Sea of Marmara, Türkiye on October 3, 2025  

In the midst of enormous political pressures, universities also face a steady undertow from "AI" development, which is moving as fast as ever.  At the same time, 2025 has brought new studies, new evidence, and also new distress about the dominance of AI in economic and cultural life, in work and study.

 

For example, a British undergraduate who’s been discussing AI with her cohort told me, “Everyone is asking why am I at university? AI can do my homework and it’s already taken my job. So what are we doing here?”  The AI industry has saturated even its users with this mixture of resignation and dread.

November 20, 2015, Lincoln Cathedral  

 

Is AI Plateauing? 

“If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:

‘Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued.’

“[Though it’s bad that AI cost increases exponentially], I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.

 

“I don’t mean searching the web, rather, I mean examples like when this summer Google DeepMind released their state-of-the-art math AI able to handle mathematical Olympiad problems. It's a hybrid, very different than a leading generalist LLM. How does it work? It just considers a huge number of possibilities.

‘When presented with a problem, AlphaProof generates solution candidates and then proves or disproves them by searching over possible proof steps…. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.’

“This sort of move makes sense, because search was the main advantage for AIs against humans for a very long time . . .”

 

“Continued improvements are going to happen, but if the post-GPT-4 gains in AI came mainly from adding first better prompts (chain-of-thought prompting) and now more recently the addition of search to the process (either over many potential outputs or over the model’s parameters itself) this is different than actually constructing baseline-smarter artificial neural networks. It indicates to me a return to the 70s, 80s, and 90s in AI.”

 

SOURCE: Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

 

EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE

 

"I do think there is an information story to be told here, but I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right? And they are voting for the spirit of resentment, they are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking, they are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right? And that spirit, that vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification and like fun resentment, right?

 

“That is an emotional register that can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right? And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

 

“If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, but they do support the animating feature behind those policies, the sort of spirit of sadistic, jeering, fuck you. That's what they really like, they enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

 

“Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

 

“People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore. So they're listening to a lot of fucking --d“

 

“Podcasts.”

 

“A lot of goddamn podcasters”

 

“Fuck them. I hate those guys.”

 

“They're listening to podcasters. They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. They're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them over burgers.

 

There's this ambient disinformation and a corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves facts and policy mattering.”

 

SOURCE: Moira In Bed With The Right Podcast: Episode 42 Nov 19, 2024

 

 SOURCE: KAL, The Economist, November 14, 2024

UNIVERSITIES DOING TRUMP’S WORK FOR HIM

 

“The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

 

“In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.”

 

SOURCE: Gabriel Winant, Dissent (November 7, 2024)

 

 

IT’S THE RACE AND CLASS COMBINATION, STUPID

 

"There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

 

"Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

 

"In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

 

"But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

 

"[I]n this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters."

 

SOURCE, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024).

 

THEFT OF ENJOYMENT

 

“Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it—the smell of their food, their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the ‘other’ is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work, to reproaching him for the theft of work). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it; this is also the case with castration, which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that ‘really cannot happen’, but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship towards enjoyment:

 

‘Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. . .The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.’ (Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Extimité)

 

“What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (‘castration’) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen’, or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it ‘only comes to be through being left behind. Yugoslavia today is a case-study of such a paradox, in which we are witness to a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment.’”

 

SOURCE: Slavoj Žižek, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 1990)

 

The answer should be an obvious no, but UCOP prepared a document for the UC Regents meetings this week that points UC in that direction.

The document is background for a preliminary discussion of the UC budget for next year (2019-2020). It advocates another multi-year agreement with state government about general funding. The immediate context is Jerry Brown cutting this year's agreed increment from four to three percent (less than that net for various reasons), as well as the overall sub-par condition of the University, again facing a series of underfunded costs summarized on page 1.  New regents will not understand the regular state breaching of compacts with UC and CSU or overall state funding declines from this document. Our overview here would be more help.

The larger context is that UCOP has never found a storyline that has attracted the state's politicians into real reinvestment.  UC's general fund has been going up at about the rate of consumer inflation (which is generally below higher education inflation).  In recent years, the state has grossly underfunded new enrollments, as the budget document points out (3).  The de facto state theory has two parts: (1) UCOP cost claims are not credible enough to address; (2) UC undergraduates can be taught for an amount similar to that of community college students.

What narrative could dislodge this second assumption?  Facts on the ground suggest it can't be.  Cal State's Board of Trustees have discussed becoming an "all-transfer" university, on the theory that their state funding doesn't allow a full-scale lower-division program. UCOP took the deal of $5000 per new resident undergrad, and as far as the state knows nothing bad has happened.  In order to keep its nonresident tuition at current levels, UCOP also accepted the pressure to increase transfer students until they are one-third of new admits, and has been making progress.  This ratio has always been a Master Plan obligation, and in my long experience, transfer students are academically comparable to students who started at UCSB.  But assumption (2) remains: UC lower division education is about the same as community college, and additional money put into it is probably wasted.

The narrative that could justify more enrollment funding is that UC undergraduates need more, better learning than they are now getting, and will need further upgrades in the near future. Better learning produces both pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits.  As I noted last time, the value of universities is disproportionately non-pecuniary, so stressing only wage and workforce effects guarantees underfunding.  UC, Cal State, and the community college system all generate intellectual and sociocultural capabilities that help wage gains and job growth indirectly, but can't be measured in those monetary forms.

Unfortunately, the UCOP budget document ties future budget increases to the University's ability to support the workforce with bachelor's degrees.  The goal is "Investment to Improve Graduation Rates, Reduce Time-to-Degree, and increase degree production" (5-6).  The target is set by the shortage of 1.1 million B.A. degrees that the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) has projected for 2030 (UC's share would be 251,000 additional degrees). This commits UC to producing more degrees through faster and shorter UC learning.  

I can't delve into each of the problems with this position, but will list the main ones:

1. workforce development has always been a formal UC goal, and has not stopped state disinvestment. (See this consultant report from 2003, which in spite of its subtitle is only about economics and health).
2. UCOP encourages the non-monetary effects of university education to remain "dark matter," even though non-monetary benefits explain the cost differences between universities and job training centers.  These start with new knowledge through research--obviously a core mission of research universities--and include doctoral education and the formation of non-routine cognitive skills in undergraduates.  These things are slow and hard, and cost money.
3. the means UCOP proposes to get the additional quarter-million B.A.s--faster- and shorter degrees--slights UC's already very good graduation rates among public universities, and downplays previous progress towards shorter degree times and higher graduation rates.
4. It also ignores the possibility that further grad rate increases will be much harder and more expensive. They will often involve fixing social and economic problems, such as excessive student work hours to cover basic expenses like food and rent.  UCOP is effectively putting UC on the hook for the state's high poverty rates and income inequality, which it lacks the means to solve.
5. The normal way to increase quantity is to cut corners and lower quality.  Campus administrations already pushed departments to minimize degree requirements after the 2008 financial crisis. In addition, many have or are moving to increasing units for a standard quarter course from 4 to 5 but without increasing instruction, so students can graduate with fewer courses.   More undergrad education will have to be done by the youngest and least experienced instructors, primarily graduate students and adjuncts.
6. Paradoxically, promising to improve graduation rates will increase the chances of sub-par funding.  That's because permanent austerity has already forced the kinds of academic shortcuts that have pushed students through more quickly. The lesson some in government have drawn is that less money for UC means more UC degrees.  
7. UCOP is avoiding discussion of B.A. degree content even in the context of a narrow mainstream human-capital model of the degree.  PPIC's calculations use wage premiums to identify "college" jobs (they are these where the employer is willing to pay more to get bachelors' degrees).  They do not do content analysis of future skills (See Technical Appendix C, p 15).  Jobs in 2030 are likely to require better BAs, not just more of them.  UC could be caught well behind the quality curve.

Since UCOP isn't explaining what is really special about UC upper and lower division education, it is putting the University into price competition with the CCCs. They are cheap because they are underfunded, lack research faculty, and over-use contingent faculty.  UC can't come close to CCC cost targets, but calls for straight workforce preparation in effect ask for UC to be compared to them.  (Workforce prep also undermines the Regents' document's other goals, like well-paid high-status research faculty.)

The quality of the education UCOP gives the Board of Regents is especially important now.  California gets a new governor next year. UC got four new regents in August, none with evident educational experience.  They need reasons to see the ideal UC as something other than an inexpensive provider of middle-skill workforce growth. This document doesn't give them any.

On the other hand, a faculty group, either the Senate or CUCFA, could write a better educational storyline, one that includes workforce data while going well beyond it.  Why don't we do that?

Update: Cloudminder recounts the lack of meaningful review of Jerry Brown's four August appointments to the Board of Regents, with clips.

Following Chancellor White's February 29th visit to CSU East Bay, Hank Reichman, Emeritus Professor at CSUEB and First Vice President of the AAUP wrote an open letter to the Chancellor.  It appeared at the AAUP's ACADEME blog.  We are reposting it with Hank's permission--Michael Meranze

Chancellor White, it takes a lot of nerve for someone making over $430,000 a year, with a free mansion and a car allowance, to tell an audience of students and faculty, who earn perhaps a fifth or even a tenth of your income and who must pay to live in the most expensive housing market in America, that “we” need to live within our means. I’m quite certain, sir, that everyone in this audience would find it pretty simple to live within your means, but my question to you is, could you survive within the means the institution that you lead provides to us? I suspect not.

Of course, you are correct when you blame this situation largely on Sacramento’s quarter-century or more of disinvesting in higher education. Yes, our political leaders have failed the CSU (and the UC) miserably. But my question is, what are you doing about it?  I’m now retired, but I taught at CSUEB for over 25 years, won both the Outstanding Professor and Sue Schaefer Service Awards, served three separate terms as chair of the Academic Senate, 15 years on the Senate Executive Committee, 9 years on the system Academic Senate, and 9 years as a department chair, and never once did I witness a single trustee, Chancellor, or other top administrator forcefully demand from the state the level of funding actually required to fulfill the CSU’s responsibilities under the Master Plan. Instead, I’ve seen an ugly parade of woefully inadequate budget requests occasionally masquerading as bold initiatives, several failed “compacts” with multiple governors, and now today, from you, word of some sort of four-year starvation plan of which you seem inexplicably proud. No, rather than fighting for us, the alleged “leaders” of the CSU have regularly bombarded faculty, staff, and students with resigned exhortations to accept public disinvestment as a “new normal” and repulsively cynical calls from the wealthy to “live within our means,” even as you dishonestly claim to preserve “quality.”

Until you and the trustees actually begin to demand and fight for the funding necessary to run a proper university system of this size, don’t come to us with crocodile tears about the skinflints in the state capital.

And, given the low level of state funding you’ve managed to obtain, can we address how you’re spending that money? My question is, given that funding has decreased, how do you explain the continued growth in the numbers and salaries of top system managers? Since 2005, CSU expenditure on managers and supervisors rose by 48%, but expenditures on faculty by only 25%. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that when a CSU campus president or other top administrator departs from the university the replacement hire is just about always offered a salary no less than that earned by the person being replaced, and sometimes they are rewarded with near-instant raises far beyond any available to less privileged employees. [CSU East Bay] President Morishita, for instance, received a 10% raise just six months after he was hired, without a competitive search, I might add. In all my years here I never received a raise of such magnitude.

By contrast, when a faculty member departs, a full-time replacement is only hired when at least one or two others in the same department have left as well. And then, do you really think the new hire is offered a salary equivalent to or above that of the person being replaced? Of course not. New hires start at the bottom and work their way up. Only administrators get to start at the top and keep rising.

In short, Chancellor White, I it seems you just don’t get it. The CSU can readily afford the inordinately modest 5% salary increase your faculty seeks, even without dipping into your $2 billion in reserves that you conveniently failed to mention. As a retired professor I have no skin in this game, but I can promise you that I will still be there on the picket lines in April with my former colleagues and so will the national organization that I help lead, the American Association of University Professors. My final question to you is, where will you be?

As Dan Mitchell has been reminding us, UCOP has appointed a Task Force to implement the Regents agreement to reduce pension benefits for future employees.  As a result of the Committee of Two, UCOP has agreed to lower the amount of employee salary that can be counted towards UCRP to approximately $117,000.  They are proposing that some form of hybrid defined benefit/defined contribution plan be created to allow employees to save above that $117,000 limit.  UCOP is also proposing that an all-defined contribution (DC) plan be developed that would allow future employees to opt out from the defined benefit plan entirely.

UCOP insists that the "New retirement benefits options are being developed as a result of the budget agreement between UC and state leaders, which included nearly $500 million to help pay down UC’s unfunded pension liability." But there are several issues that need to be raised about this claim.

1.  UCOP refers to the nearly $500M that the University will receive from the state in exchange for pension modification.  But the University will have received only $96M upon the creation of the new pension tiers. I understand that the actual state budget promises only this one year of funding. Although President Napolitano and Governor Brown may have agreed on the larger number, there is no sign that the Legislature or its leadership have agreed.  What future budgets will look like is always unclear. UCOP, in effect, is proposing a serious reduction in pensions for future employees in exchange for less than a third of the money they now estimate they will have to spend to complete UCPATH.  Will their predictions for future state pension contributions be more accurate than their predictions on UCPATH?

2.  There is no evidence that either the Governor or the Legislature asked that UC create an option for a stand-alone DC plan. Sacramento's concern had to do with the limits on the salary on which benefits could be accrued, which is consistent with its hostility to high levels of UC executive compensation.   The notion that there needs to be a stand-alone DC plan appears to have emerged from UCOP or from some other source within UC.  President Napolitano's justification for this proposal seems to be that it is what has happened in the private sector so it should happen at UC.  But we should recognize that the shift in the private sector occurred not because of widely accepted actuarial proof that DC plans are better for employees but because they enabled businesses to shift the cost of retirement onto retirees. There was nothing natural or inevitable about it. It was not driven by a desire to stabilize or improve retirement security for employees.   

In addition, you'll recall that the University engaged in a serious debate about this question only a few years ago and decided to retain its long-term commitment to a DB plan.  Rather than appointing a task force to determine the best way to implement this new plan UCOP should engage in an open discussion about whether or not this is actually better for employees. There has not been, to my knowledge, any reason to think that the relative benefits of DB vs DC plans has changed in the last few years.  If anything, the weight of the argument suggests that DC plans are worse for employees and may in fact be worse for employers.  DC plans raise the fees on accounts, force employees to assume greater risk, and tie individual retirement fate even more closely to the stock market.  From the vantage point of employers, DC plans increase fees and reduce incentives for employees to stay. There is also--despite assurances to the contrary from UCOP--the danger of ultimately undermining the the DB plan by leaving it an "orphan" plan--moving funds needed to sustain it over the long term into other more volatile directions.

3.  Nearly two years ago, Colleen Lye and James Vernon documented the decline in the quality of UC faculty salaries and benefits.   The 2014 Mercer Remuneration Study confirmed these findings (see slides 33-34 for a summary).  UCOP's acceptance of the state's pension limits and even more so its eagerness to move away from a commitment to a DB plan simply accelerate this decline.  Although I think that there are reasons to cap accrual salary in exchange for sufficient state-funding on an ongoing basis, this is not the deal that UCOP has achieved. And the policy drift towards the Defined Contribution plan is an entirely different matter.  UCOP seems to be removing the conditions that promote loyalty to the institution and seeking to encourage faculty to consider UC a way-station rather than a home.  It is the self-destructiveness of existing conventional wisdom at its most short-sighted.

The faculty, and the Senate as part of the faculty, needs to insist that the Task Force be empowered to decide--after wide-ranging discussion and employee consent--whether a DC plan is good for the university and employees.  It should not be limited to deciding how to implement such a plan. 

In other words, the Task Force needs to maximize the interests of future employees and not simply implement the practices of the private sector.

UPDATE:  Dan Mitchell has now written a new post that very helpfully lays out the problems with "orphan" pension plans.

by Wendy Brown, Political Science, UC Berkeley

3rd of 5 talks from The Operation of the Machine panel, UC Berkeley October 1, introduced by Prof. Colleen Lye

I want to make two brief points this afternoon, one about freedom and one about speech. 

If forced to compress into a few sentences the contours of student freedom and its limits in public universities 50 years ago and now, those sentences might go this way:

Then:  Because developing the next generation of Californians as educated individuals, citizens and contributing members of society was widely valued as a public good, the university offered a free, high quality education to qualifying (mostly white) middle class and working class students.  Faculty (also mostly white and male) had significant power over large domains of university policy-- they determined what was to be learned and how, what counted as an educated person worthy of a degree, and much more.  But the university administration not only prohibited student political expression, it codified a panoply of restrictions as it sought to be a zone clear of politics, unmarried sex, illegal substances and, implicitly, non-whites.  Thus “the gears of the machine”—from racial exclusion to speech restrictions—were tangible controls that cast students as rightless children being prepared for educated participation in society, economy and politics.

That was Then.  And Now?  UC doors are open to anyone with the wherewithal, parental pressure or supplemental support structures to deliver the test scores, grades, and profile to compete for admission (or who have singular athletic ability, or are well-off non-residents). No longer a public good or publicly supported, UC is construed as a place to invest in oneself as human capital, and according to a set of calculations about what will appreciate or diminish this capital.  Courses are increasingly on offer like Walmart goods, and respond heavily to consumer demand.  And faculty power has receded to a few small corners of the plantation—students feel it most in the form of access to classes and grades.  In the domain of student political, social and sexual expression, just about anything is permitted.  

However, the burden is on each of you to invest your time and effort strategically, not only to gain high return on your expensive investment but to develop the little speck of human capital that is you and that is yours alone to develop.  

This burden is so great and so impossible to put down for anything —an alluring music class or other exciting course outside your major, let alone a political cause, or dwelling for uncounted hours with an idea, a question, a compelling bit of text. Thus, if there are few repressive rules or overt restrictions on what you can do or say, the conversion of the university from a public good to a private investment made by you and your family radically changes the coordinates of unfreedom faced by students today.  How much can you afford to think, learn, want or do that does not comport with enhancing your future value to employers, grad or professional schools?  What freedom to speak, protest or organize against injustice can you exercise that would not be suicidal for the human capital you are enjoined to develop here, into which you have invested family life savings or taken on debt, and which has become the supervening if not sole purpose of a university education? 
Thus, today, the gears of the machine don’t clang and grind out there:  they are are soft, quiet, and deep inside us.  And throwing our bodies on them in resistance requires a complex contortion and commitment.

Ok, that was freedom.  Now speech, where I will also mark just one of many major differences between then and now, or between what we might call the repressive liberal era and the putatively emancipated neoliberal era.  This one pertains to the ways that the neoliberal assault on public things—a public sphere, public goods, public life--has led both university administrators and would-be activists into a certain confusion about free speech as a distinctly political right, one born from political struggle and secured historically for political life.  We have seen a bit of this confusion in recent months when “civility” or “respectful listening” have been mistakenly declared an inherent entailment of free speech or academic freedom. Certainly civility and respectful listening may be expected at a dinner table, a university classroom or a department meeting—it would be good if they prevailed more routinely.  But they have nothing to do with the exercise of free speech in public, where (barring threats, harassment, or dangerous incitements), anyone may say anything…and no one must listen or listen well. 

A far more treacherous instance of contemporary confusion about our political rights comes from the Supreme Court in recent years.  From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, the Court majority has been busily granting political freedoms—of speech, of religious belief-- to corporations who may now use their enormous wealth and power to overwhelm the last standing icon of democracy, elections, and withhold medical insurance for Constitutionally guaranteed reproductive rights.

This confusion, from high places, of whom and what our political rights are for, and what they do and don’t entail, would take hours to analyze properly.  But I want to consider one especially troubling version of it on college campuses today, one that we can do something about.  This is the effort to regulate public speech to protect certain vulnerable groups from offense, hatred, being retraumatized.  

This protection racket begin, alas, a couple of decades ago with well-intentioned feminist and anti-racist efforts to outlaw hateful or offensive speech and images.  But this tool, which aimed to shield the historically hated or subordinated from being hit again in the present, has not remained in the hands of the Left.  Indeed, while it’s animating the contemporary “trigger warning” madness (a discussion for another day) it has also become one of the more potent instruments of illiberal American ultra-Zionism today.  It is what dignifies the fallacious argument that publicly criticizing Israel on campus creates an unsafe or offensive climate for Jewish students.  

So what begin as a concern with subordinating or hateful speech has been appropriated to silence protest against power.  Of course any political argument can be flipped—Californians know this best from the legislation that ended affirmative action, which, you’ll recall, was called The Civil Rights Initiative.  But there’s something more troubling here, which is the confusion of the public sphere with therapeutic spaces or homes.  The domain of free public speech is not one of emotional safety or reassurance, and what you might hear in Sproul Plaza or up at this podium might be disturbing, uncomfortable, enraging, even offensive.  

Public speech is one of the most powerful weapons ordinary human beings have, and even the most civilly uttered sentences can disturb or terrify.  Certainly the speeches of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., or Malcolm X made neither white people nor many blacks feel safe.  Certainly the revolutionary slogan, “liberty, equality, fraternity” did not reassure either the French aristocracy or its minions in mid-18th century Paris.  Do you think Wall St Bankers felt safe when they walked past thousands of Occupy protestors decrying the obscene wealth, destruction of democracy, and carnage of public goods for which they were being held responsible?  Do you think closeted homosexuals felt safe when the Stonewall rebellion broke out? Do you think men who have pushed, drunk or drugged women into unwanted sex feel safe as women on campuses everywhere are finally speaking out against the commonplace of sexual assault?  Or that civil servants, police and other hired guns of regimes across the Middle East felt safe when citizens amassed in public squares to denounce them during the Arab spring?  Emotional safety is not what the public sphere and political speech promise.  It’s for cultivating at home if you are lucky enough to have one.  It is what you seek among friends and intimates where you expect your vulnerability to be taken into account. 

A university education, too, ought to call you to think, question, doubt.   It ought to incite you to question everything you assume, think you know or care about, not because those assumptions or cares will be jettisoned.  Rather, because, as those wild-eyed radicals Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill insisted, there is no possibility of knowing what’s right, justified, valuable or true unless you question deeply and relentlessly…unless you’re willing to consider whether your attachment to an idea or principle is really just a teddy bear you cling to, a comforting familiar.  The public sphere and a university classroom are not for hanging onto your teddy bears.  Your bears have their place, back in your room where you’re safe and restored.   But when we demand—from the Right OR the Left-- that universities be cleansed of what is disturbing, upsetting, enraging, “offensive” or triggering, we are complicit both with the neoliberal destruction of university as a place of being undone, transformed, awakened (rather than a place to get job training) AND with neoliberalism’s destruction of public spaces and the distinctive meaning of political rights, (rights that some in this room fought to bring onto campus 50 years ago).  

Let’s demand something far more important, which is to be provoked and challenged, every day and down to our very toes in what remains of this extraordinary institution.  Let’s have the courage to stand for that, and to be willing to withstand it.  

I exaggerate a bit.  When the press covers for-profit diploma mills or exploding student debt, it is smart and skeptical.    When they cover college funding or ed-tech, it gets gullible and naive. 

Take a recent entry from the New York Times: Bringing Tech Culture to the Staid College Quad.  First of all, what non-hibernating person thinks the college quad is staid?  A major Atlantic Monthly analysis of "The Dark Power of Fraternities" showed being on the quad endangers your health.  In staid Santa Barbara this year, some of my students were date-raped, stalked, framed by the local cops, and killed in a drive-by shooting.  The college quad sees protests about racism, abortion, foreign policy, police violence, and administrative misconduct.  The quad does teaching and research that is generally over the horizon of the average newsroom.  Staid is a patronizing and ridiculous word for today’s universities, which are fully immersed in their surrounding societies, while having also to stay ahead of them.

If the outdated stereotype is one problem with college coverage, falling for sales pitches is another.   Journalists seem now to believe that professional educators are a selfish special interest, while corporate marketers are impartial observers who offer the true picture.

The Staid Quad article is about the high cost of college textbooks.

In a report last year, the Government Accountability Office said the price of new textbooks rose 82 percent from 2002 to 2012, only slightly less than the 89 percent rise in tuition and fees, and far higher than the 28 percent rise in overall consumer prices.

Very bad. Textbook prices are outrageous. Who gets to explain the problem? Dan Rosensweig, the chief executive of Chegg, an education services company. “Learning has been an inefficient market,” he says. This fits with the stereotype that teaching is inefficient and teachers like it that way, so they are just fine with overpriced texts. Chegg.com’s comparative shopping service is apparently the answer – improving price information will make textbooks a more efficient market and thereby lower prices.

Actually, no.  Students aren’t price gouged by universities or their generally sad, post-book “bookstores” that sell big gulp water bottles and school sweatshirts. Students aren’t price gouged by faculty, who have zero control over text pricing.  Students are price gouged by publishing monopolies, who set prices on a captive audience.  Academic publishers are gradually strangling university libraries to get 20-36% profit margins on scientific journals, where investigators review for free but pay to publish.  The same goes for textbooks.  You can't write a good article on excessive textbook prices unless you can say "exploitative economics of academic publishing," but that's what this ed-tech article does. Textbook prices have risen because for-profit educational services make as much money as they possibly can off students, and seek market positions that protect this pricing power. Sure enough, Chegg charges for tutoring and job placement services that universities currently provide their students for free. And yet we are supposed to think that Chegg-style for-profit services will cure cost problems that their sector has produced.

There have been free services at the public college near you, but not such good free services anymore, since the public colleges that serve the lower- and middle-income, socially-un-networked students who really need job placement have been subject to year after year, decade after decade of budget cuts.  These public colleges now spend in many cases ten to fifteen cents on the dollar Harvard spends on its students.  The California Community College system, with its wealth of first-generation and low-income students, has 2000 students per advisor.  So why don’t the CC's have more advisors.  Because they don't have the money. Why don't they have they money?  Now we're getting to the right question.

They don't have money because state politicians keep cutting their budgets.  This pushes us one more step.  Why these constant cuts to the state share of higher ed?  Well, there are strong competitors that weren't around 50 years ago, like Medicaid and the world's most overactive prison system.

But there is also the tax avoidance culture of the corporate America to which “educational services” companies belong. Think Apple, tax avoidance champion on 35% profit margins (important revelations here and here). Think Google, who furnished the engineer who started Udacity, the company dedicated to driving market inefficiencies out of teaching by replacing teachers with screens—until that turned out not actually to work.  Think the whole iEconomy, engaged in continuous tax arbitrage and thus social disinvesting around the world. Think effective corporate tax rates at 12.1%, 1/3rd the nominal rate, 1/3rd the rate you and I pay. Think Bechtel, UC's partner in national lab management, "one of the country’s largest engineering firms, [re]organized as [an] S-corporation to avoid corporate income taxes."  Think the growing gap between corporate profits and corporate tax returns, on the federal level, which is not so different from trends in the states, where corporate taxes are down to 5% of revenues (California).
Whether or not the products of the private alternatives to public universities actually work, the cuts continue, conveniently for Chegg et al., who can charge for services that used to be free in the public universities that tax arbitrage continues to destroy.

Should journalists have to talk tax code every time they praise ed tech? No. Should they ask whether the educational solutions of corporate marketers aren’t in fact the problem? Absolutely yes.

And what I am as a professor doing about the high price of textbooks. What I have always done: Order old editions that have lots of used copies around. Put copies on reserve in the library. Give desk copies away. Scan and post documents on protected websites. And of course overuse my departmental xerox machine--which we'll have money to replace around 2023.

The best tabulation of the final compromise stimulus for research is AAAS's. A good summary of the overall picture for higher ed can be found at Inside Higher Ed.

I will have to do some studying to find out how much of this is new money and how much already in the works.

Meanwhile, the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) have come out with their important annual report on state expenditures on higher ed.

The background for the current downturn is as follows: "The report . . . indicates that per-student state appropriations were on the rise from 2006 to 2008, following four consecutive years of decline. Even with these gains, however, state-supported colleges are receiving less in constant dollars per student than they were in 2001 — a peak year in data that stretch back to 1983."

Since public higher ed is still underwater in relation to 2001, we're going to need a whole new stimulus to avoid another dive towards the bottom.