The Reality of Governor Newsom's Budget

A few things have happened since California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed an austerity budget in January. 

State tax receipts came in higher than expected (though they will not rise next year).

A recall campaign collected signatures amounting to the required 12 percent of registered voters, so Newsom is now running for governor. 

Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan sent the state $27 billion.

And Biden's three big Plans far outstripped anything California Democrats have offered the state since Grey Davis was recalled in 2003, leaving them paddling in Biden's wake. 

Needing to get out in front of Biden's quasi-New Deal advance, and to show some post-pandemic achievement, on May 14th Newsom announced his "generational" state budget, a "historic, transformational budget."  Here of course we welcome with open arms Newsom's recognition that solving California's problems means massive government spending, since it is true. The K-12 increases are especially welcome, as are those trying to reduce the state's long epidemic of houselessness. 

Yet like Biden, Newsom sees a narrowed function for four-year colleges and universities, and is funding them accordingly, meaning meagerly.

The press did find his historic numbers hard to follow.  Writing in the LA Times, John Myers noted the range of the proposals 

The governor’s list of spending priorities, which rely on a surprise cash infusion spread over several years that is projected to ultimately top $100 billion, is dizzying: money to house those who are homeless, support entrepreneurs, train workers, educate students and connect them to the internet, fix roadways, prevent wildfires and strengthen California’s power grid.

He then added politely, "It could be some time before the numbers outlined by Newsom can be fully reconciled. The governor frequently uses unorthodox ways to measure state spending, lumping together dollar amounts that span multiple years." The $100 billion in economic assistance translates into a budget increase of $40 billion in the current year--still an excellent increase, but one that should be defined correctly.

Reconciliation will involve a couple of simple moves. One is to separate multi-year from single-year numbers. Myers does that in contrasting the headline $100 billion with the annual $40 billion.

The other move that's especially relevant to higher ed budgeting is separating ongoing from one-time funds. The former commits the state to program building over time. The latter does not. 

UC's president and Board of Regents chair issued a statement to say, "The University of California is deeply grateful to Gov. Newsom for proposing the largest state investment in UC’s history: more than $807 million."  In his press conference (around minute 52 in the version helpfully archived by Dan Mitchell) Newsom correctly describes the permanent investment as an increase in $506 million. It's better than the $136 million he proposed in January. But as with all these budget announcements, don't read the headline, read the top line (in the slide at the top).

Here's the table that Newsom's Department of Finance published, in the Higher Education section of the May Revision.

The second row of figures is UC's Ongoing General Fund. Newsom and legislative Democrats cut UC's general fund during the pandemic year; later they decided to give it back, but not until the following year (2021-22). 

We can redo the table so that it tracks only the state's permanent commitment to UC, in the form of ongoing general funds.  I give the one-time general fund restoration back to the year to which it belongs--2020-21.  

UC Ongoing General Fund	2019-2020	2020-2021 (with cut retroactively restored)	2021-2022	2 year cumulative change
	$3,724.3 M	$3,766.0 M	$3972.1	6.65%

The one-year increase is 5.5 percent. Note that UC's GF allocation still falls short of the magic $4 billion ceiling it's been trying to break through for twenty years (in unadjusted dollars, so the real problem is worse--I discussed this issue in "Shortfall," covering the history that made Newsom's January budget such an affront).  

This increase is obviously better, but you don't get to break the $4 B barrier by restoring a cut to permanent general funds one year late. More importantly, an average annual increase of a bit more than 3¼ percent does not qualify as "the largest state investment in UC history."  It doesn't justify the "huge budget boost" trumpet blast in this LA Times headline, or the statement cosigned by UC president Drake and board chair Pérez.

There are other commitments, all one time, where the main money goes to 2 things: workforce preparedness and student housing.  

State underfunding has helped turn student housing into a scandal of private development, one that has led to overpricing, blown open this March when UCSD housing announced average rent increases for doctoral and professional students of 31 percent. Newsom proposes $4 billion (over 2 years) for a "low-cost student housing grant program focused on expanding the availability of affordable student housing." The money may well go to subsidize the private developers that helped cause the affordability problem--details are sparse.  It's a major problem, but would best be solved by the state restarting continuing allocations to capital projects, which it ended around 2006.

For the workforce, Newsom proposes $1 billion (over 2 years) "to establish the Learning-Aligned Employment program, which would promote learning-aligned, long-term career development for UC, CSU, and CCC students." The money would form a permanent endowment.  Again there are no details: much better student advising is not mentioned, but employer partnerships are, so it may turn out to be a state subsidy for apprenticeship programs. 

Newsom proposes little or nothing in core needs.  Deferred Maintenance, a problem totaling tens of billions, gets $325 million in one-time funding, which for DM is a contradiction in terms. UCLA's Asian American Studies Center gets $5 million in one-time funding to research "the prevention of hate incidents." He recommends $40 million more than that for the animal shelter medicine program at Davis. 

A better way to fight racist hate crimes would be to fully fund critical ethnic studies, gender, queer, and trans studies, political theory, sociology, history, and the other non-STEM fields that study these issues systematically and have long offered detailed solutions. That is not happening, and I will return to this issue a bit later this year.

Newsom's thinking aligns with Biden's and the national party in a few important ways. They both continue the decades-old drift toward giving public funds to students rather than to institutions.  Student money escapes the instructional and (non-sponsored) research core, whose complexity and costs keep rising, but whose growth in operating money does not keep up. 

Second, they are using higher ed as a kind of renewed welfare state. Newsom knows it is politically hard to address the state's housing affordability crisis with a massive public housing program for working- and middle-class people, but politically easy to subsidize private developers to build public housing for students.  The public colleges' working poor would be affordably housed for a few years. 

The same goes for health and related social services (legal support for undocumented students, food security, transition support for formerly incarcerated students).  I favor this full suite of public support systems--it's the point of the Real College movement--but want them to be integrated into the society at large, funded through progressive taxation of the overall population, and not used as a substitute for funding advanced education.  

Third, Newsom and Biden see higher education as workforce training for economic growth. They also tie that mainly to community colleges rather than to four-year degrees.  Newsom bundles his two biggest one-time programs into an aggregate with a largish headline number that must be shared by the 3 segments, and which treats the segments and their students as the same.  Newsom is joining Biden in demoting four-year colleges and universities, which is an anti-progressive trend that universities will need to fight.

This budget is a lot better than a cut. But it's not the New New Deal.  I'd feel better about where it might lead had president Drake and board chair Pérez described it accurately and set out ongoing needs.  But they did not.  

Here's an update of the January chart, for context.

 

Days of Refusal of Campus Police

Various universities have hosted a range of events leading up May 3rd's abolitionist Day of Refusal, meaning a strike day. This is meant to kick off a month of direct actions (described on the Cops off Campus website) to raise awareness of the necessity and the possibility of converting most or all policing functions to constructive forms of safety practices, care, and community engagement.  

During the George Floyd phase of the Black Lives Matter movement last year, ideas about police replacement arrived in the mainstream media, like these good ones from a Princeton sociologist in the Washington Post.  If campus police departments had been formed to reduce the chances of regular cops busting student heads during anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s and 1970s, student heads were now in greater danger from campus police during contemporary protests--or non-protests: UCPD found the limelight in 2006 when UCLA police tasered a student who was studying in Powell Library.

When the UC Regents passed large tuition hikes in 2009 and 2011, students protested them. Various forms of UCPD misconduct wound up in the public eye, with beatings and arrests at UC Berkeley in November 2011, including of campus faculty (see Prof. Celeste Langan's post about her arrest, and Prof. Greg Levine's recap of political repression against campus protest).  UCPD-Davis's Sgt. Pike then went on a world-famous pepper-spray rampage. This killed off any lingering sense that campus police were special--more collaborative and communicative, less anti-student, less violent towards the unresisting than off-campus forces.  

In reaction, UCOP sponsored a report (Edley and Robinson, 2012) on UCPD conduct, but not much happened. Police abuse also did not become a tenure-track faculty issue. For example,  Davis faculty senate sided with Chancellor Katehi while condemning Sgt Pike's actions. The 2009-13 period offers a long, dynamic example of why policing activists are so deeply skeptical about "police reform."   

A defining campus cop incident occurred in July 2015, when a University of Cincinnati police officer killed Samuel Dubose during a routine traffic stop off campus. After this, the media paid more attention to the greater opacity of campus police reporting, their lesser training compared to municipal departments in many jurisdictions, and their not-so-different bad treatment of people from marginalized groups. 

The protests that really brought out the police were opposed to the effects of austerity policies that the university itself was  unable or unwilling to oppose. These were often tuition hikes that disparately punished poor students and students of color. These protests worked, with the nail in coffin being protests in 2014).  The state did not replace missing tuition hikes with meaningful state increases, as we've had occasion to note, so austerity effects continue to the present day. The grad student COLA strike at UC Santa Cruz in 2019-20 was another turn of the screw. They brought heavy police containment of strikers by various police forces, and appeared to be part of a strategy of physically intimidating the students to drop the strike.  

Photo Credit: Merc News

The later administrative suspension of the strikers who withheld grades (see Michael's overview), made policing again seem an extension of administrative refusal to take student concerns seriously, deliberate democratically, and find adequate funding for the educational core. 

In 2020, UCLA faculty discovered that the LAPD geeks arrested BLM protesters on a campus baseball field named for the barrier-breaking Black baseball legend and UCLA alum Jackie Robinson. This suggested that the one big advantage of the UCPD--that they were not the LAPD--could be readily set aside.  

Derek Chauvin's guilty verdict--in the Minneapolis trial of George Floyd's killer--coupled with ongoing police killings in the days before and after, have increased an interest in permanent policing changes that goes all the way to the White House. It's into this context that UCOP has recently launched proposals for changes in UC police policy. They include a ludicrous plan to form a kind of UC SWAT that would be deployed around the state to tamp down alleged unrest.  Here you can find Dylan Rodriguez discussing Cops Off Campus in the context of policing task forces, and Michael recently posting on the UC police proposals. 

Another good place for background on the no- combined issues of overall police conversion and stopping a new militarization of UCPD is this UCSB Faculty Association post. It has a number of links to statements and explainers about local and national dimensions, as well as its own statement, which nicely represents TT faculty who've mostly focused on faculty welfare, academic freedom, administrative misconduct, and budgeting coming to take a meaningful stand on campus police transformation, and linking it to core faculty concerns. 

Of course I can't stop without making a budget point. The political economy of universities is now pressuring units toward for-profit activities. The function of policing in this model was nicely described in a big Reclaim UC post last year.  It itemizes UC police budgets and also offers an important analysis of how policing fits into a skewed administrative understanding of risk management. Here I'll close with a simpler point about quantities of expenditure.  Reclaim UC notes that UCSB's police budget was just under $11 million in 2018-19 (the UC range of base budgets is from $5 million to $22.4 million in that year).  The 2019-20 grad COLA strike was for a pay increase that would eliminate "rent burden" for grad workers. My calculation at the time was that to take all rent burdened UCSB grads out of burden would cost UCSB about $5.2 million a year--or around half of the police budget.  (I'll do the math in a future post on the new rent hikes at UCSD.)

I hope Abolition May moves the debate toward some deep and comprehensive police conversion.