Bodrum Castle, Türkiye Sept 12, 2025   

 

 

At our friend Andrea’s birthday in Hampshire last weekend, the Man in the Lime Suit said to me above the din, “they’ve taken the spark out of everyone. Taken what’s inside people that belongs to them and makes them act.”  I nodded. The spark never does go out, but I knew exactly what he meant.

 

The spark to make one’s own things is the origin and outcome of teaching and research. It leads to a set of powers in art to show what’s not seen and to diverge from what exists. 

 

In politics, it’s to break with a nightmare of the present, and build an alternative to it, brick by brick, where you have to make most of the bricks yourself. 

 

In management, the spark enables the creation of the positive narrative of your institution’s destiny and the coordination of your people into a powerful movement towards it. (I wrote about these linked elements last time.)

As you may know, a 3-1 majority of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Columbia University's Teaching Assistants (known at Columbia as Instructional Officers) are to be considered "employees" under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act.  As a result of this ruling, Columbia's TAs (and by implication those at other private universities) now have the legal authority to seek an election to select a union to collectively bargain with the University.  In so ruling, the Board Majority overturned a previous decision concerning Brown University but also, and more significantly, rejected the argument that if a graduate student's relationship with their university was "primarily educational" (6) they could not be considered employees when serving as Teaching Assistants.  Instead, using the legal equivalent of "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck..." the Board Majority ruled that when graduate students functioned as common law employees (under the power and direction of managers subject to sanction and receiving compensation) then they should be considered employees.

Moreover, the Board majority noted quite correctly that whatever may have once been the case, in the modern corporate university graduate student employees provide important economic service to their university.  As the majority noted (16):

Teaching assistants frequently take on a role akin to that of faculty, the traditional purveyors of a university’s instructional output. The teaching assistants conduct lectures, grade exams, and lead discussions. Significant portions of the overall teaching duties conducted by universities are conducted by student assistants. The delegation of the task of instructing undergraduates, one of a university’s most important revenue-producing activities, certainly suggests that the student assistants’ relationship to the University has a salient economic character.

The Board thereby acknowledged the current structure of university labor--that Teaching Assistants (like adjunct faculty and tenure track faculty) provide important economic value to universities above and beyond the educational benefit they may receive.  That economic value is generated by teaching classes and sections that bring in tuition.  Without this revenue, private universities could not exist. Moreover, this  labor takes place under the determination of the university's needs and not of the educational logic of graduate education.

In doing so, the Board recognized the logic that has been systematically imposed by university managers onto their teaching forces for decades now.  As is common knowledge, a substantial amount of the actual teaching in higher education is done by graduate students and adjuncts (of course the amounts vary institution by institution).  Despite all the worries expressed about how collective bargaining will intrude inappropriate economic questions into academic life, it is, in truth, the changing labor strategies of universities that have already subordinated academics to economics.  The never ending cries to make universities more like "businesses" (i.e. lower labor costs) is only the most obvious symptom of this transformation.

Predictably, the managers of leading private universities have objected to this recognition of reality in the discussion of graduate student employment.  As Corey Robin has pointed out, Chicago, Columbia, Princeton and Yale all quickly released statements warning graduate students that they might lose their individual voice in the overweening collectivity of a union. Implicit in all of these discussions is the threat that if graduate students voted to be represented by a union on issues relating to their working conditions, these negotiations would interfere with the educational relationship of faculty and graduate students.  As Columbia's Provost John Coatsworth put it in a letter to staff: "For my part—and, in this, I speak for my colleagues in the University administration and for many faculty members—I am concerned about the impact of having a non-academic third-party involved in the highly individualized and varied contexts in which faculty teach and train students in their departments, classrooms, and laboratories."  But this claim is absurd on its face.  As Provost Coatsworth must well know, if the graduate student employees vote for collective bargaining it will be graduate students and not some "non-academic third party" conducting the negotiations in a situation in which universities have long let non-academic (financial) considerations shape their programs.

It is hard to tell whether these responses are a sign of managers' failures of self-awareness or truthfulness.  After decades of transforming themselves on the model of the financial industry (and ensuring that many of their students end up in finance), they now worry that economic interests may disrupt academic relationships.  But graduate student employees at Columbia and elsewhere are seeking an institutional mechanism to address a power imbalance between them and university management. It is in fact this power imbalance that is destroying the academy from within, and not bargaining rights designed to correct it.  The NLRB recognized that.  Reality made a rare appearance in the discourse about the economics of higher education.

We've been told that public colleges and universities have entered a New Normal. It's supposed to be stable and sustainable. It gives colleges less--to make them learn to do more.   Happy scenes like commencement at San Francisco State, at left, are to carry on unimpeded, with lower costs but no loss of learning or research.

This week, this insidious narrative was again undone by several stories about San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, and their private cousin Stanford University.

1. Defunding Democracy

First, a rehearsal: The democratic vision of U.S. higher ed was that the burgeoning masses could get a degree that was cognitively the same as that of elites, even though they lacked the latter's social networks and private resources.  Twins separated at graduation, one going to Stanford, say, and one to UC Berkeley, with a sibling already enrolled at San Francisco State, would have student experiences that would differ in trappings but not essentials.  The great faculty and facilities at the two public universities would allow them to offer cognitive gain that was functionally similar to that received by the Stanford twin, who would have social but not intellectual advantages.  No one thought they were dooming public university students to second- or third-tier status in a secret caste system.

Of course four years of Stanford seminars, where the student:faculty ratio is now 4:1, had advantages that SF State's 50-student courses or Berkeley's 600-student lectures did not. But economists calculated that by 1980, public colleges spent 70 cents for every dollar spent by the privates (p 237). The assumption was that the gap would continue to close. As it did, artificial and unjust barriers of gender, race, religion would continue to erode as the wider society became more prosperous and more enlightened.

Instead, by the 1990s public colleges were spending only 53 cents on the private dollar.  The five public flagships that had been in the top 20 in US News & World Report's first ranking, in 1987, later all fell out of that bracket (p 237).  By 2013, public research universities were on average spending 45 cents on the private research university dollar.   Public masters universities like SF State were spending 21 cents.  Community colleges, the favored political cure to our national attainment ills, were spending 14 cents on the private research university dollar (all from Figure A2).  Meanwhile, UC Berkeley's Pell Grant rate--a proxy for low family income--is 35% while Stanford's is 15%. Since UC Berkeley enrolls over 27,000 undergrads to Stanford's 7000, UC Berkeley educates 9 times the number of low-income students each year.  It has much less money per poorer student to educate them.

We have been taught to call this efficiency.  It is grossly inefficient, socially speaking. It is also unjust.

2. A Tale of Two Universities

This week, Nike chairman Phil Knight announced that he was giving $450 million to found Stanford's Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, which would bring the best and brightest from around the world to study at Stanford so they could return to their home countries to address major problems there.  Press coverage likened them to the Rhodes Scholarships. Stanford will apparently contribute another $300 million, for a total endowment of $750 million.  The statements of the two principals, donor Phil Knight and Stanford president John Hennessy, made it clear that the goal is to create global leaders.  KQED's Forum interview with Mr. Hennessy features repeated claims that the program will not only offer the best academic training but will create the world's top leadership in every domain. The key word was leadership.  Hearing the elaborate plans for special treatment of a very small group of international students, I concluded the program is tightly focused on deluxe training for a worldwide super-elite.  They would preside over the broad democracy of intelligence rather than be part of it.

The micro scale of the student output is important.  Leaving aside the tarnished public image of university fundraising, increasingly defined as rich people giving huge, unnecessary donations to rich colleges, it looks as though the gift money goes to cover full cost of attendance for a total of 100 students for three years.   The program will have at most 300 students at a given time. A 5% annual return on the overall endowment will generate $125,000 per student per year.  This is not enormously more than what a private research university normally spends on each student ($90,000 in the Delta Cost figures linked above). And yet Knight-Hennessy has overnight become the #130 endowment in the country, about the size of Bucknell University's, itself a fairly posh school with 3,565 undergraduates. It is twice the endowment of that of the University of Wisconsin system.  In short, the Knight-Stanford gift is effective as micro-scale elite training but woefully inefficient as a mode of democratic higher education.  It just isn't part of that world.

This might seem unfair to the Knights, since they have given generously to Oregon's flagship public university, the University of Oregon.  But of the $1 billion the Knights had donated to charity prior to this gift (on an estimated net worth of $19 billion), $34.7 million went to public university campus academics (non-medical).  The figure rises to $76.4 million by counting their gift to UO's athlete tutoring center.)

Meanwhile, also this week, San Francisco State professor Joanne Barker revealed that the SF State central administration has proposed that the College of Ethnic Studies be cut by 13.8% next year. This would bring post-2008 cuts to 25% of COES's budget (in nominal dollars).  COES is the only college of ethnic studies in the United States and its founding and development are a matter of national legend.  Each year it teaches most of a Stanford (6000 enrollments) with a current-year budget of $3.6 million.  COES is required to do this, on a per-student budget, expressed as a share of 6/7ths of Stanford's instructional expenditures -- which I estimate from this financial report (p 54) and the Delta averages to be between $440 and $540 million--well, the fraction is too gruesome even for me.

In Prof. Barker's post, I was riveted by what few faculty discuss: the public college working conditions as they affect student learning. She noted that Cal State defines their basic teaching load to be 5 courses a term, which is similar to the load at a community college or high school. Faculty members then buy out courses with administration and research, generally one course per term for each activity.

The other three courses they teach, and they are expected to enroll 50 students each. The overwhelming majority of faculty in the CSU are not provided with teaching assistance. This means that faculty are expected to teach three courses and grade the work of 150 students per semester without aid.

Ideally, a humanities or social science course would assign each student two papers in a semester and then offer detailed grading of the kind that allows students to see their full range of issues and address them.  But one professor can only grade 300 papers on top of the rest of their teaching, research, and administrative job by sacrificing the rest of their life.  The other solution is to cap the quality of feedback at a modest level, by replacing at least one paper with an exam and standardizing the exams as much as possible.  The normal workload sharply limits the intensity and detail available to an individual SF State student.  Politicians who like the "efficiency" of these low costs are not thinking about the cost to educational quality for non-elite students.

CSU faculty are also expected to do research.  These days, state college tenure-track faculty have research university doctorates and the intellectual lives and research ambitions to match.   SF State students are supposed to be exposed to the same up-to-date material as their siblings at research universities in order to avoid the educational class system we're discussing here.

Prof. Barker described the SF State/ Cal State system for research support:

The only viable support for faculty research—the foundational basis on which curriculum design, publications, and conference presentations are produced—has to come from a modicum of CSU and campus-based grants and one-term sabbaticals. These grants and awards are highly competitive. 

At SFSU and in the COES, faculty wanting time for the professional development of their research and writing or for travel expenses to vet their work at conferences and workshops generally must secure outside funding from equally competitive sources. The policy has been that faculty are “charged” $10-12,000 per course per term for course release. Meaning, effectively, that a faculty person who wants time off teaching for research and does not have a CSU or SFSU grant to do so must secure an outside grant or fellowship at a minimum of $30,000 for a term and $60,000 for the academic year. Since most national fellowships, such as the Ford Foundation, average $45,000/year, CSU and SFSU has created a situation that essentially disqualifies faculty from being able to apply for these awards unless they are willing to make up the difference out of pocket.

Our colleagues in the CSU system already teach too much to do the expected research at scale, and apparently are also asked to supply from their own salary a subsidy that normally comes from "institutional funds."  These conditions demand their heroic efforts to maintain their research programs while single-handedly developing higher-order skills in 150 undergraduates at a time.  The simple reason is that the CSU system is not funded to support research, and the very limited funding they do allot to this will not go in any quantity to the arts, humanities, and qualitative social sciences.

This is the context in which the New Normal demands the public university be cut yet again.

3. Berkeley's Failed Formula

The other widening gap is between a university like Stanford and one like UC Berkeley.

The post-2008 cocktail of cuts and austerity has been very hard on UC Berkeley's budgets.  Officials followed the post-public formula to the letter: accept the public funding era is over and keep increasing fundraising and sponsored research.

They also renewed the fixation on inefficiency.  The Birgeneau administration hired outside consultants, and they generated a plan for administrative savings called Operation Excellence (OE), which had a number of component programs.  The idea was that the projected annual savings of $75 million would help the campus weather the latest round of major public funding cuts (from 2002 to 2012, UC Berkeley's state general fund appropriation went from nearly $500 million to under $300 million per year, a drop of 54% in real terms).

Some of OE's programs made a lot of sense, like simplified equipment sourcing.  Others would provide little or no return in exchange for degraded service, like the herding of departmental staff into a separate building off campus under Campus Shared Services.  The promises of savings were always overblown (see "Bain's Blow to Berkeley"), and the implementation seemed to be undermining the efficiency of distributed innovation rather than reinforcing it. Faculty were being separated from staff, and it appeared that different departments were going to get different speeds and quality of service depending on their ability to pay, United Airlines style.

But neither the staff segregation nor the new service inequalities have had budgetary benefits. The overall OE annual savings are about half of the projected $75 million (page 12).   Campus Shared Services has failed completely. Its annual savings are now expected to be zero--actually negative, since the campus has lost millions on this program so far.  Even if everything had gone according to plan, OE is a classic example of a "nickel solution"-- $75 million a year is 3.33% of the campus's $2.25 billion annual budget, and this benefit would never have fixed larger budgetary problems.

Some of these figures come from outgoing Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration John Wilton's 2013 budget commentaries, "Time is Not On Our Side" (Part 1 and Part 2).  The structural deficit was already well known to officials by then, and in fact had been a topic of discussion quite a bit earlier.  But the strategies that were part of the deficit's formation were still expected to fix it.

The half-way privatization model has been broken for a long time, and is now scaring everyone, even the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times editorial boards.  They are right to be scared. Public flagships no longer have the resources to do teaching and research at the top level of quality--and for new social conditions-- that the state assumed for all its non-elite students.

I don't know which of the old ideas UC Berkeley officials thought would fix the structural problems. Perhaps they hoped that growth in non-resident tuition, coupled with a doubling in professional school fees (since 2005), plus a few big fundraising wins, some new industry partnerships, and more non-operating revenues, would get them to the other side of the Jerry Brown austerity era where they would see serious tuition increases again.

Perhaps they didn't think they could fix the structural problems.  John Wilton made this case very well.

While it is tempting to believe that reductions in our operating expenses are the key to long-term stability and sustainability, it is fairly easy to illustrate that it is not possible for costs to become consistent with current revenue projections if we are to maintain the current standards of access and excellence.

Since cost-cutting wouldn't actually work, and since, as Mr. Wilton had observed, Berkeley now competed for its three largest revenue streams (tuition, research, and philanthropy) against every other university in the country, Plan B would be, by default, a reduction in quality.

Plan A has of course always been restored public funding, which is the only way to pursue the democratization of intelligence.  But senior managers seem to have given up on that.

4. Berkeley's Faulty Forum

This is the context for Chancellor Dirks's "Announcement of Comprehensive Planning and Analysis Process."  Its most important move is to announce the structural deficit.   It also describes short- and long-term measures. They won't have much effect: they have all been in place for years, and their effects are already baked into the budgetary cake.

The sole exception is "realignment" of academic structures.  That will make a meaningful difference only if it involves (a) mass staff layoffs, perhaps in the company of (b) faculty layoffs, accomplished by shrinking some academic departments and closing others.   Staff groups have already been raising the alarm about this prospect, which was the lead-in to the Forum the campus's senior leaders held last week.

Chancellor Dirks et al. defined four major planning areas: athletics, fundraising, administrative initiatives, and academic realignment.   Faculty members from whom we've heard thought there was little news about the actual planning.  One wrote,

Well,

(1) it would have been considerably shorter if four words had been proscribed:  "excellence," "strategic," "synergy," "realignment." 

(2) Provost Steele offered no substance except at the end, when he pretty much admitted that they plan to solve the problem of (a) increased enrollment; (b) shrinkage of graduate programs/increase in $ amount of each fellowship by.... increasing lecturers. 

 (3) on fundraising, they claim "the work shows that every dollar returns $7."  I have since asked someone in the relevant office for the numbers and have been told it doesn't have that information. In the Forum, they parried the fact that 99% of giving is restricted by claiming gifts have funded buildings, endowed chairs, etc., which is of course true but not to the point about covering operating costs.  The foundation and campus board get representatives on the advisory committee for the "Office of Strategic Initiatives."   

(4) Sibley auditorium was FILLED, and faculty asked many good questions--about how much of our structural deficit is debt servicing (I think they said that's now at $100 million, and will grow soon to $150 million, but they're seeking debt relief from UCOP).  One asked, why not use cash to pay down principal, instead of trying to "generate revenue" by entirely "realigning" a university that is, academically speaking, working well.  Answer to this and to all:  "everything's on the table" (but really, we only have 3 years of savings, so we can't do what you're asking). 

(5) they're pretty much using the PhD job situation to justify their plans for expanding the # of money-generating Masters programs, both professional and academic.  Again, a lot of push-back against this:  one scholar saying that if Masters programs are to be good, they need faculty attention, which means less faculty attention to undergraduates.  Answer to this and other objections: not if it's managed well--look at U Chicago's MA program.  No acknowledgement of completely different scale and income of U Chicago. Dirks said "societal changes" warrant move to Masters anyway; no jobs, people don't want to spend 8 years of life in grad school, etc.

That writer also noted that Berkeley Faculty Association Co-Chair Michael Buroway made a statement that seemed to speak for many faculty, judging from the applause that greeted his questions: 

Over the last decade there have been a number of costly ventures – from the renovation of the stadium to the Lower Sproul Plaza development; from Operation Excellence and Campus Shared Services to the experiment in On-Line Education; from the Energy Biosciences Institute to CITRIS. Each project is rolled out with great fanfare as a lucrative investment to be recovered sometime in the future, whereas each one has proven to be a financial albatross. There seems to be systemic pattern of fiscal irrationality. But from where does it come? 

If I may answer my own question - a major part of the responsibility lies with the administration itself. The university appears to have been hijacked by what we might call spiralists – those who advance their careers by spiraling from one organization to the next. They stay for a few years, advancing their portfolio with a signature project that then launches them into a higher orbit and plunges the university into a downward spiral of accumulating debt. The latest case in point is the outgoing VC for Finance and Administration, John Wilton, who arrived five years ago to replace another spiralist, Nathan Brostrom. Like Brostrom, Wilton is now moving on, leaving behind a train wreck. 

Will Wilton’s replacement be yet another spiralist from the financial world?  Why don’t we replace him with one of our own great economists? If we are a recruiting ground for the chair of the Federal Reserve Board and for the Director of the National Economic Council, why not for the VC for Finance and Administration?  

I’ve really only got one question: is the administration prepared to acknowledge its own contribution to our annual deficit and, if so, what does it propose to do about it?

There were apparently no answers to these questions.  But the trend is clear. Without restored public funding, the New Normal means the permanent downgrading of all levels of public higher education, and the reversion of top-quality learning and research to small elites.  Unless we restore cut public funding, California will continue to pioneer educational post-democracy.

I realize there are many other factors, but the geography of the state inequality boom does not put the University of California system on the side of broad income growth.  Take a look at the figure at left, from a new report by the California Budget and Policy Center.

Of the top 12 regions that have seen the highest percentage of growth go to the top 1%, 7 have UC campuses.  Of the others, one has Stanford and SJSU, another has a Cal Poly, and two are something akin to agricultural plantations.

3 UC campuses serve more egalitarian regions (Davis, Merced, and Riverside).  They are also lower-income--and not associated with California's famous tech economy.  (I mean tech broadly to include related (and well-paying) financial and other services, and retain the murkiness of the term, whose aggregate employment generally remains less than 10 percent of any regional total.)

Research universities do not only serve their local regions, but there is national pressure for them to shift the balance back in this direction, and UC's D-M-R campuses can plausibly invoke regional service in their pitch for funds. Partial proof was the Riverside campus's successful bid to start a medical school that the state promised not to fund properly, but that carried the day on the basis of its location in a medically-underserved region that could also use new jobs.

What can we make of the kind of stretched correlation I've just produced? We can focus on the politics of the links rather than on the economic causalities.  The latter are very hard to identify. But politics generally works with exactly this kind of loose association.

Two generations ago, UC's association with the "knowledge industry" was an association with rising incomes distributed widely in the population. This reflected the rise in general individual productivity, which could in turn be traced to all levels of educational advancement, particularly bachelor's degree attainment.  UC could say it was building a broad middle-class. Politicians of both major parties had little reason not to fund that.

Today, UC's association with the tech economy is an association with the inequality boom.  While the productivity of middle-income people does not rise more slowly than those at the top, their wages do.   (Explanations for income growth at the top are generally about market pricing power of specific skills, not about their superior productivity growth.)   Going to a UC does not now insure that your wages will rise with your increased productivity.

Of course it never did insure this, and universities cannot fix the plutocratic tendencies of the tech economy, by which I mean that cluster of practices that insure that the "regional advantage" we touted in the 1990s will never produce a tech manufacuturing empire staffed by white-collar armies on the model, of, say, the South Bay aerospace empire of the 1950s and 1960s.  The point is that UC can no longer make the same political claims to resources on the basis of an ever-more democratic distribution of knowledge and income. Compared to CSU and the CCs, it is comparatively rich and also located in fairly rich places that look the least in need of public funding help.

The solution is not only to stress the large numbers of low-income students enrolled at UC. (UC policymakers should stop weakening this important case by exaggerating the immunity of low income students to burdensome student debt).  The solution will involve explaining the concrete contribution UC instruction and research make outside of the tech industry as well, and for the vast majority of California counties that have no UC-sourced start-up companies and limited tech employment.   All UC disciplines make major contributions to the present and future workforce.  Until UC can make the broader case for all the fields and all the skills it offers, budget politics will continue to run against it.

At his blog mainly macro, the economist Simon Wren-Lewis comments on how the Labour party members who like Jeremy Corbyn (at left) for his anti-austerity policies have been misdescribed as radical: "Talk to some, and being anti-austerity has become synonymous with being well to the left. Of course in reality it is just textbook macroeconomics, . . . [and in]  2009 . . . the need for fiscal stimulus rather than deficit reduction was the position advocated by a centre/left Labour party in the UK, and the Democrats in the US. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that among a relatively well informed electorate that is the Labour party membership an anti-austerity position is still seen as a sensible policy."

The explanation for mislabeling "sensible" as radical, Prof. Wren-Lewis writes, is that while most of the Labour base stayed where it was, the Very Serious People in Labour have moved to the right, in the direction of austerity.

Something similar happened long ago in public universities in North America.  Senior managers and governing boards adopted a view that had previously been confined to conservative think tanks and political subcultures, which was that voters now saw a bachelor's degree as a private good, meaning that "the era of public funding was over."  This view became VSP common sense, and public funding has never recovered.  The two halves of that last sentence are related. There isn't a simple linear causal link between assuming austerity and receiving it, but the belief facilitates the practice.  VSP and voter preferences diverge, as Larry M. Bartels has shown, and austerity politics are more popular with the former.

For those late to the party, I'll retell a UC example.  In the spring of 2007, an aide to the Board of Regents chair gave me a friendly hallway lecture at a UC Board of Regents meeting on the end of public funding just after I'd spoken on the need to rebuild public funding. This was a year and a half before the 2008 crisis hit, so the austerity paradigm was not tied to economic conditions.  Austerity was also not tied to financial rationality: UC's budget was still in trouble from the 2002-05 cuts, as I had just been explaining on behalf of the Academic Senate, and it has not re-stabilized since.  But the austerity paradigm was tied to many kinds of regental convenience, starting with its use as an excuse for political passivity.  The aide was using the "end of public funding" to tell me why the Board would ignore the Senate's formal recommendation that they request a funding increment that would get UC back on its 2000-01 funding track.  

I don't enjoy recalling this story, but I sometimes do because it was the moment I belatedly realized that our post-public, austerity-UC was the operating assumption within the University leadership itself.

We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a "new normal" that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests.  The results have been predictable.  A recent report concluded that "forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession."  

It's worth noting that the mechanism that entrenched austerity at public universities was similar to Prof. Wren-Lewis's description of Labour party shift. We had a widely accepted if rarely argued notion that universities mostly produce public benefits with a high non-market value (public knowledge through research, complex intellectual development through mass quality instruction, deep learning for good jobs). This implied the need for strong public funding and low private costs, meaning no or low tuition. This was the "sensible" position that was still out there as austerity was digging in.  But the end-of-public-funding folks did not stage debates where people could show up. There were no venues for defending the public good position and opposing the others, no time and energy to discover and fight what Foucault called the micropolitics that transform institutions and governance itself.  One day voters woke up to find that their common sense has become oppositional or even radical not because general opinions changed but because the leadership consensus drifted right.  

So the question then and now was, how should regular citizens and employees respond?  Permanent austerity's many tangible effects continue to unfold. Some are hard to measure, like reductions in grad and undergrad educational quality.   Some are easy to measure, like the reductions in the value of employee pension and health benefits that we've seen at UC and elsewhere. These effects are controlled by the VSP austerity paradigm against which all "saltwater" economists rail, to no avail.

Long ago, Albert O. Hirschman outlined canonical responses to situations like this.

1. Loyalty.  This means accepting the new normal as normal and getting on with things--writing the grants, grading the papers, reviewing the files etc. in familiar competent ways.  In the short term this keeps things going, so it works if the problem is temporary. If it's not a temporary problem, loyalty makes the problem worse by failing to search for a solution and sometimes obstructing or marginalizing those who do.

2. Exit.  Employees quit the organization or a specific unit. They can modify this to "neglect," in which they stay in place but minimize their contribution to an organization they no longer like or feel at home in.  Exit can provide lots of information about conditions at a university.  The examples that receive press coverage are usually departures of large STEM labs (from UCSD to Rice in 2011, from UCLA to USC in 2013, from UCSD to USC this year, in a case that has already been in court).  One of the PIs who went to Rice said that their group was fleeing the effects of the "support gap" between public and private universities around the country.  This resource gap is a critical problem that is already affecting the role of public research universities in the country's science ecosystem (I go into some detail here).  Someone whose work is endangered by such shortfalls will look to see whether senior managers are addressing the problem directly, and have any hope of solving it. If they don't see these things, they are more likely to leave.

3. Lawsuits.  Albert Hirschman didn't name this, but Jerry Brown has. It works for individual remedies but not so much for collective ones.

4. Voice.  This covers a whole range of efforts to fix the larger system, from departmental retreats to faculty blogging to committee and commission service to regents' meeting protests and much much more.   Within voice we can identify a few major styles.

One is politicization, as when people try to discredit school "reform" by tracing it to anti-union ideologies and to money provided by foundations or people who are anti-union; or UC Regents' austerity policies by tracing them to their largely plutocratic status.  Whatever one thinks of it, this mode is hard to use in the situation we're in now, which has been nicely described by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson as policy drift.

Policy drift has some basic features.  It is marked by a new normal that was not openly debated before it was announced as true or irreversible or both.  Second, the new normal is established by a series of small, technical, and/or disguised compromises that are driven by one party and supported by the opposition party.  In the case of tax and service cuts, the Democrats have served as the enabling opposition: they don't share the theory (public services hurt prosperity) but they co-author the practice (austerity).

Third, the post-facto debate that is triggered by the general discovery of a new normal like austerity, which most affected people don't actually want,  is confined or neutralized by the bipartisan consensus that produced it.  When Democratic regents are as convinced as Republicans that the era of public funding is over, discussion of a reversal will not get beyond the complaining stage.

Similarly, it's hard to have an open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of UC privatization when the mere use of the term is opposed by senior university officials who are progressive Democrats.  Drift brings endless lamentation and "tough choices" that don't fix anything, but it can't be stopped by logic and evidence.

Another example is the tenure issue I've been writing about (Inside Higher Ed and Remaking): there was no popular shift in the land away from "just cause" employment--the core principle of tenure--and toward at-will firing. The shift took place among decision-makers in a wide range of sectors across the country for various economic and political reasons.  And yet the bipartisan forms of support for academic tenure make it harder to make the more general case for just-cause employment that would solidify public support. The default situation is that at-will firing will remain the norm, and academic tenure will stay an endangered exception.

Yet another example of policy drift: defined benefit (DB) pensions used to be seen as a sensible provision for low-cost retirement security.  Then decades of counter argumentation--brought to us by the financial services industry, market economists, and pension raiders--redefined DB pensions as an expensive luxury that employees didn't deserve.  Most people didn't change their minds about the enormous value of a safe retirement, or embrace philosophical critiques of DB pensions as the best means to that end. They succumbed to get-rich stories, various financial incentives, and a general sense of inevitability created by a long series of technical compromises.

The University of California still has a DB pension.  In the midst of the Great Recession, the Academic Senate and the UC Commission on the Future reaffirmed its efficiency for employees and its value to the University (in attracting and retaining top faculty and staff, and in encouraging a large, unquantifiable loyalty effort from them). But recently President Napolitano has been bargaining bits of it away--there will be a cap on accrual, and now she has defined as inevitable a non-DB tier for new employees.  The latter apparently came not from the state (which does want the salary cap) but from UCOP.  An indirect explanation appeared in a newspaper.

“This is where the pension world is moving, and for public institutions, it makes a lot of sense,” Napolitano told The Sacramento Bee editorial board in May. “It’s much more portable, so for many people that will be an attraction. There are lots of gives and takes in all of this.”

This is indeed "where the pension world is moving"--for the VSPs who control pension policy. It is not where the pension world is moving when that includes the people who pay into pensions.  People didn't change their mind about the value of DB pensions and demand a new portability even with a lower and less-secure benefit.  But some VSPs did.  The pension world that includes financial analysts now also worries about a Baby Boomer retirement crisis, and some of them are calling for a return to formula-based pension pools.   But the absence of an inclusive, evidence-based discussion before the decision is allowing UCOP to restructure UC employee retirement and health benefits slowly, boiling-frog style.  (I understand that UC unions are opposing the new DC tier, as are the Faculty Associations.  Where is the Academic Senate?)

My point here is that policy drift is great at keeping an opposition from forming. It is better at this than open ideological warfare.  The upshot is that academic "voice" strategies have to adapt themselves to policy drift. To wit, voice will need to:

(A) Show how a particular policy is the product of drift, meaning that it is neither necessary nor intellectually coherent nor inherently stable (its maintenance requires lots of effort and money).

(B) Show how the policy drift detracts from working life and overall well-being. People won't get involved in organizational redesign unless it will make a difference to their working lives.

(C) Accept the enormous amount of effort required to dislodge a "drift" consensus.   For example, the education economist Walter McMahon has confronted the private-good drift by writing a fantastically detailed four-hundred page book to show that private market benefits are a fraction (at most one-third) of the total, most of which is non-market and/or public benefit, such that the current market framework will cause society to underinvest in universities.  Of course the book wasn't enough to break the paradigm.  The media's reduction of a B.A.'s value to lifetime wage increments continues without a break, which means that many more people need to give Prof. McMahon a hand.

(D) Address the consensus on the basis of professional ethics and expertise. A familiar example is Paul Krugman: his column today says the Republicans "can't be serious," not because they are conservative but because they have stuck themselves with "crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy."  Prof. Krugman writes as though politics must be intelligent and that it is his professional obligation to hold it to standards of argument and evidence. He's right.  Faculty and staff should do the same in relation to institutional policy. The founding principles are fundamental: the right to professional self-definition; the obligation to articulate the ethics of one's professional practice; the obligation to act on them.

 (E) Create a counter narrative, an alternative paradigm. In the absence of clear framing principles, continuously advanced, debated, and rearticulated by faculty and staff, the senior managers  of any organization will naturally respond to the demands of powerful actors inside and outside the institution.  Governor Brown, various party leaders, influential business people, the most senior faculty et al. always outweigh the assembled faculty and staff--unless there is a strong culture or guiding ethos as critical theorist Amanda Anderson uses the term.   The silence of the faculty means the politicization of the administration.  Only an articulated ethos can hold the parts together.

(F) Build what the artist Céline Condorelli calls a support structure for building these counter narratives.  Departments or Senates or unions could sponsor working groups focused on addressing specific problems created by drift.  A better idea would be free-standing centers not tied to existing units.  Professors Ann Bermingham and Catherine Cole hosted a "charette" that brought faculty, administrators, and senate leaders together for several days.  It was a strong start on a process that needs to happen regularly over time to build trust, common terms, have long drawn-out fights, and evolve new ideas into systems and practices.

Another example: the education anthropologist Susan Wright once got a large grant to fund a UK research center (the Centre for Sociology, Anthropology, and Politics) whose "approach [was] to try and create 'space' for staff and students, in the midst of fast-moving changes in Higher Education, to reflect on their own values, aspiration and practices, and determine their own agendas for developing their learning and teaching." The center re-granted to groups to set up discussion and decision processes. The goal--this is me projecting a bit--was to take the values, expectations, and practices of particular groups and articulate them into an ethos.   Such a project has to be bottom-up: the UC Commission on the Future didn't change the paradigm as it had hoped because it was top-down and therefore intellectually narrow.

I realize what a hassle this sounds like.  I too had always wanted a job where there wouldn't be too many meetings.  But the alternative to having open, long form debates and getting our everyday practices into full public view is what we have now: unending policy drift.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article25517704.html#storylink=cpy