campuses and pointed to a correlation between those inequalities and racial composition: the poorer campuses had the highest proportions of Latinx, African American, and Native American students. Grasping that longer history is essential if UC is going to move forward from the present crisis.

Viewed together, the three contentious audits reveal several ongoing problems in UC's governance and strategies.  First, each of the audits marked the increasingly damaging effects of the implicit privatization strategies that UC adopted during the Schwarzenegger administration.  The first audit, as Chris pointed out at the time, hid the damage of state disinvestment by wrongly counting student fees as public funding.  Importantly, while the University challenged the audit's criticism of funding formula for campuses (80-81), it did not address this most fundamental change in the definition of public funding.

This acquiescence had two interconnected effects.  First, it almost inevitably accelerated rises in tuition and reliance on non-resident tuition.  Second, when the rebenching process later reduced campus inequities in state funding, it shifted inequality between campuses to their ability to generate non-resident tuition--an ability itself dependent, at least in part, on historical funding inequities.  One didn't need a crystal ball to see that the handling of non-resident students would become a political flash-point, when neither UC nor the state were willing to think seriously about how to structure a university that could meet its intellectual and social obligations while maintaining traditional, lower proportions of non-resident students.

Internally to the University, the acceptance of privatization has led UC to flail around in search of a magic bullet.  This process started during the Yudof Administration.  On the one hand, we were treated to the spectacle of the Regents' UC Commission on the Future that produced no new ideas  but exhausted people's time and energy.  On the other, we witnessed President Yudof's support of Berkeley Law Dean Chris Edley's fantasies for online education combined with his contempt for inclusive decision-making processes.  Shockingly, the eagerness to follow private sector fads (tech and managerial) didn't provide any real answers.

When President Yudof stepped down, the Regents continued their practice of following the latest managerial fetish and sought out a non-academic politician for president. In theory, President Napolitano should have been able to improve the political and fiscal standing of the university. After all, she had a successful political career and, while Governor of Arizona, had supported higher education in that state.

That expectation has proven inaccurate.  In the aftermath of the latestaAudit, UC is in its weakest political position since the Dynes presidency in the 2000s--if not since the late 1960s in the aftermath of the firing of Clark Kerr.

But if UC is in a weak political position externally, equal damage has been done to the University internally.  The effect of the Yudof and Napolitano years has been a growing centralization of power in the hands of UCOP, a tightened control over the campuses, and a marginalization of the Academic Senate as an independent voice.  Instead of initiative from below, essential to any real university, we face an intensifying managerial structure of top-down efforts to reduce the faculty's authority over academic matters.

Even President Napolitano's recent National Center for Free Speech and Expression is a symptom of this centralized thinking.  I hope to say something about its organization elsewhere, but for now I would simply point out that it was created, as far as I have been able to learn, without any Senate review.  Even a single campus research center would receive that much oversight.  Nor have more clearly administrative initiatives been thoroughly analyzed independently of optics and politics: the UCPath debacle, begun under President Yudof and continuing today, makes that clear.  We seem to have gone from Fiat Lux to simple Presidential Fiat.

UC needs new leadership.  But this cannot be limited to finding a replacement for President Napolitano.  The UC Regents, after all, have made the decisions--through their choices of presidents and policies--that have brought us to this point.  The Regents and UC must give up on trying to mimic the failed Michigan model in finance and the failed managerial model in administration.  The new leadership of the university must restore the primacy of academic judgment over the demands of finance, must seek new ways to transfer funds from administration to education, and must be open to ideas from below.  Meanwhile, the Senate must move beyond its currently reactivity and begin to act as a producer of vision and not just a commentator on administrative proposals.  In addition, faculty throughout the system need to take ownership of their local budgets and campus futures.

UC needs new leadership but it is crucial that that new leadership be based on more inclusive decision making and a vision that places academic judgement and the University's academic future at the heart of its planning.

Remaking is Ten Years Old!

This blog turned ten on Sunday, prompting me to wonder whether blog years are longer than kid years, or the other way around. Kid years are longer when you're waiting for your birthday. Blog years are longer when you're watching a university board meeting and you could have sworn the president said exactly that same thing about the budget 7 years ago, except it was a different president.  In any case, UC Berkeley looked like this when we started -- me in 2007, as a kind of alternate track while I was finishing a book called Unmaking the Public University, and Michael in 2009, when California higher ed got massively cut, employees were furloughed, students were protesting massive tuition hikes, and the road ahead seemed both steep and open.  Of course time in higher education policy moves in a circle, rather than straight ahead, and those of us who assumed that our professional status obligated us to continuous institutional self-governance wondered whether we were actually crew blown "into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake."

You do what you have to do, which for us has meant offering analysis of the full range of university topics, which themselves intersect with the full range of U.S. scientific, social, and cultural issues, increasingly managed in Ahabian style, with many similarly loyal first officers who, notwithstanding the last ten years of missed opportunities, remain less doomed than Ahab's.  One dominant theme has been the persistence of culture wars on the university, now returned in the form of accusations that universities are the enemy of free speech.  Another has been the way short-term public cuts have been translated into long-term structural adjustments.  Both of these we stubbornly oppose, not just because we are stubborn, though we certainly are, but because we can see better alternate realities, which we will continue to set down here.

For a good while we were greatly helped by the editing of Jack Chen at UCLA, and are still helped by Alysse Rathburn working in the background, along with at least two dozen intermittent contributors, some anonymous.   Many thanks to all of them, and to our readers.  The work for universities continues, and I know I don't speak for Michael when I say here's to the next ten years!

Troubles of the Michigan Model

How are we doing with the private-goods model? Advocates have defended it by saying that "multiple revenue streams"--tuition, philanthropy, non-resident enrollment growth, housing, for-profit masters programs--protect the university's public benefits.

I got an up-close look during my second visit this year to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Preparing a lecture on the theme of "U-M: 2117," I went through the university's most recent public data, realizing I was doing this for the first time since our UC Academic Senate group wrote the "Futures Report" ten years ago, using Michigan as a worst-case state cuts scenario.

The good news is of course that U-M is one of the world's great universities, having pioneered inclusive quality and public funding in the 19th century, and gone on from there. It has wonderful people and programs, as I experienced once again first hand.

It's also a best-case example of privatization. It has an endowment of around $11 billion, making it 9th in the country and the largest public university endowment focused mainly on a single campus. It is said to have the largest living alumni base. It is second in the country in extramural grant revenues, and would be first if we excluded Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory as a de facto government lab. It has an extraordinary number of departments ranked in their discipline's top 10 for research.  It was an early entrant in professional education, and pioneered large research centers in the social sciences.  It's a member of that tiny elite that doesn't lose money on its sports programs.

But there are costs.

First, students:   In-state fees are $15,000 for lower division and $17,000 for upper division.  Non-resident tuition is now over $50,000 for upper division students.  Average student debt for borrowers is a comparatively low $26,000.  But here's what the student body looks like.

Nearly two-thirds of U-M students come from families that make over $150,000 a year (top 12 percent).   The students who come from the bottom half of the population by income--and who are the furthest behind the upper-middle class in college attainment--amount to 13% of the student body.   U-M's Pell grant share is 15 percent, tied with the boutique private Rice University, and nearly the same as Northwestern, Tulane, and Duke. (UCSB's is 38 percent; UC Berkeley's is 31 percent, or twice Michigan's share.)

Another group whose college completion is an urgent public good are first-generation students.

Seriously, 5 percent? That's about one-third the rate of elite privates like Stanford and Princeton.  U-M-Ann Arbor enrolls African-American students at around a third their share of the state's population.  The data show that under the Michigan Model, the public research university simply stops being relevant to the majority of the population the system was invented to help.

In 2016, the national press discovered the feasibility of free college. In 2017, they've discovered a consequence of its absence:  tuition strategies increase inequality.  Some of this year's reporting is based on research from the Raj Chetty crew: a parial list of papers is here; a series of New York Times reports this year can be sampled here and here.  There was renewed coverage last week from Lee Gardner at the Chronicle of Higher Education and Rick Seltzer at Inside Higher Ed, both on the theme of public universities now catering to wealthy students.  The University of Michigan is Exhibit A.

What about the business end? The main private revenues are various kinds of tuition.  Leaving aside their negative social effects, they are probably close to their maximum.  Enrollment growth--especially non-resident enrollment growth--also has costs and limits. There may be a bit more mileage left in both, but these are mature strategies.

There's philanthropy. U-M Ann Arbor is a best-case situation.

Operating revenues from endowment are a small fraction of the U-M system's nearly $7 billion overall revenues.

Tech transfer revenues also come up in this context: UCLA recently added a business board to its operation because the professional campus staff was supposedly missing some big money.  The U-M case says there isn't any.

These are gross revenues, so the return to research is much smaller.  And the gross, averaged up to $25 million a year, is under 2 percent of research expenditures, never mind the overall campus budget.  We need more STEM research, not less. But we can't justify it in financial terms.

The big research gross tells an important story.

Ten years ago, U-M was spending 15 cents of its own money to support each dollar of research expenditure.  Now they're spending more than twice that.  In 2016, they spent $456 million of their own funds on research.  Inadequate cost coverage turns research universities into subsidy platforms for outside sponsors, and U-M has stayed on top by paying out of pocket (federal revenues are flat).  The further universities move from public to private sponsors, the more their institutional subsidies rise.  This is an absurdly taboo subject, while in the background subsidies continues to erode public university solvency.

Top university officials often say privatization, under its quasi-official name "multiple revenue streams," works just fine. The evidence says the opposite: it damages public benefits (quality degrees across the whole society), and university finances at the same time.

Feeding a Dangerous Fiction, Redux

The news is that UCOP has legitimated the conventional wisdom that there's a crisis of free speech on campus by funding a center to study it.  But I'm still thinking about the situation at other campuses, from Drexel's suspension of a tweeting professor that I discussed at length in Inside Higher Ed last week ("Feeding a Dangerous Fiction"), to one of the many interesting exchanges I recently had in Reno. 

During questions after my lecture at the University of Nevada campus there, a man in his mid-40s told a story about his friend, a cement tycoon, who didn't get a thank you note from his East coast alma mater for building them a football stadium.  He then asked me when I thought universities were going to get back to "merit and accomplishment" and stop spending their time catering to their "special snowflakes." I smiled at him.  He was a UNR alumnus but not an academic, and I love talking with non-university people about universities.

I said that there is no tension between rewarding academic merit and "protecting snowflakes," which I translated as creating non-punitive and non-threatening conditions so that people's brains can operate correctly.  The latter is the means for achieving the former.  People learn only when they feel relatively safe and respected--not protected from their own wrongness, stupidity, and failure, but protected from stigmas, stereotyping, and mistreatment based on who they are and where they are coming from.  We can look at the vast learning literature for evidence of this truth.  

Or, I said, we can can refer to your story. Your donor friend felt hurt for not being thanked properly for his gift, and thus is having his "performance" in relation to his alma mater reduced. Similarly, the classroom performance of Black lesbian feminists is impaired by disrespect for them, implied or intended.  I'm a default egalitarian, I continued, which means supporting everyone's performance equally, while also knowing that means different things depending on whether one is a rich white donor feeling unappreciated or a young Black college student hearing nonsense talked about themselves.  I may have said "even if we own a cement business we're all basically snowflakes"-- I can't remember. In any case he smiled, waved, and departed.  I was left to ponder where he got the idea that even UNR, with its endless pouring of cement (pictured above), is mainly in the snowflakes business.

The most direct answer is that a bipartisan crew of campus free speech advocates continues to mis-frame the stakes of the debate.  Key members of the liberal center have joined the political right in committing this important error.  The error is to cast universities as safe harbors for enemies of free speech in particular and of freedom in general--with administrators as their squishy enablers.

Every week, the situation gets a little more propagandized. On the right, the motive for affirming this fake story is obvious. Republicans have to control all three branches of the federal government and most state legislatures and governorships with only 1/3rd of the national electorate.   They have a sole economic strategy, which is a combination of deregulation and tax cuts that over the decades has directly hurt their middle class base without actually helping the economy.  To maintain minority rule on the basis of failed economic policy, they need to trot out enemies, and the university has been a stock culture-wars enemy for well over 50 years.

In addition, now that "The Party of Lincoln Is the Party of Trump," Republicans need to sustain Trump's leadership moves--retaliation and abuse--while neutralizing their downside, which is retaliation and abuse, or, in other words, tyrant modalities in the service of what political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters describes as the country's "civil oligarchy."  They also need to keep people from noticing that their business agenda depends on secrecy and confusion,  which free speech standards would undermine were they applied to commerce.   For example, VP Mike Pence broke a tie on a Senate vote that forces victims of bank fraud back into private arbitration, where victims are not even allowed to talk about the problem for which they are seeking redress.  The Right protects commercial speech from disclosure while advocating it for public spaces, where the First Amendment does apply, and also for college campuses, whether or not it interferes with academic freedom.  In sponsoring speech that insults and upsets people, usually members of social minorities without power to retaliate, they can hope to trigger a backlash in which, Milo-style, they can play the victim.  When they do defend free speech for leftist professors, as the National Review did in the George Ciccariello-Maher case I also wrote about, they use it to describe college campuses as clubs for protected idiots.

The Right's demand for democratic speech is highly selective, not applying to Equifax or Renaissance Technologies but always applying to the student and professor part of the university sector.  These two groups stay in the political doghouse where they can be theatrically punished.  This venerable practice generally receives an unfortunate assist from the political center, which helps frame universities as anti-liberty.  As I noted in the IHE piece, some prominent liberals have aligned themselves with the Right's stereotypes of the freedom-hating campus Left.

Yale law professor and novelist Stephen L. Carter, writing in Bloomberg, said that Middlebury-style “down shouters will go on behaving deplorably and reminding the rest of us that the true harbinger of an authoritarian future lives not in the White House but in the groves of academe.” Fareed Zakaria asserted on his CNN program in May, “American universities these days seem committed to every kind of diversity, except intellectual diversity. Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely … There is also an anti-intellectualism on the left, an attitude of self-righteousness that says we are so pure, we’re so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree.” Historian Jill Lepore used her space in The New Yorker to argue, via a cherry-picked series of scattered examples, that today’s controversies are driven by a “tragedy of betrayals” in which, from the 1970s on, “the left’s commitment to free speech began to unravel.”

My new friend in Reno would have every reason to think snowflakes were demanding that all campuses silence speech, since he could find that view in the New Yorker as on Bloomberg as readily as on Breitbart.

My pal could also get it from the leading First Amendment scholar and Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who frames his arguments with the same stereotype that "current college students are often ambivalent, or even hostile, to the idea of free speech on campus."  When he appeared on KQED's Forum program last August, Chemerinsky did not engage caller questions about whether universities must host advocates of positions that science and scholarship has already refuted, which were questions about academic standards and academic freedom, but chose to hear them as doubting the First Amendment.

Actual Left positions on free speech are represented by Joan Scott (interview with Bill Moyers rejecting viewpoint-discrimination on campus), Hank Reichman (bridging free speech and academic freedom via a post-Marcusian critique of tolerance), Wendy Brown (rejecting free corporate speech as the model for campus speech), Leigh Raiford (tying free speech movements to civil rights), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (describing speech protests as widening civil rights tactics and goals), Tiya Miles (on speech needing to be embodied in "corporeal protest") and Robert Post (universities' obligations to educational goals are logically prior to their First Amendment duties).   (Post's longer paper is here.)  None of these positions advocate a priori viewpoint discrimination, though that is the typical charge.

Post's argument is that the First Amendment protects political speech but not all speech in any context. an obvious exception is private business: mall security can prevent anti-abortion rallies at the shopping center food court without losing a First Amendment lawsuit.  Post notes that free speech requirements also don't govern the exercise of professional competence. "We do not apply to doctors sued for malpractice the core First Amendment doctrine that 'there is no such thing as false idea.' We hold doctors accountable for their expertise."  He goes on to apply this professionalist framework to universities:

Another “bedrock principle” of the First Amendment is that “the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” Yet no competent teacher would permit a class to descend into name-calling and insults. Even if the object of classroom education is to expose students to ideas that they might find disturbing or threatening, it is nevertheless inconsistent with learning for students to experience this encounter in settings where they are personally abused or degraded.

Regarding outside speakers, Post writes,

universities are not Hyde Parks. Unless they are wasting their resources on frolics and detours, they can support student-invited speakers only because it serves university purposes to do so. And these purposes must involve the purpose of education.

There's much to be said about this view pro and con, but the core idea is correct: in principle, academic authority rests on tested, disputable, and accountable expertise, not on the exercise of superior political power as covered (and prohibited) by the First Amendment.

The Left has long done a superb job of describing all the ways that formal viewpoint neutrality is actually discriminatory.  It has mapped the many ways that this discrimination works generally against whomever has less power.  This has involved talking about inequalities of power and resources, which are topics that the Right does not enjoy, and that its partisans conceal in part with the trumped-up free speech controversy.

In addition to continuing to press on denied, veiled, and structural discriminations, I'd like to see the Left develop a model of free speech also grounded in both professional duty (the doctor example above) and educational purposes.  Both are based in things the Right has successfully weakened over decades--appreciation for expertise, and a working model of public goods.  Racial equity, gender justice, and similar forms of equality and reciprocity are good both because they help the public good of learning and because they are common goods, if not rights, ethically and philosophically valuable for their own sake.

In other words, free speech needs to be reconnected to the social justice issues that trigger the Right-- and too much of the center.

UC Loses More Autonomy

In the latest fallout from last spring's disastrous, and disastrously handled, audit, Governor Brown has just signed a new law that tightens up legislative oversight over UC Finances.  You will probably remember that the State Auditor challenged UCOP's handling of funds and accused UCOP of intervening in the audit process in order to gain more favorable responses from campus officials (although UCOP denied the allegations).  In response, the State transformed UC's budget.  And now the state is increasing its intervention into UC budgeting.

In what can only be seen as a response UCOP's role in changing campus responses to the Auditor's inquiries, the new law forbids communication between UCOP and a campus

whenever a request for information relating to the security of funds of the University of California is made by the California State Auditor’s Office pursuant to these provisions to one or more campuses of the University of California, would prohibit those campuses from coordinating their responses with, or seeking counsel, advice, or similar contact regarding their response from, the Office of the President of the University of California before submitting the requested information to the California State Auditor’s Office. The bill would require the California State Auditor’s Office, when requesting information under these provisions, to include a statement in the request that it is requesting the information pursuant to these provisions and that the request for information is not to be shared with the Office of the President of the University of California.

In addition, the legislature demands increased fine tuning of the University's cost of education calculation both in terms of the relative costs of undergraduate education, graduate education, and health science education and by funding source.  Given that UC has consistently insisted that this demand is unreasonable, we can expect further political tensions between Sacramento and the University.

Chris and I have long called for greater transparency about spending and funding sources.  And I can understand the State's desire to ensure that the information it receives during audits not be tampered with.  Still, this latest statute raises a series of important issues:

1) When the accusations about tampering first broke, UC announced that it was hiring an independent investigator to examine the charges.  Has that report been concluded?  If so, when will it be released?  What did it determine?  If it hasn't been concluded then why not?  And when can we find out what actually happened?

2) As I pointed out earlier, the State's response continues to be based on the notion that legislators and the Regents are the most appropriate people to co-govern the university with UCOP.  But as has been proven repeatedly, neither the Legislature, nor the Regents, nor the Governor nor UCOP, for that matter, has demonstrated much grasp of the educational and research practices of the University.  What is needed is greater internal democracy rather than simply legislative demands.  And that internal democracy should be applied to the question of how to achieve the highest academic accomplishment, not simply how to achieve the greatest savings or, as far too many local administrators seem to think, develop the latest private sector fads.

3).  When will there be genuine accountability at UCOP and the Board of Regents?  As the audit,  this year's budget, and this legislation demonstrate, UC has become extremely vulnerable to outside pressures and the political status of the University is remarkably low.  Does anyone really believe that the people who have brought the University to this point are the ones to correct it?  And given the destructive forces emanating from Washington, does anyone expect that the budget or the political climate is going to get better?

4) Shouldn't the Senate take a leading and public role in formulating proposals to recenter the University on its academic missions?

Berkeley Disconnect

The farce that was MiloFest has now frittered away into failure.  Of course, that will not be the last time that the right-wing attempts to undermine the authority and status of higher education under the guise of standing up for free thought.  The challenge will be ongoing.

At the same time, we should not allow the fireworks over free speech to divert us from other important attacks on the educational mission of universities.  These attacks are driven not by the ideologies of the alt-right but by the ideologies of austerity.

One classic case of the damage brought about by privatization-driven austerity was revealed amidst the hubbub over free speech week at Berkeley.  While most attention was focused on the spectacles of Shapiro and Yiannopoulos, the Daily Cal reported that the Christ administration is proposing to end the funding for the tremendously successful Berkeley Connect program as part of its budget cutting plans.

Berkeley Connect is an  innovative program that provides academic mentoring to undergraduates and fellowship support to graduate students.  Undergraduates who join the program are linked with a graduate student adviser who helps them navigate their academic experience.  Students take part in small discussion groups and workshops, and pursue a specially designed curriculum.  Students overwhelmingly praise the program and it has been shown to improve their academic performance.  Over 10,000 have participated.  Even though the program had its campus support cut last year from $2M to $1M dollars it still was able to support 1200 undergraduates while providing 29 graduate fellowships.

What makes this proposed elimination so striking is that the Christ Administration appears willing to sacrifice precisely the sort of program that Berkeley claims it wants to promote because it improves the quality of undergraduate education.  Berkeley Connect began in 2010 as a result of a donation from the father of an English Department alumnus.  In 2013, recognizing its success, the campus agreed to fund its extension to additional departments.  It now serves 13 departments from Math, Computational Biology and Physics on the one hand to History, Architecture and African-American Studies on the other.  So the Christ administration is proposing to eliminate a highly successful program, built upon a commitment of campus funds and the support of appreciative parent of an alumnus, and that has demonstrably improved both undergraduate and graduate education.  And just for the record, the amount going to Berkeley Connect this year is approximately the same as what the University has recently spent on the Shapiro and Yiannopoulos events and less than 1/5 of the continued subvention of the chronically mismanaged Intercollegiate Athletics department.

To be sure, the particular brutalism of Berkeley's imposition of austerity is not due to the campus leadership alone.  UCOP is demanding the pace of deficit reduction and therefore making it more difficult to balance the budget without affecting innovative educational programs.  But when the campus announces that they have decided to exclude fellowships from the chopping block  and then turns around and makes a decision that will cut nearly 30 graduate fellowships, one has to wonder about how believable the administration's claims really are.

Indeed, as Chris pointed out in his recent budget post, Berkeley has shown no sign of an open and deep rethinking of their budget strategies and priorities of the last 15 years.  Beginning with the Birgeneau and Breslauer administration, Berkeley has been announcing new and greater privatization schemes while allowing for a dramatic expansion in administration even as funding for core educational activities has become increasingly strained.  Although it is true that in this year's budget plan, administrative cuts are serious, they don't make up for the imbalance in spending over the last several administrations.

If the Christ Administration eliminates Berkeley Connect it will be both a terrible step and a canary in a coal mine.  The Chancellor has insisted that she is determined to protect instruction.  If she is, then she will insist that her administration find the funds to maintain Berkeley Connect.  If she does not, it will be another example of the slide of Berkeley from the days when its headlines were about educational innovation to these days, when we hear mostly about rankings declines and athletic department mismanagement.

Doghouse Pension Politics

Another negative report about the University of California appeared last weekend, this time on the front page of Sunday's Los Angeles Times.  The headline summarized the storyline: "UC is handing out generous pensions, and students are paying the price with higher tuition."

The piece has some analytical problems, but that doesn't keep it from painting a powerfully dark picture of the UC system.  I should say up front that I appreciate the investigative efforts of the piece's author, Jack Dolan, and his Times colleagues to collect internal university data and to report coherently on an important issue.

UC employees have been treated to two major pension tierings in less than a decade (where new employees get reduced benefits).  They have had their contributions increase from 0 to 7-9 percent of pretax salary depending on their employee group, during a period of de facto salary freezes.  No UC employee group ever requested the "contribution holiday" in the first place: UCRP was greatly overfunded at the time, and then zero contributions became an administrative end-run around pay freezes and stagnation during the first big round of state budget cuts that started in 1991-92. For the ensuing 25 years, most UC salaries have lagged behind their peers: faculty have generally been at least 10 percent behind.  The overfunded UC Retirement Program (UCRP) balanced that out, so that "total compensation" stayed competitive.  Now total compensation has fallen behind as well (by 10 percent for ladder faculty in a 2014 Mercer Total Remuneration Study; also see Berkeley FA overview) and this is due to deteriorating benefits as well as the tiering of and the rising contributions to the retirement plan.  UC now contributes 14 percent of salary to UCRP, with 6 percent of that going to backfill the effects of the "holiday," which, stupid as its protraction was, tried to counterbalance substandard salaries (UCRP page 8). So UC employees have little to learn about UC pension problems from the Dolan article.   And yet they were likely disturbed by Dolan's equation of all UC employees with the tiny $300,000+ Club whose payouts have been critiqued by faculty before, and that the article wrongly implies represent a pervasive, fatal overgenerosity to the whole.

(1)

That said, I'm interested in the larger framing problem the Dolan piece represents. How can UC frame its operations and missions in a way that avoids this kind of repeated damage to its reputation?  Fixing root causes is of course the real solution.  But real fixes are themselves blocked by a framing narrative that makes it much harder to address root causes or even to see what they are.

The master frame is "UC is rich and dishonest and doesn't need or deserve more state money."  Dolan's piece adds, "UC acts rich with pensions when it's actually poor, and thus hurts its students."  These are both "private good" frames that rest on "public-choice" political economy, as I'll discuss below.

We are in Year Ten (or Twenty) of a university strategy crisis about changing these narratives.  How can UC increase the chances of an alternative front page headline like,

After years of austerity, UC struggles to meet needs of students without hurting staff" (or vice versa)?  

A frame composed of such headlines would allow UC to address deep problems (e.g. inadequate public funding, including no ongoing state pension funding) rather than go after the specific mistakes of their critics.

Let's take a look at how Dolan's argument works.  He argues that a "good chunk" of this year's 2.5 percent tuition increase (rising for resident undergraduates from $12,294 to $12,630) will go to filling in the pension shortfall rather than improving campus operations. UC has $57 million in new tuition money for operations, but could have had $83 million were it not sending $26 million to add a drop to the pension deficit bucket.  The piece rolls several pension issues into a giant D.U.M.E spliff, as my Mardi Gras office candle would put it.

1. "The average UC pension for people who retired after 30 years is $88,000."
2. "More than 5400 UC retirees received pensions over $100,000."
3. "The number of UC retirees collecting six-figure pensions has increased 60% since 2012."
4. "Nearly three dozen [former employees] received pensions in excess of $300,000 last year, four times as many as in 2012."
5. Former UC President Mark Yudof got a sweetheart pension deal that put him in the top ten, though he "worked at the university for only seven years--including one year on paid sabbatical and another in which he taught one class per semester."
6. The pension fund can't really afford this because it has a $15 billion shortfall--which has been getting worse.
7. The pension problem "is distinctly self-inflicted. In 1990, administrators  . .  . stopped making contributions for 20 years, even as their investments foundered."

The result is "a jaw-dropping bill for the next generation--which has now arrived." Students are paying the price.

That's just the first section of the piece.  The next section details how Mark Yudof got his pension up from the $45,000 per year the formula would have granted him--first to $230,000 per year for 5 years (via a custom formula he negotiated with senior UC officials), then to $357,000 per year when the year of sabbatical and year of teaching counted part of the president formula).  Then there's discussion of the medical professors who make up the bulk of the top-10 list.  Dolan interviewed two of them, Lawrence Bassett and Nostratola Vaziri (41.4 and 36.7 years of service), who both said they stayed for the work not the pension.  That's probably true, but leads to

     8. UC's justification for Defined Benefit pensions--they retain top talent--is false.

The rest of the piece is a mixture of people claiming that paying higher salaries on Defined Contribution plans would be cheaper, and a recount of how UCOP stonewalled The Times and another organization that thought the pension data was public. The piece notes that Regent Richard Blum did not respond to requests to explain the contract he negotiated with Yudof, and ends with this paragraph:

Napolitano’s staff also initially refused when The Times requested the pension information in February. It took until June for them to provide usable data — which showed the dramatic rise in six-figure pension payments and revealed for the first time the full amount of Yudof’s pension.

That brings us to 

    9. UC officials are not transparent and, lip service aside, don't think they are accountable to the public.

And throw in the conclusion (in pension author Lawrence McQuillan's words): 

    10. "this year's higher tuition is just the beginning of bailouts by students and their parents" of UC and other public universities. 

This chain of statements is very damaging.   (1) is not a bad but a good: $88,000 after 30 years is a reasonable pension for an institution comprised of the most highly qualified kinds of people in society, and whose professors are usually 30 when they get their doctorate and can start their career--or 35-40 given the shortage of tenure-track jobs and the stopgap of postdocs.  But then (1) gets buried by (2) through (10).  

We could analyze (2) through (10) and show that each of them is not entirely true and/or is decontextualized, and that there are counterexamples. We could say reforms have taken place, as UC CFO Nathan Brostrom does.  These kinds of rebuttals are satisfying and helpful but leave the current framework in place.  An example of failure in the recent series of UC-negative reports was UCOP's point-by-point rebuttal to the audit that we discussed several times in May (starting here).  It weirdly resulted in UCOP's formal capitulation, with no clarification for the public of the principles at stake.

(2)

What would work better is critique embedded in an explicit alternative framework.  For universities this should be a public good framework.  I theorize this in The Great Mistake, but I'll just do a summary narrative here.  The private good framework makes Defined Benefit pensions anomalous, and statements like "we're 83 percent funded!" won't change that.  In addition, a pervasive public-choice theory casts DB pensions as typical expressions of public-employee self-interest that are won at the expense of the customer (students). In contrast, DB pensions (to stick with our case here) are normal and logical in a public good framework. Here's a sample narrative, in the voice of the University administration:

Public universities create and sustain public goods in a variety of ways.  One public good is a fair salary that reflects the past effort and educational attainment of the employee and the value their ongoing labor.  Market rates are one guideline for but not the final determinant of salary.  The same is true for retirement.  Retirement security is a public good, and historical experience shows that Defined Benefit pensions are the best way of providing that.  We also know that pool investing is more efficient than individual investing.  Although UC is always being told to replace DB with Defined Contribution (DC) pensions, the main benefit would be to push the cost of retirement off state and institutional books and onto the budget of the individual employee.  There are no truly convincing ethical defenses of this "risk shift" to individuals.  In addition, the decades-long replacement of DB by DC plans (e.g. the 401(k)) has created a retirement crisis in the country. This is the real problem with pensions: not enough people have them.  We are not willing to shift from good to bad retirement design simply because the 401(k) satisfies a policy bias towards market solutions--even when their performance is worse.

In the public good context, we reject the LA Times article's assumption that students and university staff have opposing interests. We detect a standard public-choice framework, which posits that public employees are there to maximize their own welfare rather than to perform a satisfying and valuable service for a decently supportive salary, which is what we know empirically to be the case.  Public-choice assumptions misstate the problem: the problem is not that university staff have excessive pensions at the expense of the customer-student because bureaucracies defeat market discipline; the problem is that the system of public-good activities--learning, researching, disseminating knowledge--has been underfunded and continuously stressed.   We will not cut part of our employees' total compensation on the basis of an incorrect paradigm.

Since the University and society work together in a common public enterprise, we need to disclose what the funding does and explain how the institution works.  We have not been doing this well. This is largely because we don't trust the political system to grasp the history and rationale of policies unique to universities (like supplemental summer salaries for sponsored research) before they starting kicking those policies around as political footballs. We are always afraid of retaliation and have a duty to protect the university from it.  And yet we realize that we have increased public distrust by how we handle negative findings like those of the UCOP audit.  We know the price of selective disclosure is far too high, and we will end the practice of not disclosing budgetary information until we are sued or threatened with lawsuits, as was the case with the pension story. Non-disclosure blocks practical reforms by cutting us off from shared public-good goals.  Secrecy protects bad practices and thus prevents us from protecting a good overall policy.  So while pensions above $100,000 are justified (2), and their increase (3) can be traced to demographics, the spiked Yudof pension (5), was not.  We can tell you why we thought the Yudof deal was a good idea at the time, but we won't be doing such things again.  

The same goes for the 20 year pension "holiday."  This was sustained in an attempt to compensate UC faculty and staff for substandard salaries. They were below market value then, and they remain at least 10 percent below peer levels today.  We should have ended this practice much sooner, and both employees and employer are paying high costs out of pocket to make up for this mistake.  The state saved quite a bit of money from the pension holiday too.  When we place the Dolan article in a public good frame, we can see that the real issue is for all parties to contribute to keeping the retirement system solvent.  The University and its employees are doing their part: only the state rejects an ongoing commitment. A public good framework makes a state contribution natural. 

More generally, we won't engage in practices we can't defend in our overall philosophical framework, in which any practice must be able to withstand full disclosure.  At the same time, all practices that survive this test will be fully defended by us.   

Finally, our core public good is the creation and dissemination of advanced knowledge. In this context, we must insist that coverage follows full academic standards.  Here Jack Dolan's article falls short.  Dolan puts out large numbers without context. For example, 5400 pensions above $100,000 is  less than 10 percent of the over 60,000 former employees now receiving pensions (UCRP page 4). The average professional/support staff pension is $33,000; the average senior professional pension is under $60,000; even faculty, who mostly don't have 30 years of UC service, receive on average under $83,000. Mark Yudof and the other big pensions do not represent the system.  The article's cherry-picking of examples is a classic error, though it feeds the private-good paradigm that underwrites Dolan's analysis.  We will apply the same standards to critiques of us that we apply to our own research and administration.

That's a first draft on a public good frame for the retirement issue, and it could no doubt be improved. But the main point stands.  Reframing would give the public a new way of thinking about a scandal-plagued system. It could get them focused on UC's real problems and interested in actually fixing them.  And it has a better chance of breaking the doghouse cycle that the defenses we rely on now.

BFA Editorial on Free Speech and the University

In the aftermath of the failure of Milofest, the Berkeley Faculty Association has written an op-ed that raises important questions about the relationship between free speech, academic freedom, and political attacks on the university.  As the BFA notes:

Freedom of speech is one foundational principle of the public university. Academic freedom is another. Since 1964, when the UC Berkeley administration was successfully challenged by the Free Speech Movement to extend First Amendment protections to campus space, the university has had to balance the obligation to allow citizens’ speech against the commitment to academic freedom. As a public entity, UC Berkeley must respect the airing of diverse viewpoints; as a higher learning institution, UC Berkeley must protect its autonomy from political interference and harassment. Increasingly, the threat to the campus’ autonomy, on which academic freedom depends, derives not from government legislators—as in the era of the FSM, when former UC President Clark Kerr and former UC Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong were faced with adjudicating competing obligations to free speech and academic freedom. Rather, the threat increasingly derives from private interests hostile to the university’s mission of research and teaching.

You can read the entire statement at the DAILY CAL

Napolitano Sues Trump: Dealing with DACA Termination

Trump presides as the King of Pain, inflicting turmoil and loss on others, seemingly without effort or long-term benefit.  Last week the pain came from his administration's termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program this coming March.  The idea seems to be to threaten the program's 800,000 recipients with impeding job loss and deportation while the Congress that made DACA necessary by failing to pass immigration reform works again on passing immigration reform.

In "The Psychic Toll of Trump's DACA Decision," Karla Conejo Villavicencio writes,

Spreading fear and anxiety, of course, is part of the administration’s plan. Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, recently said: “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable. You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.”

The renewed fear comes to a community that already leads a kind of lower-caste life bounded by suffering.

Undocumented life in America is hard on the mind and body. Poverty, precarious employment, poor access to health care, discrimination and trauma from the migration itself often lead to disorders like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Access to mental health treatment is scant, the demands of simply surviving are overwhelming, the fear of being discovered discourages people from seeking care, and the stigma of mental illness has perpetuated a culture of silence that only worsens the suffering. . . . All of the immigrants I have interviewed and known throughout my life seem to accept chronic exhaustion, low self-esteem, fear and panic, low moods and fits of crying as normal for the melancholic migrant struggling to subsist without being arrested. 

DACA was intended to give limited relief to one set of undocumented US residents: those who were brought to the U.S. by their parents as minors (under age 16) before 2007. It authorises two-year renewal work permits and "defers removal proceedings."  It was implemented in 2012 with a major assist from UC president Janet Napolitano when she was Barack Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security. The program has been generally popular: in 2013, back before he ran for president, Trump met with Dreamer activists (above; photo credit: Estuardo Rodriguez).

In the wake of the announcement, Janet Napolitano has gone one step further. She and the UC Regents are suing the Department of Homeland Security to prevent it from ending DACA.  The lawsuit claims that DACA is being terminated through an "unreasoned executive whim" that violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act.  In her op-ed explaining her decision, Napolitano writes that the Department of Justice

offers no rationale based on the merits of DACA itself, but rather on the purported illegality of a separate program with different rules and aimed at different immigrants (the parents of DACA-eligible young people), a program that never went into effect. That justification is flat out wrong. The DACA program was a legal exercise of the department’s prosecutorial discretion and no court has found DACA to be invalid. 

In fact, in 2014, the Department of Justice office that reviews the constitutionality of executive branch actions determined that DACA was lawful. Now the Trump administration’s DOJ offers no reasoned analysis for its about-face.

Like many other university heads, Napolitano had already denounced the decision to end the DACA program while affirming the continuation of DACA-related legal, financial aid and advising programs (UC's are also summarised here; UCSB's Undocumented Student Services page is here).  In addition, she had confirmed that UCOP was

Directing campus police not to contact, detain, question or arrest individuals based on suspected undocumented status, or to enter agreements to undertake joint efforts to make arrests for federal immigration law violations.

Other universities, including the Cal State system, were already declining to cooperate with immigration officials, prompting threats of retaliation from some officials (e.g. Texas).  The University of California now becomes the first to sue, with standing to sue grounded in the harm done to its 4000 DACA students.

In the meantime, DACA students, please note: "Students whose legal status expires before or on March 5 can renew their two-year DACA status if they apply before October 5."    USCIS information is here.

I'm glad Napolitano has put UC out in front on this issue.  DACA was a patch on an immigration reform process that had been broken by congressional Republicans, and the patch should stay where it is.

But there's also quite a bit of politics to get through, and then a self-made trap for universities, with which I'll conclude.

First, the politics, which have shifted in favor of DACA.  In an echo of the lawsuits against the Muslim travel ban, the attorneys general of 15 states are suing the Trump administration to block DACA's termination, "citing Trump's racial animus."   The White House was already divided on termination, as Trump himself seems to be: his varying statements include suggestions that he would sign future DACA legislation sent to him by Congress and that for the 6 month period leading up to termination, DACA people "have nothing to worry about."  Silicon Valley supports DACA, as does the business wing of the Republican Party, as does every Democratic elected official who has spoken on the matter, as do many governors, mayors, city councils, police chiefs, school district heads, church leaders, and so on. So does two-thirds of the general public.  Ending DACA is turning out to be another unpopular thing that this popularity-obsessed president has done.   He has also done it after hurricane Harvey had devastated southeast Texas and as hurricane Irma was steaming towards Florida.  He did it at the start of a nasty political autumn when he will need solid support from both parties to raise the debt ceiling among other unpleasant political tasks.  DACA back-pedaling may be commencing soon.

Why did he do it then?  The simple answer is that the unifying principle of Trump's worldview is white supremacy. (See Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece, "Our First White President" if you need convincing, or even if you don't.)  More narrowly, his clear "racial animus" made it easier for him to take DACA students hostage to exchange for Democratic support for a border wall.  This is one motive for the timing of the announcement, though too many members of both parties hate this exchange for it to work.

A second motive for Sessions and Trump is that they are losing the immigration issue in the court of public opinion. They must have assumed that white identity politics would keep the base stirred up after it had put them over the top last November.  And yet there was no groundswell to defend the Muslim ban.  There was very limited excitement on the Right--and a fair amount of embarrassed condemnation--after the white supremacist show of force in Charlottesville last month. Charlottesville's immediate effect was to grow the size of anti-Trump counterprotests to proportions that made the Trump fans hard to find.

Trump's anti-immigration stance has not actually built a coalition beyond his base of a quarter to a third of voters.  Though immigration reform politics are complicated, and racism is a steady baseline,  the overall public is not anti-immigrant.  In the most recent national poll, a majority objected to Trump's pardon of Latino-abusing former sheriff Joe Arpaio and, in addition to supporting DACA by a two to one margin, favored some "path to citizenship" for all undocumented residents by nearly three to one (71 percent).  Americans are now more likely to favor increased immigration than they were in 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed the last "path to citizenship" immigration bill.

Still worse for Trump, DACA has been doing four things to erode support for a hardline anti-immigration position.

It has rebranded young Latino immigrants as the new "model minority"--the young Americans next door.

It has appealed to the American desire to side with the innocent, which helps it to see itself as innocent.  (For example, it is easier to admit child refugees from a Honduras made more lethal by Hillary Clinton's support for the 2009 coup against elected president Manuel Zelaya than to confront destructive U.S. policies in Latin America.)

Third, DACA has shown that diverse societies work. Integration is simply more practical as well as more humane than deportation, which seems particularly oafish and stupid in relation to DACA recipients.  Everyday life has tended to cut through the economic debate about whether immigrant labor is competitive with or complementary to native-born labor. Wherever the economy is functioning well, actual practice is an interdependent non-zero sum.

Finally, DACA has been showing that government programs can solve awkward social issues and reduce specific miseries. That fact on the ground disputes the Right's overall world view.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a lifelong race politician, and is no doubt aware of all this.  His announcement of the DACA termination sought to broaden termination's appeal on three points.

He stated that a "lawful immigration policy that serves the national interest" prohibits an "open border policy." Second, he stressed DACA's vulnerability to "legal and constitutional challenges," saying that his review found it to be inconsistent with the Constitution's separation of powers. He said he was establishing an orderly wind-down that would give Congress time to act if it so chose.  Third, he claimed that a "lawful and constitutional immigration policy" will "further economically the lives of millions who are struggling."

Sessions thus combined a "nation of laws" defense with a reference to Trump's fabled promises to bring back American jobs.  The overall point was to affirm that DACA residents are generally good people while rejecting Obama's executive order as undermining constitutional law and hurting citizen employment.

In the coming weeks, Sessions will try to appeal to people who know they too come from immigrants, who feel badly about pulling the ladder up now, but who worry about open borders, foreign disorder, ignored lawbreaking, and the scarcity of well-paying jobs.  He will also position defenders of DACA students as lawbreakers themselves. He'll specifically go after universities as a class, saying they think they are too good to follow the same laws that apply to everybody else.   He'll build on the Right's established vision of  universities as part of a liberal elite that has let middle-class jobs disappear while asserting their own special privileges.

To stay ahead of this issue, universities are going to have to do three things--three things in addition to the basic critique of such things as Sessions' own rationales.  The economic debate (e.g. Borjas v Krugman) must continue, but it has been fought to a draw that does little to affect people's sense of their economic experience. 

The first is have a good offense, and Napolitano's lawsuit provides it. It claims that legal procedure was broken not by universities like UC but by Sessions himself.  She is also a Democrat with a  unique claim to the "nation of laws" argument: she was a central player when Obama increased border enforcement and deported more undocumented migrants than any other president in history, and this record produced protests of her UC hire by the immigrants rights community that she sides with on DACA.  It will be hard for Sessions to position the UC lawsuit as emerging from someone who's soft on illegal immigration.

Second, colleges and universities will need to do a much better job of achieving racial equality.  Higher education was meant to be part of the solution to race-based discrimination, but decades of cuts and austerity have impoverished the institutions that serve the majority of students of color, starting with community colleges.  For example, there is a clear correlation between grossly unequal funding and unequal graduation rates (see Stage 7 of The Great Mistake or Separate and Unequal for details).  The U.S. has been trying to equalize K-12 funding across school districts for decades, though the egalitarian principle is honored in the breach, and resegregation has been spreading everywhere. Higher ed needs to get serious about embarking on its own equalization project.  The educational boon would be huge.  So would the political benefits for universities: they would associate themselves with inclusive social development via an equality across aggregate populations this is efficient as well as just. 


Third, racially egalitarian development will be credible only if universities break with their implicit 1990s-era economic model that has helped underdevelop much of the country. I mean the Clinton-style knowledge economy, which was to deliver general prosperity and instead produced stagnant wages for three-quarters of the workforce while devolving whole regions at a time.  Democrat consent to low tax dogma, supported by leaders in tech and finance, has eroded the infrastructure and public services that would have held economy and society together.  At the same time, universities have made their own workforces into microcosms of the dual economy that most voters hate: faculties are divided between a shrinking tenured elite and the contingent masses who comprise about 70 percent of the instructional workforce.  Administrative bloat has not stopped the same segmentation in non-teaching staff: UCSF made national news this year by outsourcing to an offshore company exactly the kind of information technology jobs that universities are supposed to prepare their students to have.  For the general public to care about universities's views on economics and immigration, they will need to set a better example.

In any case, the fates of universities and immigrants are intertwined.  Universities only make sense as a public good grounded in tax-based public systems that support full social development; similarly, immigrant and non-immigrant labor thrive together only in a social ecology sustained by strong, equitably distributed services in health, education, housing, transportation, and employment.  The same degradation of the public sector that has damaged public universities has intensified an artificial competition between immigrant and non-immigrant labor.  Universities could do a better job of using their own scholars's research--represented by the quotations with which I began--to show the range of both market and non-market contributions that immigrants have always been making.

I realize these last two points are a reach, and require new top-level strategy.  But though the UC lawsuit for DACA is a good start, it has a much better chance of lasting success--and of leading to stability and healing--if universities publicly engage with racial capitalism and the dual economy it has created.