Universities Studying Slavery: Critical University Studies in Practice

By Vineeta Singh, Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellow, Omohundro Institute, College of William & Mary.

This is the second in a series of talks from the MLA panel, "Race and Critical University Studies." The first was "Insurgent Genealogies."

In 2015, the University of Virginia’s “President’s Commission on Slavery and the University” established a multi-institution consortium of “Universities Studying Slavery,” (USS) to allow historians to collaborate on research and share best practices for attempts at reconciling institutional histories and institutional values.

In the last three years, the consortium has grown to include 38 universities in the U.S., Canada, and Britain. It is primarily an historical rather than literary or even interdisciplinary intellectual community.  It is located squarely in the South, where the institutional reluctance and incapacity to address the already hypervisible histories of slavery and white supremacy more broadly have molded a very different “crisis consensus” than at the University of California and similar schools. Because of these divergent evolutions, USS work gives Critical University Studies other ways of approaching the presentism, exceptionalism, and focus on amelioration that CUS work is frequently charged with. 

After finishing an Ethnic Studies dissertation studying the history of U.S. higher education as it reflects and intensifies the conditions of racial capitalism, I recently began a postdoctoral fellowship with The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation. This is the College of William & Mary’s initiative to study the university’s history with racial violence and to “rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary through action or inaction.” In learning with the Lemon team and other members of the USS Consortium, I have come to regard the practical and creative work of students, scholars, and activists working with such initiatives as a model for how to do a critical study of American higher education. The work is allowing us to address the color line as a central driving force in the history of U.S. higher education. It looks toward an immanent reconcilability of studies of race, racism, and racial capitalism in higher education with “critical studies about the casualization of academic labor, the privatization of the public university, and the uncertain future of U.S. higher education,” as Heather Steffen put it in the proposal for this panel.

The conflict between the study of CUS and of race might be boiled down to the hope, on the one hand, that the public research university is fundamentally a progressive good, whose expanding reach has or will index the growth of values consonant with social justice, potentially including the dismantling of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy etc.; and, on the other hand, the conviction that since the U.S. nation-state is a guarantor of white supremacist capitalism, its system of higher education, functions like all state apparatuses is a house where “only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”

In my research and in my work with the Lemon Project I have joined a generation of Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies scholars and historians who are attempting to work through this disconnect. Like the first generation of identity knowledge workers who brought identity knowledges into some kind of institutional relationship with the academy, our labors represent a kind of reconciliation--not the end of an antagonism, but its continuation by other means. Creating new, uncomfortable, and generative proximites, this reconciliation work has less to do with the affective labor of creating friendly relations and more to do with the institutional work of creating a shared political community for the perpetrators andi targets of crimes against humanity. Or better yet, for knowledge producers, it is akin to the accounting practice of ensuring that two sets of records are in agreement.

In general, universities have tried to reckon with their racist pasts through enrollment, historical study, memorialization, and of course reconciliation. Among the most inspiring successes are enrollment initiatives tailored for black students.  For example, Rutgers and Georgetown are seeking to build recruitment relationships with descendant communities.  Rutgers University’s Scarlet and Black Project’s historical study puts anti-black and settler violences squarely in the center of university history rather than, as in the past, seeing them as appendages or amendments to a history of great white men and families. 

Some universities are also engaged in countercommemoration, in which they rename campus landmarks after the enslaved laborers who built them, or after black historical figures associated with campus space. This helps black students and other students of color see themselves not just as descendants of the disfranchised but as inheritors of radical traditions of resistance and study.

Notably, the Brown [University] Steering Committee was a direct result of a reparations debate. The same year Ruth Simmons became Brown’s president, conservative author David Horowitz published a full-page ad in student newspapers across the country including the Brown Daily Herald titled “Ten Ideas Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too.” When the paper’s editors refused to print a retraction or relinquish the money the paper received for the ad (as student activists recommended), protestors “stole an entire day’s press run of the paper” (pages 58- 59). The steering committee’s final report notes that the “stolen” papers were actually returned, but also that the story of the “theft” appeared in newspapers across the country, casting the university as a poor defendant of “the free exchange of ideas” (ibid.) The following year, when a class-action lawsuit was brought against a cohort of private corporations built on profits from the slave trade, including FleetBoston bank, founded by the same family of brothers who endowed Brown University, and when think pieces like Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree’s New York Times essay warned institutions like Brown, Yale, and Harvard to brace for a series of similar suits, Brown’s president Simmons convened the steering committee, in their words,“not [to] determine whether or how Brown might pay monetary reparations, nor… to forge a consensus on the reparations question. Its object, rather, was ‘to provide factual information and critical perspectives to deepen understanding’ and enrich debate on an issue that had aroused great public passion but little constructive public dialogue.” 

The most visible of this work, however, is the focus on eliciting an official university apology—ostensibly, although evidently not always, as a prelude to a commitment to material investments; administratively, of course, the investment is in rehabilitating the image of the institution.

Although the USS consortium’s name implies a focus on the pre-1865 period, in practice its associated initiatives have used the hypervisibility of the slavery conversation to bring attention to racial formation, racial capitalism, and racialized violence more broadly.

The initiatives frequently cite Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of the afterlives of African chattel slavery to trigger a momentary removal of the veils of commodity fetishism and fiduciary responsibility, the justification used by, for instance, Jesuit priests selling 272 enslaved Americans to keep Georgetown University’s doors open in 1838.  They ask, as the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation at Georgetown does, how this historical “lack of moral imagination—the inability to see black human beings as deserving of equal dignity” persists in the present and in planning for the future.

By addressing the long history of the U.S. university as a crucial site in the creation and consolidation of American racial capitalism, such work overcomes the bias alleged to be at the heart of current CUS work. Partnering and collaborating with USS schools and scholars would help CUS practitioners do the same.

In doing so, Lemon-style initiatives also move against the tendency to treat the university as an exceptional site. The undergraduate class syllabi such initiatives inform connect the university’s slaveholding to its role in fomenting and maintaining Jim Crow segregation laws and norms off campus.

At William & Mary, student activists have further connected these conversations to the university’s ongoing use of prison labor. Their work underscores the continuity between African chattel slavery and contemporary mass incarceration and residential, educational, and occupational segregation, as well as workers’ rights and health inequity, as much on campus as off. In leveraging a crisis to create a coalition, such initiatives, mostly born of student, faculty, and community organizing, are another iteration of the kind of coalitional labor that has historically animated the fields of Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Latinx, and Gender Studies. And they are a coalition that easily makes common cause with CUS’s wider concerns.

Amelioration, the desire to manage the effects of a crisis, rather than confronting its root causes, is important to the institutions sanctioning such initiatives. As they try to tidy up unsightly and embarrassing student protests into at least surveilable, if not exactly manageable initiatives, the frequent use of the appellation “project” (instead of center or institute) in their titles indexes an uneasy triangular relationship among an administration’s desire to be absolved of past wrongdoings, historians’ attempts to “narrow the range of permissible lies” an institution can tell about its own past, and the institution’s inability to reckon with the scale of the oppression in which it has been complicit (page 173).

Yet the persistence of the scholars tasked with these efforts of memory, repentance, reconciliation, healing, and redress, speaks to their personal and collective investments in making possible another university. They also provide an intellectual community for people like Professor Hilary Green, an historian working at the University of Alabama, who single-handedly researched, designed, and implemented an alternate campus tour highlighting the presence of enslaved laborers and craftsmen on campus. Green has personally given her Hallowed Grounds tour to over three thousand visitors and students, and last year, along with earning tenure, received funds to hire student workers to expand its reach.

Green’s work is, frankly, a personal inspiration, and a model of the kind of reconciliation I envision for students of CUS and racial capitalism: it begins with a confrontational practice that forces students and visitors to recognize the racial violence embedded in the campus landscape.  Rather than waiting for institutional or disciplinary approval, Green has been reconciling the institution’s accounts with local common senses about the predatory relationship between the academy and communities of color. She is now also able to use university resources to further her transformative work.

This is also a core tenet of the interdisciplinary identity knowledge formations: to refuse the positioning of racial violence as an aberration in the history of the United States or of capitalism, and to place it at the center of these narratives. One effect is that the narratives have to re-articulate their own objects.  Another is that the rest of the campus so-called community builds “racial stamina”—the capacity to engage in meaningful dialogue about systemic racism.

In situating racial violence as a constitutive element of institutional histories, such projects keep the campus in a generative state of crisis.  This creates the possibility to answer the call for imaginative scholarly coalitional work..  I’m thinking in particular of Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things, which shifts our focus away from grand revolutionary narratives (or even the heroic model of grant-writing templates) and towards “the small things” that can enact critical forms of community—forms that make minoritized subjects agents rather than silent objects of knowledge.

Insurgent Genealogies: The Poetic and Pedagogical Praxis of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich

by Danica Savonick, Asst Professor of English, SUNY Courtland

Chris here: this is the first in a series of papers delivered at an MLA Convention panel called "Race and Critical University Studies," organized by Heather Steffen and me and held on 5 January 2019.  Prof. Savonick gets at a key motive behind the panel when she says below, "Critical university studies puts a name on something that activists, intellectuals, and scholars of African American studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies have been doing for decades and even centuries." We are interested in helping CUS contribute to the continuation and extension of these critiques and practices.

*** 
 My remarks today are drawn from my current manuscript project, Insurgent Knowledge, which analyzes the literary and pedagogical praxis of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich. I’ll give a brief overview of the project and highlight one key example, then suggest some ways that this work might help us think about this panel’s question: how can critical university studies approach issues of race, racism, and racial capitalism in higher education?

While Lorde, Jordan, Bambara, and Rich are most often studied for their literature, my project positions them as theorists of feminist and antiracist pedagogy. In 1968, at the height of the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and protests against the Vietnam War (and the same year that Paulo Freire was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed) these authors were teaching down the hall from one another at Harlem’s City College, in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program and later during Open Admissions. Like the majority of educators today, they were not teaching wealthy or even middle-class students at elite universities with ample resources. Rather, they were teaching working class students of color in the nation’s first state-mandated educational opportunity program.

As educators, these authors drew on their poetic sensibilities to develop student-centered, collaborative, and consciousness-raising pedagogies that transformed their classrooms into sites of social change. They challenged students to make crucial decisions about the structure of their courses; to conduct original local research on poverty, housing, food, and education; to write and publish literature and to become teachers in their classrooms and leaders in their communities. These pedagogies were designed to navigate and contest the privatization of knowledge and power that has come to dominate educational practice, and I hope this research will help us to continue that work today.

Given this panel’s focus on race, I want to say a little more to contexualize their educational activism amidst the racial politics surrounding CUNY in the late 1960s. Since its inception, City College has been understood as a barometer for educational democracy in the U.S. While the school had a historical mandate to educate “the children of the whole people” and had long boasted of being the “Harvard of the Proletariat,” it was not until 1965 that the SEEK program was established to address the fact that the college’s student body did not reflect the diversity of the surrounding Black and Puerto Rican Harlem community. SEEK recruited “economically and educationally disadvantaged” students and prepared them to matriculate at City College through remedial coursework.

Five years later, the college implemented a far more controversial Open Admissions policy, which expanded SEEK’s commitment to equity and access throughout the CUNY system. As Roderick Ferguson shows, the initiative was met with vehement opposition and the widespread racist belief that this influx of students of color would dilute the quality of education. Mainstream media and journalism pathologized these students as “deprived, disadvantaged, former or current drug addicts, unwed mothers, ghetto residents, fatherless[ds3],” “untrained monkeys, and lions caged in a zoo[ds4].” [CJN5][ds6]And much of this dehumanizing rhetoric came from within the CUNY professoriate, especially in the humanities. Open Admissions, according to the chair of the City College English Department, is “how you kill a college.”

At a time when faculty were accusing these democratizing initiatives of killing higher education and lowering academic standards, a number of eminent writers were lining up at the door to teach in these classrooms. These teacher-poets, along with figures like Addison Gayle, Barbara Christian, David Henderson, and Mina Shaughnessy, understood that many of these students came from underfunded schools that were left out of the city’s Progressive era education reforms. They understood that students’ unpreparedness was the product of racist institutions, discrimination, underemployment, and poverty, and not individual deficiencies. Together they
formed an insurrectionary pedagogical milieu committed to the success of working class students, first-generation students, and students of color.

At this point, I am overwhelmed by the number of stories I want to tell you. I want to tell you how Bambara was tasked with teaching a remedial summer writing course that would prepare students to assimilate into the existing curriculum, but instead she challenged them to design their own course and equipped them with the tools to reinvent the university. I want to tell you about how Lorde assigned daily journals and collaborative projects to teach students to locate their lives in relation to long histories of institutional injustice. I want to tell you about Rich’s insistence that her university did not need a new, highly exclusive MFA program but desperately needed to offer a master’s in creative teaching in order to address the nation’s devastating conditions of educational inequality.

But in the interest of time, I will focus on just one example: the praxis of publishing student writing. While these anthologies may be familiar to scholars of African American literature and women’s studies, today, I want to focus on the little-discussed fact that all of these relatively well known anthologies included student writing.

In fact, much of the writing in these collections emerged from the courses Jordan, Lorde, and Bambara taught at Tougaloo College, City College, Rutgers Livingston, and in less formal spaces, like weekend writing workshops. Instead of submitting writing solely to be read by the instructor, they organized their courses around the production of texts that could circulate in the world beyond the classroom.

For example, The Voice of the Children is a poetry collection authored entirely by students in Jordan’s weekend writing workshops and published in 1970.

In this collection, the young authors, ranging in age from twelve to fourteen, address the offensive and inaccurate stereotypes of illiterate “ghetto” children of color that were circulating in mainstream media in the late 1960s. Journalists regularly described these children as “silent creatures…[who] didn’t know the names of things, didn’t know that things had names, didn’t even know their own names.”

And yet, in just the first few pages of The Voice of the Children the young authors respond to prompts such as “what would you do if you were president?” with trenchant critiques of ghetto stereotypes, settler colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and patriarchy, made all the more powerful when we consider that their average age was thirteen. In the opening prose poem, fourteen-year-old Vanessa Howard theorizes the power of stereotypes to reduce the complexity of individuals:

Nine out of ten times when a person hears the word ‘ghetto’ they think of Black people first of all...Ghetto has become a definition meaning Black, garbage, slum areas... I think they put all Black people in a box marked ‘ghetto’ which leaves them having no identity.  They should let Black people be seen for themselves, not as one reflection on all.

By teaching her students that they were authors with important things to say, Jordan directly challenged the ways mainstream media pathologized working class students of color as deprived, disadvantaged, unruly bodies in need of discipline.

I read these anthologies as the enactment of a social justice pedagogy developed by these teacher-poets. In contrast to the top-down construction of traditional anthologies, which are typically produced for but not by students in the classroom, Jordan, Lorde, and Bambara acted on a conviction that authorship — the power to move people through language — is widely distributed despite racist and patriarchal institutions that privilege the voices of a narrow, white male elite. The authors they worked with were low-income, women with families to support, people of color, and often students (some as young as 9) and the editorial labor that went into these collections ranged from convincing publishers that these authors had something important to say to convincing the authors themselves.

As educator-editors, they put in countless uncompensated hours corresponding with publishers, negotiating contracts, and organizing publicity events. They did so because they understood the multifaceted impact these anthologies could make in people’s lives. These publications helped students understand the power of their voices and share survival strategies across the partitioning walls of classrooms and institutions. They addressed the racism of both the literary publishing industry and academia and called out to collectives of readers who had previously been ignored by publishers.

These anthologies were part of a grassroots movement for pedagogical, cultural, and social change that emerged not from top-down decisions by school boards, but led by writers and teachers embedded in city classrooms, who witnessed the pernicious gaps among existing curricula, the abundance of Black poetry, and the experiences of students’ lives. In doing so, they drew on a long history of Black self-publishing, which was central to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. And it was from these experiences of trying to publish their and their students’ writing that Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press was born.

Publishing student writing would become a central component of Jordan’s pedagogy for years to come, most notably in her Poetry for the People program at U.C. Berkeley in the 1990s, where she trained hundreds of students to write, publish, and perform their poetry and to become educators who would go out into community centers, homeless shelters, K-12 schools, and churches to teach others to write and publish poetry. Taking advantage of campus resources, Jordan insisted in students’ involvement not just in the co-creation of their classroom, but in the publication process: editing, proofing, binding, budgeting, distribution, and marketing. Reflecting on a course that concluded with a collaboratively-authored anthology, Jordan notes that “the class was producing its own literature: A literature reflecting the ideas and dreams and memories of the actual young Americans at work” (“Merit Review”).

But anthologies are just one example of the collaborative, project-based, multimodal and public pedagogy developed by these teacher-poets. Rather than dictating the forms their final projects should take, Bambara often asked students to find or invent a form that would best tell the story of their learning and share these lessons with a public audience beyond the classroom. “Do not write term papers for me,” Bambara told students, “Make sure they are useful for somebody else as well,” suggesting forms such as a collaborative annotated bibliography, performance art, a short story (for radio or TV), a magazine, puppet theater, a street theater performance, a slide show, or a picture book.

The one requirement was that it “can be shared with others.” Some examples of Jordan’s collaborative projects include a “Wrath Rally” and letter writing campaign against poverty in Biafra, organized by students in her Upward Bound Class, dramatic radio productions on children’s welfare and racial justice in South Central Los Angeles, and A Revolutionary Blueprint, a collection of reading lists, syllabi, poetry, and activities that turned the lessons of Poetry for the People into a “how to guide” for others interested in democratizing poetry. Through these assignments, these teacher-poets taught students that their voices, stories, and actions mattered for social change; in short, that each student, in Jordan’s words, “has much to teach America."

As educators, we are accustomed to thinking about how our courses can be useful to students, but these teacher-poets urge us to consider how classrooms can also become useful to the world beyond its walls. Through this pedagogy, they taught students an activist way of being in the world, in which we do not sit idly by, but confront our complicity in, and therefore our abilities to address, problems in society. They believed that everyone has something to contribute to the production of a more just, equitable, and pleasurable world, and that classrooms were one site for discovering what that might entail. Often, this took the form of getting better poems and better books into the hands of readers who needed them. Through these assignments, they showed students their collective social power that neoliberal institutions cover over: how our learning, knowledge, writing, research, and art provide opportunities to fight for change.

In a moment when conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan were demonizing activist students and calling art education an “intellectual luxury,” these teacher-poets were part of a groundswell pedagogical movement of educators who understood an education in language as a crucial skill for navigating and transforming the world. Best articulated by Audre Lorde, the study of language and literature —  in community college, Open Admissions, and remedial writing classrooms; in community centers; in weekend workshops; and around the kitchen table —  was never understood as a “luxury,” but as a way of improving “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives” (36[CJN7][ds8]), a necessary undertaking for those rendered vulnerable by the social order.

What emerges from this genealogy is a humanistic praxis that is continually responsive to material conditions of inequality, what I am calling “the indispensable humanities.” The indispensable humanities interrogate how resources are unevenly distributed along embodied axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and the roles that language, literature, education, and culture play in perpetuating and altering these conditions.

By way of a conclusion, I want to offer some provisional hypotheses/answers to this panel’s question.

1. Critical university studies puts a name on something that activists, intellectuals, and scholars of African American studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies have been doing for decades and even centuries. And so, a worthwhile project for critical university studies might be to locate our work within an insurgent genealogy that includes not only these-teacher poets but also figures like W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Mary Church Terrell, Septima Clark, Ericka Huggins, and Barbara Christian. In doing so, we might better understand our contemporary moment as the product of much longer and ongoing struggles for educational justice.

 

 2. Recent work in critical university studies has built on the legacy of these figures, analyzing how higher education often reproduces the conditions of inequality it claims to challenge, especially through longstanding violence against people of color. While these teacher-poets were, in Moten and Harney’s terms, “in but not of” the university, they also acknowledged how higher education remains one of the most viable paths towards the modest comforts of a middle-class life, especially for students from working-class backgrounds, and how absconding can be too risky for those without an economic security net. Instead, they used their knowledge of their complicity within unjust institutions to hold institutions accountable, redistribute educational resources, and make them more responsive to diverse communities.

3. With my research, I aim to position these teacher-poets as leaders of pedagogical, institutional, and social change, whose work points to the importance of fighting on all of these different fronts: from the page, to the classroom, to the streets. In our current moment, one in which racism operates more insidiously (for instance, as Sara Ahmed shows, through the proliferation of diversity discourses), I’m interested in how these educators taught students both to navigate conditions of structural inequality and to imagine and build better alternatives. In particular, their work reminds us that many contemporary student-centered pedagogies emerged in relation to the critiques of power issued by the feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperial social movements of the late 1960s. Their work demonstrates how our pedagogies can contribute to larger struggles for social justice, even from within conservative, hostile, neoliberal institutions (what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “counter-poetic” pedagogy). My aim is not necessarily to say that contemporary educators should do these exact things (although I’ve had a lot of fun trying) but to make available different ways of thinking about our classrooms as sites of social change, especially in relation to Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and other movements for social justice.

And so I’ll leave you with June Jordan’s question: “how will the American university teach otherwise?”

New Governor, New Higher Ed Support?

On the face of it the answer is yes.  New governor Newsom has proposed 6.9 percent and 8.0 percent increases for the University of California and Cal State systems respectively.  This is more than double the typical Jerry Brown increase in a normal year.

The tone of the overall budget is marked by its "California Dream" preface and references to "fresh starts and new beginnings" and various kinds of glory. Its tag line is "California for All."  Expenditures are up 4% over Brown's last budget, with health, education, and antipoverty programs doing well.  I don't have time to check, but I think the California higher education sector has not gotten an increase greater than the budget average since Gov. Gray Davis around 2000, or maybe George Deukmejian Jr. in the 1980s.

The change in tone is dramatic: Newsom is swinging for a pro-immigration Green New Deal mixed with Gov Pat Brown cum George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.  I'll take it.  The Brown years were a drag and a grind. Let's blow the doors off and actually get somewhere.

The good news for UC's budget includes basic stuff like acknowledgement that UC's underfunded enrollment went up 19.2 percent from 2010 to 2017, and that additional students need additional money.  Brown liked unfunded enrollment, which got us results like this at UC Riverside.

Newsom's budget also identifies and then increases funding to address critical student issues: hunger and homelessness, undocumented status, mental health challenges, and inadequate advising, among others (49-50).    It also gives $138 million in one-time funding for deferred maintenance, which is more than UCOP's ask.   All this is good news.

But after years of underfunding, the budget also includes shortfalls and bad habits. I'll sort these into four clouds and two traps.

The clouds:
 First, here's the UC budget request for 2019-20 from the Regents meeting in November 2018. 

The state portion of the request (excluding one-time deferred maintenance) is $422.6 million.  Newsom's proposed $240 million is about 57 percent of that total.  (And Note that $40 million of the $240 million is earmarked for graduate medical education).  

Second, Newsom makes the increase contingent on no tuition increase.  I'm in favor--but with state funding to compensate.  Low, flat tuition was great during the boom years that ended during Jerry Brown's first terms in the 1970s. UC extended those higher "master plan" levels of funding by combining lower state funding growth with tuition increases.  This was the "Compact"formula of the mid-2000s under Arnold Schwarzenegger.  But it hasn't maintained quality during years or decades of 2-4 percent increases that just match inflation in the wake of large state cuts.

If UC is going to rely on public rather than private revenue increases, then these will need to be consistently large (in the 10, 12, 16 percent range).  (This overview post provides history and a rebuttal to the claim that UC got fat off tuition increases. Or see the first chart here for UCOP's use of those big numbers.)  Large state increases won't happen without a new public discourse about higher ed in California. That is, a financially healthy UC under flat-tuition Newsom depends on a  cultural shift toward public goods that is just getting started and could be reversed.

Third, Newsom continues Brown's tradition of funding other education retirement plans but not UC's.  As CUCFA's Executive Director Eric Hays points out,

 Newsom is also paying down $3 billion of PERS debt (that currently has $59 billion in unfunded liabilities) and $2.9 billion (over 3 years) of STRS debt (that currently has $104 billion in unfunded liability).  And the state will use Prop 98 money to fund an addition $3 billion (one year) payment into STRS on behalf of the school districts. But Newsom is notably not making a similar payment to help pay down UCRS debt (continuing the state's disparate treatment of UCRS).

This will means a further tens of millions per year out of UC operating funds and a big vulnerability in negotiations.

Fourth, buildings new and old:  the money for deferred maintenance is small relative to the problem, and also one-time.  And the state is not restarting funding for capital projects.  That produces charts like this, for UC Berkeley.

In 2010, the state stopped issuing General Obligation bonds whose proceeds went to UC to build infrastructure.  "Garamendi" Lease Revenue bonds were a kind of stopgap, in that bond repayments were to be made from indirect cost recovery and lease payments rather than from a campus's general funds.  In practice, the campus did cover quite a bit of these bonds from general funds, but in any case they are gone too. "AB 94 Funding" is a euphemism that refers to the legislation that allowed campuses to borrow and pay for buildings with their own money.   Houston, we have a problem. Teaching and research need buildings, and no general revenue source for them.  (No don't say donors!)

Enough of the clouds.  Let's look at the traps.

One is the reduction of higher education to workforce development.  I recently wrote a piece on the seven main fallacies of this vision of colleges and universities, and Newsom is bringing them to life.  One issue is that poor students and students of color are as entitled to personal development and deep learning as wealthy ones; shunting them into job training colleges is discriminatory.  Another is that workforce development favors simple over complex, immediate over long-term, and known over unknown capabilities. These biases lowers educational quality in relation to social needs.  

UCOP loves the workforce argument, and has hitched its funding to a promise to provide 200,000 additional bachelor's degrees to state businesses in the 2020s.  Newsom loves it even more, and has doubled down. Here's the preamble to the Higher Education budget text:   

Higher education is central to training and developing the skilled workforce needed for the state to meet its ever-changing workforce needs and is a core pathway for Californians to improve their upward economic mobility. If colleges and universities are to remain engines of economic mobility, they must evolve along with the state's changing student population. They must provide programs that train for the skills needed not only for today, but for the future economy.

Strengthening the relationship between higher education, workforce development programs and employers will be a key focus of the Administration. The Administration will work to promote affordability, access, and efficiency in higher education.

The three pillars of public higher ed are actually affordability, access, and quality.  That last is mass quality.  It involves quite a bit of equality: students at Cal State Northridge, UC Irvine, Occidental College, and Stanford University should get learning of quality similar enough to avoid caste sorting.

In contrast, efficiency is easiest to get with fewer courses, no prerequisites, easier grading, less instructor response, and more batch processing.  Efficiency is best achieved by lowering quality-- including in the areas of complicated sociocultural knowledge that are going to make the difference in the future.

Trap two: lowered expectations.  The Jerry Brown legacy in higher ed is regression to the mean.  California state systems that had been the models for everyone became more average. Of course the people in these systems fought against that, but we all had to "chose our battles" and we have given up on quite a bit.

Deferred maintenance is a crucial example.  UC is starting to get units of $100 million per year to deal with this.  But the actual need is $3.2 -$5 billion (page 5), and this is not new capital projects (which are about $3 billion a year) but just fixing the existing stuff.  At this rate, it will take between 30 and 50 years to make the repairs we need today.  When an example comes up--like 4 years without meaningful heat in my building at UCSB--people chuckle or shrug and move on.  The unacceptable slowly becomes acceptable, and the new normal is decline.

Newsom seems to hate decline and love ambition.   California higher ed should give it to him.