Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova,
Coimbria, Portugal on April 26, 2025   

by Trevor Griffey, UC Irvine

 Before 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom developed a reputation for being a modest advocate for public higher education compared to his predecessors. This year, he proved that this reputation depended on flush state budgets, not on principle. 

 

When Newsom first came into office in 2019, the state had a projected $20 billion surplus, which allowed Governor Newsom to substantially boost spending for public higher education as part of what he called a “California for All” budget for 2019-20. 

 

And in 2022, with the state of California still receiving substantial CARES Act funding from the federal government, Newsom negotiated a 5-year “compacts” with the University of California and California State University systems that committed him to advocating for 5% annual increases to UC and CSU budgets. In exchange, the school systems committed to increase enrollment of California residents and increase student retention and graduation rates.

 

Though the compacts were legally nonbinding, they promised a sense of stability and modest recovery to UC and CSU after decades of inadequate and unpredictable funding. Unfortunately, they would soon be shredded because of a catastrophic accounting error.

 

Years of Austerty to Pay for Budget Mismanagement

 

According to CalMatters reporting, during the same legislative session that Governor Newsom negotiated the compacts, budget analysts working in his Department of Finance massively overestimated tax revenue for future years. They treated an anomalous spike in income taxes as normal, and over-estimated state revenue in future years by $200 billion per year. Legislators relying on these projections believed that they were balancing the state’s budget in 2022, and thereby set the state on a course to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than it would collect in taxes. 

 

As the effort to undo the damage of faulty budget projections continued into 2024, Governor Newsom proposed “deferring” funding increases in the compact to future years. UC and CSU leaders successfully negotiated to receive a modest increase to their general funds in 2024-25, but in exchange for accepting an 8 percent cut in 2025-26. Since the Governor and the state legislature were also proposing an 8 percent cut to other state agencies, the shared sacrifice seemed fair. The compact was temporarily saved, but the Governor’s commitment to it was effectively over.

 

Governor Puts Majority of Budget Cuts Onto Public Universities

 

Budget cuts negotiated in 2024 seemed like a done deal. Then something unexpected happened: new, more optimistic revenue forecasts came in, and the state of California entered 2025 with a projected $363 million budget surplus.

 

The Governor could have proposed to use some of this money to give a reprieve to the UC and CSU systems, or try to sustain the compact another year. 

 

Instead, the Governor’s January budget proposal reduced planned cuts to state agencies, while leaving the 8 percent cut and compact deferral in place for UC and CSU. 

 

As the Legislative Analyst Office has highlighted, this move increased state government spending by $2.4 billion over the 2024 budget deal. The Governor also proposed increasing discretionary spending by $507 million, and proposed $150 million in new tax breaks for 2025-26.

 

To pay for this new spending, as well as cover billions of dollars of unexpected Medi-Cal expenses and rising costs for other programs, the Governor proposes to withdraw state reserves by about $7 billion in 2025, leaving $17 billion for next year. Remarkably, the Governor did not propose using any of those reserves to prevent or reduce cuts to public universities.

 

Indeed, whereas the State’s Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties is normally kept at $3.5-4 billion, the Governor proposed to increase that fund to $4.5 billion. If the Governor had simply thought to keep it at a normal $3.75 billion, he could have eliminated cuts to the UC and CSU system entirely for 2025-26. 

 

The rhetoric about the state budget in Sacramento is pessimistic. Concern that Trump’s reckless actions will weaken the economy further add to a sense of foreboding. Cuts to essential services seem inevitable, and this rhetoric of inevitability undermines politicians’ willingness to vote against the Governor’s proposed budget.  

 

Staff for the California Assembly’s subcommittee on education finance have instructed legislators that even though “CSU appears to be facing a fiscal crisis,” and “UC clearly faces significant financial challenges,” politicians should focus their hearings less on stopping the cuts and more on how the school systems “will weather increasing costs and potentially declining state and federal revenue.” 

 

This fatalism is baffling— more cowardice than analysis.  Decisions made by the Governor demonstrate that the need for cuts to higher education has been manufactured by treating UC and CSU differently than other state agencies. While state budget cuts may be necessary, they are being spread unevenly for political reasons, not financial ones.

 

As Jason Sisney, the budget advisor to the California Assembly Speaker, recently wrote, the July 2024 budget deal was that budget cuts would be equitably distributed across state agencies, and UC and CSU cuts would make up 22 percent of the state’s projected budget shortfall. Instead, Governor Newsom wants to increase spending, increase tax breaks, reduce cuts to state agencies, drawn down reserves, and still leave cuts to UC and CSU in place to cover 53 percent of the state’s resulting budget deficit. 

 

In other words, the Governor is proposing balancing the state’s budget on the backs of its four-year college students. This will take the form of increased class sizes, increased tuition, and increased debt, and possibly even one or more CSU campus closures and mergers. 

 

Can Democrats Stand Up to Their Governor?

 

On April 25, 2025, State Senator Catherine Blakespear, who describes UC San Diego as “in the heart of my district”, sent an email to constituents titled “Fighting for UC.” In it, she decried the Trump administration’s research cuts to UCSD, and pointed out that UCSD had already implemented a hiring freeze and was reducing graduate student enrollment. 

 

What Blakespear failed to mention is that she has declined to sign onto a letter from more than 60 of her colleagues in the state legislature opposing cuts to the University of California’s budget. In fact, she didn’t mention the Governor’s proposed budget cuts at all, or encourage her constituents to speak out against them. 

 

Blakespear made it seem as if UCSD hiring freezes and budget cuts were coming from the federal government controlled by Republicans, when much if not most of it is currently coming from the state government controlled by Democrats.

 

Like many Democrats, Blakespear is happy to oppose Donald Trump’s policies. But when it comes to standing up to a Democratic Governor, will she or others really “fight for UC”?

 

In my conversations with multiple state legislators this term, both Republican and Democrat, I have yet to find a single one who wants to cut the UC or CSU budget. I have yet to find a single one who wants the quality of instruction to go down while the cost of tuition goes up. 

 

Many California state legislators graduated from one or more public colleges or universities in the state. They know that California voters are mostly proud of their public higher education system, and see it as a core part of the services that the state provides.

 

And yet, when you ask a California state legislator if they’d vote against a budget that includes cuts to the UC and CSU, most Democrats— even those who sign letters opposing the cuts— will tell you that they have no choice but to vote for whatever budget the Governor, the Assembly Speaker and the Senate leader negotiate behind closed doors. Their ability to move legislation requires ceding their agency on the budget, or else be ostracized by their party leadership. 

 

When you meet with the staff of the Assembly or Senate leaders, you get the reverse message: the leadership needs to hear as much as possible from members before they head into negotiations about the need to protect higher education. 

 

Few will commit. Almost everyone is equivocal. One legislator I met with repeatedly asked if we could talk about how the state legislature could oppose Trump’s attacks on higher education, so we could avoid discussion of the state budget altogether.

 

And some share legislators whispers that because the Governor provided a 6 month delay to people impacted by wildfires to file their income taxes, and a 12 month delay to file their property taxes, his “revised” budget proposal, coming very soon, is likely to be even worse. 

 

Not treating delays in revenue collection as shortfalls is also somehow off the table. 

 

Taking their cues from elected leadership over the past couple years, UC has already increased non-resident student tuition 10 percent, and the CSU system is in the midst of raising tuition 34 percent over 5 years. Who knows what more may be coming?

 

Fighting for Higher Ed at the State and Federal Level

 

Shared sacrifice may be necessary during times of budget woes, even ones created by administrative error. Yet we as college teachers, students, staff and community members need to tell our politicians that balancing the budget on the backs of college students is totally unacceptable. 

 

For decades, politicians across the US, regardless of political party, have consistently raided the budgets of their public universities during recessions, or to cover the rising costs of health care, corrections, and other services they don’t want to tax people for. Politicians may publicly bemoan tuition increases. But they secretly depend on increasing student debt to balance state government budgets.

 

That game may be coming to an end. It ultimately relies upon federal grants and loans to students that Republicans are threatening to eviscerate in what the Debt Collective has called “the most dangerous higher education bill in history.” And it relies upon students believing that the inferior education provided to them in increasingly large and online classes is worth going into debt.

 

It's up to campus labor unions to invest their resources into organizing not just their own members but organizing students and community members to contact their legislators to oppose state government budget cuts.

 

It would be great if the defense of public higher education only required standing up to Donald Trump. But for now, we also have to stand up to Democrats whose support for public higher education is always hostage to their other priorities.

 

Contact your legislator to Stop the Cuts!

·      UC-AFT: For teachers and librarians represented by AFT

·      Teamsters: For UC and CSU clerical workers and building trades

·      University of California: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/get-involved/advocate/state-budget

·      California State University: https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/government/Advocacy-and-State-Relations/Pages/Budget-Advocacy.aspx

Two years of context helps to understand the state Democrats' plan for UC, expressed in the Governor's budget proposal this month.

 In November 2019, UCOP sought to end UC's worst modern budget decade with a some meaningful funding growth. The 2010s had brought many negative net revenue effects:

• state funding cuts and subpar annual general fund increments
  

tuition freeze (welding shut UC's revenue safety value)

restart of pension contributions with no permanent state support for employer share

end of state funding for new construction

no state funding for deferred maintenance (backlog estimates ranging from $6.2B to $14B)

Campuses had diligently followed instructions to seek multiple revenue streams.  The two most familiar are non-resident tuition and for-profit degree programs (SSDPs).  

A third revenue stream has been institutional debt. It stands at $26.7 B (page 16), up 85 percent from $14.4 B in 2011 (page 15). (UC debt is also up year-on-year by around $2B from 2019, mostly in the form of new Medical Center Pooled Revenue Bonds. This does not include an additional $2.8 B in Covid-related borrowing in summer 2020, with more to come.)

Even before Covid-19 appeared, three UC flagship campuses were projecting deficits in the first half of hte 2020s. See "Destined for Deficits" for flagship details; see "The Essential Charts" for the twenty-year system pattern. Funding crises have long been visible on the campuses: UC Berkeley's VP for Finance and Administration called the funding model unsustainable in 2013.

Such news doesn't usually make it into presentations to the regents, so in this context UCOP's November 2019 budget document was unusually graphic.  It identified many areas of functional deterioration at UC. These included sharp increases in the number of students per ladder-faculty member, the same for student:staff ratios, and faculty salaries that had spent at least 20 years at around 10 percent below comparators. 

The document identified a chronic problem with state funding that usually escapes notice: net new funding is generally a fraction of the headline state increase, because it must cover terminated previous one-time funding or new mandated activities. 2018-19's headline increase of 7.1 percent yielded 0.7 percent as a "net available for sustaining core operations"--a fraction of that year's 3.5 percent inflation rate (Display 7). 

UCOP established this 2019 narrative of UC damage to justify that year's proposal for a modest "cohort-based" tuition plan, which would allow tuition increases at about inflation, fully in place after 4 years. It was a toddler-sized foot in the door, but it was a foot. The overall plan would have brought UC's state general fund allocation to just about $4 billion.

The result: Newsom cut the Regents' request for $447M for 2020-21 down to an increase of $217M. Then there was Covid, and the state cut UC $300.8 M instead.  The Department of Finance puts UC's general fund allocation for the current year at $3.465 B.

In November 2020, the regents adopted a UCOP request for an additional $518.2 M for 2021-22.  Once again, UC would be inching towards the magical $4 B level.  $300.8M of this was trying to fill in the 2020-21 cut--to keep that reduction from forming a permanently reduced baseline. There was $157.6 M for mandatory cost increases--salaries, benefits, and debt service--and about $60 M for improving student outcomes in ways mandated by the legislature.  

This month, Newsom came back with a proposal for $136.0 M. He will not backfill the permanent cut of  $300.8 M, even on a one-time Covid-19 emergency basis.  UC keeps that hole and is to receive 86 percent of what it had defined as mandatory cost increases (negotiated wage increases and benefits, among other things).  That was one of five General Fund items the regents voted in November to request. They got none of the other four, though Newsom did recommend $225M in one-time funds for deferred maintenance and some other items.  The governor's proposal would put UC's general fund at $3.6 B. That's about the level of 2017-18. It's also about the level of 2007-08, unadjusted for inflation.

 In a regents' committee meeting on January 20th, UCOP officials summarized the governor's budget in a few slides. 

 The 3 percent base increase is on the new, permanently-reduced amount. The rest are line-items that normally a public university would fund out of general operating money. UC PRIME is an example-- a diversity-oriented medical education program for underserved areas that UC Health should just pay for out of operations. Same for legal services for undocumented students, which should be funded as one among many permanent student services.  

Next slide: DM gets $175 M in one-time funds, and more earmarks are added. The DM figure is about 1.25 percent of a reasonable estimate of system-wide deferred maintenance, so at this rate UC will fix this year's back log about 80 years from now.   Except it's not annual money . . .

 The final slide notes the continuation of the tuition freeze and an accelerated deadline for closing equity gaps in student attainment.

These are all long-established goals, particularly turning UC into a workforce training system, which hails from the 1980s and 1990s, and which was re-emphasized by Newsom in his first budget. Such goals are also priced in to allocations, so new efforts at pursuit will never receive a reward. 

In short, Newsom restores Jerry Brown austerity in the form of frozen tuition and sub-inflation net state funding. We all hate the phrase, but this is classic "do more with less"--with no state interest in its effect on UC viability.

This budget presentation to the regents was more negative than UCOP's previous messaging about the governor's proposal. After Newsom's release, the UC president immediately thanked him for, in effect, providing one quarter of his request. This signaled to the media that the governor was being very supportive of higher education and that his proposal was good news. Poor Teresa Watanabe, the LA Times's UC & higher reporter, with her colleague Nina Agrawal, had to try to write a coherent story. They cited all three system heads calling the budget a "welcome reinvestment," to quote CSU's chancellor Joseph Castro, while noting that Newsom did not use the unexceptedly good state revenue picture to undo the current year cuts or to come close to matching the requests. The only figure in the story who suggested damage to educational quality was a (former) chancellor,  George Blumenthal, with direct experience of a campus.  

Taking the LAT coverage and the UCOP budget presentation together, we have these budget stories.

• It's under control. Wait until next year (UCOP budget officials)
• Funding is very complex. UC is the greatest public university (UC president)
• The governor is reinvesting in higher education (heads of UC, CSU, & CCC)
• California Democrats are degrading the quality of UC (and CSU & CCC) through underfunding (the occasional chancellor plus random bloggers)
  

One of these tales is not like the others. It is far less pleasant to consider. It is also true. But in the absence of budget context, budget history, and budget needs--absences actively generated by the first three stories--the fourth can't establish a claim on reality.  The situation keeps the quality narrative obscure. If it does, the gap between means and funds will continue to grow.

Figure 1: State General Fund Allocations to the University of California Compared to State Per-Capita Income Growth, 2001-2022, with Regents Budget Request 2020-22.

The gap is learning and research (and eating and rent-paying) that doesn't happen.

***

Data from California Department of Finance (UC general fund allocations) and from the Legislative Analyst's Office data and forecasts for state personal income growth.  Charts with tuition revenue and other details are presented and discussed here.   Photo Credit

Governor Brown released his May Revision of the California budget.  His higher education revisions suggest little beyond his continuing refusal to recognize the challenges of contemporary higher education and the social need for an expanded and deepened system of tertiary education.

Perhaps the most significant new element in the Governor's proposals is his announcement that, if either CSU or UC choose to raise tuition, the state will lower its general funding in the exact amount that the State must increase funding in Cal Grants to cover the raised tuition (7). As Dan Mitchell has pointed out, this does not mean that either UC or CSU will lose all the revenue from tuition increases.  They may therefore be tempted to raise tuition.  But it does mean that the Governor is setting the most important source of tuition aid for Californians against the general needs of improving the campuses.

As early as 2013 then Speaker John Pérez warned that UC could not expect the State to "buy out" proposed tuition increases and during the tuition freeze the state warned that it would lower base funding if the sectors increased tuition.  But the State did increase general fund revenues last year--even with tuition increases.  Now the governor is refusing to do that again and playing a game of explicitly setting off the financial needs of poorer students against the funding needs of improving education.  Not only has he offered a lower base increase (3% as opposed to the 4% that had been expected under his compact with President Napolitano) but he is now proposing that Cal Grant funding be treated as a trade-off for base funding.  He is thereby reinforcing Sacramento's insistence that spending on student financial aid be counted as part of the calculation of state funding for UC and CSU. 

There are some positive one-time allocations for deferred maintenance and selected programs at the two sectors.  But one time allocations are band-aids.  They do little to address the strain on faculty, staff and students caused by the increases in enrollments during the long decade of reduced state funding.  They do little to address the long-term capital needs of both CSU and UC.   The Governor has gone on record as insisting he doesn't "know what a legacy is."  That's just as well.  In higher education at least it isn't a pretty one.

The new UCOP scandal is the worst in a long-running series.  This one was prompted by a state audit of the Office of the President's budget, which found issues the auditor claimed cast doubt on UCOP's honesty and competence. State officials reacted angrily to the four biggest of a number of charges from State Auditor Elaine M. Howie (pictured): that UCOP spends a good chunk of money from an "undisclosed budget" that is separate from its public budget; that it affords this undisclosed spending with a tax on the campuses that yields more revenue than it needs; that it spends this excess money on systemwide programs that could go instead to students on campuses; and that it appears to have changed the results of the auditor's campus surveys to make itself look better.  The auditor also rekindled longstanding claims that UCOP hires too many administrators and then overpays them.  It even dragged pension underfunding into the mix.  

The interaction between the State Auditor and UCOP has turned a boring problem of inadequate budgetary records into another political firefight. Together the parties have produced a new round of heightened denunciations from state officials that include calls to rescind the 2.5% tuition increase and to increase direct legislative oversight of UC.  The report itself runs 169 pages and includes a 34 page, single-spaced UCOP response that rejects 72 separate passages in the audit.  This is in turn followed by the auditor's blanket rejection of UCOP's rejections.  The report also includes a 6 page letter from UC president Janet Napolitano that, in spite of the confrontation elsewhere, accepts nearly all of the auditor's technical recommendations for accounting improvements.  

The angry stand-off in the full document massively overshoots the stated policy differences, and the mutual hostility becomes a problem in itself.  Politicians and the press reacted as much to tone as content. Legislative hearings have been called for Tuesday. Long-time LA Times columnist George Skelton signaled renewed doubts about UC's ability to serve the state with a piece entitled, "Big Changes Needed at UC--Starting with the Kool-Aid-Drinking Board of Regents."  

This fight is actually unnecessary, and marks another setback for public understanding of the deeper issues raised by the report: research costs, research benefits to undergraduates, and public-good management standards. 

Raptor Budgeting?

First, on the budgetary issue, a bit of background. UCOP does two big things: performs central administrative services and manages systemwide programs. The budget statement that goes to the regents each year is split more or less 50:50 between these two categories.  UCOP used to publish budgets with more big categories (it had 4 in 2014-15, for example [page 144]).  Multiple administrative activities appear in these baskets, divided up by function (governance, budgeting and finance, etc.) along with systemwide initiatives that can be listed with expenditures for each.  

The problem seems to start with incomplete lists of programs, and continues with their being funded from two budgets, one of which the auditor calls "undisclosed." The auditor charges (summary here) that UCOP accumulated $175 million in surpluses that it did not disclose, and then spent them through a process that lacks adequate controls.  The issue is summarized in the report's Figure 6.  

Although UCOP spent some of these reserves, it spent less than it accrued in each year, so the reserve grew--and grew even in years when UCOP increased its tax to the campuses.  The auditor agrees that reserves are legitimate, but doesn't understand why UC has no written policy governing their size.  It repeatedly insists that UCOP could produce a simple unified budget of revenues and expenditures in which all outlays are visible and clearly tied to specific programs. It offers a one-page sample:

I'd add a couple of lines to this myself, but this is better than what the auditor seems to have gotten from UCOP, and UCOP agrees that it will consider adopting this kind of presentation. 

At the same time, UCOP resents the auditor using the term "undisclosed," argues that these are little more than unspent funds carried forward from one year to the next, that its "reserves" are $38 million not $175 million, that all the money was spent on programs that benefit the campuses, its students, and the state, and that administrative growth merely reflects UCOP's enormously complicated set of jobs that are not duplicated in other university systems.  

You'd think that this would be the end of it.  UCOP could say yes, we're moving budget presentations from Figure 6 to Figure 11, thank you for your help, and by the way we regret any confusion, which was entirely innocent, plus you don't understand our inner workings, which is fine because that's our job as a constitutionally independent entity.  

That isn't what happened.  The best of UCOP's response is Janet Napolitano's letter to Elaine Howie. The letter accepts most of the auditor's recommendations, deals with the charges of incompetence by saying UCOP constantly strives for improvement, lists some systemwide programs with budgetary amounts that it says are of value, and rejects the recommendation of tighter legislative control of UCOP.  The letter doesn't explain why these expenditures weren't present in the visible budget in the first place or why the initial list of programs wasn't complete.  

I completely understand the auditor's core beef.  Why can't UCOP automatically produce listings and expenditures for the systemwide programs? Why couldn't they have listed all those that are part of their response to the audit, organize them properly (for example, into the categories, "outside sponsors," "presidential initiatives," and "systemwide faculty research")?  

I'm doubly mystified because, over ten years ago, I was personally involved in a two-year Senate inquiry into UCOP's systemwide research programs, where our planning and budget committee (UCPB) made iterative requests for full expenditure data for all programs. It was pulling teeth with pliers, but we made progress over time. Phase 1, a full list of all programs with UCOP outlays, should have been in place a decade ago with regular updates as programs and funding changed, which they certainly did.  Phase 2, which apparently never happened, was to be tracking expenditures from UCOP to the campuses.  Is the geospatial systems funding--to make up an example-- going directly to fund direct and indirect research costs on several campuses, or have two of the four campuses moved the funding into administrative discretionary funds or, as in one actual case, has a campus converted research money into a pseudo-permanent set of FTE lines in a local department?  UCOP should have a handle both on how much is going out and how it is being spent.  Apparently they don't.  

In addition, why didn't UCOP have a unified budget both for the regents and the state?  I'm also bewildered by the dual budgets, which is to say that I agree with the auditor that in its multiple lengthy retorts UCOP never really explains the "undisclosed" budget.  Why do the books look like that? 169 pages later, I couldn't tell you. 

In any case, the numbers fly. UCOP generates the gratuitous mud wrestling of Attachment 2,  which apparently seeks victory through body count.  That attachment is a masterwork of bureaucratic defensiveness. Naturally, it doesn't work.  

The auditor's short final response begins,

The Office of the President’s 34-page Attachment 2 is demonstrative of the barriers we faced throughout the course of this audit.  Ultimately, Attachment 2 contained no additional information that would cause us to change the conclusions reached in our report. Rather, the Office of the President goes to great lengths to describe its dissatisfaction with the context we included surrounding the conclusions and the underlying philosophy related to transparency and accountability upon which we based those conclusions. As a result, we are choosing not to comment on each of the 72 points
that the Office of the President included in Attachment 2 because doing so would not ultimately change the overarching conclusion that we convey in this report: that the Office of the President needs to better serve its stakeholders by making decisions in a transparent and accountable manner. (165)

In the summary, the auditor writes,

the Office of the President missed an opportunity to receive feedback from its key stakeholders, and it demonstrated an unwillingness to receive constructive feedback. 

Thus an official state review finds UCOP's accounting substandard and also unlikely to improve.

Not Biting the Bullet on Research

The report concludes that 1 (an undisclosed budgetary surplus) + 2 (unjustified staff growth) = 3 ("significant change is necessary to ensure that the Office of the President's actions along with the mission of the University of California").   This is a brutal conclusion: the State Auditor is saying that UCOP isn't running UC for the public benefit.

The immediate rationale for this claim is continuous administrative growth coupled with "poor tracking and monitoring of its systemwide initiatives" that leads to misused funds.  The deeper rationale is what the funds are allegedly misused on--systemwide research.  The audit's own list of UCOP initiatives (Table 11, pp 71-72) shows spending in a number of categories, but research seems to be the big problem.   It concludes,

Although most of these initiatives provide academic or public benefits, we question the Office of the President's decision to prioritize them over other activities such as campus spending on students especially given it has not sufficiently evaluated these initiatives' purpose and intent. (69)

On its face, the statement is ridiculous: the auditor lacks the credentials to question UCOP's judgment about academic priorities, and research, the main component of most of the programs, is part of undergraduate education at a research university, not a subtraction from it.

The underlying problem is that UCOP has failed over many decades to explain the centrality of research expenditures to all levels of students.  Longtime VP for the budget Larry Hershman believed the legislature refused to grasp the research mission and always would, so the University had to act as though the state's whole allocation was going into student instruction and related services.  I don't doubt he had empirical reasons to think this, but most legislators also thought the internal combustion engine had made train travel obsolete. At some point you have to roll up your sleeves and do the tireless teaching that reframes the debate.

The tragedy of this particular audit is that UCOP is so busy saying it did nothing wrong that it can't tell the more important story, which is that research is a vital public function that costs enormous amounts of money.  UCOP has to subsidize a lot of it or it won't actually happen.  It has to use state money to do this, as it always has. We could argue about how much should be funded by UCOP vs the campuses, which is what we were getting set to do in 2006.  We could also argue about whether faculty have been pushed aside in too many of them, and whether the Senate has enough control.  But the real issue here is that the state has to pay for research as well as instruction through enrollment-based general funds.  UCOP's dual budgets may have been trying to downplay this, I don't know.  The strategy stopped working years ago, and now the battle for the state's role in research has to be fought, and not like this.

Public-Good Management

Then there's the other huge issue, which is the auditor's claim that UCOP doctored the auditor's survey results.  The auditor had sent two surveys directly to UC campus officials to find out whether there were redundant administrative services and how the campuses felt about what they were getting for their UCOP tax.  Here's the auditor's statement on the subject:

Contrary to the Office of the President’s assertion that we failed to send our survey to those knowledgeable about specific subject areas, we determined that the campus audit coordinator was best positioned to facilitate the response to one survey and the campus chief financial officer, or an equivalent position, was best suited to respond to the other survey. After we sent the survey, the Office of the President’s systemwide deputy audit officer contacted us and followed-up on some technical questions posed by multiple campuses. This level of coordination was appropriate and we took no issue with it. 

However, four days before the survey was due, the deputy chief of staff to the president organized a conference call with all of the campuses to discuss the survey. Subsequently, the emails he provided to us show campuses sent him completed surveys which he reviewed to determine, in part, whether the campus responses were within the scope of our audit. However, as we discuss on page 86, the surveys that campuses sent to the deputy chief of staff were much different than the final surveys submitted to us. As is clearly shown in Table 15 on page 87, significant changes and deletions were made to the original surveys sent to the deputy chief of staff for the Office of the President. (166)

As we know, universities, in exchange for academic freedom, agree to conduct impartial and independent research whose findings can't be skewed by politics or money.  And yet the audit claims that senior officials of a leading research university coached the subjects of a survey until they got the answers they wanted.   UCOP thus blunders right into a culture war stereotype: academics cheat, just like everybody else.  You can't trust them not to waste your tax money.   Fake news, fake science, fake climate change, #fakeuniversity.  

A depressing part of the coverage of this alleged survey tampering was the deference of the campus's top officials to Bernie Jones, Janet Napolitano's Deputy Chief of Staff, who was running the survey massage operation. For example:

Several changes were made to UC Santa Cruz’s initial survey. 

Jones told UC Santa Cruz to consider “reframing” or deleting a suggestion for greater systemwide coordination to recruit low-income students, asking administrators there to take into account the central office’s efforts in coordinating disbursement of state funds for underserved schools. 

“As you will see, I addressed 98% of your concerns and I made a number of additional changes as well (all in a direction you would not find problematic),” UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal wrote to Jones in a Nov. 23 email. Jones provided the email to The Times. 

UC Santa Cruz’s initial survey raised issues about the UCPath system, which is aimed at centralizing personnel, payroll and academic processes. 

“Some Office of the President initiatives, such as UCPath were at first very poorly and inefficiently run, but they seem to have figured it out and are on the way to bringing a huge and — often — failure prone project to a successful conclusion,” the initial response said. “The key issue is that the Office of the President provides the leadership, vision, and public relations acumen to keep the University on the best course.” 

That paragraph was removed and the final survey response instead read: “The services and leadership provided by the Office of the President are crucial for the success of the system. Especially for a smaller campus like ours, it would be both expensive and inefficient to provide those services ourselves. In addition, there is a true public policy benefit to the role that the Office of the President plays in providing uniform standards….”

UCSC's original statement was already more positive about UCPath than anything that I have heard--it was a very nice comment in fact.  UCOP apparently didn't stop with deleting the hint of UCSC criticism, but went on to exact veneration for its public service. Of course in a proper academic survey, if your subject doesn't spontaneously mention your centralized outreach program, that is the datum: it probably means they don't think this program makes much difference to them.  In the academic world, this alteration would be research fraud.  The auditor was right to toss out the results--except she also published many of them.

This part of the disaster seems to me to flow from UCOP's attempt to defend its executive sovereignty over the overall system.  UCSC's revised comment-- a smaller campus needs central services-- tries to nail shut the whole can of worms about campuses' frequent duplication of of UCOP expertise.  One example was the decentralizing of technology transfer, as over about 15 years one campus after another got their own office of technology licensing and industry alliances, even as UCOP's Office of Technology Transfer continued to preside. (Some of this decentralization is now being reversed.)   My simplified history is that UCOP used to curate, develop, and strategically guide campuses.  But in the twenty years, and especially in the last ten, perhaps from around the time that regent Richard Blum wrote a memo calling on UCOP to be "strategically dynamic," UCOP has become better known on the campuses for enforcing standardization and compliance.  Disconnected from everyday academic life, it offers the public a series of middlebrow tactics.  And as these tactics have failed to produce lasting solutions, it has also devoted itself to spin.

The budgeting and the survey meddling seem to me to have a common source, which is a closed managerial culture dedicated both to its image and its decision rights.   Much if not most of UC has become a culture of silence, of conformity, of handpicked task forces replacing senate committees, of a small list of insiders deciding everything, of non-consultation, of divisional senates that provide no information much less active discussion with their supposed constituents, of shunning or quiet retaliation in response to dissent.  Senior managers are not meaningfully accountable to their subordinates, including to the tenure-track faculty.  Some performance reviews are on a cycle and some are discretionary, but in either case comments are generally by invitation only, and results are never publicized.   If actions are ever taken, they are taken from above, and truthful explanations are not given.  UC's response to in this case is a good example of this closed culture at work: the chair of the Board of Regents posted a video pep talk that closes ranks with UCOP.   She didn't even mention the audit's criticisms, much less promise to deal with them.  It's hard to imagine any regent confronting the cognitive and ethical failures that closed cultures create.  

Like the proverbial frog that doesn't notice the water is getting hotter, we UC faculty don't seem to have noticed our gradually increasing cynicism about our university and state. Increasing cynicism has led to lower expectations.  In my email over the past few days, a number of faculty have said "well what do you expect," or "that's politics," or "that's UCOP," or "UCOP's bad, but not as bad as the legislature." Obviously I oppose legislative control, but we can't afford to wallow year after year in this choice between the legislature's intrusive austerity and UCOP's executive autocracy.   UC will go nowhere if it can't make a plausible case for its public good stature.  The prerequisite to both these things is an open culture.   Open administrative cultures depend on active governing involvement of students, faculty, and staff.