Liner Note 43. Caring for Austerity

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

Every meeting tells a story as Rod Stewart once sang, more or less.  What stories have UC’s Office of the President and Board of Regents been singing when they met every two months?  Side A in November was “protecting student affordability.”  Side B was their perennial favorite, “budget rules everything.” The bonus track, unadmitted, was “stagnation conquers all.”

 

Fiscal stagnation means permanent austerity and the damage past and future appeared in the unscripted parts of the story in the public comment periods.  There some speakers opposed the termination of the campus hiring program associated with the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). This seems to have been prematurely announced / decreed by the systemwide Provost Katherine Newman to a group of Executive Vice Chancellors, who brought the decision as an accomplished fact back to their campuses, which ignited a protest campaign from faculty, staff, PPFP alumni, academic consortia and, apparently, an unusually large number of chairs, deans and other administrators. The upshot was a letter from UC President James Milliken stating that reports of the death of PPFP’s faculty hiring incentives were greatly exaggerated. This was a real success for the protests, however unacknowledged by the president.

 

Yet his letter placed the program on standard austerity probation for all things academic: the University, he wrote, continues to assess the program’s “long-term financial sustainability,” which may lead to “some changes to elements of the program including the total number of incentives supported.” PPFP hiring incentives will be allowed out in the community until UCOP says otherwise. Permanent budgetary shortfalls mean it can be cancelled at any time.   

 

The UC Regents meet every two months, and these meetings narrate budgetary deficits and inadequate resources in a way that normalizes the authority of inadequate resources over the academic core.

 

Specific bad effects are regularly in the news: UCLA has cancelled in First Year Scholars Program for humanities and social science majors, which among other things offered that nearly unknown thing at public research universities—one-on-one faculty academic advising—to save what tiny fraction of the instructional budget?  UCLA has a large structural budget deficit, which in the current regime justifies any cuts.

 

Another example comes from UCSD, where a Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions produced a Final Report that registered an alarming collapse in the math skills of admitted students.  (A Decline in writing skills was also noted.)  These math levels are indeed very bad and need to be addressed.  But I was most struck that the recommendations don’t include the creation of foundation or bridge courses on campus to get student skills where they need to be.  The recommendations all involve more and better measurement, including a return of standardized testing (UC Regents dropped the SAT requirement for the 2021 cohort), plus tougher oversight and perhaps more use of admissions to reject rather than admit these students. The report’s focus is on sorting out rather than lifting up.  UCSD has a large structural budget deficit, which in the current regime justifies ignoring essential programs.

 

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a simple point: UCOP never asks for enough money to maintain quality UC academics.  And it has no plan ever to ask for enough money.  This isn’t a result of Trump or Covid-19, and resulting campus deficits predate them (see 2016 and 2019, etc). It began in earnest in the 2000s and has carried on under Democratic governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom.  I refer any uncertainty you have on this matter to Liner Note 26 on Newsom’s May Revision budget for UC, where Figure 1 shows his broken compact and Figure 2 the 25 year history of underfunding.

 

I’m over 700 words into this post and I haven’t discussed UCOP’s budget story this month--or to my counternarrative.  Why not? This opening is my attempt to get you to care about these sober, earnest, tedious, repetitious unto nausea, humble-brag self-declaringly “prudent” bullshit budgets.  I do this because I think the Academic Senate has given up on trying to critique and counter UCOP budgets, with some great exceptions like the Resolutions brought by frontline assistant and associate professors to the UCLA Senate (Liner Note 42). Am I wrong about this?

 

My comrades in the faculty unionization movement may have given up too, waiting for the collective bargaining of the future?  Instead of proposing alternative budgets for UC workers, UC unions often focus on misallocation (true) and underused reserves (also true, and this could indeed help in the current crunch, as AFSCME’s great research director Claudia Preparata showed for the Covid crunch—also see Priced Out, her co-authored report on UC’s contribution to the affordability crisis). Failure to deploy internal resources is an effect of UCOP’s perm-austerity story, whose wreckage we definitely do care about even if we don’t trace it directly to an austerity system whose narrative elements we don’t think we can replace.

 

As I said, normalization that leads to a lower New Normal has been happening at (and by) UC for 25 years. Hypernormalization is a concept that ascends to us from the media philosopher Jean Baudrillard, was given its name by UC Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, was used alarmingly by the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, and is nicely summarized by journalist Adrienne Matel for Trump Volume II in her Guardian read, “systems are crumbling—but daily life continues.”  Baudrillard described the replacement of reality with a simulacra that substituted for it in people’s minds, and there’s no less resistible simulacra than a budget discourse. Hypernormalization creates an affective split between “the system is broken and must be fixed” and “the system is broken and cannot be fixed.” Hypernormalizing narrative is what UCOP produces at regents meetings. Demobilization of the kind I just fretted about is its effect. Normal life is bad, and yet you can only accept it, since to refuse it is the definition of unreasonable.

 

I called this hyponormalization in my analysis of some University of Minnesota budget materials (Liner Note 28). “In hypernormality, the system’s dysfunction is widely noted. In hyponormality, information is withheld and discussion is blocked so that dysfunction can be denied. In both cases, administrative authority is maintained as program damage propagates through the system.”

 

Hyper or hypo, normalization leads to a fatalism about decline. It raises the question, can we care enough about its result, permanent austerity, to fight it consistently and seriously? Can we care enough for austerity, for its political economy, to replace it?

 

I’ll leave it there and examine UCOP’s November normalization in a separate post.