UC Board of Regents, March 2017    

That is the question.

This is the answer: Never.  

Or not at least until the campuses fight and change current Office of the President (UCOP) budget ideology and practice. They have never done that.  Not yet.  

I’m going to compare UCOP’s January state budget show with their offstage borrowing.  State funding yields little, while the debt yields a lot.  

I’ll keep my eye on two major implications for the campuses. The first is a lock-in of structural deficits with continuing cuts to the educational core--to both teaching and research.  

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

Every meeting tells a story as Rod Stewart once sang, more or less.  What stories have UC’s Office of the President and Board of Regents been singing when they met every two months?  Side A in November was “protecting student affordability.”  Side B was their perennial favorite, “budget rules everything.” The bonus track, unadmitted, was “stagnation conquers all.”

 

Fiscal stagnation means permanent austerity and the damage past and future appeared in the unscripted parts of the story in the public comment periods.  There some speakers opposed the termination of the campus hiring program associated with the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). This seems to have been prematurely announced / decreed by the systemwide Provost Katherine Newman to a group of Executive Vice Chancellors, who brought the decision as an accomplished fact back to their campuses, which ignited a protest campaign from faculty, staff, PPFP alumni, academic consortia and, apparently, an unusually large number of chairs, deans and other administrators. The upshot was a letter from UC President James Milliken stating that reports of the death of PPFP’s faculty hiring incentives were greatly exaggerated. This was a real success for the protests, however unacknowledged by the president.

 

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. 

 

Various universities have hosted a range of events leading up May 3rd's abolitionist Day of Refusal, meaning a strike day. This is meant to kick off a month of direct actions (described on the Cops off Campus website) to raise awareness of the necessity and the possibility of converting most or all policing functions to constructive forms of safety practices, care, and community engagement.  

During the George Floyd phase of the Black Lives Matter movement last year, ideas about police replacement arrived in the mainstream media, like these good ones from a Princeton sociologist in the Washington Post.  If campus police departments had been formed to reduce the chances of regular cops busting student heads during anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s and 1970s, student heads were now in greater danger from campus police during contemporary protests--or non-protests: UCPD found the limelight in 2006 when UCLA police tasered a student who was studying in Powell Library.

When the UC Regents passed large tuition hikes in 2009 and 2011, students protested them. Various forms of UCPD misconduct wound up in the public eye, with beatings and arrests at UC Berkeley in November 2011, including of campus faculty (see Prof. Celeste Langan's post about her arrest, and Prof. Greg Levine's recap of political repression against campus protest).  UCPD-Davis's Sgt. Pike then went on a world-famous pepper-spray rampage. This killed off any lingering sense that campus police were special--more collaborative and communicative, less anti-student, less violent towards the unresisting than off-campus forces.  

In reaction, UCOP sponsored a report (Edley and Robinson, 2012) on UCPD conduct, but not much happened. Police abuse also did not become a tenure-track faculty issue. For example,  Davis faculty senate sided with Chancellor Katehi while condemning Sgt Pike's actions. The 2009-13 period offers a long, dynamic example of why policing activists are so deeply skeptical about "police reform."   

A defining campus cop incident occurred in July 2015, when a University of Cincinnati police officer killed Samuel Dubose during a routine traffic stop off campus. After this, the media paid more attention to the greater opacity of campus police reporting, their lesser training compared to municipal departments in many jurisdictions, and their not-so-different bad treatment of people from marginalized groups. 

The protests that really brought out the police were opposed to the effects of austerity policies that the university itself was  unable or unwilling to oppose. These were often tuition hikes that disparately punished poor students and students of color. These protests worked, with the nail in coffin being protests in 2014).  The state did not replace missing tuition hikes with meaningful state increases, as we've had occasion to note, so austerity effects continue to the present day. The grad student COLA strike at UC Santa Cruz in 2019-20 was another turn of the screw. They brought heavy police containment of strikers by various police forces, and appeared to be part of a strategy of physically intimidating the students to drop the strike.  

Photo Credit: Merc News

The later administrative suspension of the strikers who withheld grades (see Michael's overview), made policing again seem an extension of administrative refusal to take student concerns seriously, deliberate democratically, and find adequate funding for the educational core. 

In 2020, UCLA faculty discovered that the LAPD geeks arrested BLM protesters on a campus baseball field named for the barrier-breaking Black baseball legend and UCLA alum Jackie Robinson. This suggested that the one big advantage of the UCPD--that they were not the LAPD--could be readily set aside.  

Derek Chauvin's guilty verdict--in the Minneapolis trial of George Floyd's killer--coupled with ongoing police killings in the days before and after, have increased an interest in permanent policing changes that goes all the way to the White House. It's into this context that UCOP has recently launched proposals for changes in UC police policy. They include a ludicrous plan to form a kind of UC SWAT that would be deployed around the state to tamp down alleged unrest.  Here you can find Dylan Rodriguez discussing Cops Off Campus in the context of policing task forces, and Michael recently posting on the UC police proposals. 

Another good place for background on the no- combined issues of overall police conversion and stopping a new militarization of UCPD is this UCSB Faculty Association post. It has a number of links to statements and explainers about local and national dimensions, as well as its own statement, which nicely represents TT faculty who've mostly focused on faculty welfare, academic freedom, administrative misconduct, and budgeting coming to take a meaningful stand on campus police transformation, and linking it to core faculty concerns. 

Of course I can't stop without making a budget point. The political economy of universities is now pressuring units toward for-profit activities. The function of policing in this model was nicely described in a big Reclaim UC post last year.  It itemizes UC police budgets and also offers an important analysis of how policing fits into a skewed administrative understanding of risk management. Here I'll close with a simpler point about quantities of expenditure.  Reclaim UC notes that UCSB's police budget was just under $11 million in 2018-19 (the UC range of base budgets is from $5 million to $22.4 million in that year).  The 2019-20 grad COLA strike was for a pay increase that would eliminate "rent burden" for grad workers. My calculation at the time was that to take all rent burdened UCSB grads out of burden would cost UCSB about $5.2 million a year--or around half of the police budget.  (I'll do the math in a future post on the new rent hikes at UCSD.)

I hope Abolition May moves the debate toward some deep and comprehensive police conversion. 

Although Derek Chauvin's conviction for the murder of George Floyd offers essential accountability for one case of police violence, it is a small step towards a genuine reordering of public safety around notions of justice.  As Simon Balto has pointed out, the prosecutors made a serious and effective effort to separate Chauvin from "good policing" in order to treat him as a particularly violent officer.  Balto also suggests that a similar argument can be made about the Department of Justice's quick move to investigate the Minneapolis police department.  Both moves are necessary but they run the risk of providing accountability for a singular case while leaving intact the basic assumptions and structures of American policing.  Both the prosecution and the investigation are moments along a road that has been opened up by years of protest, legal action, critique, and reimagination of the possibilities for public safety.  Neither the Chauvin conviction nor the Minneapolis investigation mark a leap forward, but they do not impede the movement to transform if not abolish policing. 

But you would never know about these developments if you read UCOP's Police Policies and Administrative Procedures proposals.  Altering what is commonly referred to as "The Gold Book," these proposals ignore the wide-ranging debates and criticisms of UC policing over the last year--including those from the Academic Council.  Instead, UCOP has pushed towards an even more militarized and coercive structure for UCPD.   Although certain of the changes simply bring UCPD into compliance with legal requirements, as on the issue of federal law authorizing retired police officers in good standing to carry concealed weapons anywhere in the United States.  But those clauses should not blind us to the extent to which UCOP is voluntarily structuring UCPD with disregard to the multiple concerns raised within the university community and in ways that increase the likelihood of violence being used by UCPD.

I urge everyone to read the policy for themselves.  Everyone has until May 7 to send in comments on the proposed policy (you will find an address in the policy proposal).

But I would like to point out 3 instances within the policy that signify a complete disregard for community concerns.

1) The first occurs in Section 1506 and allows for a wide range of exceptions to the requirement to wear and keep active body cameras:

Exceptions to required activation or continuation of the BWV recording are: 

(a) When, in the officer’s judgment, activation, continuing to record, or changing the BWV functions would jeopardize their safety or the safety of the public. However, the officer shall activate or re-activate their BWV as soon as it is safe and practicable to do so unless other exceptional circumstances exist; 

b) When, in the officer’s judgment, a recording would interfere with their ability to conduct an investigation;

 (c) When recording could risk the safety of a confidential informant, citizen informant, victim, or undercover officer; 

(d) In patient care areas of a hospital, clinic, rape treatment center, or other healthcare facility (including mental health) unless enforcement action or evaluation by the officer under W&I §5150 et seq. is being taken in these areas. If recording is necessary, officers shall make reasonable efforts to avoid recording individuals other than the subject; Final 12 14 20

 (e) Once a crime scene is secured and the officer no longer has an investigative role, and where the chance of encountering a suspect is unlikely; 

(f) Prior to or while discussing a case on scene with other officers or during on-scene tactical planning; 

(g) When, in the officer’s judgment, privacy concerns outweigh any legitimate law enforcement interest in recording; 

(h) When a call for service is a phone call or phone report only; 

(i) When ordered to stop recording by a supervisor; 

(j) When the recording of a person is in violation of the law. (6)

A few of these are reasonable.  But a), b), e), f), g), h), and i) offer a remarkably wide range for discretion that could be used to conceal violations of law or policy.

2) The policy also allows for a wide range of what it refers to as "Pain Compliance Techniques" (section 809) including: "batons, conducted energy devices (CED), oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray, chemical agents, restraints, and kinetic energy projectiles (KE)." (35)  (The euphemisms are telling).  These can be used in a wide range of circumstances predicated on loose definitions of resistance, including, going limp,  locking of arms or even verbal actions indicating an intent not to comply. (30-31).  The issue is not whether these rules are legal.  Moreover, the University can and does insist that an officer's use of force be in accord with the "reasonable officer" doctrine asserted in Graham v. Connor (1989).  The question is whether or not the University should be deploying these weapons and doctrines at a moment when policing needs to be rethought dramatically.

3) Even these two aspects of the proposed policy pale in their failure to engage with the university as a whole compared to the proposed establishment of the Systemwide Response Team (15-23).  I do not have the time to fully detail this section and I urge everyone to read it for themselves.  In essence, it aims to establish a special SWAT-like force across the entire system with its own command structure, policies, equipment and personnel drawn from local forces: each campus is expected to designate 20% of its police force members to participate in the SRT.  

Although protection of "dignitaries" is listed as one task of the SRT. it is difficult to imagine this force as designed for anything but the control of protests.  Interestingly, I have not heard any comments from UC's National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement on this issue.

In their comment on the Chauvin verdict, President Drake and Chair of the Regents Perez expressed the wish that it would help the country "to reimagine and work toward a safer and more equitable future for us all." If they actually believe that they will recall this proposal and start a genuine process of rethinking policing at UC.

An Open Letter to University of California President Michael V. Drake and the University of California Board of Regents

Dear President Drake and Members of the UC Board of Regents, 

We write to you today with our backs against the wall. As department chairs and program directors in the most racially diverse college at one of the two most racially diverse campuses in the University of California system, we in UC Riverside’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) and our staff and faculty colleagues across UCR have been struggling for years to make ends meet. Already chronically underfunded by the state, UCR was devastated by the budget decisions made by then-President Yudof and the Regents at the height of the Great Recession. We have worked in staggeringly understaffed and underfunded conditions since then. Yet on top of our chronic underfunding by the state, we now face an additional – and permanent – 11 percent budget cut. This is not just unsustainable financially, it is unsupportable on grounds of fairness, equity, and most importantly, of racial justice – pillars of the University of California’s mission. 

UCR’s budget is made up almost entirely of salaries and benefits – in CHASS, the proportion is 98 percent. Thus any permanent budget cut inevitably is a cut in people. We hemorrhaged staff and faculty during the Great Recession, and although we have been able to hire additional faculty in subsequent years, our student population has grown rapidly enough to largely outpace those gains, leaving us severely overcrowded and still struggling to rebuild. Our world-class research university already operates on a shoestring; further cuts would be devastating. For many of us, this pattern of systemic neglect and chronic underfunding of a university serving a student body composed of at least 85 percent students of color is troublingly reminiscent of redlining, the practices consolidated after the Second World War that devastated thriving neighborhoods made up predominantly of people of color. We are writing to implore you to stop the redlining of UCR. 

With roots stretching back to the turn of the twentieth century, UCR has a distinguished history in the UC system. A former agricultural experiment station, UCR was meant to serve as a flagship undergraduate institution in the UC system, serving the Inland region of Southern California. UCR is second only to UC Merced in the percentage of students of color, has one of the highest percentages of Pell grant recipients in the nation, and serves a student body that is well over 50 percent first-generation college students. Yet our increasingly brown and working-class campus has frequently been overlooked or sidelined within the UC system. 

This is not simply a symbolic move; even after a post-recession reconfiguration of the UC system’s distribution of state funds to its campuses, UCR currently receives approximately $8,500 per student, whereas UCLA receives closer to $11,500 and the Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, and San Diego campuses receive $10,000. Yet our student-to-faculty ratio is higher than the UC system average, and our student-to-staff ratio is fully 38% higher. We applaud the recent “re-benching” decision that will bring the funding of UCR and other under-funded campuses to within 95 percent of the systemwide per-student average by 2024. But as with redlined neighborhoods, the damage to UCR’s resources from decades of neglect cannot be reversed simply by bringing our support from the system up to an amount that is only slightly below average rather than grossly below average, nor will the phased-in implementation of this plan help us avoid devastation in the present moment. We were facing an 11 percent budget cut before the announcement of the re-benching; we are facing the same budget cut after its announcement, because rebenching is not enough. 

It takes more funding, not less, to create an educational environment in which first-generation college students and students of color can thrive. UCR has been lauded for closing the gap in graduation rates between white students and students of color, and for the past two years US News and World Report has ranked us the top US university for social mobility. We have an internationally renowned faculty that includes two Nobel Laureates, close to fifty Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows, and nineteen Guggenheim Fellows. But in addition to being highly accomplished researchers, scholars, and artists, our faculty are something more: many of us came to and have remained at UCR because of our deep commitment to serving first-generation and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) students. UCR educates Californians – 96 percent of our students are California residents – and in return, because we do not expand our budget with out-of-state tuition, we suffer. Were all UC campuses facing the same dire circumstances, we would weather the storm shoulder-to-shoulder with them. Instead, we are being left out in the cold yet again: when many colleges at other UC campuses are losing only two to three percent of their budgets, we are facing the stark decisions demanded by an 11 percent permanent budget cut. This abandonment by the President’s office and the Board of Regents is a demoralizing example of structural racism. 

For nearly a year, we have all witnessed the disproportionate impact of both COVID-19 and the pandemic-induced recession on BIPOC communities, some of them the same communities devastated by redlining and nearly destroyed by the Great Recession. Communities subjected to decades and, in many cases, centuries of systemic racism have few of the resources that have helped many white communities to remain safe and financially solvent during this crisis. Systematically deprived of resources through decades of neglect, our campus – with one of the brownest and poorest student bodies in the entire UC system – is facing economic devastation. How will staff who already do the work of two people take on more, if we have to cut our staffing even further? How will departments that are already stretched to breaking stretch further? Should we increase our teaching load even more, and destroy the stellar educational system we have built in favor of an impersonal factory model? Should we turn away from our research and creative production and deprive our students of the cutting-edge insights and opportunities afforded by a world-class faculty? With a globally engaged student body, should we meekly accept the elimination of UCR from the UCDC program and others like it? The UC system clearly believes that students at other UC campuses deserve these opportunities; are our students any less deserving? 

The correlation is glaring between the fact that we serve one of the highest numbers of BIPOC students in the system, the historic lack of systemwide investment in our campus, and the offer of a solution that brings the UC system’s support of us to less far below average over the course of the next several years. In a time of long-overdue attention to the destruction wreaked by systemic racism in the US, it should finally be clear that UCR’s students deserve a fully equal investment from the UC system, including support to correct for years of economic marginalization. It’s time to stop redlining UCR. 

Respectfully, 

Juliann Emmons Allison, Director, Global Studies

Sheila Bergman, Executive Director, UCR ARTS

Heidi Brayman, Director, Liberal Studies

Rogerio Budasz, Chair, Department of Music

Edward T. Chang, Director, Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies Christopher K. Chase-Dunn, Director, Institute for Research on World-Systems Walter A. Clark, Director, Center for Iberian and Latin American Music Derick A. Fay, Acting Chair, Department of Anthropology

Tod Goldberg, Program Director, Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts

Weihsin Gui, Director, Southeast Asian Studies Program

Sherine Hafez, Chair, Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies

Steven M. Helfand, Chair, Department of Economics

Rickerby Hinds, Chair, Department of Theater, Film, and Digital Production Tamara C. Ho, Director, California Center for Native Nations

Matthew King, Director, Asian Studies Program

Jacques Lezra, Chair, Department of Hispanic Studies

David Lloyd, Chair, Department of English

Tom Lutz, Chair, Department of Creative Writing

John N. Medearis, Chair, Department of Political Science

Yunhee Min, Chair, Department of Art

Jennifer R. Nájera, Chair, Department of Ethnic Studies

Daniel Ozer, Chair, Department of Psychology

Andrews Reath, Chair, Department of Philosophy

Ellen Reese, Co-Chair, Department of Sociology and Chair of Labor Studies Judith Rodenbeck, Chair, Department of Media and Cultural Studies

Jeff Sacks, Chair, Department of Comparative Literature and Languages Michele Salzman, Chair, Department of History

Joel Mejia Smith, Chair, Department of Dance

Glenn Stanley, Co-chair, Department of Sociology

Jason Weems, Chair, Department of the History of Art

Melissa M. Wilcox, Chair, Department of Religious Studies 

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 Cathy Gere and Adam Aron,  professors at UC San Diego

Much has been written about the problem of denial of climate change science. But the University of California exemplifies another, possibly much tougher, problem: How do you go from acceptance of the science to action? 

The UC is a leader in climate change research and policy. And yet, its ten campuses emit more than a million metric tons of CO2 every year from burning natural gas, a fossil fuel, to provide heating, cooling and electricity. Many in the current generation of UC students -- increasingly aware of the extent to which global heating poses an existential threat to their futures -- are asking themselves why a university that has done so much to raise the alarm about greenhouse gases has done so little to curb its own emissions.

In 2013, then-UC-president Janet Napolitano launched the ‘Carbon Neutrality Initiative.’ This unfunded mandate, handed down from the Office of the President to the individual campuses, promised that the university would go ‘carbon neutral’ by 2025. 

In the first few years, the focus was on energy efficiency measures, such as better insulation, and lights that turned on with movement sensors. These efforts were successful in reducing emissions, but those savings have now been erased with a dramatic new building plan at the UCs. While the efficiency gains were an achievement, the low-hanging efficiency fruit are now all picked, and the emissions goals set by President Napolitano are still way out of reach.

Three quarters of the university’s energy is supplied by natural gas, a fossil fuel, obtained by highly toxic hydraulic fracturing methods that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The UC looked into replacing fossil natural gas with biofuels, but that is, at best, a limited solution: there are serious problems with price, scale, and supply. 

A group of experts concluded that the only path to genuine decarbonization lay with electrification of the campus energy systems, but that was rejected as too expensive. Meanwhile, billions of dollars were found for new buildings.

So, with minimal investment in genuinely decarbonizing the university’s energy systems, the Carbon Neutrality Initiative is planning to make up the shortfall with inexpensive "carbon offsets." These are schemes to which institutions and individuals contribute, to try to "make good" on their own greenhouse gas emissions: for example, UC continues to burn natural gas while paying for forest preservation somewhere else. These carbon offsets have been called ‘licenses to pollute’ and likened to the ‘indulgences’ of the Catholic church (a pay-for-prayer scam). Thus, for the UC, ‘carbon neutrality’ does not mean reducing its emissions; it means paying people elsewhere (generally in low-income countries) to reduce their emissions while we go about business-as-usual.

Along with many members of the wider climate action and climate justice movement, we object to offset in principle and in practice.

First, we object to offsets in principle. The idea that we can pay someone in a poor part of the globe to reduce their emissions so that people in the richest country in the world can continue to burn fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases is morally bankrupt. Even if it works exactly as promised (which we very much doubt), all that ‘carbon neutrality’ achieves is the maintenance of the status quo. The IPCC 2018, backed by the world's governments, was very clear: we need to reduce emissions by about 50% by 2030 from 2010 levels to have a chance of keeping global heating to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. So the UC must stop burning natural gas. It can also, at the same time, support reforestation projects. The latter is no substitute for the former.

Second, we object to offsets in practice. To take just one example of an offset program that the University has already mooted, indigenous reforestation in Ecuador, this can hardly be computed in terms of sequestered tonnes of CO2. 

For such a scheme to work, trees have to be planted across an enormous area and reach maturity. Wildcat logging, mining and agricultural encroachment have to be held at bay. Political agreements have to be honored without corruption. How likely is it that all these things will hold true at a time when the climate emergency is accelerating and countries are experiencing increased instability as a result?

The UC is currently soliciting feedback about the carbon offset program from members of the university community. We are urging the administration to abandon the offsets program publicly, and to redirect the resources set aside for it into planning for electrification of the campus energy systems. 

Any path to stopping global heating must pass through genuine decarbonization of our infrastructure. Investing in a false accounting of ‘carbon neutrality’ is a form of climate denial: it denies the reality of our emissions and our responsibility to curb them. The UC prides itself on being a climate leader; we want the university to lead the world in real solutions, not in greenwashing.

California is a state with nearly 40 million people (bigger than Canada and Poland, smaller than Algeria and Spain). It had a 2019 Gross State Product of around $3.2 trillion (bigger than India, Great Britain and France, smaller than Germany and Japan).  It has ten research universities with the letters "UC" in front of their place names. Each of those ten universities has a president, though the ten call this president a "chancellor."   Tomorrow, July 7th, the UC Board of Regents will announce their selection for UC president, a kind of president of presidents.  What functions might this new person perform  to avoid being superfluous, or worse, a conduit of oligarchic state policy into the university?

A few come to mind, moving from specific to general. The new president should:

1. Get separate state and federal funding for full Covid-19 mitigation. After two decades of austerity budgets, March-June 2020 losses of  $1.8 billion, and a likely 7 percent cut from the state legislature for 2020-21 (p 43), UC doesn't have the money to open campuses safely. Continuous testing alone could cost around $1 billion a year.  The many other needed changes  would pile costs on top of that.  UC campuses may eventually decide to put fall term (almost) entirely online (they will need to comply with today's ICE rule that international students in all-online programs cannot stay in the United States).  But they shouldn't have the program decision forced by sheer lack of funds for testing, tracing, isolating, and temporary facilities.  The new president will need to seek special Covid-19 funding for at least the two-year period 2020-22.

2. Undo top-down governance.  President Richard Atkinson (1995-2003) was not an organizational democrat, but UCOP rule-giving used to be balanced by new-program funding and distinctive UCOP expertise.  The latter was long ago duplicated on the campuses, and UCOP no longer supports growth or quality upgrades: the underdeveloped Merced campus is Exhibit A, the Riverside campus's medical facility is Exhibit B . . . UCOP never asks the state for enough money to cover the actual costs of combining full access with high quality. Several years of underfunded enrollment increases--the "surge" that President Napolitano negotiated with Jerry Brown and state government--caused serious damage to education on the campuses, but this news, which I and others still regularly try to convey in meetings with UCOP officials, has yet to be received.  Although they are removed from the everyday struggles of the campuses, UCOP monopolizes the University's public image as well as its governmental and financial policy.  Campuses spend quite a bit of time conveying basic information up the chain, with apparently limited success.  The next president will need to restore campus confidence in UCOP's ability to formulate policy that reflects campus needs, rather than trim campuses to fit state policy.

3. Fix the broken funding model.  In the coming years, the University of California needs to do a lot of things: increase racial diversity and equality of outcomes, expand STEM research, fully support social and cultural research, improve undergraduate learning, increase doctoral student pay to relieve rent burden, rebuild a deteriorating physical plant, reverse the adjuncting drift, and close employee pay gaps.  But UC doesn't have the money to do these things. The reason is that the half-privatized funding model doesn't work, and never did.  The only way to make up for low state funding is with massive, unacceptable tuition increases.  The only way to freeze or cut tuition is to increase public funding.  I've written volumes about this, with abundant data, but proof lies not only in the financial critique of privatization but in the policy of the privatizers themselves. The "compact" with UC and CSU devised by Arnold Schwarzenegger and his first finance director, Donna Arduin, cut state funding increases to 2-3 percent per year. But even they knew that neither UC nor CSU could live on that, so the compact required tuition increases of 7-10 percent per year.  Those folks didn't care about UC greatness, but they understood that if they held state funding growth to inflation then UC would need in-state tuition of around $20,000 by this year to keep the place afloat. Today, UC gets about 40 percent per student of its 2001-02 funding, had that kept up with enrollment and state income growth. The next president needs to rebuild the public funding model, not do extend and pretend with the current semi-privatized hybrid. This person will also need to explain that politicians who underfund  public universities are politicians who advance systemic racism.

4. Redefine university education around nonmonetary goals.  A college degree should lead to employment at good wages, but this is the only thing college presidents and politicians have been selling lately.   Economists and policymakers also fixatee on college's impact on upward mobility, which is another version of wage gains.  There are two problems with this.  First, private monetary effects are only a portion of higher ed's total effects, which are mostly social or nonmonetary or both. (Nonmonetary benefits include analytical skill, research findings, and dozens of others.)  So colleges hide most of their benefits behind a rhetorical invisibility cloak, and speak only of money all the time.  Second, the money payoff has never been more uncertain in the postwar era than it is today.  Net monetary gains have become harder and riskier as the cost of a degree goes up and automation and the gig economy chew into the white-collar vocations that seemed impregnable as recently as the 1990s.  Recall Robert Reich's "symbolic-analysts" inheriting the earth, then read Scott Timberg for a good overview of the 2010s in his book subtitled "the killing of the creative class."
The current economy weakens higher ed's financial arguments, but the next president should see this as an opportunity to take the PR eggs out of a shrinking basket, and educate everyone on the non-monetary and social benefits of universities.  The latter are more exciting and gratifying than wages alone, but more to the point, they are more durable in our post-knowledge economy in which universities are building a post-middle class.

Overall, I'm perhaps most sad about how hard it has been for UC folks to feel excited about and confident in the university's future.  Recent presidents have modeled a diminished realism, which has meant accepting less and learning the austerity mindset.  This is obviously at odds with the state and country's self-image as heroic leaders of technological and social progress, but who notices the contradiction anymore?  The Regents further demoralized the UC community by kicking everyone except themselves out of the search process, and making the selection of the next president an expression of their sole ownership of the University.  Then Covid-19 came along, and the immediate reflex was to start planning for cuts. With rare exceptions, administrators did not resist, even for a few days. It's obvious to me that the university, the state, and the country can only spend its way out of this crisis, and that we should spend massively on the things we want, like environmental sustainability, intellectual progress, and social justice. Universities should be central articulators of the solutions.  Do we have it in us? We've spent years just trying to hang on financially while ignoring the stupid slings and arrows politically.  Can we still go really big?  UC needs a president that wants a major role for universities in maximalist social reconstruction-- and will learn from the people of the university how to enable it.

UPDATE JULY 7: My first reaction to the widely-expected announcement that Michael Drake is coming back to UC as president is total relief.  He's an academic. He's an educator. He's a good administrator. He knows how UC works.  He will not require basic education--quite the opposite. He'll be the first president of color of a university whose student body is 27 percent white.   He is  certainly capable of doing the things listed above.

Two other things.  During the financial crisis of 2007-2011, when he was serving as Irvine's chancellor, he told the regents more of the truth about quality decline on campus than did any other officials. In March 2011, he told the Board that "faculty members now spend a great deal of time mitigating damage caused by cuts rather than building for the future. He described the situation of the University as one of slow decay rather than growth. Most effort is focused on protecting the educational path for students; innovation and growth are not being fostered."  He fudged it a bit, and said UC was going from A+ to A, but his statements of struggle and slow decline was a pointed heresy in a rigid, formulaic governing system. It got the regents to pay more attention to the chancellors.

On the other hand, Drake gave up on public funding in the 2000s. He may continue to think, as I wrote at the time, that "the budget shortfalls can be handled with regrettable but nonetheless manageable layoffs that have already taken place. The non-UC reader would think, well they’re tightening their belts and fixing their IT problems and we’ll end up with a UC that gets an A for only $2.5 billion in state funds. There is no screaming on our end that says no it cannot be this way and also no it need not be this way."

Michael Drake is an historic appointment--of a continuity candidate, in a time when continuity won't work, in the minimal sense of keeping UC solvent with an intact workforce.  If he is going to rebuild UC for the future, by doing those things listed above, he will need help and also pressure from faculty, staff, and students beyond anything that has been offered up before. Lots of work to do.

By Eric Hays (CUCFA)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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