UC Irvine on April 13, 2018     

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

Last May, 2025, I had the radicalizing experience of successfully lobbying for three months as part of a labor union coalition to prevent $270 million in proposed cuts to the University of California (UC) general fund allocation from the State of California, then watching multiple UC campuses go forward with tens of millions of dollars of budget cuts anyway. 

It was a level of cynicism and exploitation that I frankly hadn’t expected from a public sector employer. For months, the UC office of the President (UCOP) mobilized students and Regents to personally lobby legislators to prevent budget cuts that would be “devastating” to students. Legislators, facing tough choices about how to close a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, heard our pleas and protected us while passing on cuts to other government programs instead. Then UCOP said nothing when campus Chancellors, citing structural deficits compounded by uncertainty in the Trump age, went ahead and and made some of the same cuts that legislators had explicitly given UC money to prevent.

Statement from the American Association of University Professors chapter at New York University

In ordinary circumstances, most of what AAUP chapters do is reactive—stepping up to advocate for the protection of faculty and student rights when they are under threat. At a time when higher education’s morbid expectation of its future is one of crushing austerity and, for some colleges, extinction, our NYU group decided to be proactive and assemble some principles for a post-COVID university. This was not done because we labor under the illusion that a university can be a morally purified space. Instead, we wanted to honor (by gathering together) the ideas and suggestions and arguments for reforming our institution that we have heard being made by faculty and students over the years. Of course, many of the action items on the list are far above our pay grade, but, at some point, we have to start behaving like self-organizing employees of the more humane workplace outlined here. --Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

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Principles for a Post-COVID University

How should NYU play its role in a “just recovery” from the COVID crisis? How can we build on the experience of the crisis and from the opinions, grievances, and solidarity that circulated in NYU communities during this period? In thinking about how the university can sustain and rebuild itself, the AAUP envisions NYU as a more transparent, democratic, caring and resilient institution, prioritizing the equitable treatment and rights of its students and employees, minimizing the cost of attendance, and striving more single-mindedly to live up to its motto—“a private university in the public service.”

For too long, NYU policy has been dictated by debt-leveraged expansionary growth, domestically and overseas, and by an institutional desire for upward mobility as measured by national and international rankings. Post-COVID, and in the spirit of social and ecological sustainability, we would like to see NYU focus on thriving in place rather than reaching after “performance” goals that are defined by financial institutions or managerial value metrics. 

Transparency

With the university’s finances under pressure, now is the time to provide faculty, students and staff full access to NYU’s fiscal affairs.

Participatory budgeting should be a key component of the transition to transparency

Executive policy-making should be open to faculty review, and senior administrators should draw more routinely on faculty expertise

Top-level decision-makers should consult and solicit input from the faculty body before making large-scale policy moves, especially on GNU matters

The terms of operation of global branches – in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and other GNU “nodes” -- should be transparent to the entire NYU community.

Democratic

The faculty role in shared governance, as recognized by AAUP principles, should be fully restored and clarified.

The NYU administration should agree and affirm that the Faculty Handbook is contractually binding.

Faculty and students should be represented on the Board of Trustees.

Faculty who are elected, and not handpicked, should serve on committees to choose senior administrators, including the Provost and President.

Minutes of BOT and administrative leadership meetings should be accessible to faculty and students.

The right to organize (including that of contract and tenure-track faculty) should be upheld and encouraged, and NYU should recognize any bargaining unit formed by a majority of its eligible members.

Community-driven town halls and plenary assemblies should be instituted on the NYU Calendar to inform and review institutional decision-making.

Caring
NYU should be a sanctuary campus, prioritizing safety and sanctuary to members of the university and its host communities.

Resources and legal assistance should be extended to vulnerable and marginalized community members.

NYU should not operate branches of the university, domestic or overseas, in breach of its nondiscrimination policies.

Employees and students should have (free) access to comprehensive health care at Langone-Grossman if they choose.

Workplace welfare councils (with faculty, student, and staff representation) should be elected in every university unit to safeguard employee well-being and workplace quality.

Affordable

Every effort should be made to lower tuition and retire NYU’s reputation as poster child for student debt.

NYU’s unequal pay structures should be addressed, including gender salary gaps, salary compression, and the role of underrepresentation of minority faculty.

Senior administrator salaries should be sliced, and nonacademic administrative personnel positions downsized.

NYU should establish a much more equitable range spread between the highest and lowest paid of NYU employees, with total compensation packages included in these re-adjustments.

Salary and student fellowship increases should be tied to COLA, and not merit evaluations.

NYU should secure the steady conversion of NTT into TT faculty positions at every GNU location and in its US campuses; as a preliminary goal, NYU should aim for not more than 25% NTT positions in 5 years across the university.

NYU should extend protections comparable to those that accrue to tenure to all full-time faculty who have served continuously for seven years.

Faculty housing rent should be capped at an affordable percentage of income.

Sustainable

NYU’s carbon footprint should be minimized and its endowed funds should divest from the fossil fuel industry, and all enterprises involved in incarceration, immigrant detention, and military production.

Air travel, to global sites and to academic meetings, should be curtailed.

Cross-disciplinary climate crisis research and study should be prioritized.

New environmental justice and climate justice initiatives should be targeted and funded.

NYU should adopt an environmental stewardship role in downtown Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, modelling and propagating just practices.

Public Service

Since NYU sits on occupied lands of Lenni Lenape peoples, it should fully adopt a charter of decolonial ethics and practice.

NYU should extend public access (for meetings, workshops, assemblies) to its underutilized classrooms and buildings when they are not being used. It should also seek to provide students across the city access to its libraries and online research resources.

NYU should prioritize pathways for students from New York public schools and community colleges to matriculate at NYU; it should also extend and deepen support to such institutions in other ways that those institutions identify as arenas for collaboration.

NYU should make special efforts to support DACA and undocumented students.

NYU’s reach as a landlord and real estate owner should be surveyed and redefined to help address the city’s urgent housing crisis.

Representatives from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn communities should have the right to review and participate in the approval of all new building and expansion plans.

Local community representatives should have the right to serve on a committee for developing university-community initiatives that will benefit from NYU’s research and resources.

Racial and Social Justice

Indigenous study and engagement should be instituted and encouraged in all university programs.

NYU resources should prioritize the reduction of institutional inequalities for students, staff and faculty of color, along with LGBTQ, disabled community members, DACA and undocumented students.

NYU should insist on staffing reforms on the part of departments and units with an overwhelming majority of white instructors.

Gender balance and racial diversity should be adopted as an institutional principle of all NYU workplaces.

Truly affordable housing should be made available for faculty of color and first-generation academics who often have higher student debt burdens than their peers and cannot rely on family wealth.

Global University?

NYU should convene a community-wide review of the GNU mission and its record.

Free movement of students and scholars across borders and GNU sites should be guaranteed by NYU and host authorities.

NYU should loudly and visibly protest travel and enrollment restrictions at its GNU sites and NYC campuses and lobby the relevant political authorities to lift those restrictions. In cases where there are boycotts of NYU campuses by faculty and students in other parts of NYU because of these restrictions, NYU should recognize these as fundamental expressions of academic freedom.

Academic freedom protections, in all of the forms and expressions recognized by the AAUP, should be guaranteed across all NYU sites.

NYU should uphold the right of all employees, including those contracted to construct and maintain GNU buildings, to be protected by the ILO's basic international labor standards.

NYU should insist that US authorities remedy the challenges faced by international students and faculty--travel restrictions, embassy closures, and impractical visa protocols.
     
      The Executive Committee of the NYU Chapter of the AAUP
       
         Rebecca Karl, President
         Paula Chakravartty Vice-President
         Andrew Ross, Secretary
         Anna McCarthy, Treasurer
         Fred Moten, Member-at-large
         Vasuki Nesiah, Member-at-large
         Mohamad Bazzi, Member-at-large
         Marie Monaco, Immediate past President
     

As expected, the State Auditor's report on UCOP has triggered a huge political uproar. The charges of secret reserves, out of control personnel policies, special benefits for executives, and UCOP interference into the audit process have been explosive to say the least.  There have been two legislative committee meetings that addressed it, numerous statements from politicians about its implications for UC, and editorials and op-eds expressing justifiable outrage about UCOP secrecy and management practices. Predictably enough, some legislators have called into question UC's constitutional autonomy.  Despite, or perhaps because of, efforts by UCOP and the Regents to explain away some of the problems, the damage to the University's reputation has been considerable.  This report is going to haunt the University for a good while.

Amidst all of the heated disagreement, however, there has been one fundamental, and fundamentally wrong, point at which all of the arguing parties appear to agree:  that the answer to the problems the audit revealed can and should be solved from the top down.  Wherever you turn in the discussion (whether in the auditor's suggestion that the legislature pass a separate budget for UCOP and establish an outside overseer, or President's Napolitano's assurance that she had established an internal UCOP working group to improve things, or Regent Lozano's insistence that the Regents were hard at work in ensuring their "governance" of the institution as well as hiring an outside consultant to help with UCOP reforms), the common element in all of the proposals is that the answer is to be found in a closed loop of decision makers shuttling between Oakland and Sacramento (with the occasional nod to the campus chancellors).

In fact, the most striking aspect of the auditor's report and UCOP's response was the almost total absence of any acknowledgement of faculty or staff knowledge or perspectives.  Where were the formal responses of Senate Committees in the report?  How exactly is the auditor to know if the programs that UCOP oversees are productive if they don't get unfiltered responses from the people who are providing the education and front-line services to students, are engaging in research, and are attempting to convey that research to the public?

Moving forward, the Regents have decided to hire an outside consultant to review UCOP's plans for reforms.  This suggests that the University has no business or public policy schools with faculty who are experts in these issues.  If only the Senate had a knowledgeable committee on Budget and Planning or perhaps one on Research that could provide meaningful and ongoing oversight of practices that are supposed to enable the university's core functions. But apparently not.  Instead we are to witness UCOP organize an internal reorganization with some review by a paid outside contractor answerable to the Regents who have never demanded from UCOP either the clarity of presentation or the documentation that everyone now seems to agree is essential going forward.

To be fair, this problem is not limited to either UCOP or the Regents.  Although arguably an effect of the Yudof administration and the wrong turn taken by the University Commission on the Future, the proliferation of task forces, the sidelining of formal Senate oversight, the general decay of shared governance, and the centralization of management and authority is deeply embedded on campuses as well.  Task forces not only serve to tilt authority in the direction of management but also eliminate the production of institutional memory and documentation that are, or at least should be, one offshoot of standing Senate committees.  Of course, that institutional faculty memory will only matter if faculty themselves are willing to take the time and effort to press for their viewpoints to be heard and to have influence.  As one Anonymous argued in a comment on Chris' last post, it is up to faculty to begin to take the time to work with staff to clarify and understand university budgeting from the departments on up.  This knowledge will not solve all of our problems.  But given what we know from the audit and its responses, reform cannot depend on top-down initiatives.

I recognize that all of these things may seem to be lost causes; too many of us have accepted the new rules of the game. While we complain, we do not see any possibility of change.  To make matters more difficult, secrecy tends to protect specific rather than general interests.  But more is at stake than simply a desire for faculty voice.  The contemporary managed university does not have the internal democracy nor the free flow of information and institutional knowledge it needs to meet its purposes.

In his comment on Chris' last post, Bob Samuels noted that some of the changes to the audit responses made the online education program look better.  But UC's online venture is a  classic example of managerially imposed and rushed changes made in the nature of a supposed market driven necessity.  I'm sure we have all heard managers complain about how faculty do not want to change fast enough; perhaps they might consider that a rush to bad judgment marginalizes the deeper thinking that makes failure less likely.  If the University really wants to think about how to educate and create knowledge more effectively for the twenty-first century,  they would do well to recognize that in universities knowledge flows upward.

The recent experience at UC Riverside is only one example of the crises that can result from a managerial failure to learn from faculty and front line staff.   There the administration sidelined faculty input in the early stages of its planned expansion, rushed to hire despite faculty concerns, didn't think about the necessary lab and classroom space its new hires needed and marginalized departments.  In the end, the Riverside Senate had to step in and salvage the situation.  If there had been genuine consultation the situation would have been avoided in the first place rather than being redone later.  This situation was not the result of evil or self-serving administrators but rather of the collapse of the practices of shared governance and the recognition that institutions require a structured way to absorb the multiple perspectives that exceed the managerial groups.  But that is not an idea one would find in the closed managerial circuit between the State Auditor, UCOP, the Regents, the California Legislature, or, most likely, local campus administrators.

Of course, these problems are not limited to UC.  As indicated by the ongoing revolt of the faculty (including a resolution of the university's faculty senate) over Purdue University's secretly negotiated agreement with Kaplan's online education business, the willingness of university administrators to seek deals without proper consultation and without due public debate is widespread.  Nor is this limited to public universities (indeed private universities are probably worse). Yale and Columbia (neither of which have robust traditions of faculty governance) have sought to mobilize a seemingly endless array of technicalities to keep their graduate student workers from collective bargaining. Vanderbilt University has recently sought to prevent the unionization of their NTT faculty by claiming that they are managerial (a position rejected by the NLRB) and suggesting that their unionization would break down traditions of shared governance (although few NTT are included in that).

These may at first glance appear to be distant from the controversies about UCOP.  But they all point to the same issue: the refusal of top managers to recognize that the cost of achieving their expanded flexibility is the increasing inability of universities to take advantage of the practical knowledge held by faculty and staff.  There is, of course, a perspective of system and of the whole that must be part of any decision-making process.  But it is only one such perspective.  And if that perspective is, as has happened, increasingly sundered from the perspectives of the faculty and staff, then we will see more and more examples of universities cut off from their purposes and surrendering to demands to serve other interests than their own.

I'm going to use a lull in my travel for The Great Mistake to start clearing my post backlog, starting with a response to the most recent review, by the sociologist Andrew Perrin.  His piece is at the public sociology blog Scatterplot, and, among its other virtues, it offers the most sustained engagement on research costs (Stage 2 of the book's decline cycle) that I've received.  I posted a comment on his post and crosspost it here.  His skeptical analysis of the emphasis I place on research costs is essential reading. It advances the kind of debate whose general absence has helped dumb down university policy.  I'm very grateful to him for the intelligence and energy that went into his analysis.

This blog has covered research costs many times ("How Can Public Universities Pay for Research?" "UCLA Loses LONI: Why Budget Silence is Bad for Science," "UCSD and the Crisis in Public University Research Funding," etc.) In The Great Mistake I go into the problem in detail, and also, in the final chapter, suggest a way of solving the core research cost problem without needing new money.  

After one talk this winter, someone asked me, "are you arguing that the way we fund research is the public research university's Achilles' heel"?  "I wish," I replied.  "That was just one small though important body part that didn't get protected in the River Styx, so you could armor it and be ok.  Our research funding model is more like a tragic flaw.  It is a secret weakness that cannot be separated from a great strength--unless it stops being a secret and is brought to light."  As I was later watching Toneelgroep Amsterdam's great 6 hour sequence of three Shakespeare plays, Roman Tragedies, I wondered, is the public university like Coriolanus, returned a military hero but unwilling to work with the newly empowered plebeians in the Senate, and so destroyed? Or like Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, picking the wrong political allies, with the same result? Or Mark Anthony, losing the civil war to Octavian by ignoring his own strategists, who assured him he could not win at sea but must fight on land? Overkill, perhaps.  Start by reading Andrew Perrin.

***

My response:

Many thanks for the thought and intelligence that went into this review.  I agree with the criticism of UC-centrism.  I’d like to assemble a research group to do comparative state studies of university policies, or at least work with other people on this.  We’re getting a better picture through a series of books that focus on the systems the authors know from the inside.  Austerity Blues looks at New York, to take just one other example. Jeff Williams and I would love to publish more work on various state systems in our Critical University Studies series. As you say, North Carolina is a crucial case.
On research funding, let me first take a step back.  The book argues that treating universities as private goods has lowered their social value and hurt their finances. Many defenders of any given instance of privatization either deny social or educational costs or say they are less than the life-saving benefits of the new revenue streams. My examples question these life-saving revenue benefits, which in many cases are actually negative.  Universities always generate value even when they lose money on something like extramural research or small-scale teaching.  But policymakers shouldn’t support a practice—privatization—that doesn’t correctly do the one thing it is supposed to be good at, which is provide net financial benefits (gains that aren’t created by losses elsewhere in the institution).
Research costs come where they do in the book’s decline cycle because they are a core example of the university’s primary reaction to abandoning the public-good model of the university (Stage 1), which is to stop saying public benefits justify monetary losses on research, and to start saying the university generates monetary benefits on research (the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 was one turning point).  The latter statement has the double liability of obscuring research as a public good and of being wrong. Research is a public good and a private (institutional) loss, as it can be in the public good model, and as we disallow in the (inappropriate) private good model.  (A lot of bad things are tied in to this error, like splitting STEM and SASH research on phoney market grounds, hinging some portion of federal funding on science’s (exaggerated) direct economic value, etc.)
Other broad points. Technically, the contrast I draw is between high-research and high-teaching fields, where fields with lots of extramural funding have high gross revenues but lose money when overhead costs are netted out, and fields with essentially no extramural research but lots of enrollments are able to run surpluses—surpluses that administrators must use to cover losses elsewhere.  The fact that these kinds of departments polarize into STEM and non-STEM is contingent on other historical problems that I’m trying to help address.
Also, I am pro-STEM and hate the STEM/SASH divide.  I spent not the happiest years of my professional life as a co-founder of an NSF center trying to overcome it.  I see the divide as an artifact of a two-cultures ideology that has produced fundamentally different—even mutually incomprehensible-- material conditions of research.  The grant scramble in STEM feels to me to be inhumane and even anti-intellectual. I think it’s getting worse all the time, and I have nothing but sympathy and admiration for the colleagues who work 80 hours every week while skipping weekends for months at a time to keep their labs running and students funded.  I take their plight as seriously as I take that of SASH scholars. And yet I also see political inequality between STEM and SASH that is supported by budgetary opacity.  Designated makers always beat takers in America, and my hope is that showing the makers are also takers (we all are both) will create a more open and less biased policy arena and fairer, more effective outcomes.  A side benefit, which I don’t do much with in the book, would be redress for the structural poverty of qualitative and interpretative research, for which I don’t see any ethical or intellectual justification.
Since I advocate a wholesale public good model for universities, I am pro-subsidy.  I am also pro cross-subsidy.  I don’t mind some Sociology enrollment income winding up in Electrical Engineering to pay for accounting staff.  In terms of what you call external funds, my view, which goes beyond that of Walter McMahon and other economists I cite, is that the general public should pay all the costs of public universities, in the full knowledge that some returns will go only to the student they subsidized in the form of private market benefits (a salary increment), while most returns are nonmarket, indirect, and social, and fan out incalculably into the society, as we want them to.  In “internal” terms, we all need to help each other out.  If running one chemistry hood costs as much as running the lights and computers in 35 sociology offices, then sociology coughs up for chemistry.  The reverse should also be true.
The paragraph you call grudging (pp 94-95) reads as follows:

The problem with this situation is not that these subsidies, which are called cross-subsidies, are inherently wrong. To the contrary, these subsidies are commonplace and justified by the public benefits of research results. They are also justified by the private benefit to the student of attending research-intensive universities. At these institutions, students work with faculty who are at the forefront of their part of the knowledge world. They have access to the research process, which helps them to develop creative capabilities sooner rather than later. One can argue that the public and the student receive more benefit from an education in which instructional funding subsidizes research in the same environment. Though the costs can and should be separated so we can see who is paying for what and how much, the cross-subsidy is completely legitimate in principle—as long as it is acknowledged and shared in an equitable way.

The last sentence is the issue for me: not that we have cross-subsidies, but that we hide them. This removes them from the realm of policy and shared governance, and even correct accounting.
 Here are my more specific responses:
You write,

After a few silly anecdotes about scientists prevented from buying printer paper on their grants (do English professors not need printer paper?), Newfield then relies on NSF and university budget data to claim that between 9% and 20% of universities’ outlays for research are uncompensated by federal funders, so must be made up by institutional funds. These funds, he claims, often amount to nearly 100% of institutional research expenditures, which leaves 0% for institutional support of SASH and other research that doesn’t attract extramural funding.

I agree the anecdotes are silly. The point is that research accounting rules set up Catch-22s: some are silly, and others which blow holes in universities budgets. I also break down the range of 9-20% into three models all of which are justified by different sections of research funding reports based on the same data.  The differences reflect not only the ambiguity of semi-official interpretations of federal data, but also unequal budgetary situations for different kinds of universities. We need much more—and much more open—research to have a more complete picture of what is going on.
Next:

There’s a lot of forensic accounting going on here, and I think Newfield makes untenable assumptions to reach those high numbers (20% unfunded, 100% of institutional outlays). Most important here is the accounting for what universities pay for research that is not extramurally funded. Lots of that is implicit; professors spend their time, paid by university funds, on research and scholarly inquiry all the time. They do it with computers, office supplies, and sometimes dedicated funds that don’t count as research expenditures but are university resources spent on research and scholarly activity.

I’m not sure what you mean by untenable assumptions, but I assume you mean the omission of a portion of tenure-track faculty salaries and benefits as university’s internal funding of research.  I mention this omission in a footnote (middle of p 363, and also see the following note), and my reason is that this applies to all research professors in all disciplines, and is part of what one must do for one’s basic salary. Put differently, it would increase both the total amount of institutional funds spent on research and the total amount of research expenditure, so it wouldn’t change the share.  If anything, counting part of salary and benefits would have helped my inequality case, since disciplines that expect extramural grants for tenure, promotion, etc. generally require about half as much teaching as those that don’t.  In any case, I could better acknowledge that research universities do invest in all faculty in this way, especially since I am personally very grateful for that.
Next you write, “Throughout the section on extramural funding, Newfield implies that universities would not be doing the research if it weren’t for that funding.”  I’m agnostic on this. Your counterfactuals are interesting, but I don’t think they affect my argument.  It’s true that universities paying 20% of research is better than them paying 100%.  But paying 0% is better than paying 20% when general operating money per student has never recovered to the levels that the research enterprise assumed, and when students are progressively taking over from taxpayers in supporting it.  20% or 50% fro institutional funds would be fine with me were research funded at adequately high levels and as a public good, such that subsidies (including those from students as private individuals) are no longer extracted, left acknowledged, and not reimbursed.
Then, “That emphasis is puzzling because, unlike the rest of the book, it’s really not necessary to the overall argument. Each other piece of evidence goes directly to the devolutionary cycle (p. 36), but it’s not at all clear to me why the external-funding claims support that argument at all.’’
I tried to address this point above.
And:

his greater claim that in fact the English department is subsidizing STEM is based on treating institutional funds in two conflicting ways. When they pay for English salaries and overhead, they are treated as external income from tuition and state funds: fees paid for English professors’ work. But when they pay for STEM salaries and overhead, they are treated as internal funds. Newfield is right to call out the PR machine’s implication that STEM pays for itself and English doesn’t, but he’s wrong to interpret this as an internal subsidy.

The terms external and internal may be confusing.  External funds become internal funds, or what the federal accounts call institution (or institutional) funds.  Student tuition and state general funds, plus some other smaller streams, become the university’s unrestricted funds that they distribute as they deem best.  It’s an “internal” subsidy in the sense that the university is itself paying a share of research costs on top of what it gets from the specific extramural research sponsor (DARPA, The Legacy Foundation, etc.)  But the university isn’t creating this money itself, and “profits” from other enterprises (like medical clinics) don’t flow toward core campus operations like instruction and research.  So I stick with calling this an internal (or institutional) subsidy. But again, I don’t think subsidies are bad. I just think hidden subsidies are bad.  (One practical reason that helps propel the decline cycle is that they have convinced legislators that research makes money rather than loses it, so they don’t understand why the state should pay more money for university operations.)
Finally:

That account masks a much bigger problem with reliance on external funding: its intellectual costs. Funding rates are already very low, and today’s “skinny budget” contains draconian cuts to those low budgets. All that means that scientists will be spending more of their time trying in vain to attain funding instead of doing science. (Grant applications are the beginnings of science, yes — but only when high-quality applications are likely to be funded.) Furthermore, the bottleneck by which such an enormous majority of science is funded by just a few agencies raises the prospect of an intellectual monoculture; heterodox inquiry is unlikely to flourish under such concentration. I think it would be better for science and for SASH disciplines for universities to find ways to fund more research across the disciplines internally.

I hope my account doesn’t mask this problem, even if it doesn’t analyze it.  I also hope my account helps the discussion you call for by shining a light on how we spend institutional funds now, precisely so we can imagine spending them differently. 
In general, I agree with you that the agency funding situation poses major intellectual problems.  These are important and longstanding.   Clark Kerr described federal granting agencies as having created a “putting-out system” that made universities dependent subcontractors with borderline sweatshop conditions, and that was during the golden age of federal granting growth in the late 1950s and early 1960s. More internal funding would help with this quite a bit.  Projects could be developed in collaboration between faculty and their offices of research, and consortia could be created bottom-up to share costs across universities.  It would be helpful to draw up some questions and projects that can’t get funded in the current system but that could under this alternative.
The drawback of course is that universities would need to quadruple their research funds to cover what we currently fund today, which still wouldn’t be enough, either for STEM or for SASH disciplines.  I’d like to see a cultural shift that would allow the public to trust universities and their associated professionals enough to do that, but that’s a long road.
In any case, many thanks again for your very helpful and insightful analysis.

As you have probably seen, the Governor and the Legislative Leadership have agreed on a final budget bill.  From a funding standpoint, there is little in the new bill regarding UC to change Chris's critical analysis of the Governor's May Revision.  UC is scheduled to receive up to $25M beyond the Governor's original call for a 4 percent general fund increase on condition of a continued tuition freeze.  CSU fared somewhat better.  It will receive approximately $50M over the Governor's May proposal.  It too, though, has a variety of conditions placed on the money.  For UC the key pages of the bill are 105-113 and for CSU 113-117.  I'm going to focus on UC in this post because I am less familiar with the implications for CSU. But I hope that people at CSU will use the comments section to expand the discussion.

There are several key points to make about the total budget package.

First, it includes a one-time payment of $96 million for the UC pension.  But this money is dependent on a dramatic reduction in the benefits of UC's defined benefit pension plan (as was clear from the Regents agreement with the Governor).  After a new system is put into place, the maximum salary that can be counted in a pension calculation for new hires will be approximately $117,000.  The Regents have proposed a supplemental Defined Contribution Plan and have also floated the possibility of allowing new hires to go entirely into a DCP.  If the latter should happen it is possible that the DBP will become unsustainable in any form.

Second, the Legislature was able to get the Governor to agree to an additional $25M above his May proposals.  But this money is contingent on the University enrolling an additional 5000 resident students by the 2016-2017 academic year (107).  There are a couple of things to be said about this situation.  First, as Dan Mitchell pointed out, UC is unlikely to increase numbers in a dramatic fashion for the upcoming year.  That means that these increased numbers will hit with great impact in 2016-2017.  Having been at UCLA when it attempted a dramatic increase in numbers I can say that without proper preparation and expanded faculty and student services the effects are quite serious. Secondly, the Legislature is assuming $5000 of the marginal cost of each new resident student.  This figure is even lower than the LAO calculation that, as I pointed out in an earlier post, would lead to the permanent under-funding of the University. In addition, the money will arrive long after the students have both enrolled and had their presence documented by UCOP.

Sacramento is also insisting that this money, itself inadequate for the simple increase without a lot of supplement, also be used to increase and quicken graduation rates.  Now increasing graduation rates is something that we can all support--but Sacramento appears to be concerned with increasing graduation rates no matter the effect on education.  It wants more students to pass through more quickly with inadequate support--a position that ties in nicely with the Governor's vision that costs can be driven down by pushing students into online courses or reducing requirements.  There is, in all of this, a general disregard for academic expertise and an apparent conviction that quantity is the most important variable.

Although less explicit, it seems as if the Legislature and the Governor are willing to make the University more dependent on non-resident students even as they insist on increasing the number of resident students.  Although the Legislature and the Governor have insisted on a continuation of the tuition freeze for resident students through the 2016-2017 academic years (106), President Napolitano has been empowered to increase tuition for non-resident students up to 8% annually.  Both the Governor and the Legislature have apparently agreed to the assumption that non-resident students can be used to underwrite resident students so that the State can continue its long-standing failure to support higher education in the state.

Thirdly, and more positively, the Budget Bill demands greater administrative and spending transparency (108-109).  The bill directs the University to finally clarify the nature and distribution of the Manager and Senior Professional category (long one of the black holes of administrative transparency), to clarify the financial sources it considers applicable to educational activities, and to provide forecasts of costs and resources through 2018-2019. Although this transparency will not accomplish anything in and of itself, it will allow for a more open discussion of priorities than has been possible in the past.  The bill also demands that the University include state employee salaries in any market calculation for the Senior Management Group.  In effect, Sacramento is challenging the University's insistence that its administrators should be paid more than other public executives. Given the University's recent practice of hiring administrators without prior background as educators it is perhaps not surprising that the Governor and Legislature are now wondering why they should be treated differently than other public administrators.

                                                                               *****

At this point in time, it is difficult to see how President Napolitano and the Regents efforts to provoke public support for the University were successful.  Nor is it clear that the continued willingness of the University to act as if the Governor is the only player in town makes any sense.  In the end, the University received approximately 25-30M extra dollars compared to what the Governor had promised in previous budgets.  But this additional money comes with some very crucial strings, including a drastic reduction of pension eligibility, agreements to look into reducing graduation requirements, increased auditing of faculty and staff, increased dependence on NRT, and the possibility of even greater state intrusion into university affairs. It is also true that President Napolitano was able to get the Governor to promise a longer-term funding commitment to the University.  But as we learned from Schwarzenegger's "compact," those promises are easy to make and easy to break.  So, the bottom line seems to be minimal increased funding, seriously increased auditing of academic life, continued pressure to sacrifice educational quality to cost cutting, and a commitment to substantial cutbacks in retirement benefits for future employees.  Not a good budget round.

Rose Aguilar had a segment of her show "Your Call" on KALW that focused on the UC Budget and the need for transparency. UCOP apparently decided was not to send someone to talk on public radio in San Francisco. But luckily Chris participated along with Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee and Kevin Sabo of UCSA.

You can find the episode HERE

Chris here. As part of the Free Speech Movement anniversary events at UC Berkeley last month, Michael and I had a two-hour discussion with Berkeley faculty and staff at an event sponsored by the Berkeley Faculty Association.  We are posting our slides here and we will provide a bit of commentary along the way.

We pointed out at the start of the talk that we don't think that the policies that respond to the "new normal" are very new. The situation itself isn't new either.  The combination of inadequate public funding and expanding dependence on private support has framed the entirety of both of our careers.

So we divided up our presentation.  We have a final slide, Option 3, that was meant to prompt discussion about how UC faculty in particular should respond.

Part I.

Our core concern here was with Impacts on faculty work life—and hence on the university’s academic productivity.  How are we all feeling? How is morale, job satisfaction, pleasure in the job, the “faculty experience”? 

There are some specific components that always get attention: (1) Salaries.  (2) Benefits. We are also preoccupied with (3) working conditions: hours per week, staff support, quality of time for research thinking, and particularly time for the unfocused reflection that finds and fixes problems in deadline work, and is the main source original thinking. Do we have the conditions for “depth” – for slow work, slow method? 

In addition, there's (4) Professional Autonomy. Is the university gradually making its faculty post professional? Or does the university still reflect the faculty's various educational and research visions? 

These questions are best answered with qualitative data. Here we invoke a few crude metrics just to illustrate the problem. One is compensation.  UC has a well-known salary lag.  I recently read a report in which the UC president claimed that "faculty salaries at the University of California already lagged behind our peer institutions around the nation by about 8 to 9 percent and are projected to lag about 16.5 percent come July.'’  The president was David Saxon, speaking to the Los Angeles Times in December 1982. 

For decades, UC officials have also pointed out that generous retirement and health benefits made up for lower salaries: while salaries lagged, "total compensation" was well above average.   Unfortunately, this last round of cuts has eliminated the advantage in total compensation. 

The slide below was recently confirmed by a Mercer compensation study that shows that UC faculty total compensation joins cash salary at subpar, both are in the negative 10-12 percent range. This means that the value of UC benefits has declined substantially in recent years.   And of course salary "scales" no longer function normally: departments we've spoken to now routinely add "above scale" salary to routine merit requests and more frequently request advances of more than one step.  Salary inequity and the "loyalty penalty" are both growing problems that salary scales, when properly funded, had at least partially solved.

Another major UC faculty issue is the state of graduate programs and funding, since they are the hallmark of UC as a research university. The next slide shows a decades-long decline in the system's share of grad students.



We didn't assert that UC grad students should be at a particular level--say, 20 percent of total student enrollments-- or quality is at risk. Our point was that UC has had a goal of bring all the campuses to the research intensity of the flagships, and that this is one of many core educational projects that have never been achieved because of insufficient funding.

Then there's faculty-staff relationships. Faculty need staff more than ever to do more complicated kinds of research and instruction. Both core activities are getting more collaborative, and require a wider mixture of skills. As just one example, use of instructional technology would increase more quickly if faculty could work with course designers to help make large lectures more effective. Instead, this has been the moment in history that universities like UC Berkeley used programs like Operation Excellence to split staff from faculty into "shared services" pools.

There's a potential staff partner now--trapped behind a pane of glass. Off-campus staff pooling could seem like a good operational idea only to business consultants who have no idea how faculty or educational staff actually work. We understand that the Berkeley campus senate is now finally looking into problems with OE.  But unravelling the worst parts of the program will cost money we don't now have.

Here's a summary slide for trends that limit traditional faculty autonomy without improving effectiveness.

We didn't go into depth on any of these trends, but each reflects the growing tendency for the ground rules of the core area of faculty sovereignty, instruction, to be set by non-teaching managers with little faculty input.  I'm particularly interested in the last two.   It's obvious to me that the 21st century world requires more complex intellectual capabilities than ever, and that these depend on integrating diverse forms of knowledge both within and between courses.  And yet this is the moment in which many think college should be more like a single-subject training module, or that more difficult or boring parts of courses can be thrown out in favor of a greatest hits approach.  We saw xMOOCs crash and burn because their marketing got so far ahead of their educational performance. We're getting set up for repeat performances in more obscure parts of the university. 

Nonetheless, the default political model for a university degree is increasingly community college job training--among Democrats as much or more than among Republicans. The current pathway is that many educational activities even at major flagships like UC Berkeley will be diluted and standardized, while most sponsored research projects will be protected. UC Berkeley is cutting against this with programs like Berkeley Connect, but the trend is towards concentration of resources rather than toward general quality through wide distribution. This is a normal effect of replacing public money--for general quality--with private funds, which are self-interested and targeted.

Part II.

We're suggesting through this sampling of trends that UC isn't on the mend, and won't heal by itself.  What are more positive options?

The California governor was giving his Inaugural Address, and alleged as follows:

false prophets have risen to advocate more and more government spending as the cure – more bureaucratic programs and higher staffing ratios of professional experts. They have told us that billion dollar government increases are really deep cuts from the yet higher levels of spending they demand and that attempts to limit the inflationary growth of government derive not from wisdom but from selfishness. That disciplining government reflects not a care for the future but rather self-absorption. These false prophets, I tell you, can no longer distinguish the white horse of victory from the pale horse of death.

This was not Ronald Reagan but Jerry Brown.  It was not the latter-day but the original Jerry Brown, in his 2nd inaugural address in January 1979. "Jerry Brown's mad as hell," all right, and still mad thirty years later.  He's mad at people who want public funding. This means YOU--the University of California. Whether it's the 1980s or the 2010s, Jerry Brown is the original Austerity Democrat.  

He's not going to restore anything. Not next year after his re-election. Not ever.

Gov. Brown isn't alone. Here's a Legislative Analyst Office slide that breaks down growth by category in state funding over the decade leading up to the financial crisis. The starting points are of very different sizes so the percentages are somewhat deceptive. But it tells an important story:

The two biggest losers at the state level are higher education and job training. California says it has a world-leading human capital economy. But it minimizes public investments in  human capital.

Of course California surfed a national wave of replacing state funding with tuition:

The whole country has been on a privatization binge.  Overall spending kept rising, but not for instruction or academic salaries.  Most of the increased spending in this slide comes from facilities competition, marketing, and related administrative functions demanded by privatization itself.

Here's a slide I've often updated for various posts on the UC budget. The story is always the same. The blue line tracks the growth in state personal income. Were UC's state funding to have grown merely at the same rate as actual state income, it would have matched the blue line.

Instead, UC has fallen $2 billion behind. (The general fund total is about $3 billion in 2014-15, but we now have to subtract the interest on construction bonds that the state used to pay and that is now, per UCOP's request, on UC's budget. So this chart is still current.)

In recent years, UCOP has started to quantify, in simple terms, the kind of rebuilt revenues that would get the system back to solvency. This one started to appear three years ago (Display 6).

The University needs about 16 percent increases per year, UCOP has been saying, to make up for past cuts and ongoing mandatory cost increases. (This is on top of cost reductions and other savings that haven't fully materialized, so this slide understates the problem.)  

Scenario 1 is a split, which means 8 percent + 8 percent each year from students and from the state. Scenario 2 is close to the Compact ratios that UCOP struck with Arnold Schwarzenegger--tuition increases of two or three times the state's increase. Scenario 3 is all tuition. There's a missing Scenario 4 that appeared in an early slide -- 16 + 0, where the state stops asking students to pay more and fills in the difference. UC is getting none of these.  It's getting 4 + 0, for the foreseeable future.

The result of revenue increases of ¼ of need appears in another UCOP figure:

This projects a $3 billion deficit only two academic years from now.

One of the best translations of this figure came from President Mark Yudof, when he addressed a Regents retreat in September 2012 (my transcription):

There were no board votes approving faculty salaries that are not competitive with peer institutions, . . .yet we are 10-20% behind in faculty compensation. There were no board votes approving a freeze on faculty hiring, but effectively that is what we’ve had over the last few years. There were no board votes approving a steady rise in our student-faculty ratio over the last decade, but in fact our numbers show a decline over the decade of 50% -- that is, we have 50% more students per faculty member than we did in previous decades. And in the past six years we have 30,000 more students without adding any new faculty at all, other than replacing existing faculty. You didn’t vote on any of that, but that is the consequence of the situation in which we find ourselves.

UC is still on that path today.

Are the campuses tied closely to the fate of the system? We couldn't address this question in a short talk, and took a quick look at Berkeley. The flagships have better resources than the younger campuses, but even Berkeley has been struggling. It fell into deficit in FY 2013.

I think the appearance of an operating deficit in FY2013 resulted from running out of reserves that covered holes in previous budgets. But I am guessing. I also don't have more current numbers. The point here is that even the historic wealth of UC's oldest, most accomplished, and most established campus doesn't protect it from the effects of a broken business model, in which private funds are supposed to make up for public cuts, but don't.

We noted that the administrative responses are credible but inadequate. We can't blame people for trying to do something, and using the tools that are actually and hand.   Still, we would prefer that folks admit this stuff won't work, since that's the first step towards trying something else that might.

"Nickel" solutions is my shorthand for widely-advertized solutions that in reality generate about 5 percent in additional revenues on a current base, or close about 5 percent of a funding gap.

This slide has no math. Leave a comment if you want me to produce some. I noted that I think OE's savings will be negative as it is patched and partially reversed to fix the inefficiencies (not to mention the reduced job satisfaction) it has produced. There's a lot to say about NRT, which lets the state off the hook, is now producing an organized parental backlash, and externalizes costs onto other campuses who take the less profitable but qualified state residents that Berkeley rejects. And that's for starters. This is not a sustainable fiscal strategy, but I didn't belabor it so I'll control myself here.

The silver bullet is supposed to be non-resident tuition (NRT).  NRT is often described as essentially free money in the amount of $23,000 in fees that out-of-state and international students pay above the $12,000 or so base paid by residents. UCOP always says that NRT students don't crowd out residents, but instead subsidize resident education in a period when their state government no longer wants to.  The visual version of this claim looks like this slide from a UCLA's Senate deck in fall 2013.

No wonder people get excited if NRT allows 50 percent more mileage from resident tuition. But it doesn't.  Net resident tuition is being compared to gross NRT, while my calculation on the slide used UCSD's estimate of $10,000 net per NRT student.  Gross NRT was 8.5 percent of core funds at UCLA  (slide 4), which put net NRT back in the nickel range (and about 2 percent of overall campus revenues).  (The use of NRT increases inequities within the UC system, but we didn't go into this with our Berkeley audience.)

Another way of thinking about NRT is as compensation for state funding cuts.   At UCLA, gross NRT made up for about 1/3 of the state funding reduction in 2007-08 to 2012-13 (slide 5).  This money is a lot better than nothing--if it's free politically as well as fiscally. But it never has been, as we've argued here going back to 2009.  This fall, UC officials are finally admitting this in public. This particular nickle solution may have peaked. 

My summary of this section was that the New Normal is the Old Normal. In other words, the Old Normal is what current budget politics will keep delivering. Unfortunately, the Old Normal is broken, in the sense that it can't support the working conditions that made UC so good in the first place.

This unhappy thought brought us to Option 2, where Michael took over.

Part III.

Michael here.  One possible response to this pattern of state cutbacks and nickel solutions would be for faculty to look inward to their department-based projects and let existing shared governance take care of the "big picture."  That would be mistake.  Shared governance has declined, and as it is presently practiced can't redirect the institution towards educational improvement or professional development.  

I found two organizational charts that illustrate the problem.

This first is from a 1998 essay by John Aubrey Douglass, arguably the leading historian of UC, about shared governance.  Although simplified, it shows the central place of the Academic Senate (on a level with Chancellors), with its leadership at the top of the pyramid  (level with the Council of Chancellors).

Now compare that with a current organizational chart provided by UCOP online:

If you pull out your magnifying glass you will find the Academic Senate in the purple box off to the left.  The Senate is directly connected only to the President and has been crowded out by the multiplication of administrative authorities over the past 15 years.

The theory of the Senate's role has stayed the same.

Shared governance was built on the professional status and educational authority of the Faculty.  This status enabled the faculty to delegate authority to the Senate and then go about its everyday business in classrooms, labs, libraries, and departmental meetings.  During the decades-long period of expanding resources, both state and federal, fiscal crises were the exception.  Departments could assume that if staffing needs weren't met this year they would be met next year or the year after. This eliminated the need for faculty to survey and manage the consumption of resources in other people's units, since there was little zero-sum competition over the medium or longer term. Administrators were able to handle routine management and planning within a relatively clear-cut political and economic ecology.

Unfortunately, that situation no longer exists.  Austerity has become the rule rather than the exception, and its consequences include the following.

We now live in a situation where instability is normalized.  While in the late 20c, administrators had to deal with the state, some donors, and a diffuse but not particularly interventionist public opinion (except for specific moments of crisis) managers now negotiate with a range of funding masters, most of which they have sought out, including an expanded universe of donors venture capitalists, bond raters, and out of state parents as well as an openly skeptical Governor and Legislature.

For the past two decades, UC managers have responded to pressure by shifting burdens onto those without the clout to reject them.  Students get increasing tuition, faculty get more work in the form of new tasks like fundraising and old ones on a larger scale (e.g. increased class sizes).  Staff members are being called upon to perform more work with fewer numbers.

I summarized the effect of the new financially-driven style of management with this slide:

I don't need to go into the detail of all of these--I'm sure you know them all well enough.  The point was that over the course of the last decade, the Senate, especially at the system-wide level, has been marginalized in the process of policy formation.  The structurally-produced reactive role makes it easier to cast the faculty as the opponents of progress, even as the central administration at UCOP has acted to impose its positions on the system as a whole.  In some cases (online education and the Supplemental Salary Program) there has been the appearance of shared governance.  In others, most recently the invention of UC Ventures, UCOP has simply cut the Senate out and chosen to work through task forces or through conversations with individuals.

I concluded that in its current weakened condition, the Academic Senate is no longer in a position to formulate, much less implement, a strong academic vision of UC's future.

Part IV.  

Chris again. Our premise is clear from the title of this slide.  We have concluded that UC can be fixed only through an unlikely but essential change--the broad mobilization of its faculty to define and then continuously shape the University's development over the next ten years. We mentioned theater professor Catherine Cole's initiative two years ago, which brought faculty, staff, and administrators together for several days.  

We noted some of our premises: the idea that there's no money is ridiculous. Austerity is slowly strangling us (e.g. Michael and Chris).  Lowered expectations are damaging our imaginations.  We need to fight for genuine workplace needs.

This slide described five general areas of activity. 

The slide fulfilled its purpose as a conversation starter--the discussion went on for 30-40 minutes.  I'll emphasize a few major themes.  

One was the need to deal with faculty privilege--both the perception of it invalidating our critique and the reliance on it to remain passive. My own sense is that this can be neutralized when faculty visibly stand up for other people, which we didn't do, for example, when frontline staff were being carted off to shared services because of Operation Excellence. That precedent can be changed.  Another example was the panic about resources and completion in graduate programs.  Faculty should work more systematically on the protection and support of our masters and doctoral students.

A second was doubt about the "efficacy of stories." What can tales of the struggles of faculty or staff or students actually do, institutionally?  Some of the stories were in fact about faculty defeat--and of course our story is about the rise of managerialism to control (rather than rebuild) declining resources. Stories need to lead to mobilization and organization: how do these do that? They certainly don't do that by themselves. 

This led to a third major topic.  The New Yorker in the room said, "you guys need a union." So did someone from Cal State. A UC librarian noted how their union produce some wins for libraries: librarians have much less power than faculty, she said, and yet look what our organization did. A Berkeley faculty member defined the needed project as co-governance,  with structure of implementation TBD.  There was another call to join the Berkeley Faculty Association!   And so now what? Where things go from here depends entirely on us.