Nov 5, 2008, UC Students in Grenoble

In 2016, I was one of the Democrats who was pretty sure that Trump could win.  Then in 2020 I was pretty sure he would lose.  Now I’m back to pretty sure that he will lose in 2024. I have a few reasons, including education, as I’ll explain. 

 

I’m not celebrating the Democrats here. I omit the Biden administration's failures (nicely recapped by Patrick Healy here). I do agree with whoever said, in this good discussion of relations between the anti-war left and the Biden war party, that defeating Trump is not a step that can be skipped.  These are reasons for this defeat.

 

First, there’s the technical issue of the limits of the numerical, meaning the limits of polls, or really the limits of the interpretative tweaking of polls.  The media is too positivist by half, and underplays the importance of the assumptions behind the weighing of the results.  The main thing I’ve heard is that the pollsters are obsessed with not undercounting Trump voters because they have in the past.  So they are likely overcounting Trump voters. Everyone in the media “knows” about weighting, and pollwatchers offer learned discussions, but they still talk as though polls are empirical snapshots. They are not.  The performance of the campaigns isn’t even close. I think the voting will be less close than the polls.

 

Second, Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.  His act is in serious decline: it’s bleak, rancid, and desperate. His escalation into the full Nazi is a sign that he knows he is slipping behind.  Harris and Walz are hugely successful in the arena I don’t really care about but know is important—money, ad buys, sound bites, celebrity endorsements, glamour connections, and other things that may sway many people, including those who don’t see politics as distinct from other forms of entertainment in the unending flow of processed images and sound. Harris and Walz are both very pro, and I think that’s the main cause of Trump’s rising fear.

 

Third, Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.  We are supposed to be in the age of post-reason, where everyone is driven by emotion, affect, and image-created impulse and is also fine with that.  It’s true that Trump seems to command an Orc army in which not one foot soldier has been alienated by his firehose of provably false claims and civil-war inducing curdled vows, like deporting millions of US residents with the military.  But peak outrage is not the state in which people actually live, even the Trump faithful who are carried away at a rally as they might be at a football game.  Trump is certainly the choice of the reactionary millions—say the one-third of Americans and the three-fifths of Republicans who agree that immigrants poison the blood of America. This is a very high number: I’m not minimizing the problem and to the contrary am studying it. But it’s not a spectacle of mass mind-control that cannot be stopped by ordinary politics.

 

Fourth is a contingent semi-harmony among Democrats.  Some people have argued that Harris-Walz have built a majority centrist coalition around women’s rights to safety and respect, post-Dobbs abortion, meaningful environmental policies, supportive government, non-racism (if not active anti-racism), pro union workplace and wage policies, reduced inequality, and the rule of law. Since I think that’s where the majority of US voters are, I think this will work to build a majority.  The left will need to work hard to fix Harris-Walz’s timid economic plans and acceptance of Biden’s catastrophically bad foreign policy, with a focus on shutting down Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.  After they win the election.

 

Everything I read says that Harris-Walz have a great ground game and that Trump-Vance don’t have one at all.  They have liars’ circuses, which encourage the media to mistake part for whole and overstate the attending faithful—100 in Austin, 25,000 in New York—as a mass movement.  But on the ground, the education is happening, from house to house. Oliver Laughland reports:

 

I am out with two women, Leslie Hughes and Luwaunna Adams, whom I met two years ago when we were making a video in western Pennsylvania – a perennial battleground region in the US’s closest-fought swing state. . . . As we trudge the streets, knocking doors in the crisp autumn air, we meet a number of apathetic voters who tell the women they are not planning to cast their ballot this time around. One young man named Rashad says he cannot understand how Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote in 2016 and yet lose the election. “If ‘we the people’ chose someone, but the electoral [system] chooses someone else, what’s the point of my vote?” he asks Adams. Another woman says she finds it impossible to discern “which one is good and which one is bad” – and so has decided to sit it out. …

 

But Hughes and Adams do not give up. They stand for 10 minutes with each voter, running through many of the ways Trump failed during his first four years and why, they say, he should not be given another chance. They talk about how their rights as unionised cleaners are on the line. Adams engages in a frank lesson about the power of voting in her home state. “Your vote does count,” she says to Rashad. “You know what time it is.”

 

Both [voters, Rashad and an unnamed woman], are eventually won over and decide to cast their vote for Harris. Adams lets out a cheer of joy. “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you,” she tells Rashad. He agrees: “Especially in this era of brainwash. Everything is just brainwashing you to think a certain way.” He thinks about taking a break from social media.

 

It is a moment of clarification and a reminder of just how distorted reality has become in this election. Conversations like these may well be the only way to bring Pennsylvania, and by default the whole country, back from the brink.

 

Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift.  A second ago you thought this. Now you think that, which may be the opposite.  Your feelings change too. The shift is very different from reacting to words or images. It takes root. It has been interacting with you, your identity, and your life, and isn’t just something you’re skimming through. 

 

It’s hard to talk about this difference. we’ve demystified our binary oppositions between thought and feeling, active engagement and passive reception. We’ve also damaged our understanding of learning vs. watching things, or learning vs. viewing, as part of a tech barrage that ramped up with MOOCs in the early 2010s and has reached a new peak with “AI.” 

 

And yet these things are different.  Active thinking is what we try to achieve in class. It involves internalization, learning that “sticks.” It is recognizably different from rote response—there’s a large established literature on this.  It also happens here on the campaign doorstep.  

 

Luwaunna Adams has the best phrase for it.  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”

 

Basically, I think “thinking for yourself” is going to win.   And therefore so will Harris-Walz. 

 

Then Trump’s ground game will begin, which will involve massive disputation of the election results.  But he will try that because he will have lost the election.

July 19, 2024, Three Cliffs Bay, Wales

Michael Meranze and I stopped this blog not long after I left UC Santa Barbara to take up my current job as Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) in London, England--it’s great!--and Michael became divisional chair of the UCLA Academic Senate and then co-chair of that campus’s Covid task force.  

 

We had a few relapses. I wrote a late-pandemic post on the UC budget in October 2021 and another in January 2022. Michael fell off the wagon in Spring 2024 to critique the New McCarthyism and the authoritarianism of administrators’ handling of student anti-war protests.  

 

But generally this has been my cooling-off period from the dominant focus on higher ed.  I have now been out of my professor job for four years. I moved from Santa Barbara to London, and am now a resident of the UK.  I’m also nearly two years past my period on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and my year as MLA president (2022).  My focus there was the political economy of the academic humanities and the need to build research infrastructure (my columns are here).  The break from higher ed blogging helped my research and writing to expand into other areas.  

 

And yet none of the issues we worked on here have been resolved or ameliorated.  Many have gotten worse, like academic freedom.  Understanding their interconnections with other topics, forces, and sectors has become more pressing. 

 

I’m going to restart the blog to cover an expanded range of issues confronting the creation and use of knowledge. It will cover the culture industries as well as education.  It will continue Remaking the University’s linking of teaching, research, academic content, consciousness, et al. to political economy.  Political economy blogs don’t tie their topics to culture: Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook is a case in point: no cultural or educational drivers there, though he has great art.  Here I’ll study these factors together.  I’ll emphasize social and cultural knowledge in our era of tech determinism  

 

Remaking II will also cover protest knowledge of the kind that Israel’s war in Gaza has provoked on campuses across the country and that has changed public framework for discussions of Israeli policy and the Middle East.

 

The blog will continue my version of critical university studies, with its focus on higher ed’s material conditions and its effects on learning and research. Thanks to Michael (and other, occasional contributors), we analysed a wide range of university matters from 2008 through early 2022.  Now the blog will cover related institutions as well. 

 

In addition to US higher ed coverage, I will be linking UC and US higher ed to university systems elsewhere in the world. I have a front-row seat at UK higher ed crisis—now openly recognized as such—and it’s an important parallel to the US situation. 

 

I used that baggage-laden term, culture industries. The three I follow diligently are journalism, publishing, and theatre, and will be writing about these. By virtue of longstanding local friendship circles I have a good sense of the working lives of many London artists, and will link to commentary on the current art system.  

 

My foundation, ISRF, funds annual grant competitions on open topics as well as focused internal research.  Our current research topics include “Alternatives to Green Finance,” “Political Affect,” “Political Economy and Race,” “AI, Learning, and Attention,” and “Future Universities.” I’m a kind of P.I. on these, and will discuss work in these areas as it becomes relevant here.  I continue to study the nature and social effects of literary and cultural knowledge, so that will turn up as well.

 

Given my job now, I also follow Greater Academia: foundations, think-tanks, museums, libraries, public engagement councils, and research-oriented community-based organizations. They will turn up from time to time.

 

Since public knowledge emerges as much from social movements as from universities, we’ll cover their work in relation to higher ed, media industries, and tech, especially their efforts to improve working conditions. 

 

This sounds like we’ll be spread very thin. We will be.  I can’t actually cover these terrains of cultural knowledge and activity without the shift from “I” to “we” that just happened. But we’ll figure out how to do this as we go. 

 

Part of the solution is that we’ll cover much of this material through citations and excerpts of other people’s writing rather than writing all the posts ourselves. We’ll have three kinds of posts:

            Liner Notes: regular posts, likely one from me per week.            

 Highlights: links and excerpts from pieces about the topics named above.

            Archives: institutional material, which will help correct the misleading histories of academia created by university PR operations and the media.

            

In the process, the blog will set a few themes on a collision course: the varying states of organized knowledge in the world today, knowledge labor, knowledge management, society’s knowledge needs and demands, propaganda and disinformation. And of course money.

 

I’m going to focus somewhat less on the knowledge refusers that on the knowledge producers.  What is happening to knowledge work, broadly conceived?  What has happened to the working conditions especially for cultural work—humanities professors of course but also graphic designers, local musicians, set dressers, and other trades and crafts? Working conditions was my MLA presidential theme in 2022. I will continue that theme here. 

 

The same goes for persistent funding problems. I’ll carry on with Remaking’s political economy of the university and its professional workers, and expand it to non-academic workers.  

 

Culture work is grossly underfunded everywhere. This is happening at a time in world history when none of our major problems can be solved without bringing cultural knowledge to collaborate with the technological dimensions. Problems like climate crisis, inequality, oligarchy, racism, xenophobia, and nonstop warfare all require STEM and non-STEM disciplines to work together. The polycrisis has been entrenched by the continuing acceptance of C.P. Snow’s 1950s model of a divergence between “two cultures” (for him, physics v. literature).

 

At the same time, culture should exist for culture’s sake. It is an intrinsic good. It is a human right. Its sidelining, its funding neglect, creates cognitive shortfalls for addressing both personal and world issues and a rights problem as well.  

Underfunding is a root cause of epistemic injustice, suffered by non-normative standpoint knowledge of every kind.  Epistemic justice depends on budget justice. We’ll cover it.

 

What about the new title: Long Revolution?   I was thinking of doing Remaking Knowledge Work, to reflect my preoccupation with knowledge labor and its institutional conditions. 

 

My colleague Stuart said, why not Knowledge Strikes Back.  That’s pretty close actually.  

 

The current title, Remaking II: Long Revolution, is meant to reference not only the knowledge wars in which my entire career has taken place, but pathways out of them.

 

I spent part of last summer on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, where I go to swim and read. I  wrote a chapter there for a volume on Raymond Williams’ concept of structure of feeling. The chapter is called “Raymond Williams’ Subtheory of Cultural Revolution,” and begins like this:

 

New politics, new economics, new societies: where do they come from? How do they eventually emerge?  How do cultural changes come to affect political and economic systems that seem hopelessly entrenched, if not determined to restore a vanquished past?

 

Raymond Williams called the process of emergence the long revolution. It was slow, and bogged down in its own hesitations and backsliding. It often stalled out for decades at a time. The general direction of the long revolution was democratization. This was democratization of politics but for Williams it was more particularly democratization of culture.

 

Within culture, the long revolution meant a democratization of intelligence, in which the entirety of a given society gradually gets full access to the infrastructures of learning and communication that eventually allows everyone to enact their creative agency in the society overall.   

 

I do believe we’re slouching towards world democratization in spite of our new dark age. But there’s no arc of the universe tending toward it. It takes continuous work amidst the constant backsliding.

I would like the blog to be a place for that work, where we can think these issues through collaboratively, and generate better ideas about how we can overcome our knowledge troubles and their kindred crises.  I hope you enjoy the new version of Remaking.

Less than 24 hours after my last post, dissenting political opinion faced violent suppression on both coasts of the United States.  In New York, Columbia's President called in the NYPD to take control of Columbia's campus.  In Los Angeles, UCLA did little  to prevent violent thugs from attacking the divestment encampment with fireworks, chemical agents, and clubs, all while spewing hate speech at the protesters. Police, when they arrived, did little to stop the attacks for at least an hour.  (for video see) Then on May 1, the UCLA administration called in the police  to remove the encampment, something they accomplished through force--including flash bombs, batons, rubber bullets--in the morning of May 2.  We are left with the example of the leaders of two leading universities either calling for, or implicitly accepting, state and right wing violence against free speech.

As I indicated in my last post, the current suppression of divestment encampments and the mobilization of anti-Semitism against them (despite the many Jewish alumni, faculty, and students who participate in and support the the divestment movement), must be seen against the years long right wing attempt to destroy higher education as source of independent thinking.  As is often the case, Chris Rufo helpfully made this point clear in his recent tweet on the difference between Columbia and the University of Florida, where he praised the latter because as he put it: "This is a leadership cascade: @govGovRonDesantis sets the vision, @BenSasse enacts the policy, and the aptly-named Steve Orlando reproduces the tone.  Coordinated Movement. Clear incentives.  Perfect contrast with Columbia."  It is hard to find a clearer description of state controlled education than that.

But with all of that said, yesterday marked something different.  The combination of police violence and vigilante activity directed against dissenting speech was outrageous.  To be sure, this combination is not new in the United States as Steven Hahn has recently reminded us.  Nor can we be shocked that campus administrations have turned to force to control their space. There was another danger this week.  For years, free speech warriors and nattering nabobs of neutrality have been complaining about the heckler's veto.  I share those concerns.  But this week we saw the result of one of the largest heckler's vetoes in recent history: as two universities responded to violence and condemnation of protest by shutting down the protest itself.  No clearer message can be sent to those who disapprove of both dissent and American colleges and universities that their aggression will get them what they want.

We need to be clear that when the campus administrations declare the encampments unlawful or in trespass, they are marking them as objects for violence.  This action is not some purported neutrality.  Instead it casts them out of the community and imagines them as outside the law.  The violence--both state and mob--is a failure of leadership at the highest levels of both universities.  Chancellors, Presidents, and Governing Boards share in the responsibility.    

Columbia President Shafik's capitulation to, and then collaboration with, the House Republican Show Hearings marked a turning point in the development of the New McCarthyism in the United States.  Her decision to suspend encamped students and declare them in "trespass" and to then call in the NYPD in violation of, at least the spirit of Columbia's governing documents has unleashed a remarkable number of copycat Presidents.  Presidents at Emory, University of Florida,  Indiana University, University of Texas, Humboldt Polytechnic, and Yale and Connecticut to name only a few, have suspended student protesters, called in police (in some cases including snipers), and struck poses of campus emergency--all in response to what have been overwhelmingly peaceful protests in support of Palestinian rights.  

Of course, as President Shafik quickly learned, if she had hoped to appease the right-wing critics of the protests and of higher education she was sorely mistaken.  Her naming names and revealing confidential information about investigations at the hearing only provided new openings for the Right to intensify pressure as she effectively conceded their claims that her campus was in crisis.  Who could be surprised when House Speaker Mike Johnson, himself under pressure from his own right wing, decided to make Columbia a photo op in order to call for Shafik's resignation, while Senators Hawley and Cotton called for the National Guard to be mobilized to break up the encampments.

The evident failure of President Shafik's strategy to appease the House Republicans and the ongoing imitation of her actions make manifest the politically precarious state of higher education today.  In thinking about this situation I'd suggest that three points are crucial:

1. Shafik's strategy, and those of her epigones, was doomed from the start because the right wing focus on anti-Semitism was never a good faith effort.  That there have been anti-Semitic statements and actions seems clear, but these have been isolated and on the margins.  That Republicans who didn't condemn Charlottesville and who promote the Great Replacement Theory have suddenly become concerned about the safety of Jewish students beggars belief.  Instead, this specific effort to smear campuses is a continuation of the Right's prior campaigns to limit the teaching of subjects critical of current and historical structures of class, gender and race.  There is little movement needed for Florida to go from limiting discussion of sexuality and race while attacking academic freedom and faculty authority, to suspending anti-Zionist student organizations, to reinstating requirements to teach anti-communism as if that remains a pressing issue.  It's true that there is nothing new with attempting to insist that anti-Zionism is by definition anti-Semitism.  But that conflation has always been about limiting knowledge and political debate at least as much as it has been about protecting Jews.

2. The fact that Shafik's turn to police has been imitated so widely should give us pause about treating her as a special case.  It is true that she is a classic example of a university president whose experience is not as an academic.  But that excuse cannot be made for so many other presidents.  Instead, the reliance on force marks both the structural separation of senior management from the everyday life of campuses--especially their everyday intellectual and academic life--as well as the overweening power of donors and, in the case of public universities, governors and state legislators.  Governing Boards have become much more active and much more closely tied to wealthy and intrusive donors given the relative decline in public funding support for higher education.  These are all outcomes of the long-term spread of managerialism in higher education.  But this need not be written in stone.  As the cases of Brown,  Northwestern, and Wesleyan demonstrate, it is possible for Presidents to choose an alternative path.  But they have to recognize the academic nature of their institutions to do so.

3.  Indeed, the fact that there have been alternative approaches to the encampments suggests what college and university leaders need to do if they want to preserve the autonomy and nature of their institutions.  One of the failures of President Shafik, as well as her predecessors from Harvard and Penn, was her failure to use her time to challenge the premise of the hearings.  I recognize that to do so would be extremely difficult.  The whole thing was a show trial.  But President Shafik could have used her time to defend her institution and the nature of higher education, to explain the nature of academic inquiry, to insist on the importance of the intellectual autonomy of universities from political interference.  She did none of those things.  Instead, she violated some of the most important traditions of academic freedom we have.

The Strike continues with no end in sight.  Although there have been tentative agreements concerning Post-Docs and Academic Researchers, in the Academic Student Employee and Student Researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues.  This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although the UAW made significant adjustments in its proposal UC responded with little change.  You can see the latest UAW wage proposal here and the latest UC wage proposal here.  

It is impossible from the outside to tell where the negotiations are headed.  But what I want to try to do here is offer some suggestions for how we could think about the gap, how we got here, and what we might do in the future to alter the conditions that have created what is undoubtedly a crisis at the University, and a depressing foreshadowing of the end of UC as a serious research university.  If the latter does happen the responsibility will ultimately lie with UCOP and the Regents with some support from the campus Chancellors.

The first point is that it seems clear that there is a fundamental gap in the way that each side is defining these negotiations.  UC is approaching this as if it were a conventional labor negotiation with a class of workers whose position is fundamentally stable.  The UAW and its supporters on the other hand, start from the position that they have been placed in an untenable economic position.  Given the fact that TA wages have barely kept up with national inflation over the years combined with the extreme cost of housing in California, they cannot continue with relatively minor adjustments in the dollar amount of their monthly pay.  To make matters worse, UC's latest offer has a first year adjustment that is about equal to current inflation.  In this light, UCOP appears completely out of touch with the reality of life on campuses and indifferent to its lack of knowledge.

This image of autocratic disregard was only deepened by Provost Brown's appalling letter to the faculty last week.  Although much of it was standard UCOP pablum, he inspired widespread faculty hostility with his closing flourish threatening faculty members who refused to pick up the work of striking workers with discipline beyond the docking of pay.  For the last three years, faculty and lecturers  have performed an enormous amount of additional labor to keep the university afloat during the pandemic: transforming their courses, spending additional time with students, planning for campus transformations, and putting their research duties on the side to maintain "instructional continuity" as the administration likes to put it.  After all this effort, for the Provost to threaten disciplinary action for those who choose not to pick up the work of striking TAs or to act upon their own convictions about academic integrity, manifests a contempt for the faculty that is hard to ignore.

It's important to grasp UC's budgetary situation correctly.  Most importantly, the usual invocation of the university's 46 billion dollar budget needs to be put aside.  Most of that budget is tied up in the medical centers or in funding for designated purposes.  The real budget that is relevant is the core budget made up of tuition, state funding, and some UC funds.  It comes in closer to $10 billion (Display 1) and is largely tied up in salaries across the campuses.  As Chris and I have been pointing out for nearly 15 years, UC has been subject to core educational austerity surrounded by compartmentalized privatized wealth (although we should notice that the medical centers barely stay in the black).  This crisis will not be overcome by hidden caches of money floating around the university.  The problem is deeper than that:  its roots lie in the combination of state underfunding and the expansion of expensive non-instructional (often non-academic research) activities that have taken up too much of campus's payrolls.

But I want to stress that this reality does not mean that the graduate students are being unreasonable in seeking wages that enable them to perform their employment duties and pursue their studies.  Instead, it is a sign of how deep the failure of the University has been in (not) providing a sustainable funding model both for students and faculty supporting students.  The Academic Senate has been pointing to this problem for at least two decades.  In statements and reports from 2006, 2012, and 2020, the Senate has repeatedly insisted that graduate student support was insufficient and proposed steps to improve it.  Even the administration itself has sometimes recognized its depth.  To take only one example from 2019, UCOP's Academic Planning Council declared that:  

UC must do better at financially supporting its doctoral students, particularly as it seeks to diversify the graduate student body. The University cannot compete with its peers for talented candidates if it does not offer competitive support. In 2017 the gap in average net stipend between UC and its peers was nominally $680.3 In actuality the gap is much greater due to California’s high cost of living - with factored in, the average gap in doctoral support is closer to $3,400.4 This is a huge difference but not insurmountable. The Workgroup urges UC leadership to make every effort to close the gap so that the quality of UC’s doctoral programs is maintained and enhanced.

UC campuses, with planning and prioritization, could guarantee five-year multi-year funding to doctoral students upon admission. According to current data, about 77 percent of doctoral students across UC receive stable or increasing net stipends for five consecutive years.5 (Appendix 1.) With some exceptions, this multi-year funding is relatively consistent across campuses and disciplines. However, this funding is typically not presented as a full five-year multi-year guaranteed package upon admission. Offering five-year funding upon admission would enhance recruitment of high-potential students, offer financial security, and address one of the chief stressors for doctoral students - worry over continued funding while in the program.

In addition to offering guaranteed five-year funding, the University must address the issue of graduate student housing. Graduate students, many of whom have family responsibilities, face enormous challenges in finding affordable housing. Without a targeted effort to address graduate student housing, UC’s capacity to attract and retain qualified candidates is at serious risk.  (4-5)

And yet the problem persists.  The Academic Senate has stressed this issue repeatedly and with great force.  A recent letter from the UCLA Divisional Senate's Executive Board has pointed its finger at the problem--the need for renewed state funding.   It is time for the administration to do something to fix it--and something that doesn't simply damage other parts of the academic endeavor.

UCOP will continue--as they always do--to insist that we cannot get more money out of the state to pay for what needs to be done.  But let's press on that point a little more.  It is certainly possible that we are heading for a recession--the Federal Reserve seems determined to induce one to put labor in its place.  But does that mean that the state doesn't have the capacity to respond to an emergency at the University?  Despite all the talk about a budget shortfall, Dan Mitchell at the UCLA Faculty Association Blog has been pointing out that the situation is far less clear than the Legislative Analyst is insisting (and the University is repeating).  For one thing, revenues have been higher than expected and that even with the possibility of a downturn the state has around 90 billion dollars in usable reserves. If the state won't help it's not because of economic necessity but a matter of political choice.  After all, the Governor had no problem finding $500 million to pay for a private immunology research park at UCLA that provides little, if any, real benefit to the campus academic program.  The Governor and the state can do more for the educational core of the University than they are doing: and if UCOP and the Regents can't show the state how necessary that is, then one wonders again what their purpose is.  

I want to make one final point.  UC is the research university of the state and UC insists that graduate education is at the heart of its purpose.  But if UCOP actually agrees with that then the question must be: what do we need to do to have academic graduate education in a sustainable form?  What resources do we need to enable students to both contribute to the larger functioning of the university and to pursue their studies?  Are we willing to have only graduate programs where students have family money or have already flipped a startup?  Or where they are here to gain an additional credential to take back to their jobs?  Does UCOP remain committed to UC's contributions to disciplines across the spectrum of knowledge?  Or does it only care about graduate students (and others) as cheap and disposable labor?  

I don't expect that these negotiations or this strike can answer or settle these questions.  But UC is at a crossroads and the university--especially its leadership--must face up to that.  The long-term question raised by the strike is whether UC will continue as a research university; if we don’t make it possible for future scholars to attend, we will have forfeited our purpose.  There is an opportunity here to take the first steps towards creating a new sustainable vision of a twenty-first century research university.  Or we can continue as we have in decline.  The choice ultimately is UCOP's and the Regents'.

****

(I've focused here on the ASE unit because the Student Researcher Unit is admittedly a more complicated problem.  The vast majority of GSRs are supported by external grants and those grants have both limits and their own rules.  To some extent UC has been negotiating with someone else's money.  That doesn't mean the situation is impossible but rather that it has to be implemented in such a fashion as to protect Principal Investigators from damaging unintended consequences.)

I've fixed the mistake in the Los Angeles Times headline on Gov. Gavin Newsom's higher ed budget proposal for 2022-23.  In fact, if you add one-time money from the current and coming years, Newsom is proposing overall cuts to UC and CSU.

The base general fund increase is five percent next year (see summary slide above), with five percent promised each year for five years total in a new compact between the university systems and the state.  

Newsom delivered  the compact promise with a joke about how he knows the people who lived through the last (broken) compacts will doubt this one too.  Newsom signaling he knows we think Sacramento compacts are worthless doesn't make Sacramento compacts less worthless.  So I assume only next year's five percent.

Newsom's five percent is better than Gov Jerry Brown's annual two or three percent--apparently twice as good.  However, Newsom gets an inflation rate that is twice Brown's too. The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Index accelerated from 4.2 percent to 5.7 percent from July to November 2021. CPI hit 6.8 percent, and projections for inflation in 2022 by Fannie Mae and others suggest a five percent increase will be entirely consumed by inflation.  Hence the term "flat," and also my sense that the corrected headline is still optimistic.  For more than a decade, two Democratic governors have been giving UC and CSU flat annual budgets--when they are not cutting them.  That is not changing.

The other touted feature is that the state is funding residential enrollment growth.  Newsom proposes it support 6,230 new California undergraduates with $67.8 million (or $10,882.83 per student).  Again, it looks good compared to Jerry Brown.  He proposes an additional $31 million to buy out 902 nonresident slots at the three flagships (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego), at $34,368.07 per student. Don't ask me how they came up with those numbers.  What is clear is that the nonflagships are not getting state funding for the nonresident students they have been unable to admit because of the enrollment cap that emerged from the political blowback caused by the flagships.  Newsom sets up UC for a multi-year series of tuition carve-outs that allow the flagships to keep their nonresident tuition premiums, maintaining intra-campus budget inequality.

Most UC campuses are at capacity and have been for some time, so getting new students means hiring new faculty and staff and building or expanding facilities.  In practice, it means more costs and also more hardships for existing students. They will have even more trouble getting courses and housing.  Next year's per-student rate is less than half of what UCOP says is the average cost of instruction of each student (that is vastly more than most departments receive per major but never mind). We can say that $10,882.83 will at best cover costs of the new students and at worse create new deficits.  Like the base increase, this is not an increase in UC's per-student operating budget.  (The small "cohort tuition" hike will also make very little difference.)

Last fall, I suggested 2021 might well be, financially speaking, Peak UC.  The governor's new proposal confirms that fear about a stagnant 2020s of unfunded mandates.  Further confirmation came from UC president Michael Drake ritually praising the governor's generosity, putting a cap on growth in the bigger revenues.

I'm not going to go into more detail on the numbers until they settle down, and won't chart any trends until spring.  Newsom is right to see budgets as "expressing our values," as he said at the end, but his presentation was a numerical mess, referencing three different sizes of surplus ($42 billion, $20 billion, $31 billion), two from his own office, and identifying dozens of individual program totals from two different budget years.  So in the meantime, let's take a look at some other issues raised by the presentation, both on the campuses and the state as a whole.

Newsom has exactly two ideas about higher education. One is that it maximize access on the basis of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).  The other is that it prepare students for jobs, and by jobs he means jobs in technology. 

Newsom makes state funding contingent on several 2030 goals: UC eliminating racial gaps in grad rates, getting grad rates to 76 percent for four-year students, and getting students to debt-free graduation. These are essential goals and UC must achieve them. But they require fundamental change in the UC business model.  That now depends on undergrad tuition subsidizing research and other activities--so less money is in instruction and student support, which hurts retention differentially across racial groups.  The business model also depends on saving a lot of university money (my estimate is $755 million in 2019-20 using Accountability data) by capping financial aid, therefore forcing undergrads to borrow and work during the academic year (see Stage 2 and Stage 5 respectively).  

This is such an important point--the need to fund goals rather than simply assert them--that I'll expand a bit. You improve graduation rates in part by hiring enough instructors so that every student can get every class they need, when they need it. Because of chronic underfunding, many or most students on all UC campuses wait quarters or years to get admitted into at least a few of their core required courses.

How do you reduce racial gaps in graduation rates? You offer personalized, individual advising to every student who wants or needs it.  You don't tolerate caseloads of 740 students for each advisor, which Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielson, in their important book Broke, report is the case at UC Merced's school of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts (page 123). 

You also reduce racial gaps in graduation rates by taking students of color out of the cafeteria job they use to reduce their borrowing and into class: you cut their work hours ideally to zero while they are enrolled full time. You do not impose a Self-Help Expectation of $8,500 or $9,200 or $10,000 on every student with financial aid, even if they are low income, as every UC campus does. In other words, if you want to reduce racial gaps in graduation, you don't do this, for years and years: have a net cost of attendance of $10,000 per year (after financial aid) for students whose whole family earns $60,000 or less.

You also don't allow the poorest students to have the most debt at graduation.  

You stop doing these things by buying out financing gaps for poor and otherwise disadvantaged students, and then you put money into  personalized, intensive advising, well-funded student centers, and other things most UC faculty and staff could name off the tops of their heads.  When you start paying to provide these things, you're then able close your graduation gaps.

These are all things UC campuses want to do. None of them are things that either the governor or the legislature want to pay for.  None of them are things whose costs UCOP has itemized and justified in public in order to inspire the desire to pay for these essential things.

The governor mentioned diversifying university faculty.  This has been an explicit UC goal since the 1980s. Again there are racio-cultural obstacles. But the material ones are at least as important.  A diverse faculty comes from diverse doctoral programs, which means strong retention in those programs, means fully funding grad students from working-class backgrounds who are at greater risk of dropping out for lack of funds or excess debt.  UC does not fund its doctoral programs at the needed level.  

Thus in 2019-20, grad students went on a multi-campus strike over their rent burden, demanding a cost of living increase outside their union contract so they could cover costs in the private rental market. Nothing was done, and the students who started it (at UC Santa Cruz) were expelled for a while.  In the midst of the pandemic in early 2021, UCSD grads had to protest in the face of massive rent hikes in campus housing.  In 2022, rent burden is, if anything, even worse. The diversity of the faculty stops there, with unmanageable costs of living.  If it is serious about faculty diversity, UC should announce debt-free doctoral programs. But the governor and legislature would have to pay for it.

In sum, Newsom insists that UC close graduation gaps with essentially the same per-student funding that caused the gaps in the first place.  UC officials should point this out.

Now, on this question of college for jobs: Newsom and most policy people continue to work with a version of Human Capital Theory (HCT) descended from the 1950s, in which "learning equals earning."  In reality that is true only for a subset of students (generally already financially advantaged--for the theory's flaws see our LARB review-essay).  Policymakers are trying to fix the theory by saying, "tech learning equals earning," and UCOP encourages this splitting of STEM from other fields by publishing wages-by-major data.). 

Enter Gavin Newsom: propelled by half-baked but established neo-HCT, he is making these five percent state funding increase contingent on "supporting workforce preparedness and high-demand career pipelines," requiring 25 percent increases in degrees in STEM "and Education or Early Education" disciplines, as well as the same increase in "academic doctoral degrees," all by 2026-27.  The requirement is not exactly water-tight, and it also has a very weak justification in existing jobs projections.  The original 2015 report that started this "million missing college degrees" fixation shows most new jobs appearing outside of STEM (Figure 4).   Did anyone in the governor's office read the current occupational breakdowns for the state? It's the same story here, with tech a minor employer by size (though not by wages, which are high). But the STEM quota sails anyway, towing a legitimate fear about teaching shortages behind.

Even if the job market really did say STEM, it's an invasive step for a governor to mandate changes in degree outputs in a university.  Californians felt sorry for Floridians having to put up with Gov. Rick Scott making nasty cracks about anthropology and saying he didn't want taxpayers to foot the bill for useless degrees. Newsom is effectively doing the same thing. It raises allocation questions: Will new faculty lines to teach the expanded enrollments all go to STEM plus a few for education?  Will provosts need to stop hiring in arts and humanities for a number of years to pool lines in the "high demand careers"? Should California's future musicians, screenwriters, architects, designers, painters, film editors, historians, novelists, and journalists avoid the experience of being second-class citizens by going to UC? 

There are no answers, and this brings me to the experience of watching a governor's budget presentation on dozens of topics where the word "education" wasn't uttered until well after minute 70. Newsom organized his address around five existential threats. He had no vision of a New California, but ran through a series of hard problems that must be solved. I sympathize: he has not been having a joyful time. There's pandemic illness and also its political madhouse, with the recall trying to get rid of him for doing his public health job. There's drought and fire and the climate crisis behind them. There's the cost of living crisis. There's decades of underinvestment in transportation and other infrastructure.  There's a very polarized state economy, where a third of the workforce earns less than $15 per hour (page 3). There's a decades-old housing crisis, where so much private wealth has been absorbed into inflated housing assets that the state spent $5.2 billion last year--an additional University of California state budget--paying people's rent. 

Newsom brings a lot of energy to this slate of problems. He fired dozens of powerpoint bullets at them, each carrying a $100 M or $200 M or $1 B payload. But it's all the equivalent of filling (very important) potholes, keeping the electricity on, getting the shots in arms, giving the kids something to do in school until their parents get home.  

Even the tech future of green transition is remedial, trying to undig the hole of climate change in a state still almost entirely dependent on the private car.  There was something hollow in Newsom's enthusiasm for the state's green tech leadership: he cast the state's investment as bait for private investors, took it as an opportunity to hype the hegemonic tech sector that I think he quietly dislikes for its entitlement and arrogance as do most Californians, overpraised legislative honchos and others, and started referring to California as a "leader in this space" or that space--space being a term he used dozens of times.

Contrast this with how Newsom sounds on things he cares about. Then he is serious, knowledgeable, plainspoken, and open. What he really cares about is pre-K, school nutrition, homelessness, getting people out of encampments, mental health, universal health care, summer school for poor kids, a decent access to basic goods for disadvantaged people.  Whatever his neoliberal policies might be, Newsom's deeper desire, I felt watching him, is to ease the worst suffering.  This is also where he feels useful, even perhaps a bit of a hero.  But this desire doesn't find much to feed on in higher education as officials present it to him.

It's not just Newsom: the media isn't interested in higher ed either. During question time, the press had crisp questions about Newsom's contradictions on personal exemptions from Covid vaccines, his concrete plans for supporting reproductive rights, his borrowing of his recall opponents' plans for the mental health system, and his proposed changes in the Medicaid prescription program. They had nothing about higher ed.  This is a real problem for the sector. The governors' office doesn’t get vigorously questioned about higher ed, so they don’t prep for that, they rightly think the media and its consumers don't care about the details, so they never think, "we’re going to get pounded on mandating STEM degrees so we’d better think this through."  

I’ve written about Biden-era Democrats assigning college to a dedicated space in the welfare state. The good news is that they want government-run social development—Biden has in fact broken with key tenants of neoliberal Obama-Clintonism.  The bad news for higher ed is that the Biden-Newsom mainstream has no intellectual developmental plan for higher ed to address. Biden-Newsom are a real policy advance on Obama-Brown--an advance for children, the food insecure, the mentally ill, the unhoused, the uninsured, but not an advance for college students or the educational system.  

For them, the knowledge economy is abstract scenery, a slightly smoggy familiar sky.  We may need a million more college degrees, but that's just a logistics problem—there’s no interest in process or content or quality upgrades to say nothing of revolutions in thought or in the public's collective cultural and political capabilities. For them, UC and CSU are server farms that should run quietly in the background. There's nothing heroic about them, and they won't make a hero of any president or governor.  They are of modest interest as economic infrastructure. They are certainly not, for this Democratic party, a state engine of destiny.  

This could be changed, in a couple of diverging ways. One would be all three segments busting out of the workforce preparation trap and developing exciting stories of college-fueled individual and social transformation.  I know some deans and individual faculty who could do this. I don't know anyone at the senior manager level who would. Please correct me if I've missed some folks. 

The second, more plausible path is to comply fully with the mainstream Democrat welfarist passion. Inspiration is also needed here, that makes the state's politicians heroes of social justice. But that means defining the processes that would allow UC (and CSU) really to meet graduation and the other targets, and then setting their actual price. 

Fix the funding, or miss the goals. It shouldn't be a hard decision.

Date: November 23, 2021 

To: Susannah Scott, Academic Senate Chair, UCSB 

Henry Yang, Chancellor, UCSB 

Cc: Michael V. Drake, UC President 

Cecilia Estolano, Chair, UC Board of Regents 

Robert Horwitz, Chair, UC Academic Senate 

From: Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty 

Re: The planning of Munger Hall at UCSB 

The UCSB Academic Senate Town Hall Meeting, “Faculty Questions on the Munger Hall Project,” held on November 15, 2021, intensified pervasive and significant concerns about 

(a) UCSB administration’s lack of response to fundamental questions about student well-being related to the Munger Hall project, including concerns about mental health, physical safety, security, and accessibility; 

(b) student housing options on campus and future housing projects; 

(c) building funding, planning and construction processes at UCSB; 

(d) abrogation of the right of faculty shared governance; 

(e) the impact of these decisions on UCSB’s stated commitment to social justice and equity; 

(f) UCSB administration’s failure to adequately take into account and address the opinion of experts in architectural design and rethink the design to ensure student well-being. 

To elaborate:

On the Design of Munger Hall: A broad swath of architectural design and housing experts both within and outside the university have criticized the design. Among its many problems we call particular attention to: (i) lack of natural light and ventilation—particularly the absence of openable windows; (ii) floor plan that reveals poor organization of space at the scale of the rooms, the suites, and the entire floor space at each level; (iii) inadequate thought given to student accommodation and well-being, given what we know about virus transmission, quarantine, and recovery in situations such as COVID-19; (iv) poor wayfinding and evacuation plans that would greatly endanger students in fires, earthquakes and other disasters; (v) massing and volume; (vi) environmental sustainability. 

We, the faculty, are gravely concerned by these issues, and we urge the UCSB administration, including Chancellor Yang, to address openly, explicitly and responsibly the many questions regarding the current design’s impact on the safety, security and mental well-being of the students. These fundamental questions were not answered at the November 15 Town Hall meeting and we urge the administration to answer them now. 

On Due Process: A key reason for the current state of affairs is that the usual design review process that has governed campus construction over the last 30 years was bypassed. The request-for-proposal stage of the design review process was ignored, thereby eliminating potential competition to Munger’s design. When the design review committee and its panel of architects were asked to comment, their views were not adequately taken into account. 

We have two options to move forward: 

1. Stop the plans. Begin the entire design process again following the established procedures of the design review committee. 

2. Halt the process and modify the plans. Consider the advice of a joint committee of experts on design, health and safety, drawn from both outside and inside UCSB, including Academic Senate Members and student representatives. The UCSB Academic Senate must have a say in the composition of such a panel of experts, the issues they will be asked to consider, and the way in which their recommendations would be implemented. 

We wish to send a clear message to the Chancellor, UC Office of the President, the UC Board of Regents, and the donor, that we will not accept inequitable and unsafe options for student housing. 

While we recognize the measures that must be taken to resolve the immediate housing crisis, we call on UCSB to democratically and transparently develop a long-range housing plan that ensures safety, affordability, community responsibility, and environmental sustainability for students, faculty, and staff. Not only does UCSB have a responsibility in this regard, but so do the President of the University and the UC Board of Regents. 

Sincerely, Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty, including, 

Constance Penley 

Swati Chattopadhyay 

Laurie Monahan 

Eileen Boris 

Dominique Jullien 

Bishnupriya Ghosh 

Lisa Hajjar 

Jeffrey Stopple 

Bassam Bamieh 

John Majewski Richard Wittman 

Ann Bermingham 

Michael Curtin 

Ann Jensen Adams 

Omer Egecioglu 

Mark A. Meadow 

Harold Marcuse 

Catherine L. Albanese 

Heather Badamo 

Sabine Frühstück 

William Robinson 

Barbara Herr Harthorn 

Herbert M. Cole 

David White 

Steven Gaulin 

Bhaskar Sarkar 

Kip Fulbeck 

Barbara A. Holdrege 

William Elison 

Kate McDonald 

Christina Vagt 

Juan E. Campo 

Arpit Gupta 

Julie Carlson 

Elisabeth Weber 

Stephan Miescher 

Jenni Sorkin 

Janet Walker 

Kevin B. Anderson 

Nancy Gallagher 

Aazam Feiz 

Hilary Bernstein 

Wolf Kittler 

John S. W. Park 

Silvia Bermudez 

Sara Pankenier Weld 

Marko Peljhan 

Jorge Castillo 

Jill Levine 

Evelyn Reder 

Kim Yasuda 

Erika Rappaport 

James Frew 

Janet Afary 

Fabio Rambelli 

Amr El Abbadi 

Giuliana Perrone 

Salim Yaqub 

Elena Aronova 

Cristina Venegas 

Stuart Tyson Smith 

Phill Conrad 

Volker M. Welter 

Adrienne Edgar 

Joseph Blankholm 

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi 

Catherine Nesci 

John W. I. Lee 

Sylvester O. Ogbechie 

Daniel Masterson 

Grace Chang 

Daniel Reeve 

Enda Duffy 

Roberta L. Rudnick 

Leroy Laverman 

Walid Afifi 

Iman Djouini 

Cherrie Moraga 

Dorota Dutsch 

Mark Maslan 

Charmaine Chua 

Roberto Strongman 

Amrah Salomón J. 

Ralph Armbruster Sandoval 

Carlos J. Garcia-Cervera 

Darren Long 

Sharon Tettegah 

Aashish Mehta 

Kaustav Banerjee 

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia 

Helen Morales 

Casey Walsh 

Terrance Wooten 

Birge Huisgen-Zimmermann 

Felice Blake 

Juan Cobo Betancourt 

Mario Garcia 

Scott Marcus 

Ingrid Banks 

Jody Enders 

Nelson Lichtenstein 

France Winddance Twine 

Lisa Jevbratt 

Ellen McCracken 

Juan Pablo Lupi 

Gisela Kommerell 

Edwina Barvosa 

Jeremy Douglass 

Valentina L. Padula 

Mayfair Yang 

Harvey Molotch 

Sven Spieker