Two recent polls, one by the Public Policy Institute of California and one by LAT/USC offer dispiriting news about the prospects for Proposition 30.  The PPIC poll still shows more support than opposition for Prop 30 but its support has fallen below 50% (48% in favor, 44% opposed, 8% undecided). (9)  According to the USC/LAT poll the numbers are similar (46% in favor, 42% opposed)  (4-5)  For a proposition to be trailing a week from an election bodes very, very badly for its passage.  Unless there is some turnaround or a more significant effort to get supporters to the polls, both K-12 and Higher Ed will be facing devastating cuts.

As with the Presidential contest, the California elections offer the choice between continuing the dispiriting new normal and an accelerated descent into a new Gilded Age of publicly supported private inequality.  But, in California, the significant action is in the propositions: specifically Propositions 30 and 32.  

Proposition 30--the compromise between Governor Brown, students, and unions--raises money for education.  It increases the marginal rate on income over $250,000 (for a single filer) for 7 years: in other words, rates on all income below $250,000 will remain at the present rate, on the $50,000 between $250,000 to $300,000 will rise 1%, on the $200,000 between 300,000 and $500,000 will go up an additional 1%, and the income over $500,000 will go up another 1%. (2)   It also raises the sales and use tax by 1/4 cent for 4 years. (1) The expectation is that Proposition 30 will generate on average an additional 6 Billion dollars of additional annual revenue, 89% of which would go to K-12 and 11% to the Community Colleges. (3-4)

1970s California was no utopia, but I do get whiplash going from giving a UC budget talk yesterday at a UCSB Faculty Association forum to preparing for my senior seminar at noon by re-reading the Issacson biography of Steve Jobs. Jobs famously stood for the fusion of art and technology, not today's desperate and sterile fixation on building STEM with no regard for its interconnections with the arts and humanities.  Jobs was also famously obsessed with making things truly great.

Atkinson taught his team to put Jobs's words through a translator.  "We learned to interpret 'This is shit' to actually be a question that means, 'Tell me why this is the best way to do it.'"

Another example:

"If someone didn't care to make their product perfect, they were a bozo."  At the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981, for example, Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. . . it worked well enough.  As Osborne famously declared, "Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous." Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne.  "This guy just doesn't get it," Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors.  "He's not making art, he's making shit."

Fast forward thirty-one years to yet another UC budget crisis forum, where the academic equivalent of making true art was as plausible as proposing that UC launch its own mission to Mars.  I showed slides of how far we have sunk: since the MacIntosh was released, the states have cut their real-dollar investment in public higher ed by about 25% (SHEEO Figure 3), and in California it's quite a bit worse.  Proposition 30 is a meager stopgap, but it is essential in order to prevent yet another cut to UC's and CSU's state funding--the "trigger cut" would be another 10% or so for UC. 

The overall panel discussion centered on engagement.

Please come to the Arbor at noon Tuesday to support UC-AFT's UC Day of Action for Prop 30 and Against Prop 32.  UC-AFT President, Bob Samuels, will be speaking along with Nelson Lichtenstein, Das Williams, Hannah-Beth Jackson, A.S. President Sophia Armen, and Juan Donato.

Passage of Prop 30 is critical to education funding at all levels in California. UC faces a guaranteed $250 million cut this year if it fails to pass.  The UC Regents have already discussed a 20% fee increase for UC students if Prop 30 fails.  

Prop 32 would completely ban union political contributions, while leaving most corporations free to spend on politics. 

If you teach in the morning tomorrow, please let your students know that passage of Prop 30 could save them about $2400 in tuition increases this year, and encourage them to attend the rally tomorrow at noon at the Arbor to learn more.

By Pat Morton, UC Riverside

Timothy White, Chancellor of UC Riverside, announced yesterday that he will become Chancellor of the California State University system at the end of this year.  The surprise announcement was greeted with unalloyed delight by activists on campus.  This response might seem strange to those who know little about Tim White, whose public persona is relatively untarnished by scandal or controversy.  He has never been publicly vilified like UCD’s Chancellor Katehi, nor has he ever faced calls for his resignation or a vote of no confidence from the Academic Senate. In fact, White’s positive public image is probably one of the chief reasons he was chosen by CSU.  By carefully managing this image as an affable, nice guy despite presiding over a period of budget cuts, student protests and declining educational quality at UCR, Tim White has been able to keep his real agenda undercover.

In spring 2011, Tim White disguised himself as “Pete” and posed as an assistant chemistry professor, a track coach, a library worker and a campus tour guide for the reality TV show “Undercover Boss.”  The stunt attracted enormous press attention for White and UCR, and prompted an outpouring of uncritical affection for this Chancellor who proved he was capable of being just like us.  To see the episode in this light, however, you had to ignore the condescension that permeated his interactions with staff and students, and the fundamentally corrupt premise of the show, which allowed White to dole out money and special favors to his unsuspecting interlocutors.  Leaving aside the propriety of a Chancellor appearing on a reality show in the first place, the display of his selective largesse was particularly distasteful at a moment when UCR faced a $50 million budget gap resulting in staff layoffs, work time reductions, huge class size increases, decreases in student and academic support, reductions in faculty by attrition, mergers of academic units, and other draconian measures that eroded educational quality.  

The bread-and-circuses approach worked to distract attention from White’s policy decisions, such as the pursuit of a new Medical School that has taken millions of dollars and more than a dozen FTE out of the campus budget.

Cross posted from the Huffington Post

Mitt Romney had two simple jobs in the first presidential debate. First, he had to be the defender and not the privatizer of Social Security and Medicare. Second, he had to be the candidate of the middle class rather than of the rich.  He'd dug himself a big hole with the kind of statements that appeared in the leaked video that had him claiming that 47% of Americans are dependent on government, and with running-mate Paul Ryan's obsessive variations on his theme of how America's makers are burdened by its takers.  Romney also had to be for things that women voters favor, like public education, although, as I pointed out in the Chronicle of Higher Education, his world doesn't need it.

On the other side, Barack Obama had to cement his small lead as the sane, moderate candidate whose genuine great strength is that he doesn't have contempt for most Americans, especially those whose everyday life is a constant struggle.  He had to show Gov. Romney to be an extremist who will cut taxes for the rich and make the declining middle class pay for them with the mortgage check they would have given to the bank if the bank hadn't taken away their house, and then cut Medicare and give that to the wealthy too. He had to challenge Romney's credentials as a pragmatist businessman who was simply going to do what works.

Gov. Romney couldn't have counted on what happened October 3rd, which was President Obama freezing and folding, allowing Romney to pose endlessly as the friend of retiree and worker alike.

As Chris pointed out, there was a striking gap at last week's Regents' retreat.  On the one hand, there was a new discourse of educational decline--but it remained strikingly vague.  On the other hand, there were a precise set of financial proposals--but they were neither new nor up to the challenge.  As is so often the case with the Regents, their distance from the actual functioning of the University (especially as it takes place on the campuses) became clear.  But we would be hard pressed to think that the business officers were any better.

Appropriately, much of the discussion focused on the cuts in state funding and their effects.  It appears, that Oakland is finally recognizing that they can no longer issues warnings about the potential damage of future cuts but must instead begin to demonstrate the already existing damage resulting from prior cuts.  That recognition is welcome.  But if it is to lead to something new it must be accompanied by a second recognition:  that it is unclear that UCOP is prepared to act effectively on that realization.  There are what one might call an external and an internal dimension to this problem.

The most important statement of the morning session of the UC Regents’ retreat came from President Mark Yudof, who for the first time that I have heard put the decline of UC academic quality at the top of the Regents' agenda.   He kicked things off (around 0:24 on the UC FA Blog's recording; Yudof Facebook version) by saying that the University of California is experiencing a “quiet but steady erosion of our academic quality at almost every level.”  He noted that people often express outrage at rising tuition, pension cuts, and various other UC policies. But where, he asked, is the outrage at the erosion of academic quality? He said that the board, in trying to cope with funding problems, had taken a series of passive decisions that damaged quality.

  
There were no board votes approving faculty salaries that are not competitive with peer institutions, . . .yet we are 10-20% behind in faculty compensation. There were no board votes approving a freeze on faculty hiring, but effectively that is what we’ve had over the last few years. There were no board votes approving a steady rise in our student-faculty ratio over the last decade, but in fact our numbers show a decline over the decade of 50% -- that is, we have 50% more students per faculty member than we did in previous decades. And in the past six years we have 30,000 more students without adding any new faculty at all, other than replacing existing faculty. You didn’t vote on any of that, but that is the consequence of the situation in which we find ourselves.   

The University of California with its legacy of trailblazing academic quality deserves better.  It is up to those of us at this table to reaffirm an active, immutable commitment to academic quality at UC, starting now.

This was music to my ears. The idea of fighting educational decline is not new, of course—the faculty senate committee for planning and budget (UCPB) started arguing in 2002 that threats to quality quality was the key argument against budget cuts, stated this directly to the Regents in 2007, and then the press began to cover quality problems during the fiscal crisis in 2009. What is new is the statement that declining academic quality is the university’s number one problem, or the declaration of a kind of educational quality emergency.  There is hope that rebuilding quality will finally get our undivided attention.

The retreat then turned immediately to balance-sheet and business strategies, led by Nathan Bostrom and Peter Taylor, at the head of business and finance respectively.

The Regents love these guys, and they are indeed both very articulate and also good at encasing budget strategies in a language of educational goals.  But the morning passed in a parade of previously rehearsed small-time revenue measures.  The second piece of good news was that the Regents seem finally to be tiring of the mismatch between the revenue problems and these business-process solutions.

The scheme that brought out some frustration was “parking securitization.”  The actual ownership structure remains undecided and unclear, but the basic idea is to bundle most of the parking spaces at all the campuses and transfer the concession, valued at maybe $1 billion, to the UC Retirement Program, which would then feed UC systemwide parking revenues into the pension fund.  The relevant slide (10) suggests selling bundled systemwide parking to a 3^rd party, which made many people immediately think of the disastrous sale of Chicago’s parking meters to a company that has screwed everything up.  Mr. Taylor insisted no 3rd party would be involved, but this did not quell the uprising.

For example, Regent Schilling commented, “I assume the campuses rely on this revenue?” Mr. Taylor said well yes, but the revenues they rely on for maintenance and operations would stay on the campuses and another portion would go to UCRP – you “can slice and dice this any number of ways.”  Regent Schilling said that she'd asked because, “I just want to be careful that we don’t screw the campuses.” Not screwing the campuses quickly made the plan more confusing and also chopped away a any likely returns.

Raising another core issue, another regent said it’s strange that this is the exact opposite of the Luskin hotel and conference center we just voted at UCLA.  There, he noted, we are trying to build new assets for the future when we could get the same thing—hotel rooms—for a lot cheaper right now by going down the road.  With parking, you’re proposing that we get rid of assets we already have. How do these opposite strategies fit together?  Regent Blum chimed in by saying that as much as he admires UCOP's creative financial team,  parking securitization is a very bad idea.  The real problem, he said, is we haven’t paid into the pension fund for twenty years, but that doesn’t mean we should transfer assets.  Overall, parking securitization went nowhere.  Since the campuses do indeed skim parking for all sorts of local operational needs, this scheme will encounter massive resistance and is very unlikely to happen.

Most of the other business ideas have been around for a while—a controversial kind of bond restructuring ($50 million in annual savings, slide 8); moving of short-term funds from lower- to higher-interest instruments ($30-$50 million, or $40 million on slide 9); the taking by UCOP of accumulated interest from thousands of campus “funds functioning as endowment” (FFE) (a one-time $20 million, slide 7); the use of standardized systemwide vendor contracts ($50 million annually at the medical centers, with another $50 million estimated for the campuses); and finally, cuts to unfunded state-mandated programs. About two hours for all revenue increases that don’t involve further cuts to faculty, students, and staff.

No one who spoke in the meeting  believed that you can add up these savings and get something like $200 million in new money that could be put into instruction and research.  Regent Blum pointed out with some exasperation that the umbrella contracts were proposed by a previous consultant five years earlier, and that a now-retired UCOP official had worked full-time on savings that never materialized.   Say with great effort that $100 milion were saved. That would amount to about 5% of the cuts plus mandatory cost increases UC has suffered since 2008.

So following Mr. Yudof's great kick-off, the discussion got sidetracked from the issue of reversing educational decline by getting UC out of structural deficit mode and into a full budget.   The obvious first problem with these business strategies is that the scale is too small by an order of magnitude.  The second problem is that UCOP keeps circling like a moth to the flame around ideas that involve a reach-in on campus resources, in the campus's worse financial period since the Great Depression. Mr. Taylor joked several times that for what he is about to propose he will need to hire bodyguards.  So why keep making this kind of proposal?

This gets us to the third problem, which is a flawed managerial epistemology.  It says in effect that management expertise bring with it a higher-order wisdom that creates new value by overriding local practice.  UCOP's plans always link efficiency to centralization. In reality, centralization is as likely to cost money as it is to save it, since coordination requires time and more money while at the same time suppresing tacit knowledge, concrete relationships, accumulated know-how, on-site experience--the whole craft practice involved in particular administrative jobs in specific communities that address distinct needs.  The centralization override is not only painful and frustrating for the affected employees, but is destructive of the knowledge that resides in them.  CFO Peter Taylor is eloquent on the beauty of standardized contracts that leverage size and scope—I have never heard better speeches on the virtues of vendor consolidation. But finance people aren’t often great students of humanistic management theory, which does grasp both the ethics and the value-added of freeing up employees to structure their own work and make their own decisions in horizontal collaboration with each other. Under questioning, Mr Bostrom and Mr Taylor did concede that campuses and departments may sometimes be right to say that they know what they’re doing.  Once this truth is admitted, many of the expected financial savings disappear.

The fact is that educational quality comes from the campuses, will be fixed there, and will be fixed from the bottom-up.    Possible administrative savings of $100 million via better vendor contracts and interest rates should be seen as financial officers doing their jobs, not as pathbreaking reforms.  The latter will count only when the affect the quality of a UC education. 

As you have probably seen (since it has been covered by the Financial Times, Business Week, the LA Times, Inside Higher Education, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other news outlets) the System-wide Coordinating Committee on Graduate Affairs suspended its review of the proposed transformation of the Anderson MBA from a state-supported program to a self-supported program.  Chris offered an analysis of the proposal's budgetary confusion back in June. CCGA offers a full menu of objections.

For those of you keeping score that means that both Senate Committees (UCLA's Graduate Council and CCGA) that had the time to do a thorough review of the proposal refused to approve it.  The Legislative Assembly at UCLA had supported it by a small majority in a June meeting.  But it should be noted that that meeting had a severely limited time for discussion, crucial financial details were only made available to the Assembly the day before the meeting, and the voting began before the discussion had actually finished (although the administration had been given its own time to speak).  Despite the seriousness with which the Legislative Assembly members approached their task, it is hard to see how they were provided with the opportunity for careful analysis that the Senate Committees had. 

Just in time for the two major political parties to offer their different visions of austerity, the California Community College system released a report based on their survey of the effects of the budget cuts.  Not surprisingly, the cuts have dramatically reduced the ability of the Community College system to offer courses and opportunities for those seeking to enter higher education through the most affordable door.

Just in time for the fall rituals of orientation and enrollment, the Center for the Future of Higher Education in conjunction with the New Faculty Majority Foundation has issued a new report entitled "Who is Professor Staff, and How can this person teach so many classes?"  The report points again to the centrality of contingent labor for the present organization of higher education.  It details, in important ways, the impact of the present labor system not only on those who teach but on those who learn. The report is based on a survey of contingent faculty carried out by the Center.

As "Who is Professor Staff?" makes clear, the majority of teachers in higher education are not only contingent faculty but are part-time contingent faculty.  Moreover, a majority of those the Center surveyed taught at more than one college or university, some taught in several institutions.  This prevalence of part-time faculty is not simply an effect of the overwhelming predominance of two-year community colleges--over half of the respondents taught at a four-year institution (even if in addition to a two-year institution). (4)  Despite the common perception of higher education populated with tenured and tenure-track faculty it is the reality of contingent and part-time faculty that is the dominant fact in the labor system of higher education.  Reliance on contingent faculty is also the prime mechanism through which university and college managers have sought to cut instructional labor costs.  And, of course, this point does not even address the  importance of Graduate Student Instructors at the university level.

Bain passes judgement on UC. 

CA Democratic party formally opposes Prop 32--the measure designed to weaken unions.

Some reflections on "leaving academia."

Business officers wade into academic affairs.  Here is some of their reasoning.

Are professors really obsolete?

Harkin releases committee report on For-Profits.  If you are looking for summer reading here it is.  Another Congressional report notes that profits not learning drives the pay of For-Profit executives.

Coursera has a recruiting party.

Court rules Michigan State rule violates constitutional protections for free speech.  It tried to punish anyone who disrupted an employee at his or her work.

Bill Keller wants to protect the wealthy and the war machine, lower everyone else's living standards.

Is UC "starving the humanities"?

In another display of leadership, UC Berkeley scrambles aboard the MOOC bandwagon.  Bousquet offers thoughts on the MOOC model.

Irvine to start new School of Education.  (t/h Cloudminder)

Berkeley negotiates new Federal ICR rates.  I thought UCOP was supposed to do this sort of thing for all campuses?

Physical campuses remain essential.

Is UC Davis facing another scandal?

Memo to digital zealouts: it turns out that computers are NOT the best metaphor for the human brain.

A recent Bain & Co report on higher ed, on sustainable funding, has irritated some people as much as their equally flawed analysis of admin costs at UC Berkeley irritated us. Most critics are responding not only to the report's claim that 1/3 of the country's colleges are financially unsustainable, but to the fact that this unsustainable group includes the richest universities on the planet, including Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.  This does suggest on its face that their methodology doesn't make sense.

Yet the report also makes true and important points which I'll get to below, before discussing how the corporate consulting community is likely to use their interactive websites and exploding hairpieces for educational evil and not for good.

What the authors do is look at two ratios of financial health and locate the 1700 universities they reviewed on a nine-cell matrix.  Each institution is rated by its increase in expenditures to revenues (the "expense ratio"), and its decrease in assets to liability (the "equity ratio"), both of which are bad.  Unfortunately, the data behind their equity ratio ends in 2010, before endowments (and later, real estate) had started to recover, making schools look poorer than they are.  As for expenses, the poorest UCs, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz, are more "sustainable" than Harvard and Princeton because they have lower expense increases, which in public Us we call "budget cuts."

The latest on the Colorado movie theater assault.  The alleged shooter graduated from UC Riverside.

Campuses outline the effects of the funding cuts.   The Regents--with the exception of Russell Gould--vote to support Brown's tax initiative.  But they still raise professional school fees.

The Regents cave on UCLA hotel.  

UCLA Committee on Academic Freedom supports professor against allegations of political bias.

CSU Board approves pay increases for new campus Presidents.  But they are still considering raising tuition, reducing enrollments, and laying off people.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and DOE release report on private student loans.  It isn't a pretty picture.

The Recession is destroying Public Universities.

Oregon Bill proposes to give universities more autonomy but to limit annual tuition increases.

What online education can't do.  But its promoters do hope to make money.  Subsidized by others' labor of course.