Venice, Italy on May 8, 2026   

by Sean L. Malloy, Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), UC Merced

In September 2025, I wrote a guest post for this blog entitled “Why Should We Stand Up for the UC?” that placed much of the blame for the current federal assault against the University of California on the complicity and weakness of UC leadership, including the Regents, UCOP, and the Academic Senate.  In bowing to the false claims of antisemitism that have served as the Trump administration’s pretext for attacking American universities and unleashing police and administrative terror on anti-genocide protesters, the UC invited federal intervention while crushing the grassroots movements of students, faculty, and staff that not only stood up for the best values of humanity, but also represented the best defense against rising fascism and authoritarianism.  

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

I’m opposed to the University of California’s current responses to the Trump Administration’s multiple shakedowns.  I want to explain why, and suggest an alternative, by starting with Charlie Kirk, shot dead on September 10^th on a public college campus.

 

Kirk’s killing deprives Trump’s movement of its best youth storyteller. Kirk told stories about current issues like migration, the Great Replacement of white people, and universities eating the brains of the people. Kirk worked, like Steve Bannon, in cultural narrative as a power that drives politics and state action downstream. In 2024 he ran his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour through the country’s campuses including Cas Mudde’s, who noted the escalation from his 2018 “exposing lies and leftist propaganda” tour. The Evil University was a central villain in Kirk’s script, not a bit player, and Kirk sought to stigmatize, censor, suppress, discredit, and revile it. He succeeded, as Jamelle Bouie nicely explains. 

 

While UC campuses weighed current-year budget cuts in the range of 6 to 15 percent, the Board of Regents contemplated a vision of equilibrium. When the UC Office of the President's November presentation was done, a regent invited chancellors to respond. UC Riverside's Kim Wilcox (at left, perhaps showing the size of his budget gap) started a courteous series of dissents from the junior campuses, with a timely assist from Berkeley's Carol Christ. Wilcox was featured in Teresa Watanabe's LA Times story that covered the disconnect between celebrating UC's racial diversity (done) and actually funding it (not). The effects of cuts are swaddled in confusion, a confusion seeded by UCOP's budget narrative and planted in the fertile soil of the regents' modest knowledge of their university.

1. UCOP

Each November, UCOP proposes a budget to the Board of Regents for the following fiscal year. In November 2020, they proposed a budget for 2021-22, which the regents then voted unanimously to approve. The result becomes the University's official budget request to the governor and the legislature. 

Here's the summary attachment of the request. Noteworthy items include the request for a full restoration of the state legislature's cut to UC's 2020-21 budget of about $300 million, a second year of pay freezes for faculty and most unrepresented staff (merit increases are funded), and a 1.5% wage increase for a category of non unionized frontline staff.

The dominant narrative is . . . a balanced budget! (Same for Finance and Capital Strategies.) Each item is an increment on an invisible base. Nearly all the items are personnel costs, in keeping with the perennial narrative element that workers are the cost albatross around the university's neck.  The failure of the state to fund capital projects is given the artificially minute price tag of $15 million (debt service).  The exception is deferred maintenance, featured as mostly an investment in cost savings, and expressed as a one-time sum, with no definition of total need (likely 100 times larger) or notice that DM is in fact the opposite of a one-time thing, by its very nature. The request for a state funding increase ($217.4 million, oddly parceled into four items) is not defined as a percentage of a general fund base or as a response to specified campus conditions. The amounts are very small, and have no obvious connection to the mass of current operations.

The budget document (B4) was presented to the regents by the two budget officials who do these honors at regular two month intervals, Nathan Brostrom and David Alcocer. They are both highly competent people who are genuinely devoted to the wellbeing of UC: my comments are not about the individuals but the narrative.  The presentation began about 2'15" into the last session (bottom video on this page; perma-archive of audio is here).  UCOP framed the current year cuts with a full "V-shaped" recovery.

The shortfall is minimized as "near-time," even though these non-core operations are, on campuses, forcing cuts to the educational core.  The term "bridging strategies" suggests losses have been contained, the further implication being no damage to the workforce and no need for better state funding support. As we have often noted in this space, the virtue signaling of self-reliance lets the state off the budget hook.

In presenting this slide, Brostrom noted the campuses have different shortfalls and different strategies for filling them.  This slide looks at the system aggregate.

The main message is, again, the balanced budget. The state cut UC $300 million in the middle of a pandemic when it was losing $2.2 billion in revenue and incurring an additional $431 million in Covid-19 expenses. This reality disappears.  In the UCOP story, cuts don't really matter because the cuts were made up with a bunch of harmless-sounding stuff, like attrition and using reserves. 

Same thing for next year.

The state's cut to UC funding is permanent, so it shows up again. The current year's cost increases do too--so they apparently weren't actually covered as shown in the previous slide.  There are some new "savings." These are really self-imposed cuts: the 10-year UCPath fiasco (a systemwide personnel transactions platform), in which IT "efficiencies" have really meant "morale-crushing rigidity and huge new costs," should have ended UCOP's annual invocation of such savings. But the regents don't seem to know operations realities like UCPath's impacts on staff, so there they are again.  Non-resident student tuition is assigned a full bounce back, and the rest is supplied by restored state funding (though Brostrom noted verbally that this would be "one-time"). It all adds up to the standard budget narrative of equilibrium.  

In reality, it doesn't.  It adds up to cuts on every campus, and a scramble to maximize alternative revenue streams that, in another unstated problem, move workforce effort away from the state-funded educational core.  The actuality of cuts surfaced briefly when the opening regental questioner, Michael Cohen, said about the phrase "cost savings" that "I think you probably grabbed a sentence from some prior documents from the last decade or so," and then asked what long-term savings they mean. Brostrom noted that NRST is capped now, and new high-tuition programs are already in wide use. Translation: the budget patches of the 2010s are now used up. In fact, that leaves workforce cuts, delicately phrased as "attrition and others."  (Cohen also got Brostom to move the number for reserves on the core budget from $174 million to $2 billion, although the issue died there.) In short, "cost savings" mainly means "workforce cuts."

Before we get to the Riverside dissent, let's tote up the core budget story elements:

1. Budget cuts happen, but they never cut UC's world-leading excellence.
2. UCOP cannot stop these budget cuts, but has already neutralized them.
3. All fund sources are basically the same: private is as good as public; borrowing is as viable as state funding.
4. The burdensome costs are personnel (not capital projects, deferred maintenance, or internal subsidies for sponsored research).
5. Campus budgets have inherent differences that the campuses are handling differently.

November brought the latest installment of the "wait and see" policy advanced in every budget presentation during the 2020 Covid period. Covid will fade, and the business cycle will bring UC back to normal. In this story, no new framing, no new thinking, no new policies, no new advocacy, no new mobilization is needed. 

2. The Chancellors

Cohen's question was followed by one from Lark Park, who noted that the system budget doesn't always reflect the campuses and asked if one or two chancellors would like to speak. Enter UC Riverside's chancellor Wilcox.

A lot of people have talked about the pandemic as a magnifier of differences. . . . It's true that we haven't raised resident tuition in many years. And we are a campus that is almost exclusively resident students. That part of our budget has been fixed for many years. . . .And of course that's in the face of the same kind of cost increases that everyone else has faced.  This has been a serious challenge for us at Riverside. To give you an idea, we have now people on campus suggesting that we eliminate the entire athletics program, shut down the study abroad program, our UCDC participation, and our UC Sacramento participation. And that's simply so we can preserve the dollars so we can maintain the core of the university. And ironically the last three . . . are because of our low participation rate, which, ironically, is because our students have fewer resources to participate. So for us, this is a dire situation. There are 6 FTE employed in the chancellor's office at UC Riverside.  I'm one of those six. We anticipate next year there will be 4.  We're cutting everything we can to manage this budget situation. While I appreciate the perspective of Nathan and David on the total being balanceable, the impact on the ground is significant. (2'44'':45 - 2'46":30)

Two other junior campus chancellors backed Wilcox. Juan Sánchez Muñoz at Merced added that his local community depends on campus services that are being curtailed. Cynthia Larive at Santa Cruz noted the added burden of the very high cost of housing in that coastal location. Finally, Berkeley's Carol Christ chimed it to say that although Berkeley's budget is completely different from that of the younger, smaller campuses, "this is the most severe crisis I've ever experienced in my career in higher education. It is a really challenging crisis for the campus.  . . .We have a deficit measured from March 2020 through June 2021 of 340 million dollars." She described a few sources and added, "our losses in athletics are catastrophic."  While there are differences around the UC system, she concluded, "it's not a question of not having budgetary duress on the campuses." (2'55" - 2'56")

The regents' responses made it clear that they do not know what Covid costs and losses plus state cuts are doing to the the campuses. At the end, Regent George Kieffer said, "if we maybe think about a working group, a smaller group, to understand how the process works within UCOP. . . [Formulas for campus allocations] are something I think that the regents have not understood--that I have not understood for most of my term."  Kieffer is the immediate past chair of the Board of Regents.  This admission suggests that the vast majority of the governing board has no real idea of how budgeting works or affects the campuses over which they have complete fiduciary responsibility and control. 

A remarkable summation of the board's competence came from Park, speaking between Wilcox and the other chancellors.

Chancellor Wilcox I appreciate your candor on this. I know it can't be easy. I am surprised to hear this news, but I guess maybe in some ways I shouldn't be. There was a speaker in public comment this morning who alluded to the per-pupil funding disparities. [At the presidential search town hall at Riverside], we did hear an earful from faculty at the time, about how they felt undervalued in terms of per-pupil funding.  I guess I'm kind of taken aback by this. It's kind of ironic because I remember a presentation you gave, this time last year even, we heard about all that Riverside has achieved. And if we could just tell the Riverside story and the Merced story, it would be tremendous and we'd just get so much state support--in terms of the kind of students we're trying to support. I'm really worried that we are doing a real disservice here. And it worries me--I think that rather than advancing our interests on equity we're actually impeding it when we let the disparity continue to exist. I guess I should look to myself too--I've heard this and I've seen the numbers, but it just hasn't struck me as much. I do know it's tough times across the board because of Covid. But just as we know that some populations are struggling more than others in the real world here, I think that if we don't come to grips with this, we're not serving the system well. I think we need to figure out whether our formula advantages the already advantaged, which is something that goes against a lot of principles we've stated in the last year when we've done away with SAT when we endorsed Prop 209  [sic]. I just think we need to go beyond this veneer, to get at what equity really means. . . . I appreciate your being candid with us and I appreciate the speaker who spoke in public comment. It reminded me of what we heard in Riverside.  I just would like to see this discussion continued in the very near future. I think we have to solve it. I think we have to decide that we want to do more than talk about equity, that we want to put our money where our mouth is. (2'47" - 2'50")

Of course Park is right: the regents have been giving lip service to racial equity and inclusion because they have never bothered to insure that equity was budgeted. They seem not to study before the meetings, nor do they appear to read widely and think independently about systemic issues, even those overlapping with their expertise in finance, construction, and the like. The information is widely available. The Senate's UCPB produced a version of the campus funding disparities chart (via UCSD professor Andrew Dickson) around 2006.  The Santa Cruz chancellor's office injected a similar chart into budget negotiations with UCOP in 2009-10. A state audit thoroughly investigated the situation in 2011, and here at the blog we did a detailed, two-part post on the racialized funding inequities (2011-12; Part 2).  The Riverside campus hosts leading scholars of US and educational racism, structural and otherwise; one of these is Dylan Rodriguez, current president of the American Studies Association and immediate past chair of Riverside's divisional senate. The immediate past chair of Riverside's Council for Planning and Budget, physics professor Harry Tom, could produce an eloquent, comprehensive campus budget summary with an hour's notice. A former president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, Pat Morton, teaches at Riverside. The current systemwide Senate chair, Mary Gauvin, teaches at Riverside, and was at the regents' budget presentation. And so on.  The information is out there for the regents to find: it's just not found for them by UCOP.   Unfortunately, this "disengagement compact" at the top of UC has hurt 21st century UC students, particularly the very high share of disadvantaged students that are relegated to the poorest campuses.

Chair Pérez concluded item B4 by saying, "I did hear very clearly a desire from regents to dig down, and get a more granular view of the budget, so I will work with the president's office to figure out how we can achieve that."  The regents almost made it a full 50-minute hour on the UC budget proposal for 2020-21 (2'15"-3'03"). With some collective effort, it could be a turning point.

3. The Story

Here are some key elements of the better budget narrative that UC and other public universities desperately need.

A. Big picture context: In contrast to current practice, each budget proposal must be compared to the previous regental request (November 2020 to November 2019).  (November 2019's B4 was a better presentation because it included metrics that nearly touched the third rail of UC politics: budget-driven quality declines.)  The year-on-year pattern should then be put in historical context.  Here's an example from our "essential charts" post in May.

The state underfunds UC (red line) compared to the state personal income benchmark (blue line), and falls dramatically short of funding that tracked both income and enrollment growth (yellow line). State government has been saving money on the UC system for 20 years, and the regents can't see sub-standard campus resources without this context.  

In addition, the inadequate net revenues from past tuition hikes and the terrible effects of new unfunded costs need to be factored in to grasp net per-student funding. UCOP could produce a more authoritative version of this effort:

In the calculation, net educational revenues (green line) follow the clearly inadequate state funding (red line), not higher gross figures the regents see (details are at the post linked above). This is a very bad situation that is redefining the quality and nature of UC. It of course won't be fixed until it is faced.

B. Tie budgeting directly to its effects on policy priorities.  Today's board is rightly obsessed with racial equity and inclusion. It's fairly easy to show a prima facie racist correlation in state funding for UC (from our "First Black President" post).

This should be used to shame the legislature out of its practice of giving half the per-student funding to today's minority-majority UC that it gave to white UC. 

C. Clearly explain funding allocations to the campuses, including "rebenching." 

Here's a down payment on an explanation the regents need to have. Rebenching was UC's response to a state audit back in 2011. The audit identified funding inequities that it set forth as racialized ("Racial Patterns of Campus Budget Inequality").  Not only had UCOP allowed campuses to keep all their non-resident student tuition, which "advantaged the already advantaged," to cite Regent Park, but was giving less state general funding to the newer (and browner) campuses.  The plan was to increase the average per-student allocation to the highest level (UCLA's) with new money.  It took about six years, and here's the theory of what happened. 

Here UCOP has told the regents that the campuses now live in budgetary equality. So why was Riverside Chancellor Wilcox saying his campus gets the least money per student?  

Because of how rebenching actually worked.  Rebenching carved out some kinds of campus specific state earmarks and gave each campus a fixed base, so not all state funding was rebenched. Secondly, students were weighted by type, with doctoral students counting 2.5. For example, UC Berkeley had 41,891 students (headcount) at a census point in 2017-18. But it has a high share of doctoral students, so its "weighted" enrollment was 49,894. Berkeley gets the same rate of $6000 and odd per student, but for 8,003 students more than it physically has. Riverside moves from 23,279 unweighted to 26,338 weighted, or an increase of 3059. Berkeley's increase is 19 percent relative to its unweighted base; Riverside's is 13 percent.    This in keeping with the other features of the formula leads to "advantaging those already advantaged."

A final factor is that only a campus's enrollments at the start of the rebenching period were actually rebenched. (I am inferring this from the fact that I was not able to reproduce the UCOP chart above, and got an approximation only by holding enrollment constant.) Sometime during this period, UCOP decided to accept a "surge" of resident students to compensate for the political liability that high non-resident enrollments had created. New resident undergraduates were given whatever amount was cooked up in a Brown-Napolitano deal in a given year ($5000 one year, $0 in another, etc.). Here's actual (weighted) enrollments look like:

No convergence. Flat funding. And Riverside bumping along the bottom. (I assume UCSB did better because it grew less in this period.) The surge's underfunded resident undergrads were the price UC paid for rapid non-resident tuition growth, meaning that campuses like Riverside paid for NRST revenues at campuses like Berkeley.

Each campus experiences its educational quality through total available revenues. Adding tuition (including the non-resident tuition and for-profit masters programs (SSPs) at 3x resident rates to state funding looks like this:

This confirms Wilcox's claim that Riverside has the least revenues per student. UCOP in effect is sending poorer (and mostly URM) students to the poorest campus in defiance of UC's professed values, to say nothing of standards of educational and social effectiveness.   You can also see here the chronic problem of "Two UC Systems," separate and unequal, which the enrollment surge intensified.

D. Tell the budget stories from the bottom up.  Wilcox disrupted budget orthodoxy by talking about his campus for 105 seconds.  The other chancellors spoke for around 60 seconds each.  These vignettes changed the Board's budget perceptions, at least temporarily. They could and should be multiplied a thousand-fold and turned into coherent stories.  Faculty, staff, and students could create a different master narrative by laying out what is happening in classrooms, grad student cubicles, libraries, and laboratories. It would fundamentally change budget perceptions, and also, over time, public understanding and budget politics in a bewieldered state. 

Many other people need to tell their alternative budget stories. You other people. All kinds of campus people. Neither the regents nor UCOP can or will do this on their own.  They don't know enough, and they aren't correctly placed.  You actually do know enough.  This knowledge can overcome the current stumbling blocks: top-down governance, and the absence of a UC opposition party to put forth a New Budget platform for UC.  The Senate hasn't done it. CUCFA hasn't done it.  Even AFSCME, whose Claudia Preparata has done the best independent analysis of UC reserves, hasn't done it.  The pieces of alternatives are a good start but aren't enough. Individual work can always be marginalized in the time-honored UC tradition of shunning the messenger and ignoring the message.  (Even tenured faculty fear shunning, since it makes them feel devalued and also blocks the possibility of an administrative appointment that, during decades of sub-par salaries, is the main way to get a significant raise.) A complete rebuilding of a broken budget model is too important to keep delaying the day regular campus folks start pooling their experiences, saying the way things ought to be, building the story line, and detailing how to fund it.

Warmest congratulations for getting to the end of 2020.  Happy 2021 to one and all.

By Robert Cohen (New York University)

The release of the California College Republican’s Platform has attracted press attention because of its extreme right wing positions demonizing the university as “degenerate and murderous” -- denouncing university support of transgender rights, undocumented students, Mexican and Muslim student organizations, and funding of birth control, and abortion.  But what the media coverage of the platform missed was the brazen dishonesty of these college Republicans’ discussion of free speech on campus. Indeed, the charge  of attempted censorship that the platform makes against  the UC Berkeley administration, with regard to the campus appearance of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, is not merely misleading and false; it is by far the biggest lie I have ever encountered from student activists in the more than 30 years  I have spent studying, publishing books and articles, and teaching courses on American student politics. There was no attempted censorship of Shapiro at Cal, and the charge that there was represents an attempt by these right wing students to masquerade as free speech martyrs, which would be laughable were it not for the fact that such lying defames a Berkeley campus administration that has in reality ardently supported (and spent millions of dollars protecting) the free speech rights of conservative speakers at UC Berkeley.

What the California College Republicans’ Platform said was that the Shapiro incident at UC Berkeley was an “example” of  the “attempt” by campus “administrators” to “suppress… free expression” of “conservative students…. The University of California at Berkeley attempted to prevent Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) from bringing conservative speaker Ben Shapiro by forcing BCR to pay for his $600,000 security bill necessitated by violent leftist demonstrators.” This a complete fabrication. UC Berkeley never sought to force the BCR to pay an astronomical security fee. Nor did UC Berkeley in any way seek to prevent Shapiro’s appearance. Quite the opposite. The administration did everything in its power to make that appearance possible and to ensure its safety. 

Here are the facts. Back in July 2017 the BCR applied for a large room to accommodate the Shapiro event, which it planned to hold in mid-September.  It turned out that none of the  large rooms used for student events at Cal  were available on the date the BCR requested. So to ensure that this conservative speaking event could occur anyway, the Berkeley administration took the extraordinary step of making available Zellerbach Hall – whose large auditorium  had  usually been a venue for concerts and major cultural events, and in the past had rarely if ever been made available for student speaking events.  The administration even agreed that it would pay the Zellerbach venue fee, something it had never done for any student political organization. In other words, the UC Berkeley administration was leaning over backwards to accommodate Shapiro’s talk, even subsidizing it, so much so that Berkeley’s left-leaning student newspaper, The Daily Californian complained of administration favoritism towards the BCR.  

Yes, security costs for the Shapiro event in September 2017, most of which were paid for by the university, were expensive. But that was not merely – as the Republicans claimed – because of concerns about “violent leftist demonstrators,” but also  because in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy (where a white supremacist murdered an anti-racist protester) there were fears that violent right wing extremists might come to the Berkeley campus to assault their leftist counterparts and students of color. Indeed, there had been street battles in Berkeley during the summer of 2017 between extremists on the right and left. So the university spent for for the necessary security to prevent such violence and to ensure that there was no repetition of the riot of February 1, 2017, when a paramilitary force of some 150 masked anarchists invaded the Berkeley campus,  threatening public safety, doing $100,000 in property damage to the university, forcing the cancellation of a speech by the  bigoted, foul mouthed, far right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Thus the administration brought in an army of police, closed five campus buildings, and had police barricades set up on Sproul Plaza to establish a security perimeter that made violence or rioting impossible, enabling the Shapiro event to occur with no disruption.

These security measures were  costly not only  in terms of money (despite a serious budget deficit Cal spent some $800,000 on the Shapiro event) but the disruption of the academic lives of many students, who could not access the services of the offices that were closed the afternoon of the Shapiro event.  This led to  complaints from students, faculty, and staff that for the sake of an unpopular speaker brought by one small student organization (the BCR), regular functions of the university had been halted. Cal’s chancellor Carol Christ, heard such complaints. But she had declared that this, her first year in office would be “free speech year,” because at Berkeley – home of the Free Speech Movement – “free speech is who we are.” And so to protect Berkeley’s vaunted free speech tradition she opened herself up to such criticism and had the university absorb the financial costs as well, all to prove that right wing speakers could come to the university to exercise their First Amendment rights. 

As to the BCR, its expenses for the Shapiro event were modest, paying only a  security fee of $9,162, which was dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of dollars the university paid in actual security costs. In fact, had the UC Berkeley administration not covered for the BCR the venue rental for Zellerbach Hall these conservative students would have had to pay another $13,274.02 to have hosted Shaprio in its grand auditorium. 

In a more rational era, campus conservatives would be grateful that Cal had subsidized their celebrity speaker and that they had a chancellor so committed to free speech that she went to such extraordinary lengths to ensure the Shapiro event’s success and  safety. But since this is the Trump era, where much of the American right wing  disregards truth whenever it finds doing so useful for its favorite sport of liberal-bashing, we end up with dishonest statements from the CCR accusing the "liberal" University of California administration of an imaginary free speech violation. Indeed, it was Trump himself who set the standard for such dishonesty when on February 2, 2017 his blame (and threaten) the victim tweet falsely implied that UC Berkeley had caused the anti-Yiannopoulos riot, sought to suppress conservative speech, and should therefore lose its federal funding. Actually, UC Berkeley’s administration insisted on Yiannopoulos’ right to speak on campus  despite pressures to cancel the  speech on account of his record of using campus podiums to mock, bully,  and invade the privacy of a transgender student and to foment bigotry and political violence. It was only when the riot perpetrated by an invasion of club-wielding (mostly non-student) anarchists  threatened the public safety that the speech was cancelled.

The riot is, of course, evidence that a militant, violent wing of the  Bay Area Left is hostile to the free speech rights of the far right. It is also true that amidst the 2016 presidential election season made extraordinary tense because of Trump’s nativist, Islamophobic, white nationalist campaign, BCR members were sometimes treated like pariahs by leftist students, and that campus conservatives at times faced verbal and even physical intimidation from their political foes at Cal. But such problems – serious as they are – do not justify inaccurate and ideologically motivated attacks on the university  administration itself, which consistently opposed such intolerance. 

The reality is that just in the last spring semester alone, the BCR had, with the UC administration’s support, hosted such conservative speakers as Charlie Kirk, Rick Santorum, Heather MacDonald, Candace Owens, Dave Ruben, Steve Simpson Antonia Oakfor, and Allie Stuckey. Even Yiannopoulos, who would, as with Shapiro, cost the university a fortune in security,  in September 2017,  returned to Cal for a campus appearance and gave a speech so brief and vacuous that UC spokesperson Dan Moguloff referred to it as “the most expensive photo-op in Cal’s history.” So for even the crudest and most irresponsible of  right wing speakers (Yiannopoulos, who just this week expressed regret that the pipe bombs sent to critics of Trump  had not detonated ) free speech is alive and well at UC Berkeley. But so is the free speech masquerade in which the California  state Republican student leadership continues to pose as free speech martyrs, repressed by an administration that actually has consistently championed the free speech rights of conservatives.  

The farce that was MiloFest has now frittered away into failure.  Of course, that will not be the last time that the right-wing attempts to undermine the authority and status of higher education under the guise of standing up for free thought.  The challenge will be ongoing.

At the same time, we should not allow the fireworks over free speech to divert us from other important attacks on the educational mission of universities.  These attacks are driven not by the ideologies of the alt-right but by the ideologies of austerity.

One classic case of the damage brought about by privatization-driven austerity was revealed amidst the hubbub over free speech week at Berkeley.  While most attention was focused on the spectacles of Shapiro and Yiannopoulos, the Daily Cal reported that the Christ administration is proposing to end the funding for the tremendously successful Berkeley Connect program as part of its budget cutting plans.

Berkeley Connect is an  innovative program that provides academic mentoring to undergraduates and fellowship support to graduate students.  Undergraduates who join the program are linked with a graduate student adviser who helps them navigate their academic experience.  Students take part in small discussion groups and workshops, and pursue a specially designed curriculum.  Students overwhelmingly praise the program and it has been shown to improve their academic performance.  Over 10,000 have participated.  Even though the program had its campus support cut last year from $2M to $1M dollars it still was able to support 1200 undergraduates while providing 29 graduate fellowships.

What makes this proposed elimination so striking is that the Christ Administration appears willing to sacrifice precisely the sort of program that Berkeley claims it wants to promote because it improves the quality of undergraduate education.  Berkeley Connect began in 2010 as a result of a donation from the father of an English Department alumnus.  In 2013, recognizing its success, the campus agreed to fund its extension to additional departments.  It now serves 13 departments from Math, Computational Biology and Physics on the one hand to History, Architecture and African-American Studies on the other.  So the Christ administration is proposing to eliminate a highly successful program, built upon a commitment of campus funds and the support of appreciative parent of an alumnus, and that has demonstrably improved both undergraduate and graduate education.  And just for the record, the amount going to Berkeley Connect this year is approximately the same as what the University has recently spent on the Shapiro and Yiannopoulos events and less than 1/5 of the continued subvention of the chronically mismanaged Intercollegiate Athletics department.

To be sure, the particular brutalism of Berkeley's imposition of austerity is not due to the campus leadership alone.  UCOP is demanding the pace of deficit reduction and therefore making it more difficult to balance the budget without affecting innovative educational programs.  But when the campus announces that they have decided to exclude fellowships from the chopping block  and then turns around and makes a decision that will cut nearly 30 graduate fellowships, one has to wonder about how believable the administration's claims really are.

Indeed, as Chris pointed out in his recent budget post, Berkeley has shown no sign of an open and deep rethinking of their budget strategies and priorities of the last 15 years.  Beginning with the Birgeneau and Breslauer administration, Berkeley has been announcing new and greater privatization schemes while allowing for a dramatic expansion in administration even as funding for core educational activities has become increasingly strained.  Although it is true that in this year's budget plan, administrative cuts are serious, they don't make up for the imbalance in spending over the last several administrations.

If the Christ Administration eliminates Berkeley Connect it will be both a terrible step and a canary in a coal mine.  The Chancellor has insisted that she is determined to protect instruction.  If she is, then she will insist that her administration find the funds to maintain Berkeley Connect.  If she does not, it will be another example of the slide of Berkeley from the days when its headlines were about educational innovation to these days, when we hear mostly about rankings declines and athletic department mismanagement.

In the aftermath of the failure of Milofest, the Berkeley Faculty Association has written an op-ed that raises important questions about the relationship between free speech, academic freedom, and political attacks on the university.  As the BFA notes:

Freedom of speech is one foundational principle of the public university. Academic freedom is another. Since 1964, when the UC Berkeley administration was successfully challenged by the Free Speech Movement to extend First Amendment protections to campus space, the university has had to balance the obligation to allow citizens’ speech against the commitment to academic freedom. As a public entity, UC Berkeley must respect the airing of diverse viewpoints; as a higher learning institution, UC Berkeley must protect its autonomy from political interference and harassment. Increasingly, the threat to the campus’ autonomy, on which academic freedom depends, derives not from government legislators—as in the era of the FSM, when former UC President Clark Kerr and former UC Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong were faced with adjudicating competing obligations to free speech and academic freedom. Rather, the threat increasingly derives from private interests hostile to the university’s mission of research and teaching.

You can read the entire statement at the DAILY CAL

The most visible item on this week’s University of California Regents agenda has the Board considering a cap on the enrollment of non resident students. It appears towards the end of the second month of a Trump administration that has not dampened enthusiasm for debt-free college or free college but increased it.

Democrats in California, New York, and elsewhere are proposing debt-free plans and are weighing tuition-free as well ("Degrees Not Debt," "The $48 Fix"). In January, the California Legislative Analyst's Office published a report calculating the costs of debt-free college degrees in the state's public systems. When I extended their arithmetic for UC, it showed that UC could be debt-free for less than 10% of its current tuition income.

That would be an amazing thing. It would change what the public thinks universities can do for them. But the UC Regents are talking about a different tuition issue this week.

In California, nonresident (NR) enrollment was a ticking political time bomb that finally went off a year ago, when the State Auditor released a report finding, to quote its title, “The University of California: Its Admissions and Financial Decisions Have Disadvantaged California Resident Students.” The UCOP rebuttal didn’t appease the legislature, which translated the angry denunciations of some members into a proposal that nonresident undergraduates be capped at 10% of overall UC undergraduate enrollment.

(1)

UC’s response is to propose an overall UC cap at twice that level, or 20% of undergrad enrollment. The proposal grandfathers the three campuses that are now above that cap at their current levels (Berkeley at 24.4%, UCSD and UCLA nearly tied at just under 23%). It lets other campuses grow their NR student enrollment to the point that the overall university level, now 16.5%, reaches 20%.

The advantage for UC is that it can continue to grow overall nonresident supplemental tuition (NRST) revenues (which bring $26,682 in tuition on top of the $13,500 state-resident tuition and campus fees that NR students also pay). The disadvantage for UC is that this flies in the face of legislative desire, which is that NR enrollments stop growing and start getting cut back. Sometime this week, the Regents' proposal was downgraded to a discussion item, so that even this modest proposal will not be up for a vote.

I’m going to focus on aspects of one issue: does NRST actually work as public income replacement?

NRST is a prime example of privatization, since it partially replaces public funding—state general funds—with high tuition from individual students and their families. Privatization advocates have two main arguments. First, they say they didn’t “replace” public with private funding, since the public funding was already cut and they needed to fill a gap. Second, in the case of NRST, the tuition money comes with low costs, and the benefits are always far greater than these costs.

This year, both UCOP and Senate leaders are also stressing the blessings of diversity as uniquely offered by NR students. UC may have started privatizing reactively, but now seems to say that private funding is as good or better than public funding, at least in the case of NRST, which is per student $26,682 better than public funding. But is NRST in fact an example of privatization bringing both fun and profit?

(2)

When I first wrote about it in September 2009, I calculated that its financial benefits were overstated: senior officials announced gross income figures that didn’t deduct expenses or real non-monetary costs like the political goodwill required to maintain state funding. I called NRST one of the “nickel solutions” that can get to a 5% (or some other single-digit share) increase in a vulnerable revenue stream but not beyond that. I was using Robert Birgeneau’s plan to do what in fact has happened—ramp up the nonresident share of UC Berkeley’s undergraduate enrollment to about 25% of the total. Then-chancellor Birgeneau projected an increase of tuition revenues to $70 million at 25% NR enrollment.

In response, I estimated the benefit to the UC Berkeley budget had it already achieved a 25% share of NR students: 8% of full instructional expenditures as I calculated them, and 4% of overall campus expenditures. Hence the nickel.

UCSD professor of marine chemistry Andrew Dickson—and fellow UCPB vet—used a different methodology to come up with a similar estimate. Both of us emphasized hidden or indirect costs of adding NR students. These included new instructional and student support needs. They included the price of political resentment and backlash from the public and the legislature, which would appear in the concrete budget effect of either cuts or reduced public funding increases over the long term as the University proved once again that it didn’t need so much public money because it had so much private money, including tuition from that semi-infinite supply of international students who were joining a billion-strong global middle class allegedly hungering for an American BA.

This blog's NRST analyses suggested three worrisome features of UC advocacy.

1. UC calculates the financial benefits as a gross income, not as a net. Indirect and nonmonetary costs (like political goodwill or student work hours) aren’t analyzed publicly. 
2. It denies or deems temporary the anti-public aspects of the move. UC officials were then suggesting that NR enrollment would last only as long as the budget cuts and could be dialed back as soon as possible. 
3. When someone does put political costs on the agenda, senior officials define them as effectively zero. The same goes for the costs to public funding. I have again recently had a face-to-face experience with a senior UC official who declared the feedback loop from private back to public to be nonexistent. In this view, UC’s continuous and successful efforts to increase private revenues never have and do not now teach politicians that they can cut state funds without hurting the University. 

In contrast, my research for The Great Mistake found statements going back to 1970 that inferred legislative obligations from tuition hikes. For me, the question is not whether tuition hikes dampen state funding increases but how much? How much public money do tuition hikes cost? My answer in 2009 was more than the 8% of your instructional budget or 4% of your campus budget reaped via expanded NRT. With only 4% annual GF increases and a tuition freeze following deep cuts, the UC system has been losing more than 8% a year compared to its structural needs (e.g., Displays 5 and 6; discussion of this “New Normal”).

What’s happened since? The state cut public funding and still hasn’t built it back. The University raised tuition and then the governor forced a freeze. The University ramped up nonresident enrollment, such that UC now has about 5 times the number of NR students that it had ten years ago. As in any social system, these elements of the funding model are interconnected.

Then, about ten years after the growth began, the State Auditor issued its report, and the political blowback began. UCOP responded in three ways. It posted a rebuttal that insisted the University has continued to admit all eligible resident students, rejecting the state’s claim that NR enrollments damaged access. It emphasized the pre-existing plan (page 8) to admit an additional 10,000 resident students, in spite of below-cost per-student funding from the state. And now, the regents will have a discussion of an NR cap that allows further NR growth at the non-flagship campuses up to an overall system total of 20 percent.

(3)

You can see the surface appeal of nonresident tuition from this UCLA budget slide, referring to $1.4 billion in core campus revenues in 2015-16.

NRST was 12% of the campus's core revenues, or over half the total tuition the campus gets from resident tuition. Given limits on the growth of state funding and resident tuition, NRST is no longer a temporary alternative revenue stream but a significant part of the overall budget. At least from the administrative perspective, Premise 2 above--NRST's temporary nature--is moot.

But remember that these are gross revenues. Let's look at NRST net income, and switch back to Berkeley to compare the 2009 calculations to the actual situation at nearly 25% nonresident enrollment.

Like all campuses, UC Berkeley grosses $40,182 per NR undergrad. We subtract gross in-state tuition of $13,500, since the campus would get this anyway with a resident student. (The University normally takes one-third of gross in-state tuition as “return to aid” to support financial aid programs, but NR students also pay this on the in-state tuition "base.") UC Berkeley thus receives $26,682 for replacing a resident student with a nonresident student, or for adding a nonresident student rather than adding a resident student.

Next, we subtract a round number of $10,000 for the marginal cost of instruction and related expenses for adding an additional student. These include new additional costs incurred by adding an NR rather than a residential student (a larger international office for visas and other paperwork; language support; academic tutoring; acculturation and integration programs--anyone who things social integration is cheap has never done it!) This reduces the net yield per nonresident student to $16,682. (In the table in regents’ item B4, page 7, the net is instead $15,862.)

Then, we encounter another subtraction. Undergrads who are residents of California also bring state general funding with them. This is the amount that has been cut so much over the decades--it is down from $19,100 in 1990-91 to $7,160 (in 2016-17 dollars, Display 3). But $7160 is far from zero. In the case when a nonresident student replaces a resident student, we subtract $7160. The net after deducting direct costs or losses for this kind of NR student, who replaces a resident, is $9522.

Hmm. If we posit that UC Berkeley decided not to add unfunded resident students and not to overcrowd its facilities, so that all nonresident students replaced a resident they might have taken were the state paying for them, we multiply this figure back by UC Berkeley's 7335 nonresident enrollments. In that case, we get a net NRST for the campus of $69,844,000. This is freakishly close to Robert Birgeneau's 2009 estimate of $70,000,000. More importantly, it is under 10% of the campus's gross tuition revenues. It is just under 4% of the campus's 2015 operating revenues. In short, NRST remains the nickel solution that it seemed to be in 2009.

A rebuttal to this analysis would object that its premise is wrong: UC Berkeley added resident students as well so NR students didn't simply replace them; the state wasn't paying for many of the resident students so there wasn't that $7160 difference to subtract; or it was paying $5000 instead. I agree that we would get different numbers if we changed the proportion of NR added to NR replacing residents and plugged in the state's shortchanging. There is a range of reasonable estimates of the NRST net. But they wouldn't increase the NRST totals enough, net of direct monetary cost, to justify making NRST a central and irreplaceable tuition strategy. That's my first conclusion. There's a price to the privatization of revenue streams, and it needs to be netted out.

(4)

Direct financial costs don't exhaust this price. We still haven't touched on the indirect and non-monetary or intangible costs of the NRST strategy. Some of the indirect costs are monetary. There are costs of competition for nonresident students in the form of new capital projects, better overall student services, better housing, and the like. (I'd refer doubters of these indirect costs to Berkeley's former VC for Administration and Finance John Wilton's analysis behind his comment, "Berkeley must now compete for its three most important revenue sources against the best private and public universities.")

Other indirect costs are costs to academic quality. This is a taboo subject in a University that is now engaged in a permanent campaign to fundraise from everybody, but the problem continues eight years after the crisis. This year, to compensate an angry legislature for NRST, UC enrolled the largest one-year number of new residential students in living memory. Campuses are handling the “surge”--on top of the continued growth of non-residents--with strategies like hiring non tenure track rather than tenure track faculty, growing course sizes, and endorsing short-cuts such as having some undergraduate work be graded by other undergrads. How do we quantify this cost of tuition-suppressed public funding--which may follow our graduates into their working lives--so that state government cares about it?

There are still other costs I will merely name. One is the public cost to national higher education as states race each other to swap students so they ca triple charge them. The Department of Education should confront this absurd escalation of overall national tuition charges, which drives some share of student debt, though even under Obama it did not.

Another other is the loss of political goodwill. This is hard to put a number on, but "The $48 Fix" calculated that UC is at least $3 billion in general funding below where it would be had it simply grown with the state from 2000 on (Table 1). Clearly not all of this gap can be traced to tuition hikes. But the annual state funding shortfall is 5 or 6 times larger than even the gross NRST revenue figure for the system-- to say nothing of the net.

We should do a few things going forward. Faculty should support the Senate's call that UCOP not just give the state an NRST cap (page 8), but call on it to buy out the NSRT--and set a wider precedent for restored public support.

We need to recognize that the three premises I mentioned above don't hold. We must see nonresident enrollment through a calculation of its net revenues that includes its indirect, political, and social costs. This means we must face the fact that when we include the cost to public support of the educational core, privatization is a money loser. This leads to the only viable alternative, a public-good model for the university that supports debt-free college,and a $48 Fix.

The same goes for research as well as teaching. Research funding and graduate education have also been destabilized by the private-revenue model. I'd ask faculty skeptics who think "multiple revenue streams" is the only way to keep Berkeley and other UC research on top: Are you better off today than you were 8 years ago, when we started to ramp NRST up?

I've always believed that university professors are willing and able to govern academics, but now I am not so sure.  I am worried about growing fatalism among even tenured faculty activists.  I'm concerned about the tacit belief that unstoppable historical forces have already destroyed the universities they want to keep.  From this standpoint, local resistance can work but remaking is futile, though remaking is the premise of shared governance and of academic freedom.

My summer travels took me to London, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Liverpool, Bonn, Cambridge, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Crewe, York, and Valencia, mostly for lectures and discussions with faculty members about the state of  universities in their country.   I was struck by the contrast between the great intelligence and professional commitments of the professors on the one hand, and their lack of hope for universities on the other.  Several of the visits revolved around higher education conferences, where I heard brilliant analyses of the nuts and bolts of national education initiatives that lacked a standpoint for faculty intervention.

Everyone was extremely busy teaching, running research centers, organizing outreach programs, testifying to government officials, and so on--there was never a lack of constructive activities.  But I sensed little confidence that any of the faculty activities would help improve their institutions or the policy environment. There are important exceptions to this rule, and I am always impressed by the great spirits who continue to be attracted into academia. When necessary, faculty would set up Temporary Autonomous Zones and hope that these spaces--labs, classrooms, offices--would escape outside attention long enough to succeed at getting their work done. It's not that faculty members saw managers as their enemy. They saw them instead as a fatal environment.

A few examples: in Denmark I heard stories both of a comedic inability of managers to return email from faculty who had major proposals before them and of the mandatory use of automated work output management systems that scored and ranked faculty members for university managers.  In South Africa, I encountered professors who were angry at their students for demanding #FeesMustFall rather than at politicians for failing to fund the higher education mission. in Britain, I worked with faculty who were responding to the post-2011 elimination of public funding for all qualitative teaching fields by reinventing entire programs nearly every year to be more appealing to the student market.  They were all great people who had reacted to challenges by creating better local solutions, but with no expectation that it would help the university system.

In most cases, output audit was replacing direct faculty-administration dialogue and the collaborative reimagining of that university's future.  The UK's Tory government has been the most explicit about its use of funding authority to replace professional judgment with market signals. In cutting central government funding for instruction to zero for most subjects, it has forced teaching to cater to student demand.  It uses impact assessments and other auditing techniques to norm STEM research to business needs.

Governments are ignoring the fact that universities are supposed to be way out in front of public sensibility in both technical and sociocultural subjects.  Universities can't be original unless they are out in front. Managing by audit, in contrast, readily norms the teaching of society, culture, and science to established mainstream views, whether that be commercial television's stories of the origins of terrorism or the pharmaceutical industry's preferences on the characterization of molecules. This norming reduces the university's non-market and social value. It ironically reduces its market value by emphasizing existing rather than future skills for students and well-known rather than challenging problems for research.

It was impossible for me to forget the University of California's travails no matter the distance, and I see two recent Berkeley issues through the gap I saw this summer between faculty reaction and faculty governance.  One issue is the budget: Berkeley's senior managers are apparently still saying that private revenue streams and more entrepreneurship will fix the budget deficit.  I interpret the evidence to show that the deficit came in large part from privatization and cannot be fixed by more of the same.   I also think that the admin's proposed solutions of "enrollment control, self-supporting degree programs, increased land utilization, entrepreneurship, and fundraising" expresses the conventional budgetary wisdom of our proverbial neoliberal era of the kind that universities exist to get beyond. Either way, the issue can't be resolved by meetings that offer spotty information about which faculty ask isolated questions and express frustration.  It can only be resolved by faculty bodies--the Senate and/or the Faculty Association and/or other groups--doing independent analysis with comprehensive financial information and building their own sustainable budget to advocate to the administration.  Faculty members haven't shifted from budget reaction to budget governance. Until they do, nothing will change.

Same goes for the Berkeley administration's suspension in the middle of the term of a student-taught course, "Palestine: A Colonial Settler Analysis."   Dean Carla Hesse suspended the course on the same day that  "43 Jewish, civil rights, and education advocacy groups" wrote to campus chancellor Nicholas Dirks to claim that the course was political advocacy, met the "government's criteria for anti-Semitism," had been approved and was being taught by anti-Zionist zealots, and was out of compliance with UC Regents policy.  And yet the course had been approved through a standard process in which faculty members have primary and ultimate authority over the curriculum--in this case the department's acting chair and the Academic Senate.  It also appears that the Berkeley administration would have taken no action without pressure from outside interest groups, and that the suspension was a response to this outside pressure.  The chancellor and/or executive dean in this case intervened in the faculty's core domain in response to an outside grievance, and they triggered national coverage of basic questions about academic freedom.  For the blow by blow of that issue I refer you to John K. Wilson's detailed analysis, Berkeley professor Samera Esmeir's commentary, and Dr. Wilson's critique of Dean Hesse's reinstatement letter.  My point here is that various kinds of internal pressure were brought to bear, from every student in the course and also from Berkeley faculty, which resulted in the course's reinstatement, and yet this kind of strong reaction is not going to be enough.

For the dean's reinstatement letter claims both that deans "review, but do not approve the academic content" of courses in this program and that this review legitimately asked about course content, that is, about "whether the stated objective for the course to 'explore the possibility of a decolonized Palestine' potentially violated Regents Policy by crossing over the line from teaching to political advocacy." The latter phrase does assert an administrative right to review content of these student-taught courses even when they are, as in this case, approved by the appropriate faculty.  Dean Hesse's position is thus that enforcement of University instructional policy does not lie with the faculty alone, but requires administrative supervision.   This remains a departure from standard AAUP-based principles of faculty self-governance of instruction.  It is consistent with the trend toward shifting the supervision of instruction reflected in the MOOC wave of 2012-13, where officials signed contracts with little faculty knowledge or input, and with the trend toward removing faculty from the university's reputation management that enabled acts like the Board firing of Professor Steven Saliata from the University of Illinois and of Asst. Professor Melissa Click from the University of Missouri.  While faculty reaction helped resolve the immediate UC Berkeley issue, faculty governance will be needed to reconstruct authority over curriculum in order to prevent such intrusions in the future.

The Berkeley student course on Palestine raised the question of whether society will allow universities to function as their over-the-horizon intellectual resource.  It represented academic inquiry that fulfilled the intellectual mission of being out in front of public sensibility on an important question. When a classroom, library, or laboratory houses original solutions, some factions will see them as impossible, outrageous, or offensive.  This is the routine impact of any avant-garde in art, science, and every field in between, whose members are treated as enemies before in many cases being lauded as pioneers.   All the outrage means is that the university is doing its job.

Since senior managers can apparently not be expected to stand up to influential outsiders, the tenured faculty will have to do it.  It would be better to do it by re-establishing governing authority over the conditions that make originality possible, rather than putting out particular fires on a global scale.

As the Berkeley and Davis campuses seek new chancellors, they'll be looking for people who can deal with endless public university budget problems.  In Berkeley's case, there's the $150 million structural deficit that surfaced on outgoing Chancellor Nicholas Dirks' watch.  

What should the next chancellor do to fix the deficit? Chancellor Dirks raised the prospect of cuts to the academic core, but mostly stuck to the standard model of growing private revenue streams. This has meant more fundraising, more non-resident students, more high-priced "innovative master's programs and more executive education.  It also means using [public university] assets in more commercial ways." It will mean figuring out how to start raising tuition again while promoting the high tuition-high aid model.   The quotations are from Nicholas Dirks.  Privatization was what he was doing, and what he did well within the rules of the game, particularly in fundraising. Leaving aside his management mistakes to focus on the budget issues, should Berkeley look for Nick Dirks 2.0, Nick Dirks on steroids, some kind of Double Dirks? 

The deficit predated anything chancellor Dirks did. John Wilton, the campus's lead budget officer, had announced it in November 2013, and traced it to old and new forms of state underfunding.  The Schwarzenegger and Brown budget cuts did enormous damage to UC finances. For a while, budget shortfalls were covered by reserves, but several years into the era of subpar funding, these were running out. Vice-chancellor Wilton had also already factored in all non-state and private revenue growth projections. The UC Berkeley deficit has come from a combination of state, university-wide, and campus budget choices. In addition, that deficit was not going to be closed by the growth in private funding.  More on that issue below.

We get reports that senior UC Berkeley officials are pinning much of their deficit, up to $50 million a year, on a choice the university system imposed called "rebenching." This is a program to start to reduce inequities in the UC Office of the President's allocations among the campuses. For many years, a student at UC Davis received a much higher state outlay than did the same kind of student at UC Santa Cruz; the same was true for UCLA vs. UC Irvine, and so on around the system. A 2011 report by the California State Auditor found large cross-campus inequalities and no good reason why this was so. It also found that the campuses with a higher proportion of Black, Latino, and Native American students got less money per student. (See Table 6 and this post for figures and analysis.)  The pre-rebenching allocations were clearly unethical and arguably racist, and although UCOP's response plausibly denied racist intent, it worked with the Academic Senate to rebench allocations to improve equity.   

But was Berkeley supposed to pay for it all? Have a look at the 2012 report of the Rebenching Budget Committee.  The total allocated for the entire system’s rebenching was about $37 million per year, now stepped up to $46 million per year total for all campuses (page 12).  So even were the entire system being rebenched at Berkeley's sole expense, it still wouldn't come to $50 million a year.  

In any case, this is not how rebenching works. The equity funding comes

(1) from new state money (it is not redistribution but finally-equitable distribution), allocated by 

(2) weighted enrollments (more per-student money for campuses with large doctoral programs like Berkeley) after 

(3) "set-asides" for designated programs that adjusts each campus's base budget, leading to 

(4) a leveling up of all campuses to the top campus level (Los Angeles). 

The effect on Berkeley can be seen in my number 1 favorite recent UC spreadsheet, Appendix A of the rebenching report. First, Berkeley's reduction under the new system was a bit over $6 million (row U), far smaller than Davis's or Los Angeles' because it wasn't as overpaid, so to speak, by the established system.  Again that's much less than $50 million.  But that wasn't to be an actual loss because, after various considerations, Berkeley was to be rebenched up by about $28 million per year, or +10% on its original base budget.  The 2012 plan had rebenching giving the Berkeley campus $4,688,619 more each year for six years.  This was only half of the additional new money going to the two most underfunded campuses by equalized weighted enrollment--Irvine and Santa Barbara--but it was not a deficit maker.

Perhaps the actual allocations have not followed the plan. But if that is the case, officials should produce figures that show what has happened instead.

Here's a visual of rebenching over six years (Appendix B).

Berkeley was a bit over the old average, so seemed a loser in the socialist benchmarking paradise. But in reality it is below the new benchmark, and so is to benefit from rebenching like all campuses other than Los Angeles, which is to stay the same.  Note that this is only one of the campus's many revenue streams, does not include non-resident tuition which each campus keeps for itself, is based on weighted enrollment, etc. Note especially the deeper issue, which is inadequate state funding. This had been softened at the wealthier campuses but not at the poor ones.

Rebenching is not Berkeley's problem. So if the public system isn't sinking Berkeley, what is?

That would be a combination of public cuts, already mentioned, new costs incurred by campuses, and new costs that UCOP or the state has pushed onto the campuses in recent years. The new costs that UC campuses haven’t incurred themselves include:

• Normal cost inflation.  VC Wilton estimated this as historically 3-4% per year, meaning the UCOP “deal” on state increases  (4% per year for a few years) is essentially a zero gain.
• Capital projects.  The state has largely withdrawn from campus development.   
• Pension contributions (up from zero to 14% of payroll since 2010).
• Increased employer health care costs, including retiree health care.
• Central administration, aka UCOP,  which is now funded via campus taxes to the tune of something close to 15% of state funding.
• Subsidies for UCSF (a $130 million premium in enrollment-based allocations (Appendix A row J * row M)

There are also campus-based structural costs, particularly the practice of covering a large share of research costs (19% at Berkeley) with institutional funds. (Background on this can be found here.)

How do these costs hit Berkeley? A quick scan of the campus's Annual Financial Report for 2014-15 (pdf page 5) shows that pension contributions have grown from zero to $128.4 million per year.  “Other employee benefits,” which I assume is largely health care, is up to $274.4 million.  Interest on debt and capital leases is $90 million a year (up $10 million year on year). In the realm of capital projects, "proceeds from debt issuance” fall short of “purchase of capital assets” by $140 million (and by $160 million in the previous year).   Grants and contracts income declined $40 million over one year (they  have since rebounded). At the same time, over two years, Berkeley's outlays of its own "institutional funds" to support research, mostly losses on extramurally-funded projects, increased $26 million (from $138 million to $164 million).   This is a partial list of the real contributors to Berkeley's $150 million annual deficit.  

What drives these expenses?  State politics for one: were the state to fund UC's employer share of pension contributions, Berkeley would fix $128 million of its $150 million problem.  There are also necessary growth and upgrades: some chunk of the capital project costs are in the category of always improving teaching and research. Research policy is another: federal agencies force universities to subsidize research and foundations and corporations are even worse. 

But a big general driver is what I call the price of privatization. It is expensive to compete with Stanford, Cal Tech, et al for corporate partners, non-resident students, research grants, wealthy donors, senior executives, and everything else. VC Wilton said it best: "Berkeley must now compete for its three most important revenue sources [philanthropy, students, and research] against the best private and public universities." He went on to assert, "Because 87% of our revenue does not result from a legislative process, the need to be market-competitive is essential." The decline of public funding has induced a preoccupation with competing to increase mostly private revenue streams and with covering all the costs of the market competitions on offer.

In the post-crisis scramble, where do managers draw the line between necessary investments and privatization boondoggles?  Which of the projects that created that $140 million shortfall for capital debt/assets is part of the core mission and which supports off-campus interests or a favored group? How big are the avoidable costs of competition? Which competitions should be avoided on the basis of costs? If a research and teaching mission lacks a competitive revenue market, do you tax it for the sake of someone else's market competition? When you don't really know where to draw the line, and money is cheap, do you try all of them, especially if you can launch them by executive order?  Faculty, staff, and students should be directly involved in answering these questions.  They are budgetary and also properly political.

Post-Dirks, Berkeley has a real choice between faster, better privatization (and its costs) or figuring out privatization's costs and cutting it down to size.  Ironically, dialing back is supported by the budget data of its advocates. VC Wilton probably was not telling Chancellor Dirks that privatization would work because fundraising and partnerships were magic bullets.  I think they saw it more as a muddle-through strategy designed to kludge the system for another 5 years (2013-2018) with gains from non-resident tuition, educational businesses, real estate, and endowment income, at which point UC would either start big tuition hikes again or Berkeley could gain its semi-freedom to charge its own higher tuition.

The full debate between privatization and its costs never happened.  This is in large part because of the managerial decisionism I won't discuss here, and also because, as Jacques Lacan would have expected, denial was an important part of the disclosure.  Wilton Part 1 disclosed budget strategy failure.  Wilton Part 2 hid it in plain sight.  While former Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was a true believer who could effortlessly suture the contradiction, Chancellor Dirks was perhaps unsettled by the double message that UC Berkeley’s administration has been broadcasting for a decade: we must privatize; we are more public than ever. Were this so, he would naturally seem indecisive, as though he “embrace[d] ambiguity.”   In fact, privatization is ambiguous.  It wants private money, especially high net tuition, and to keep its public subsidies, and to keep its public-mission image.  Chancellor Dirks' Chronicle of Higher Education article and his resignation memos are classic performances of the not-quite-convinced that make the model feel as unworkable as it actually is.  I assume he was following the established Berkeley administrative program.  He knew the formula.  But he hadn't swallowed the blue pill. 

Berkeley's problem isn't rebenching.  Berkeley's problem isn't the UC system. Berkeley's problem is unrestored public funding in conjunction with privatization, which raises costs while encouraging cuts.  How much does its own program grow the funding gap between what public education needs and what privatization makes us want?  I'm sure the campus can find a chancellor who is willing to find out.