August 17th was new UC President Michael V. Drake's first day of work (red gown at left, at CSU Dominguez Hills).  He picked a hard time to start the job. But the Board of Regents has made it harder by pushing the president and the faculty out of the search for the campus chancellors.  The Board did this to the University's first Black president in the name of diversity.

Lack of diversity was the lead reason the Board of Regents (BoR) gave for rushing through changes in the selection process.  Both staff and faculty (especially tenure-track faculty) do need to be more diverse at UC.  But the Regent-commissioned report didn't  analyze applicant pools and hires to show racial disparity or anything else.  They would have had to offer evidence of systemic bias, since, in terms of outcomes, President Janet Napolitano (2013-2020) has a reasonably good diversity record with her 6 chancellor hires.  She brought on board two white men, Sam Hawgood (San Francisco, 2014) and Howard Gillman (Irvine, 2014), both promoted from within the campus, an African American man, Gary S. May (Davis, 2017), two white women, Carol Christ (Berkeley, 2017, from the campus) and Cynthia K. Larive (Santa Cruz, 2019), and a Latino man, Juan Sánchez Muñoz (Merced, 2020).  The 3 external hires were a Black man, a white woman, and a Latino.  First glance suggests that the easiest way to cut the white majority is not to hire from within.  

The Regents proposed a much more dramatic solution: a set of new search rules that overshadowed all other issues at their July meeting, including Covid infections and costs and the possible 12-16% revenue losses in 2020-21 that I discussed last time.  A review of the case suggests that a lack of chancellor diversity was not the main motivation.

In November 2019, Board Chair John Pérez convened a Regents Working Group on Chancellor Search and Selection. It produced the report, which does note the opportunity to "underscore how UC can better integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion practices into its chancellor search and selection process." But first came this:

While over the years, the Regents have delegated authority for many of the operations of the University to the President, appointing chancellors remains one of the most important responsibilities, which the Board has reserved unto itself.1 This reservation of authority requires particular attention and dedication by Regents with respect to the appointment of chancellors— the specific process which is set forth in Regents Policy 7102. (1)

Footnote 1 cites Bylaws 22.2 and 31.  Bylaw 22.2 sets out specific reservations of regental authority, and is a series of unilateral approval rights.  Bylaw 31 states that chancellors "are appointed by and serve at the pleasure of the Board," with the president advising and consulting on appointments without appointment power.  It also defines the chancellor as a direct subordinate of the Board as well as the president--as someone who can be line-managed by the Board. 

The Board's main motivation for the review appears to have been to increase its direct power over appointing chancellors.  The two discussions of the items were fraught, with both the Senate and the current UC President objecting to the changes and asking for further discussion. In the end the changes sailed through. 

First, the changes. The Board's Governance Committee Agenda for July 29th had three items on this matter, in which the acceptance of the Working Group Report would lead to immediate changes in the search policy, Regents' Policy 7102.  You can see the modifications here.   The new and approved clean copy is here.   The key changes are: 

1. Though the Board of Regents always appointed chancellors, candidates were identified and a finalist proposed to the Board by a "Committee." Now, this body is a "search advisory committee," with its powers identified as advisory only.
2. The president was the lead on running the search.  Now, "the Board and the President each has a role"--they are co-managers of the search process.
3. The five faculty members of the Committee were appointed by the Academic Senate.  Other groups selected and sent their representatives. Now, the chair(s) of the search advisory committee will select members from a slate of three for each position.
4. The Committee membership was constituted by the process of submitting names, not subject to further adjudication (I assume).  Now, the president meets only with the regental members prior to retaining a search firm or any committee meeting to insure a "strong balance" on the committee.
5. The five faculty members of the Committee were responsible for reviewing candidates and submitting names to the full committee, "working with the president."  Now, this reviewing is done by an outside search firm.
6. The Committee deliberated the virtues of the long and short lists submitted by the faculty reviewers.  Now, the lists prepared by the outside search firm are discussed by the president and the regental members of the committee.
7. The Committee came to a conclusion about the final candidate(s) together, through some (unspecified )process; the president would then communicate the nomination to the Board of Regents for approval. Now, only the regental members of the search advisory committee will vote amongst themselves on the name to be forwarded to the full Board of Regents.

In short, the chancellor search will be run by an outside search firm hired by the Regents and the Regent members of the search advisory committee. Only Regents will vote on the committee, and the result will be handed from the Regent members to the full Board. The president has been removed as lead authority in the search, and the faculty have been removed from the review process.  Faculty can submit nominations to the committee, just like anyone else.

Ironically, the actual search issue this year was not faculty having too much influence over administrative hires but having no influence at all.  During the search for the new president that led to Michael Drake-- the Regents completely excluded the faculty advisory body from contact with the applications or any of the candidates. The Senate Chair has in the past functioned as a member of the Special Committee; after an initial meeting, she was never allowed back. The Academic Assembly formally protested in a February Resolution, when the problem could have been fixed.  The Academic Council also protested in a July letter dated the day before the discussion of the chancellor search items. It objected to the refusal of the Regents even to acknowledge receipt of formal requests to be consulted. The new chancellor's search process will make them more like presidential searches, which in the current case meant the near-total bypassing of the faculty. 

The Senate response to the Working Group's search changes was strongly negative.  Before the letter I just mentioned, on July 23rd, the Academic Council wrote to the president to say that the "lack of inclusion" of faculty from the Report's interviews had skewed the results, and that it offered no justification for marginalizing faculty expertise about and personal commitment to their campus. It also stated that research university faculty members have special knowledge of what it takes to run a research university and asked that the new rules be delayed for further consultation, including consultation with President Drake.

The next Senate response was the bombshell, a letter signed by 20 former chairs of the Academic Senate, including virtually every head of the Senate for the past quarter century.  Though I've often wished for it, especially for demanding the Regents improve their generally poor job of maintaining UC revenues, I've never seen this kind of united Senate front before. The chairs' letter rejected the implication that "the UC faculty have been an impediment to the diversification of the University," pointedly contrasting the Senate's longstanding defense of affirmative action with the BoR's overturning of it in 1995, from which Underrepresented Minority (URM) student representation has never fully recovered. The letter defined the process of the recommendations as "not in keeping with the best practices of our University" in having excluded faculty from the Working Group and the Senate from meaningful prior review.  In addition, the former Senate chairs criticized the demotion of the president in the chancellor's search.

[T]he proposed Section 6 of the policy . . . would require the President to meet privately with only the regental members of the search committee, and then seek their approval of the President's choice prior to submission for approval by the full board.  The effect of this change is to fundamentally undercut the authority of the President in selecting Chancellors.

This critique of the Regents on both process and substance was the basis of a Los Angeles Times article by Teresa Watanabe. Many Regents, including the Board chair, first read about the 20 Chairs' retort in the newspaper, and they were riled before the discussion began.

There were two discussions of the search process changes during the meetings , first on July 29th (here) and then July 30th (starting at 2'09" here). The Working Group report was defended by Regent Lark Park, the WG chair, and by several of its other members.  I watched both discussions on line, and didn't hear anyone identify a clear operational problem to which the changes were a solution.  Park said the point was to be "more efficient, accountable, and inclusive" (2'04").  No one objected to this goal,  but there were questions about how these changes accomplish that? A few Regents expressed frustration with getting only one finalist  at the end of the search on which they were asked to do an up-or-down vote. But there were other, simpler ways to address this understandable concern. For example, the Committee could meet with the BoR while the process is ongoing, or the President could write reports to the Board chair every 2 weeks, or the Committee could submit a short list of 3 final candidates to the full Board instead of just one (as will now be done for Committee selection). None of these would require pushing the faculty or the President out of the process, as these changes do.  

The outgoing President didn't support the changes. Janet Napolitano noted there's "the question of what the problem is that we're trying to fix here" (2'41").  She said the Working Group could try to reduce their differences with the faculty and also said that "it would be useful to consult with President Drake." She noted that while most of the changes are "not necessarily objectionable," that one is a change to the president's power and the other is change to the faculty power. She said to the Board that her preference was that they "receive the report" at that meeting and engage in "greater consultation" with the faculty. They should "then consult with President Drake. I think that would be very respectful of him "(2'43"). 

Here the President offered the Regents accurate definitions of both respect -- consultation and discussion prior to a decision--and of shared governance, in which the process treats the views of all parties subject to equal treatment.  The sharing of governance requires what we can call epistemic parity, in which one set of views cannot simply negate the other, but must seek some kind of mutual understanding if not reconciliation.  In the previous process for selecting a UC campus chancellor, the sharing took place during the review and consultation process, after which the BoR hd full decision rights.

The expression of regental views went on for quite a while. A handful of Regents, including immediate past chair George Kieffer, acknowledged the deep dissastisfaction of the faculty and the clear non-support of the president, and said these were reasons enough to delay the vote until further consultation had amended views (3'08").  They were in effect speaking for shared governance's underlying principle of treating the epistemic positions of each party as valid, requiring further efforts at accommodation.

A bit later Board Chair Pérez asked Regent Park a narrower question-- whether she had in fact not shown the document to the Senate leadership in time for the Senate to deliberate and opine. She said there had been a meeting with the chair and vice-chair, and they had noted they needed to consult with the Council, which then produced the negative letter linked above.  Park then responded to the general concerns (starting 3'23").

I will just go back to this Chancellor appointment being the purview, responsibility, and duty of the Board members and the Board members alone in ultimate approval, and that is why Regent search committee members are treated differently in the proposed amendments to Policy 7102.  With regard to . . . the letter signed by many academic chairs. I was at some level astonished to receive that letter. I felt that the letter was not respectful, or did not acknowledge the purview of the Board, and the many Bylaws and Standing Orders that currently exist that show exactly who reports to whom, what has been delegated to whom, and what responsibility lies where.  22.1, 22.2, 30, 31 of the Bylaws all speak to this. Standing Orders 100.1, 100.4 clearly lay out the responsibility. . .  This idea that the Board does not have this prerogative is frankly surprising in terms of coming from past members of academic leadership in that acknowledgement, and seemed to suggest that the Chancellors function more as political appointees of the President, and again that if they're not picked by a president they cannot be loyal.  I find that not credible, and contrary to all the policies and bylaws that I have seen. Not to mention that upon that logic, none of these chancellors today could be loyal or follow the direction of our new President because he did not have a hand in picking them. So that to me is a fear that can be quickly dispelled by taking a more vigorous look at the existing Bylaws and Standing Orders. 

I really welcome the wisdom of our new president in a great many things. But I will take today as a case in point for not delaying further action. 

Park said that we've had a lot of discussions already and that to say "we should spend a great deal more time on these recommendations " would suggest that the Board cannot do  time and process management, and "then as a Board we cannot govern if we literally tie ourselves up in endless discussion." She was totally opposed to further consultation. She added, 

This is not an attack on shared governance. Truly it is not.  Faculty are the lifeblood of the university. That will not change with these recommendations. . . . And I would really love to see 24 [sic] academic senate leaders come together to opine on things that are deeply concerning and weighty to the institution--rather than whether shared governance has been quite respected enough in these modest recommendations.

There are several issues here. First, Regent Park missed the point of the Past Chairs letter.  It did not challenge the Board of Regents' appointment authority, but disputed the plan to end the shared procedures that had traditionally led up to the exercise of that authority.  

Second, Park read disagreement as an attack on regental authority. 

Third, her response to that perceived attack was to reassert that regental authority-- as unilateral. 

Fourth, she told President Drake that approving her recommendations was more important than getting his "wisdom."

Fifth, she denied Academic Senate's clam that this was an attack on shared governance by asserting that it wasn't. 

The full Board did indeed respond to Park's call to power.  Few explicitly echoed Park's claim that the point of the changes was to give the Regents full unilateral control.  Many instead told the faculty that they didn't want what they said they wanted, or that not having it didn't matter like they thought.  Regent Leib specialized in this Orwellian discourse, telling faculty that the Report was a "gift" to them because it meant they wouldn't have to do so much work. The discussion was often patronizing and dismissive, and oblivious to common sense basics of sharing and collaboration.  Regents like Lansing and Leib didn't want the faculty to feel bad, or think they were part of doing a bad thing to them. But they and nearly all of the rest of the BoR voted not to wait to give either the faculty or President Drake reason not to feel bad.  

Obviously nobody is going to die from all this, but the Regents' report, discussion, and vote were a textbook case of epistemic injustice, resting on the five features above.  This happens when the more powerful side tells the other that their concerns are wrong, that they need not be considered further, and that they comprise an attack on legitimate authority. 

Let me finish by widening the picture a bit.  Faculty, staff, and most campus administrators have no power over major University decisions of top management appointments, budget policy, layoffs and furloughs, system health and safety regulations, and the like.  But they do have clear jobs to do on their campuses. The function of governing boards is not so clear. What, today, is their value-added to the overall institution?  

University governing boards were justified in earlier centuries as a kind of natural aristocracy: the better people had a monopoly on wisdom, and board membership were drawn exclusively from them.  Few now espouse this kind of social Darwinist view of concentrated intelligence.  In addition, today's universities are enormously complex. The needed intelligence is widely distributed.  Experiences and needs are quite diverse. Front-line contact is more valuable than ever. The intelligence that solves problems must be integrated from a range of quarters. In this context, boards of trustees or regents are archaic forms.  The unilateral authority affirmed by Regent Park is this form at its most archaic point. 

Board members almost always lack university expertise, so that members of the campus community cannot be heard to say to each other, "How can we keep UCPath from ruining our lives? Regent N might be able to help us."  Or, "How do we reduce houselessness among formerly incarcerated students? Let's call Regent Q: she knows a ton about this, and would be glad to listen."  I have never heard a comment like this. Campuses and their many units feel entirely on their own;  the BoR is treated as a ruler, distant and adversarial, to be managed and dodged but not consulted for special insight.  The stereotype is that they are most concerned with (1) implementing the views of external powers in business and politics; and (2) exercising their own rights and powers.  

Unfortunately, Regent Park fulfilled this stereotype.  The Board, faced with a choice between power and consultation, sided with power.  Personally, I would love to bring to bear the achievements and capabilities of Regents in their own domains. I would love to see them exercise their sophistication and influence to protect the university from political interference and financial damage. Such Regents would be outward facing. Their internal gaze would focus mostly on managerial competence--on helping the senior managers serve the increasingly beset employees of the institution.  In the three domains of politics, management, and finance, such Regents would be especially focused on the third. They would insure financial vitality--they would protect and increase core revenues as necessary. 

Good trustees--like good professors, physicians, presidents, landscapers, cooks, civil engineers, parents-- don't push their authority beyond the limits of their competence. Power beyond knowledge is the great American temptation: U.S. organizations are top-down and prone to chains of command. University governing boards are generally granted quasi-monarchial sovereignty, as is UC's. The structure is inherently and deliberately anti-democratic. It is not justifiable on grounds of standard political theory. Elizabeth Anderson's book Private Government is a good analysis of the anomaly of governing authorities that have "arbitrary and unaccountable power over workers" in a putatively democratic society. Still, though lacking in political justification, unilateral power might have operational claims: Power can be earned by operational effectiveness.  But, as we have been forced to note repeatedly on this blog, the operational achievements of the UC Regents are rather modest.  Instead of addressing this problem by, for example, spending all of one day on the buried budget crisis, the Regents made themselves less accountable to faculty and to the president--the clear purpose of Regent Park's Working Group.  

As the Regents succeed at greater power and distance, epistemological bubbles will form around them, and consultants--who report to them and are unlikely to challenge them--will replace people in touch with real conditions on the ground. UC's split between Oakland's Office of the President and the campuses will continue to make this worse with a structural gulf that can be crossed only with consistent and accurate communication, and that has been undermined here by the regents own action. To be accurate, this communication must be between parties with relatively equal standing.  Exchange between superior and inferior is distorted by the inferior's need for self-protection, and the superior's entitlement and self-overestimation. I can't go into this here.  To summarize in a formula, epistemic inequality insures error.  When the Board turned a collaborative committee into a two-tier set up with superdelegate privileges for its Regents, they insured the intellectual distortions that no one actually wants.

One final note: governing boards all over the country, like UCs, have gradually come to regard the faculty as a problem for university success.  There are many sources and causes for this, but the result is default prejudice against faculty as people who just defend their privileges rather than the interests of education or university.  I must call this managerial bigotry against professionals. It is categorical, uninformed, and wrong.  UC will never move forward until its Board, including its Jerry Brown Bloc, and its allies can work through their anti-faculty prejudice and make use of their deep expertise, always freely given.  For example, each of UC's 10 campuses has some of the world's most respected scholars of race and ethnicity, who would bend over backwards to help increase educational justice and diversity.  

The saddest moments in the regental discussion on July 30th were when outgoing president Napolitano asked the Board, at least twice, not to decide the new president's role in chancellor searches before President Drake arrived. It would have meant waiting 3 weeks.  The Regents couldn't wait, and so the outcome of her last meeting as president was the triumphant affirmation of Bylaws 22.1, 22.2, 30, 31, and Standing Orders 100.1 and 100.4.

I wish President Drake the very best in his new role. I'm very sorry the Regents cut his power over  chancellor's searches.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Sentinel (Michael Drake at the investiture of  CSU Dominguez Hills President Thomas A Parham)

By Ronnie Lipschutz (Political Science, UCSC))

February 20, 2020

To: Chancellor Cynthia Larive, Provost, and EVC Lori Kletzer

From: Ronnie Lipschutz

I write this letter as an individual faculty member who has been at UCSC since 1990.  I am not representing any faculty group, department or Academic Senate Committee.  It is my own assessment after 30 years at this campus.

I attended the Academic Senate meeting on Wednesday, February 19, and felt a growing sense of dismay as I listened to your presentations and your responses to questions from the floor.  I was especially dismayed by EVC Kletzer’s repeated statement that she did not know what would happen after the Friday midnight deadline issued to the striking TAs to turn in Fall grades.  Nor was I reassured by her stated position that, should a shortage of qualified TAs follow, departments and faculty are responsible for dealing with problems of enrollments, class capacity, teaching and workload. While I am aware that such decisions are generally made “locally,” this response is a rather disingenuous one and ignores the fact that the present situation is a consequence of Administration decisions and actions taken over the past decade. Over that time, the Administration has paid little heed to either Senate or faculty warnings about the lack of funding to support new initiatives, such as graduate growth, Silicon Valley and others.  Now the faculty is being asked to address the results of 20 years of poor administration, planning and judgement. 

I will not belabor this last point except to point out that the increase in undergraduate enrollments since 2000—which have greatly exacerbated the local housing crisis—have also required growing graduate student enrollment to teach them, without having in hand the necessary resources to support the latter.  Generally, the formula was something like the following: undergraduate growth would bring in the tuition required to fund teaching while graduate growth would facilitate research and recognition which, in turn, would provide the extramural research funds and private donations that would support such growth.

Moreover, so far as I can recall, during those two decades, a number of strategic academic plans were prepared explaining that such growth was necessary for the glory of UCSC, without any transparent, public explanation of how the necessary funding was to be procured. This hallucinatory vision became dogma ten years ago when UCOP offered “rebenching” funds in exchange for a new “graduate growth” initiative. These funds were accepted with in full recognition that they were insufficient to support the new FTEs and graduates students coming to campus. 

I will not repeat here the many assurances that were offered by the Administration about how such growth would be achieved—those are available in the many documents and studies, none of which clearly explained how this would be financed.  And, until the TA strike, the Administration continued to blithely assume continued undergraduate and graduate growth as necessary from both financial and branding perspectives. Needless to say, we are now reaping the whirlwind. The Administration appears poised to use the TA strike as a pretext for reducing graduate enrollments to levels that can be funded given available resources.  If this is the plan, it is an extremely cynical one. 

Furthermore, to put the onus on faculty for dealing with the resulting crisis is even more cynical.  I do not blame you for this situation; it is the result of two decades of administrative ineptness and opacity as mentioned above.  But to shift the burden of coping to faculty, who will have to scramble to adapt, and undergraduates, who will be shut out of necessary classes and receive a degraded education, is inexcusable.  

Finally, to announce that yet another committee will be established to consider the contradictions is simply kicking the can down the road.  We all know that such committees tend to make reasonable recommendations that cannot be funded, and that their reports end up on a (metaphorical) shelf somewhere, to be ignored the next time a similar problem arises.

Which leads to the fiction of “shared governance.”  Somehow, there is a wide (mis)perception that this means joint management between administration and faculty.  Of course, it means no such thing: the Administration decides what it wants to do and then consults with the Faculty Senate for comments (with objections routinely ignored). Over the past decade, there were ample warnings from faculty that the graduate growth initiative was unsupportable, but these were simply dismissed with the proviso that “we will take care of it.”  So, perhaps you should take care of this, rather than shifting the onus onto the faculty.

If this letter sounds bitter, it is—very bitter. For 30 years, I participated in what was a promising and exciting experiment and that has been transformed from gold to dross.  I am retiring at the end of June and so none of this matters very much to me in practical terms.  But it matters greatly to undergraduates, whose credentials may well be very tarnished by this fiasco, to the graduate students, who were made promises that have been broken repeatedly and many of whom have, at best, a future career of “freeway flying” in store, and to faculty and staff, who have to bear the burden of the Administration’s generally inept administration.  We have ethical obligations to our students and, if we cannot fulfill them, we would do better not to make empty promises to them in the first place.

By Eric Hays (CUCFA)

Governor Gavin Newson presented his 2020-21 state budget proposal last Friday. The full budget summary is here; the detailed budget for higher ed can be found here.

UC Board of Regents Chair John Pérez and UC President Janet Napolitano quickly put out a statement wherein they essentially thanked the Governor for his generosity. The concluding sentence is “UC appreciates the governor’s strong continued support of higher education and looks forward to our ongoing partnership.”

While there is something to be said for the politics of maybe getting more of what you want by being polite rather than by being rude, I think there is real harm in UC making such a public statement as it probably gives the public the idea that UC is being generously funded by the state while that is absolutely not true. And this proposed budget, should it pass, will simply make things worse.

Let me start by pointing out that California public universities are provided less funding per student than any state except Florida (see the "Total Education Revenue per FTE" data).

Governor Newsom can, and did, at the his budget release press conference point to a 5.8% increase in general fund base support for UC to try to make this budget proposal look generous, but that ignores so many things.  The first point to make about the increase in funding to UC is that this is a 5.8% increase only if you just look at the general fund base budget. In past budget years, the state has provided UC with substantial one time funds. This year there is substantially less one time funding. So, when you look at total state funding of UC, base plus one-time moneys, the overall increase to UC is actually 1.3% in 2020-21 relative to 2019-20. This compares to a 3.5% increase in state revenue overall,and a 2.2% average increase in state spending across all departments,
indicating that UC is not a priority in this budget.

To be fair, the table on page 25 of the budget summary link above shows that, at the macro scale of looking just at the grossest division of expenditures in the state budget, Governor Newsom is proposing cutting spending to almost every program in state government except Health and Human Services, which gets a 13% increase, K-12, which gets a 1.6% increase, and Higher Education, which gets a 0.1% increase.  

Public higher education, and UC specifically, then are getting a small increase in funding, but such a small increase will likely be completely countered by inflation.  More importantly, while funding is growing modestly, enrollment is growing quickly. University wide headcount grew from about 200,000 in 2015 to 222,493 in 2018.  State funding for UC would have to grow at least as fast as enrollment is growing if we were just to maintain the current funding per student (and remember, California is 49th of 50 states on this metric), and this low rate of growth in funding to UC is just not going to do it.

What's more, the budget numbers above don't consider big portions of UC's budget that the state has basically walked away from since the recession: namely paying for UC's pension and paying for facilities.

The state used to pay pension costs for UC's state paid employees. But, after the contribution holiday (when the UC Retirement System was more than fully funded such that neither employer nor employee had to make contributions into it for nearly 20 years) ended in 2010, the state refused to restart their employer contributions to UCRS. Note that the state continues to pay its share of retirement contributions for other state employees, such as faculty at CSU. As UC's 2019-20 budget proposal indicates, the state has shorted the UC Retirement System a total of about $3 billion since contributions restarted in 2010. (160)

Newsom's budget last year included a $3 billion supplemental pension payment to pay unfunded liabilities of the CalPERS retirement plan over fiscal years 2018-19 through 2022-23 plus $2.9 billion for CalSTRS (the K-12 teachers’ pension) to pay unfunded liabilities over the same period. Although at one point debated, in the end there was no similar debt relief for UCRS in last year's budget. This year's budget proposes accelerating the payout to CalPERS so that the 2020-21 through 2022-23 moneys would be paid in 2019-20 -- but still no money for UCRS.

For facilities, the state is short $20 billion in education and general facilities capital funding for UC -- the buildings and other infrastructure that UC needs for its core mission of teaching and research (about 1/4 of which is seismic repairs and upgrades, 1/4 is repairs and replacement of aging plant, and half is needed for expansion of educational programs caused by past and ongoing rapid enrollment growth).
 
The bottom line is that California public universities have long had to do more with less, causing real long term damage, and this budget proposal is not going to change that.

After UC president Janet Napolitano announced her resignation, effective August 2020, the prospect of searching awoke a quotient of dread. "The Regents will pick," one Senate elder told me.  "They won't listen to us. They don't care what we think."  The idea here is that a small group of uber-regents will pop out another person whose remoteness from educational functions and faculty they will deem a virtue.  This has become a national trend: secretive searches that look for a chief executive who will preside over the university rather than develop it from within, and reflect the interests of the governing board ahead of those of the university's multiple constituencies.  Examples include presidential searches in South Carolina and Colorado this past spring.  The conflict is also present at UC (see this post for national as well as local background). 

But the UC Regents do have a formal search process.  Called Regents Policy 7101, it requires a number of steps.

The first is that the Board Chair forms a Special Committee comprised of six Regents and other ex officio members (paragraph 1).  The membership of the new Special Committee is posted here.

The Chair of the Special Committee then "consults with the full Board of Regents at the beginning of the search for the purpose of reviewing the relevancy of the criteria to be considered and approved by the Board of Regents and discussing potential candidates (paragraph 4). During the search, "all Regents will be invited to all meetings with all constituencies."  The Regents then make the final appointment, although Policy 7101 does not specify whether the full Board votes or how that vote proceeds.

The important features here are (1) the Board retains exclusive decision rights over the selection of the president and (2) every member of the Board has equal access to the meetings that constitute the search.  The Policy protects the rights of regents whom the Chair does not appoint to the Special Committee--the process is not to be controlled by the Board Chair's Special Committee or a small group of allied Regents--and affirms the Board's sovereignty over the search.

But there is also (3): in between the beginning and the end of the Policy comes a potentially huge and dynamic systemwide consultation process conjured in luxuriant description.

B. The Chair of the Special Committee will invite the Academic Council to appoint an Academic Advisory Committee, composed of not more than thirteen members, including the Chair of the Academic Council and at least one representative of each of the ten campuses, to assist the Special Committee in screening candidates.

C. The Special Committee will consult broadly with constituent groups of the University, including the Academic Advisory Committee appointed by the Academic Council, Chancellors, Laboratory Directors, Vice Presidents, students, staff, and alumni. To facilitate consultation, there shall be appointed advisory committees, each with no more than twelve members, of students, staff, and alumni. The student advisory committee shall be appointed by the Presidents of the graduate and undergraduate student associations and shall include at least one student from each campus. The staff advisory committee shall be appointed by the Chair of the Council of UC Staff Assemblies and shall include at least one staff member from each campus. The alumni advisory committee shall be appointed by the President of the Alumni Associations of the University of California and shall include at least one alumna or alumnus from each campus. Such consultation will be for the purpose of (1) reviewing the relevancy of the criteria approved by the Board of Regents and (2) presenting the nominee or nominees to members of the groups at the conclusion of the search.

In classic UC style, the executive decision making body has parallel advisory groups that allows the appearance of consultation but which it can also ignore.  Hence the pessimism of some Senate elders. On the other hand, the advisory committees have a power of self-constitution and also activity.  The only stated rule is a cap on the number of members. The named advisory committees are:

• Academic Advisory Committee
• Student Advisory Committee
• Staff Advisory Committee
• Alumni Advisory Committee

The Policy puts no limitations on the activities of the committees.  How do these Advisory Committees (ACs) actually influence the Special Committee and the overall Board?

The standard theory is prestige: find the most prominent or trusted insider from each campus and create what management theorist Clayton Christensen likes to call a "heavyweight team."  In the case of the Academic Advisory Committee (AcAC), prestige theory assumes that the regents recognize academic (or senate service-based) prestige and would honor it by adapting their views.  Each heavyweight would be recognized as speaking authoritatively for the (leadership of the) particular campus.

Here's the problem: I know of no evidence that the last three presidential searches have worked this way; the evidence I do have suggests the opposite.  Business culture does not respect academic culture, the class gaps between professors and most regents are too wide, and the key feature of Christensen's heavyweights--decision rights--is stripped from the ACs. 

If this isn't enough to undermine AC leverage, there's also the structural weakness of the committee.  With the AcAC, each campus gets one person to represent its ladder faculty; this committee has a maximum of 13 people for a systemwide ladder faculty of over 11,000 (pdf p 94).   This faculty is divided among 10 campuses, between campuses and medical centers, across all the disciplines, which have diverse needs, and across racial groups, which also have diverse needs.  The idea of one person representing hundreds or thousands of their colleagues makes no epistemological (or political) sense.  It is also a recipe for an incoherent voice coming out of the AcAC, which Senate handpicking of membership can ease only at the price of lost diversity of views.

But the UC advisory committees could affect the presidential search, by using their committees to prompt campus discussions about the presidential search in the context of the immediate future of UC.  All of the Advisory Committees could set up a series of events in which they talk with their constituents on each of 10 campuses.  They listen to hopes and fears, gather ideas about leadership needs, hash them over, and then transmit the resulting comments, recommendations, or demands to the Special Committee.  One faculty member suggested a "UC Day" in which town halls happen across the UC system at the same time. The ACs would have to identify a deadline that would fall before the Special Committee's long-listing and short-listing of candidates such that it (and the Board overall) could fully consider the input.  Each committee could do its work in about 6 weeks--2 campus visits a week (if not all done at once), plus a week to debate, formulate, and forward recommendations.  The scope of the issue is limited and the reports should be short.

Another benefit of using the ACs as a public fulcrum: town halls and other public events would be newsworthy.  Whatever they think of professors, unions, and students, governing boards do care about institutional reputation, media coverage, and what they hear back from VIPs as a result of that.  They also care about the public debates and collective movements that shape public opinion and apply political pressure.  A recent example is the issue of food insecurity and student homelessness.  For years, the Board were told UC financial aid took care of low-income students and they took no action to mitigate student poverty.  Then, sometime after Bernie Sanders put free college on the political map in late 2015, the media started covering student hunger and homelessness.  The UC Regents responded by forming a Special Committee on Basic Needs in late 2018.  The actual results have a long way to go, but the point is that governing boards do respond to public discourse, eventually, academic discourses included.

In short, though UC governance has a top-down 19th century structure, the Regents are most likely listen to faculty, students, alums, and staff under three conditions: their Advisory Committees (A) represent a real constituency brought together by a consultation process that (B) speaks publicly about its views of the University in a way that (C) publicly (re)frames the University's needs for its next president.  The idea is to create an interest, a buzz, an excitement, a university-wide discussion over what we do and don't need, and, more importantly, to construct a constituency which then builds discourses that have an institutional and political existence.  There are no guarantees, but the wager is that the state's media would cover a process in which a university system holds a discussion about its current goals and consequent leadership needs on all ten campuses.   The process would upgrade the level of public discussion about California higher ed both inside and outside the University.

This process would also help locate potential presidents with one vital skill, which is gathering exactly this kind of information from their own institutional grassroots.  This might seem irrelevant to the president's main job of political lobbying, but it is not. Recent history shows that a president without deep knowledge of the university's daily life simply cannot make the statewide case for the University's public benefit and fiscal needs.  UC's advisory committees could set an example of the creation of this kind of profound, inspiring knowledge that the University needs in its next president. 

I do hope the current Academic Senate leadership, Chair Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Vice Chair Mary Gauvain, rapidly set up a systemwide faculty fact-finding and deliberative process via the Academic Advisory Committee, details TBD. UC needs a new president with deep understanding of the University's issues, people, and potential, and the ability to learn directly from them.

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Dear President Napolitano,

You have now been the president of the University of California for nearly five years. You are one of a handful of people who speak for the entirety of the university system. You are the head of a slightly larger group (two or three dozen?) that decides UC policy.  You also have direct access to the mass media to explain the needs and benefits of UC. 

You represent a university that consists of hundreds of thousands of students as well as about 150,000 staff and over 10,000 faculty. Many of us have given decades of our working lives to UC. We have deep experience of the institution and highly developed expertise in our subject areas.  And yet with few exceptions, we have no way of bringing this expertise to the wider public.  As a group, our views are as unknown to the state at the end of our thirty-to-forty-year careers as they were at the beginning.  

This places an enormous moral responsibility on you to represent hundreds of thousands of silent people correctly. It imposes an enormous intellectual responsibility as well.

As the representative of the university, your intellectual responsibility is of course to tell the truth: universities that replace truth with politics and marketing steadily lose public trust, as they should. By "truth," I don't mean a fixed obvious fact we can kick. I mean the current state-of-the-art on a topic, created by open methods, testing, and debate, and subject to further revision as better data and interpretations arise.  The job of universities is to determine the truth defined as an issue's state-of-the-art understanding, which in all areas continues to evolve.  This means that university administrations are in the position of having to keep up with the state-of-the-art in relevant fields as generated by their students, staff, and faculty. 

One field that administrations must keep up with is higher education studies.  As a scholar in some of its most pressing subfields, I sometimes feel that senior administrators are running away from research findings rather than embracing and acting on them. 

A case in point is university philanthropy.  Last week you met with CSU Chancellor Timothy White "to discuss the future of public higher education."  The Daily Cal coverage ended with this:

Napolitano also discussed the role of philanthropic financial contributions in the UC’s financial model. 

“We have very generous donors, and if we look at the trajectory of philanthropy in the UC, we see a pretty steep upward curve over the last 10 years or so,” Napolitano said at the conference. “The point of fact is that public funding at the level it was at is unlikely to be restored, and we’re going to need to continue that upward trajectory in terms of philanthropy to support the UC.” 

This tells the audience that private donors have been and will continue to compensate for the decline in public funding. It accepts that the public funding will stay inadequate, which demobilizes the 62 percent of California adults who "say the level of state funding for the public higher education system is not high enough."  It states that fundraising, which has been a central UC fixation for at least 25 years, can grow indefinitely, and increase its share of UC's budget.  

These venerable beliefs are not correct.  But they have remained in place over many years because we have never had an open, research-driven, fact-based debate about philanthropy in which the need to increase fundraising was not assumed in advance, and in which administrators review and then follow data-based research findings.

For example, UC's most recent report on private support finds that annual giving has doubled over the past twenty years (1). That is a good thing: philanthropy funds many important specific projects that would otherwise languish.  But research has shown something you no doubt also know: philanthropy growth is not relevant to the public funding shortfall.

The basic problem is scale.  In 2006, my Senate colleagues and I showed this in a report that was transmitted to President Dynes in 2006 and presented to the Board of Regents in 2007; those slides are here).  We noted that the University, which was already down $1.35 billion in general fund allocation from 2001, would need a $30 billion gift to replace this revenue stream.  Our internal joke was that fundraising could fix UC's general fund problem-- if UC nationalized Harvard's endowment.  We are right to be proud that UC's generous donors now give $2 billion or so to UC every year.  That generates $100 million a year at 5 percent interest, which is about 3 percent of UC's current general fund revenues.

Another UC report this year, which the Board of Regents read at their recent retreat, confirmed this conclusion.

Philanthropy to the UC system and its campuses has risen by 50 percent since 2000, and now totals more than $2 billion per year. Virtually all of these funds are restricted and are not available to support general operating costs. Even if philanthropy to UC were to double in the next 10 years, the increase would nominally offset only a quarter of the decline in state funding per student since 2000, and the additional (private-interested) activities required by the philanthropic funding would lead to an even smaller offset for educational (and public-interested research) activities. Fundraising may help with capital costs, but it is much less likely to be a significant income source for ongoing educational costs. (39)

This new report supports fundraising but not as a replacement for public funding.

I'll belabor a few other issues that reduce philanthropy's net returns to the University.  Fund-raising cost indices suggest that the overhead for raising a dollar is about 20 cents, so initial net is perhaps 80 percent of the gross figures we publish.  Many gifts leverage matching funds from the University, so the true net after costs is quite a bit less than that, or even negative (UCLA's Luskin Center received a generous donation of $40 million for a project with overall costs of $162 million).   There are other subtractions: the doubling of UC fundraising needs to cover nearly 30 percent more students with inflation lowering the take another 20 percent over that ten year period.   There are institutional burdens: the donor model has spawned hundreds of school, program, and department-level fundraising programs across the UC system, whose costs in time, money, and loss of resources for the educational core have not been calculated.  More indirectly, talking up private funding may encourage the state not to rebuild public funding to 21st century requirements.  (This is a feedback loop that, given years of inadequate annual general fund increases, UC officials should consider seriously.)  And this is not an exhaustive list of issues.

As a true believer in universities, I am always sorry to find so much fault with our belief in a cherished source of revenue. But we can thank our generous donors, encourage new ones, and tell them the truth that we need to fight like mad to rebuild the public funding base that makes their giving valuable. 

I'll wrap up with a question: why are public universities competing with privates on our weakest (and their strongest) ground?  The source of UC Berkeley or UC Irvine's comparative advantage has been strong public funding.  The source of Stanford's and Cal Tech's has been great private wealth. Why don't we try to advance on our own terms?

You no doubt carefully reviewed the New York Times's major college access study a year ago.  Called "Top Colleges Doing the Most for the American Dream,"  its authors devised a College Access Index that ranked colleges and universities "based on a combination of the number of lower-and middle-income students that a college enrolls and the price it charges these students."  

Here are the top 10 places, where UC put in an astonishingly good performance. 

These figures make intuitive sense-- except perhaps for those in the final column, endowment per student. They show that UC campuses are simply not in the big endowment game. UCLA, the wealthiest UC, has a per-student endowment that is 1/50th of Princeton's. Access champion UC Irvine's endowment is 1/116th that of neighboring Pomona College. And so on. These are the results of 25 years of consistent UC fundraising focus.  They are also normal: public universities top out at $250,000 and $220,000 per student (University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and the list plunges rapidly into the 5 digits (UT-Austin's oil money gets it to $72,500).

We should have a broad university discussion of the evidence and conclusions to draw from it. In the meantime, these are my inferences from the research.  First, mass access to high quality public universities is distantly related to a large endowment.  Second, this mass quality is closely related to non-private sources of income, meaning state funding: rebuilding that must be job 1 for public university presidents. Third, we should pitch mass quality to potential donors as the general public good that leverages and transcends the special good their gifts do for particular people and programs. Fourth, we should brag about our small per-student endowments. They show we are working on a grand scale, producing value for the entire public that lies behind us.

Even without a full-scale investigation of UC philanthropy, you could reasonably revise future statements on this subject to read as follows:

“We have very generous donors, and if we look at the trajectory of philanthropy in the UC, we see a pretty steep upward curve over the last 10 years or so. The point of fact is that public funding must be rebuilt to support the full benefits of these gifts.  We’re going to need to continue that upward trajectory in terms of philanthropy.  But it cannot support the UC on its own. We must work at a massive scale to get the state the million additional degrees its needs.  We need the whole population to help us with that.

The cost to the median taxpayer would be low--but this is enough for now.

Loyally yours,

Chris Newfield

The UC Regents have finally released Justice Moreno's Report into the allegations that UCOP interfered with last year's audit.  As Chris and I noted last spring (see here, here, here, and here) the damage caused by UCOP's handling of the audit has been considerable.  With the release of the audit, newspapers up and down the state have intensified their criticisms of UCOP and President Napolitano.  Although the Regents and others are trying to minimize the implications of the audit, the damage is real because the Moreno Report is so damning.

The State Auditor, Elaine Howle, had explicitly requested that the campuses send their survey responses directly to her office.  The surveys covered campus views of UCOP itself, and were thus not to be routed through UCOP.  As the report makes clear, President Napolitano approved a plan that required campuses to submit their evaluations of her office to her office before they were transmitted to the auditor.  Although there may not have been any illegality in UCOP officials asking to review the audit responses, it was a remarkable step to take: requiring that evaluations of a superior pass through that superior would obviously have a chilling effect on the responses.

UCOP insists that their intention was simply to make sure that the responses were appropriate to the audit and represented the view of the campus chancellor. But this claim isn't persuasive.  Justice Moreno and his team found numerous examples of the President's Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff pressing campuses to make their evaluations more positive (9-13).  The chancellor of the Santa Cruz campus reported receiving an angry phone call from President Napolitano because his campus had sent their responses in without being checked by UCOP.  After he recalled his responses and went over them in light of UCOP criticisms, UCOP again pressed him to make further changes (20).  President Napolitano has declared that she didn't know that her Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff were intervening on the micro level.  But she did approve a plan that, by its very nature, would stifle the free flow of knowledge and information upon which the audit (and indeed a healthy university) depends.

In order to explain its actions, UCOP claimed a "toxic" relationship between the University and the auditor and the sense that the audit itself was political.  And the Moreno Report does raise important questions about the behavior of the auditor's staff in intruding upon and surveilling UCOP staff members (5-6).  But while these facts may help explain the attitudes of UCOP, they do not justify their actions.  Most of the discussion of the relationship between the Auditor and UCOP has focused on the 2016 audit of non-resident students which caused open conflict between UCOP and the auditor.  But it is important to remember that the struggles go back at least as far as the 2011 audit that identified funding inequalities between campuses and pointed to a correlation between those inequalities and racial composition: the poorer campuses had the highest proportions of Latinx, African American, and Native American students. Grasping that longer history is essential if UC is going to move forward from the present crisis.

Viewed together, the three contentious audits reveal several ongoing problems in UC's governance and strategies.  First, each of the audits marked the increasingly damaging effects of the implicit privatization strategies that UC adopted during the Schwarzenegger administration.  The first audit, as Chris pointed out at the time, hid the damage of state disinvestment by wrongly counting student fees as public funding.  Importantly, while the University challenged the audit's criticism of funding formula for campuses (80-81), it did not address this most fundamental change in the definition of public funding.

This acquiescence had two interconnected effects.  First, it almost inevitably accelerated rises in tuition and reliance on non-resident tuition.  Second, when the rebenching process later reduced campus inequities in state funding, it shifted inequality between campuses to their ability to generate non-resident tuition--an ability itself dependent, at least in part, on historical funding inequities.  One didn't need a crystal ball to see that the handling of non-resident students would become a political flash-point, when neither UC nor the state were willing to think seriously about how to structure a university that could meet its intellectual and social obligations while maintaining traditional, lower proportions of non-resident students.

Internally to the University, the acceptance of privatization has led UC to flail around in search of a magic bullet.  This process started during the Yudof Administration.  On the one hand, we were treated to the spectacle of the Regents' UC Commission on the Future that produced no new ideas  but exhausted people's time and energy.  On the other, we witnessed President Yudof's support of Berkeley Law Dean Chris Edley's fantasies for online education combined with his contempt for inclusive decision-making processes.  Shockingly, the eagerness to follow private sector fads (tech and managerial) didn't provide any real answers.

When President Yudof stepped down, the Regents continued their practice of following the latest managerial fetish and sought out a non-academic politician for president. In theory, President Napolitano should have been able to improve the political and fiscal standing of the university. After all, she had a successful political career and, while Governor of Arizona, had supported higher education in that state.

That expectation has proven inaccurate.  In the aftermath of the latestaAudit, UC is in its weakest political position since the Dynes presidency in the 2000s--if not since the late 1960s in the aftermath of the firing of Clark Kerr.

But if UC is in a weak political position externally, equal damage has been done to the University internally.  The effect of the Yudof and Napolitano years has been a growing centralization of power in the hands of UCOP, a tightened control over the campuses, and a marginalization of the Academic Senate as an independent voice.  Instead of initiative from below, essential to any real university, we face an intensifying managerial structure of top-down efforts to reduce the faculty's authority over academic matters.

Even President Napolitano's recent National Center for Free Speech and Expression is a symptom of this centralized thinking.  I hope to say something about its organization elsewhere, but for now I would simply point out that it was created, as far as I have been able to learn, without any Senate review.  Even a single campus research center would receive that much oversight.  Nor have more clearly administrative initiatives been thoroughly analyzed independently of optics and politics: the UCPath debacle, begun under President Yudof and continuing today, makes that clear.  We seem to have gone from Fiat Lux to simple Presidential Fiat.

UC needs new leadership.  But this cannot be limited to finding a replacement for President Napolitano.  The UC Regents, after all, have made the decisions--through their choices of presidents and policies--that have brought us to this point.  The Regents and UC must give up on trying to mimic the failed Michigan model in finance and the failed managerial model in administration.  The new leadership of the university must restore the primacy of academic judgment over the demands of finance, must seek new ways to transfer funds from administration to education, and must be open to ideas from below.  Meanwhile, the Senate must move beyond its currently reactivity and begin to act as a producer of vision and not just a commentator on administrative proposals.  In addition, faculty throughout the system need to take ownership of their local budgets and campus futures.

UC needs new leadership but it is crucial that that new leadership be based on more inclusive decision making and a vision that places academic judgement and the University's academic future at the heart of its planning.

As you have probably heard, Linda Katehi submitted her resignation from the position of Chancellor of UC Davis today.  I don't have the time to offer an analysis of the central documents but I wanted to provide links for those of you who would like to look further into the investigative report and the various responses to it.





Chancellor Katehi's Letter of Resignation

Statement of Davis Academic Senate Chair Knoesen regarding the resignation.

Report of Investigation of Chancellor Katehi (with redactions).

Text of President Napolitano's Statement on Chancellor Katehi's Resignation.

Statement by Chancellor Katehi's Attorney Melinda Guzman in response to Report and Resignation.

On President Napolitano's confidential letter to the regents on Chancellor Katehi (Cloudminder)

by Linda F. Bisson, Former Chair, Davis Division of the Academic Senate, 2006-2008; 2011-2012
Rachael E. Goodhue, Chair Elect, Davis Division of the Academic Senate 2016-2018

Dear President Napolitano:

We want to express grave concern over a pattern of negativism in the press and social media regarding women Chancellors and senior administrative leaders. 

There are strong parallels between the singularly intensive criticism of our Chancellor Linda Katehi and that previously of Chancellors Fox (UCSD) and Denton (UCSC), and of UC Vice President Greenwood. Yet, the activities that are being criticized clearly fall within the standards of UCwide practice.  This pattern is exemplified by a 2006 LA Times article that criticized compensation practices for senior UC executives: those singled out for criticism for “extravagant pay practices, perks and privilege for top executives” are all women. 

The intensity of the criticism at the time ended in tragedy for Chancellor Denton. Chancellor Fox’s term was equally framed as fraught with turmoil, turmoil apparently not experienced by her male colleagues who were facing identical issues due to budget cuts and lack of diversity and inclusion. In an article in the San Diego Union Tribune written on Chancellor Fox’s decision to step down, she is described in terms steeped in implicit gender bias, including the quote ascribed to former President Richard C. Atkinson:  “She handled that as well as she could have handled it” – not as well as anyone could have handled it or as well as it could have been handled.

Women in leadership positions are often the victims of intense implicit bias and, as a consequence, of the phenomenon of “single storyism” - the reduction of their actions to a simple narrative that appeals to the biases of a broad section of society, in this case implicit gender bias and women being incompetent for their position. Whatever they say or do in response is twisted to fit the “single story.”  We think the LA Times article listed above illustrates perfectly the problem of the single story experienced by senior women administrators at UC.  If the LA Times story were rewritten today, Chancellor Katehi’s name is likely the only one that would be added to the list.

All of UC is richer because of the participation of women and underrepresented groups at all levels. We know you and your leadership team share this belief. We are concerned that UCOP does not recognize that senior administrators who are identified with an underrepresented identity vital to our diversity are subject to vilification in the press simply because of that identity.  We are also concerned, as recent press regarding our Chancellor Katehi demonstrates, that Chancellors and other senior administrators are not well-equipped to deal with single storyism, nor is there the recognition that others, such as UCOP, must step in to address the criticism as well.

The absence of factual information on UC policies and practices with respect to external compensation for all senior administrators has led to speculative and negative public debate regarding a single senior woman, when the practice of external involvement is widespread. We would like to request clear articulation from UCOP of both the formal policies and the informal practices as they pertain to executive compensation (e.g., have senior managers been encouraged to participate in activities outside UC). We note that legislators are calling for the same review. UCOP's understanding of the broader issues involved is essential to informing these external discussions. The need for UCOP to take action is urgent.
 
We thank you for considering this request.
 
c:  André Knoesen, Chair, Davis Division of the Academic Senate
     Dan Hare, Chair, Academic Senate
     Linda Katehi, Chancellor, UCD