I’m not sure that interest in Obama’s plan for colleges has survived the weekend. Bankster scourge Matt Taibbi quickly pronounced it dead on arrival:  

The key number in it is a date. This is from Time: “Obama will also ask Congress to tie those ratings to federal student aid by 2018. . .”  One friend on the Hill laughingly called it "complete bullshit" and stressed the loose time frame, noting that we won’t even know what the rating system looks like until 2015, and then nothing actually happens until 2018. Which, conveniently, is two years after the President leaves office.

Mr. Taibbi reads the plan as an attempt to distract the base from “monstrous screw-ups” in most other areas of administration policy, since he’s going to need the base for the autumn’s retread budget stand-off with the Republicans.

In Part I of this post I argued that Obama is spoiling his program—and hurting colleges--with a framing that traces high tuition to college mismanagement for which the cure is federal auditing rather than real solutions. The first two are (1) financial reinvestment and (2) supporting professional expertise by letting faculty and staff do their jobs.  I was happy to see that the president of the American Association of University Professors, Rudy Fichtenbaum, in the most important response thus far, made similar points. He said that “consultation” about the rules should not mean “they will consult with college and university Presidents and not with the faculty who must actually do the teaching, much less the students they claim to assist.”  Prof. Fichtenbaum also made graphic use of budget statistics, noting that between 1987 and 2012, in constant dollars, “government support has declined from $8,497 to $5,906 per student, while net tuition increased from $2,588 to $5,189.” 

These are the kind of points that President Obama should be making again and again.  Colleges did make lots of ad hoc and often bad decisions scrambling for dollars against a secular trend of declining public revenues, especially raising tuition repeatedly and excessively.   To repeat, the way to fix this is to reinvest in public colleges and universities, and to put the reinvestment decisions in the hands of the experts –the faculty, working in a more forthright and empowered way with their senior managers—and not in the hands of government regulators.

This is not what President Obama is saying. He has heard it from some quarters. In his disappointed post, Bob Samuels noted that last year he was at a higher education meeting in the White House in which he called for reforms to focus on support for the “core missions” of the institution of instruction and research. “Unfortunately, my arguments fell on deaf ears.”

This raises the third huge omission in the Obama plan—its lack of interest in supporting the college learning process.  Attendance and completion statistics are important, and the bad numbers generated by the for-profit sector and by many poor public colleges should be used to get people’s attention.  But the deeper issue is how students learn, and what colleges need in order to help them do that.  What are those things that colleges need?

A lot of false confusion has surrounded this topic recently.  The most widely noted recent book on the subject of learning was Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011), which was interpreted to show that students don’t learn much at all in college.  This view gave comfort to the Right, which has been trying to downgrade public colleges for decades, and to educational technologists like the current generation of MOOC enthusiasts, who have deflected criticism of the poor educational outcomes of MOOC courses by saying that they “could not be worse” than what traditional courses do. 

Unfortunately, this interpretation was wrong.

In fact, Academically Adrift’s core finding was that most students learn quite a bit.  36% of students learn little in four years, meaning that about two-thirds do learn, some a great deal. In addition, we also know a lot about the institutional conditions of student learning. 

Professors Arum and Roksa’s analysis showed that much of what goes into good learning is “academic preparation” that occurs before students get to college. The quality of “academic experiences in high school” explains virtually all of the learning differences between students from college and non-college families once they get to college. They explain 2/3rds of the differences between African American and white college students (page 50).  This means that local and regional colleges who educate the majority of first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color—with less money per student—are being unjustly blamed for the failures of the K-12 system. (See the UT-El Paso comments in Part I.)

In addition, we know fairly exactly what these good learners do in college.  Here is what I extract from Professors Arum and Roksa’s findings for typical student Jane.  For Jane to learn higher order thinking in college she must do all of the following:

1. Take many demanding courses (20 or more pages of writing per term and 40 or more pages of reading per week) (72-73, 94-95).
2. Spend much more than the current norm on her academics (class time and studying together average 16% of a student’s week, with studying averaging a total of 12-13 hours a week) (69, 97-98).
3. Work with faculty that have high expectations for her and her peers (93).

We also know some other things: academic rigor is hugely helped by a small set of institutional and practical conditions. Jane must

4. Major in a strong academic field in the liberal arts and sciences, not in a vocational or strictly “practical” field.

This is the most grossly under-reported finding in the study. The figure is taken from a later summary.

All those “practical” majors that colleges have added to satisfy business and parents and students’ desire to learn something that will help them get a job? They are the majors where student learn the least.  If you want to learn a lot in college, take art history, anthropology, electrical engineering, or chemistry—all of these kinds of subjects produce learning.  If you want to learn the least possible in college, major in business.

The list continues.

5. Minimize non-academic social commitments: no fraternity and sorority membership, minimal off-campus socializing, minimal group study (103-04, 101).
6. Minimize work for pay, do not work off campus, and never work more 10 hours per week (the current average is 13 hours per week) (102, 85-86).
7. Bring your net cost of college as close to zero as possible, with no loans (109).

The genius of American public colleges was that they at one time satisfied all of these conditions.  They had the resources to offer low tuition, low-cost and low-principal loans, and little paid work for most students, all because of generous public funding.  This supported intensive academic study at colleges with plenty of staff to run the hands-on practical laboratory learning in biology or handle the 30 pages of writing per semester of freshman English—sometimes times 2 drafts. No one who voted or spent this money invoked a measure like the baseline for amazing creative proficiency popularized by Malcolm Gladwell – 10,000 hours to become the Beatles, and also 10,000 hours to become an excellent intellectual property attorney, multilingual business executive or great eighth-grade teacher.  All this is still true, or more so, since we’re supposed to educate everyone to be card-carrying members of the “creative class.” 

Only generous public funding and autonomous college staffs can allow the college majority to get much further into the long arc of their personal greatness than the austerity colleges that both major parties are delivering now.  

If President Obama wants to maximize learning, he must relentlessly educate the country on its real ingredients. He will also have to come clean on the major public funding increases and the new respect for educational expertise that better learning will require.  And if he can’t or won’t do these things, which is likely, the rest of us will have to do them instead.

The most important fact about President Obama’s speech about college affordability in Buffalo is that he left out the three core problems facing higher education today--or he made them worse.  These problems are:

1.    public funding cuts, which has caused outright poverty for the local colleges most likely to serve poor students

2.    lack of professional autonomy, in which faculty, staff, and students are not allowed to do their jobs without constant interference from external bureaucrats

3.    inadequate educational quality, in which student learning is eclipsed by entry and exit statistics

President Obama knows perfectly well that public tuition increases have moved in lockstep with state cuts, and said so in passing.  These cuts have caused a crisis that has been particularly bad at the entry level of the college system, where the majority of poorer students start.  For example, the supposedly open California Community College system turned away tens of thousands of students during the state’s budget crisis.  Even as funding has stabilized, students there have their progress impeded by the fact that there are 2000 of them per advisor. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the restraints under which public colleges now operate.  We have downgraded our national public university system, and wonder why it isn’t working as well as it should.

Decades of economic Reaganism generate an automatic rebuttal to these kinds of facts, which is that more money won’t help the schools—they need more rules, more compliance, and fewer unions that resist compliance.   Overall this claim is false, and it is easy to see on the college level if one compares funding levels and graduation rates.
  

For example, in the University of Michigan system, I’ve compared the Ann Arbor flagship, with its bevy of well-to-do in- and out-of-state students, to the Dearborn and Flint campuses (relatively Arab-American and African American).  I found 3 to 4 times the Pell Grant (low-income) share at the Dearborn and Flint campuses compared to the flagship; ½ the per capita tuition funds; ½ the per capita state funding; and, no huge surprise, ½ the graduation rate at the local campuses.  This is a function not just of selectivity but more importantly of lesser academic services at the poorer campuses going to poorer students—less advising, counseling, tutoring, intensive feedback, mentoring, research possibilities, and other things that increase student persistence. In graduation rates, you get what you pay for.
 

Since no one wants big tuition hikes, the only way to increase the graduation rate is to make a major public reinvestment, starting with poor colleges with bad rates.  But President Obama didn’t call for major restoration or rebuilding of state investment in public colleges, and there is only one minor tool in his auditing kit that would encourage it.  His charge that colleges just raise fees and pass on the costs to the taxpayer smacked of Ronald Reagan’s waste, fraud, and abuse paradigm for public services.  This can only damage the future case for the new public revenues the sector obviously needs.

This brings us to the question of professional autonomy.  Autonomy is cheaper than administration, because you don't have to pay for a compliance bureaucracy.  This is a big deal at universities, whose every interaction with the federal government involves complex reporting on everything from the sports programs to research grants and financial aid. Universities have to pay for this, and they charge students to do it.  The Obama plan will only increase these costs, and add to the administrative bloat that is a major source of the cost growth that everyone dislikes.

There’s a deeper issue here too. Professionals have expertise in their area and auditors don’t. This means than on the whole, the professional staff and faculty who work in the classroom and laboratory trenches know more about their educational issues and answers than do senior managers on campus or in statehouses, to say nothing of Washington D.C.   Authority has been shifting for decades from experts to the managers who control the experts’ organizations.  K-12 micromanagement through testing is one major example, and another is the power of insurance company executives and on-site care-managers over practicing physicians, which has made medicine more expensive while in many accounts damaging the quality of primary care.

Barack Obama is a full-fledged member of audit and supervisory culture, and is willing to impair professional judgment on the ground for the sake of collecting data elsewhere. I understand the case for data and for using it to fix performance problems.  This case motivates the part of the plan that will tie at least some federal financial aid to school performance, along “Race to the Top” lines.  A higher education scholar I admire, Sara Goldrick-Rab, in describing herself as a fan of the president’s rating and financial aid plan, argues, "Colleges that won’t commit to providing accessible, affordable, high-quality postsecondary education should not be receiving federal Title IV funds, period."  She’s right. If the plan goes through, the sector most at risk of sanctions is the subprime for-profit sector that gets 90% of its revenues from the government to produce the worst graduation and student debt rates in the country’s history.  Forcing educational upgrades here would be a wonderful thing.

The catch is that an auditing program needs to distinguish colleges that won’t produce good outcomes for reasons of self-interest from colleges that can’t produce good outcomes for reasons out of their control.  Many people have already pointed out that exactly those colleges that take on the challenge of underprepared or overworked or poorer students are also likely to be caught in the federal dragnet.  The solution for the first group is to cut their federal subsidy. The solution for the second group is to increase their funding. How do we tell these kinds of schools apart?

Statistics alone isn’t going to tell the difference: you can't lump UM-Flint together with a Kaplan college even though the causes of their similarly poor graduate rates are completely different.  You can tell the difference if you work closely with the professionals at the schools to see what the are doing, who their students are, and why, in detail, they get good or bad results.  Audit blocks the reciprocity and respect on which effective reform depends. Coercion is a form of ignorance, and it’s overuse in the president’s plan will make current problems worse.

I have to stop, and will pick up with the third issue and some better alternatives this weekend.

by Leslie Bary, Department of Modern Languages, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

I teach Latin American literature and culture in a public research university that, having lost half its state funding over the past five years, has moved at near warp speed to an entrepreneurial model. So as to become more current on pedogogical and policy issues affecting us and other institutions in similar situations, this summer I joined a Coursera MOOC and a Facebook group where faculty from around the country discuss online teaching.

In 2008, the year the markets crashed, the Gates Foundation announced a new focus on recasting postsecondary education as a credentialing process. Gates and other private foundations dedicated to the educational “reform” movement donated generously to news organizations covering higher education. The opinion pages of newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal advanced the foundation agenda, touting the advantages of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Backed by venture capital, these low-cost courses would allegedly solve the budget crisis in higher education by supplanting traditional universities. Taught by the best faculty, in the most modern way, MOOCs would be a pedagogical improvement as well as a device to cut costs or perhaps, raise revenue.

The MOOC I took, however, was pedagogically weak. The topic was Latin American culture. The professor had no academic preparation in the field. The course bore the brand of an institution that does not recognize it for credit, even from the division for continuing education.

In six weeks we were assigned one academic article. Other readings and lectures appeared to be derived from popular encyclopedias. They offered shapeless, often outdated lists of names and facts. Key readings were policy proposals from private foundations and international organizations based in G-8 countries, informed by assumptions about the region that were never debated. A typical discussion question was, “Has urbanization encouraged development in Latin America?” We had quiz questions on whether global warming had an effect on Latin America, whether eco-tourism were available, and whether Latin Americans had contributed to world literature.

By the third week there were active forum threads on design weaknesses of every type, from the poor quality of questions to the chaotic architecture of the website. Other common complaints were the inaccessibility of the professor, the lack of monitoring on the forums, and a grading system that ignored content in favor of form.

Automated messages from Coursera, meanwhile, told us we were wonderful students, dedicated to learning. Would we like to join the Signature Track, offering a paper diploma and a signature in ink? The Signature Track normally cost $59, but it was available for a special price of $29.

Soon the approach to the material came under serious challenge. The course assumed a Latin American cultural unity, based on a common past and presaging future glory. It drew on mid-twentieth century developmentalism, and emphasized the importance of free trade. Many students knew how dated and how partial these perspectives were, and the discussions questioning them were spirited.

Students also set up web pages to help each other search for more comprehensive and more objective sources, and more nuanced discussions of Latin American cultural processes. The pages attempted to counterbalance the lack of authentic materials from Latin America in the course, and the preponderance of material from organizations defining Latin America as a “problem” to be solved by Europe and the United States. This was “peer-to-peer” learning, but we could have engaged in it at a higher level had we not been obliged to excavate basic materials and cast off outdated arguments first.

We were at a disadvantage in comparison with students in regular online courses, since they can count on library databases, journals, e-books, and bibliographic guides, as well as online chat and telephone consultation with reference librarians. The lack of access to such resources rarely comes up in discussions of MOOCs. But library resources are essential to any “top-tier” education.

This apparent oversight may indicate a deeper problem in the MOOC ideology. The MOOC enthusiasts claim that learning is best done without traditional teaching, imply that these do not go together, and assume that research is unrelated to either. It would be disingenuous to say my MOOC classmates improved upon traditional university education by sidelining the professor and engaging in collaborative learning.

The students did pool resources to discuss the course topic, despite the lack of materials and of a professor working in field. Given an informed and engaged professor, richer course materials, and access to a research library, things normally provided in university courses, the quality of discussion and of collaborative projects could have risen higher.

Is the MOOC I took an anomaly? Or is it what MOOCs may become once the current fervor wanes? Are star-led MOOCs the wave of the future? Or will these be a small vanguard of loss leaders, designed to legitimate the new convention, but soon to be diluted in cost-cutting mediocrity?

In my Facebook discussions on MOOCs and online teaching with faculty nationwide, it became evident that a well thought out MOOC is expensive to create and to run. Those preparing MOOCs reported large investments of equipment, time, and technical assistance. Much of this preparation would have to be repeated for each iteration of the course, if it were to remain fresh. Only MOOCs preserved like yellowed lecture notes would be inexpensive.

To think clearly about well-tempered MOOCs, we might separate the project of making education more affordable from that of offering courses from US universities to global audiences. The conflation of these two projects, through the intimation that the work of corporations like Coursera is a philanthropic project to “democratize” access to higher education, muddies the issues substantially. Privatization often sells itself by offering both democracy and economy, as it stakes out new resources to monetize. We should not let this rhetoric direct our thinking on educational practice.

Finally, although the desire to improve educational quality worldwide may be laudable, it overlooks state institutions like mine, hard-hit by the funding crisis. Can MOOCs save our students? I am in a better one now, with a good professor. Students in it, more MOOC-savvy than I, marvel: “Why can all MOOCs not be like this?” That this course stands out as it does only indicates that the poor pedagogy MOOC promoters bewail pervades MOOCs as well.

At their July meeting, the UC Regents made several important changes to the Faculty Code of Conduct (Regents Policy 7401, APM, 015).  First, they expanded the list of protected characteristics against discrimination to include gender, gender expression and service in state military or naval service.  And second, they strengthened the right of faculty members to engage in criticism and commentary on University Policy and decision-making.  Under the new rule, the University is obligated to recognize and protect the:

freedom to address any matter of institutional policy or action when acting as a member of the faculty whether or not as a member of an agency of institutional governance.

The Regents now recognize this capacity as part of the fundamental conditions of university life and as a protected part of a faculty member's rights and responsibilities.

The question of the rights of faculty to engage in criticism and commentary on the University became an issue in the aftermath of the legal case Garcetti v. Ceballos.   In that case, concerning an employee of the LA District Attorney, the Supreme Court ruled that speech that flowed from a public employees duty was not protected by the 1st Amendment unless the speaker was operating as a private citizen.  (For those of you of a philosophical bent think Kant's What is Enlightenment?).  The Supreme Court left open the question of whether a University might operate outside of this restriction.  But in a follow up case, Hong v. Grant, (where the case turned on whether or not a merit increase had been denied because of Professor Hong's criticisms of departmental decisions and leadership, the 9th Circuit opined that "it is far from clearly established today, much less in 2004 when the university officers voted on Hong’s merits increase, that university professors have a First Amendment right to comment on faculty administrative matters without retaliation."  Although the 9th Circuit did not rule on this issue and the Supreme Court has not followed up, the Hong case made clear that there was fundamental uncertainty about the right of faculty to criticize University policy and decision-making without the fear of reprisal.

The Regents are to be commended for formalizing the right of Faculty to freely participate in the governance of the University.

But we need to be clear that we recognize what the Regents' action has and has not done.

First we need to recognize that the Regents action does not change the actual structure of University governance.   To take only one obvious example, nothing in the changes to the Faculty Code of Conduct alters the basically neo-feudal relationship that the Board of Regents maintains with its faculty and staff.    According to Regents Standing Order 105.2 (e), "the Academic Senate shall have the right to lay before the Board, but only through the President, its views on any matter pertaining to the conduct and welfare of the University."(emphasis added).  As with their process for choosing President-elect Napolitano, the Regents continue their basic attitude that faculty and staff should be seen but not heard (except at brief public comments sessions or when the President thinks it is okay).  If President-elect Napolitano genuinely wants to indicate that she recognizes the difference between her last place of work and her new one, a small step would be to persuade the Regents to drop the policy that the Board needs to be protected from the thoughts of faculty and staff.  They might gain a greater sense of how the University works.

Second, we need to acknowledge that this is a change to the Faculty Code of Conduct.  Despite the optimism of the Daily Cal's report on the new policy, there is no indication that this protection extends to staff as well as faculty.  Instead, staff will remain just as vulnerable for speaking their minds about departmental, campus, or university policy as they have ever been.  As the sorry history of "Operation Excellence" and its implementation demonstrates this is not a small problem.  But I am sure that anyone can think of stories from their own departments, divisions, or campuses to make the same point.

Ultimately, though, the Regents' change is a step forward--if faculty seize it collectively.  With a new President coming in, now is the time for faculty to increase their efforts to shape policies and to gain greater control of the the future of the University.  The changed language of the Faculty Code of Conduct may be partly symbolic.  But symbols matter if we make them matter.

For a half century, American higher education has imagined itself as a source of both social mobility and equality.  To be sure, there have always been limits to this claim.  It took important struggles during the 1960s and 1970s to open up universities to wider and more diverse student bodies.  And the impact of a college education itself creates an important social division between those who have degrees and those who don't.  In fact, it has been this perceived economic benefit that has helped justify the redefinition of higher education as a private rather than a public good. 

But Separate & Unequal, a recent report by Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, reveals a disturbing reality.  The report makes abundantly clear that over the last 15 years higher education has been a source of increasing racial inequality.  Focusing on African-Americans and Latinos, Carnevale and Strohl show that although minority enrollment has increased at a greater rate than has growth in white enrollment, this growth has been disproportionately in the poorest, and least selective, higher education institutions. (9-10, 16-21)    

Separate & Unequal also demonstrates that this differentiation cannot be explained by college preparedness. Examining similarly situated students (in terms of scores and grades), Canevale and Strohl found that although white and minority students went to college at similar rates, they did not go to the wealthier more selective colleges at similar rates.  Given the growing economic inequality among higher education institutions this division then led to far greater disparity in actual graduation rates and rates of time to degree.  Not surprisingly, graduation rates are highest in the wealthier sector where more resources (both in and out of classrooms) are available to students.  This problem has been increasing since the mid-1990s. (11-12)

As Carnevale and Strohl make clear, the end result of this tendency has been lower graduation levels and the intensified  reproduction of educational inequalities across generations.

Separate & Unequal offers a serious challenge to those promoting the "mismatch" theory (that affirmative action leads unprepared minority students to institutions too demanding for them to succeed).  In fact, the evidence provided in the report suggests that the problem is the exact opposite of that proposed by "mismatch": that the real difficulty is that minority students are being directed below their capacity and also deprived of the resources that help enable any student to succeed.  Retention and completion rates are simply higher at wealthier institutions no matter what your racial identification. (25-27)  In large part, this fact is due to the obvious inequality in resources spent on students.  As Carnevale and Stohl point out, the 82 most selective colleges spend (on average)  $27,900 per student, the most 468 selective colleges spend $13,400, while the open access (where African-Americans and Latinos are overrepresented) spend on average $6000.  (24)  Completion and graduation rates follow the money.

Given the increasing inequality among higher education institutions, Separate & Unequal argues that what we have witnessed in the last 15 years is an economically rather than legally constituted separate and unequal Plessy higher education system (although admittedly they don't use that term).   Although formally race blind, higher education in practice has evolved a new system for extending racial inequalities through access to resources. To be sure, their focus on the racial dimensions of the question is not meant to eliminate class as a variable here.  But even when controlled for class, racial inequities remain.  Indeed, the most powerful forces pushing against equal access to resources lie at the point where race and class reinforce each other.  (35-40) 

Given their emphasis on the importance of admission to the better resourced more selective, colleges and universities, Carnevale and Stohl emphasize different strategies for admission officers to more actively overcome these disparities--in particular a recognition that attempting to overcome these racial inequalities without directly addressing them (that is to say by seeking to create proxies) is extremely difficult.

But I want to point to two more implications of their study:

1).  Although they attend to the reality that there has been a growing financial inequality between higher education institutions (the pursuit of higher rankings and the desire of (overwhelmingly white) students to attend the higher ranked colleges, Carnevale and Stohl take that as a background condition for their analysis.  But it is worth highlighting in its own right.  As we have pointed out on numerous occasions, the gap between private universities and public universities (even within the more selective sector) has been growing over the last 15 years--to say nothing of the gap between private and the less selective public sector.   This period has also seen the increasingly widespread deployment of the High Tuition--Sort of High Aid model with its shift of economic burdens from states onto individual students and their families.

While one might have hoped that the student debt crisis with its contribution to the destruction of the economy as a whole and its clear and present danger for Higher ed finance might have finally quieted the Perverse Propagandists of Privatization and led to a rethinking of the immorality of the High Tuition--Sort of High Aid model, nothing of the sort seems to have occurred.  But in light of Carnevale and Stohl's data we can see even more clearly the wider implications of this strategy of social destruction--if we think of the inequities in access to resources as compounding the problem of debt itself it becomes clear that the inequality within higher education institutions and the increasing privatization of burdens is deepening the racial polarization of the country.

2).  Separate & Unequal should make us even more skeptical of the Flores-Steinberg approach to access through online providers.  As Canevale and Stohl make clear, it is not simply access to higher education institutions that matter (although that is necessary) but access to higher education resources.  Flores-Steinberg will (as would have the Edley-versity) simply provide a fig leaf for politicians and administrators to look like they were doing something to address inequities while actually reinforcing the growing racial disparity in access to the full range of higher education resources.

In the end, Separate & Unequal offers a clear challenge to American society:  renew necessary funding for public higher education to reduce inequities in higher education resources OR willfully choose to use higher education as a mechanism to increase racial inequality in the United States. 

By Anonymous

The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Janet Napolitano has been confirmed as the new President of the University of California on 18 July 2013. This position comes with an annual salary of approximately $570,000, an increase of $370,000 over her salary at DHS.  More importantly, her selection as the new UC President reflects not only a lack of experience with educational institutions, and a lack of transparency by the Regents, but a failure of the Regents to recognize the harm and terror inflicted on millions of families who continue to suffer the impact of a deportation and detention regime that increased during her tenure. 

President Obama praised Napolitano for “taking steps to make our immigration system fairer and more consistent with our values.”  But one wonders what these values are:  Napolitano, after all, proposed the draconian “Secure Communities” program (popularly known as S-Comm). Originally  S-Comm permitted communities to “opt-out” from collaboration between local state police agencies and federal immigration agents, but Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents reveal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deliberately misled state and local officials about the programs ostensibly non-compulsory nature, apparently to stem opposition. DHS insisted on mandatory collaboration, and the policy “churns roughly 400,000 detainees through 32,000 beds each year.”  These detainees are routinely denied legal counsel and moved from state to state without notice. “While DHS has published a manual that sets forth standards for immigration detainees’ access to counsel, the manual is not binding.”  

The concerns of local law enforcement appear to have been well founded: experts on the topic of immigration have identified an increase in insecurity in those communities that fear calling the police due to the S-Comm program. A lawsuit filed against the DHS during Napolitano’s tenure, identified the incarceration of lawful permanent residents, inconsistent conditions of confinement, substandard and abusive detention conditions, widespread detainee mistreatment, lack of training of ICE employees, and inadequate medical care that has led to numerous deaths, 33 of which occurred since the start of Napolitano's tenure at DHS.  It is worrisome that these actions be celebrated as examples of “our values” by President Obama. It is even more alarming that this history would be welcomed by the Regents of the University of California, the leading public university system in the nation.

Moreover, Napolitano has overseen the privatization of detention centers and use of subcontracted guards. The privatization of detention centers has invited a rise in the number of detentions and increased periods of incarceration that include indefinite detention. Despite a decline in unauthorized border migration to a 40-year low, in 2011 ICE detained a record number of 429,000 immigrants. In 2012, investors in these prisons accrued $2 billion dollars of tax-payer money. Furthermore, Napolitano supports the security measures that will ensure  the ongoing privatization of detention centers and direct profits to a burgeoning biometric industry.  These measures, costing $46 billion dollars, are part of the current immigration bill under discussion in the House of Representatives.  

Napolitano’s recent statements of support of the DREAM Act are contradicted by administrative actions she has taken as the head of the Department of Homeland Security: the broad scope of prosecutorial discretion regarding deferred action, an ongoing culture that maximizes arrest rates, and limitations on the right to legal counsel. The National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild argues that limits on prosecutorial discretion for deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) (which may include rejecting applications for infractions such as possession of one marijuana cigarette) remain weak. Additionally, ICE requires DACA applications by individuals in immigration detention to contact adeportation officer or the ICE Office of the Public Advocate, but ignores that this office was defunded in March 2013. Revelations of bonus programs that award thousands of dollars to border agents (incentives that invite harassment and intimidation) for increased arrests irrespective of legal status and ongoing limitations on access to counsel throughout DHS raise questions on ICE’s ability to fairly process DACA applications. This concern is compounded following a federal district court ruling this month involving a FOIA suit regarding noncitizens’ access to counsel in interactions with ICE that resulted in hundreds of redacted pages by the agency, which reveals a lack of transparency in the DHS. Napolitano’s systematic denial of the legal right to counsel, abuses by ICE personnel, and an “ongoing culture of secrecy” may very well impede information regarding DACA applications and thereby dilute the DREAM Act.

Immigrant youth, or “DREAMers,” who have participated in mobilizations for equitable access to education and immigration reform have pressured President Obama into instituting Deferred Action; a new Executive Order that allows students, youth and ex-military who meet certain eligibility requirements for a two year amnesty from deportations. Thanks to their efforts, approximately two million undocumented youth who attended school in the U.S. may be eligible for naturalization upon passage of the immigration reform bill. These “DREAMers” members of immigrant communities that have sacrificed to improve the lives of their children, who have also sacrificed in meeting and exceeding their obligations as students, have pressured Obama into supporting an amnesty as part of the new immigration reform bill, but now will have to confront someone who has created a noxious environment for their families and communities in the pursuit of their academic dreams.

At a time when the Latino/a population will comprise a plurality of California in 2014 and the rate of Latino/a high school graduates pursuing higher education (69%) that surpasses whites (67%) nationally, the confirmation of Napolitano as the next UC President risks Latino/a gains, especially among first generation college students with significant proportions of the undocumented. The appointment of Janet Napolitano sends at best a mixed message to “DREAMers” about the commitments of the next UC president, who spent the last five years focused on hard-line implementation of security laws rather than on educational advancement, and threatens the mandate to public education across the nation.

Despite calls from students, faculty, the LAT and the Sacramento Bee to allow greater public discussion and debate over the appointment of Janet Napolitano as President of UC, the Regents moved ahead and quickly named her to the position.  In so doing, they have forfeited what little moral and ethical authority they retained as leaders of the University of California.  They retain, of course, the legal power to act as they please and as they have done.  But we should be clear that they have rejected the idea of a University and have declared that they see UC as simply another bureaucracy to be managed from the top.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

I should make clear that I, like basically everyone else, have no idea what sort of President Janet Napolitano will make in the end.  But that is precisely the problem.  President-elect Napolitano has no experience within higher education, has demonstrated no deep engagement with questions of education or scholarship, was shielded--with the apparent consent of the Academic Senate Leadership--from widespread contact with, or questioning by, the wider university community, and the public debate over her appointment was ignored or dismissed with boilerplate pablum from the Regents and their allies.  It is possible that she will prove a better advocate for the University than her two immediate predecessors but that is a pretty low bar; as is the fact that as Governor she supported higher education more than did Arnold Schwarzenegger. I do hope she proves an effective President;  it is in all our interests.

But the more fundamental problem is the Regents.  That only Student Regent Cynthia Flores thought that Secretary Napolitano's record at Homeland Security needed to be addressed is a clear sign of the indifference of the Regents to the nature of a University.  That the Regents seem to think of the President as largely a political post demonstrates they don't even understand the nature of the institution they presumably direct (a point reinforced by the Regents confusion over the nature of Shared Governance).  If the rumors are true that Napolitano's two strongest competitors were not distinguished academics but rather scions of the military-industrial complex (Colin Powell and Leon Panetta) then the failure of the Regents to care that they direct an educational institutions becomes even clearer. 

Let's look at some of the symptoms of the Regents' incapacity:

1) As numerous people have pointed out, the Regents' intensely secretive appointment process ran against the very nature of a public university.  To be sure, this secrecy was in keeping with their long-standing resistance to providing full public access to their discussions and proceedings (if you need proof of this just follow Dan Mitchell's heroic efforts to make Regents' public sessions available on audio for listeners who can't stay glued to their computers during the live proceedings.)

But even for the Regents, this process was incredibly secretive.  No possibility was allowed for public discussion or questioning during the search process, the nomination was made in the middle of July one week before the full Board voted on it, at the point of nomination perhaps half of the Board even knew the result, or had ever met the candidate.

Regent Lansing sought to defend the secrecy by claiming that a more open process would have scared off qualified candidates.  But this claim is fatuous.  The University of Texas has an open process as do other universities; every other academic appointment (whether to faculty or administration) that I know of has open campus visits without losing qualified candidates (and most people I know tell their home institutions when they have on-campus interviews even though this is not required); and Lansing doesn't seem to consider whether career aims of the candidate should trump the interests of the institution.  Or for that matter, what it means that someone aiming to lead the leading public university system in the country would only apply if the process was conducted in secret.

2)  Many people have also pointed out that the secrecy of the appointment process mirrors the secrecy of Secretary Napolitano's job as Secretary of Homeland Security.  I won't belabor that point here.

But it is striking that the Regents would consider her background--as an attorney general, governor, and Secretary of Homeland Security--appropriate for directing a University.   The Regents and their defenders all deploy the rhetoric of unconventional choices or thinking "outside of the box." But the idea that because a person has managed one bureaucracy focused on one task s/he can lead a different bureaucracy with a different task is entirely conventional from the perspective of contemporary managerial ideology.

From this perspective it matters not what the purpose of an institution is--since all you need is to replace one manager with another.  But this ignores two points:

First, as Chris already pointed out any notion of "meritocracy" depends on demonstrating your skill and success in a chosen field--otherwise it is simply who you know.

But just as importantly, managerial ideology ignores the reality that different institutions serve different purposes and have different functions. 

In truth things are quite different.  Educational institutions may adopt certain techniques from business but they should not be modeled on businesses: the purpose of a business is to make profit, the purpose of a University is scholarship, that is to say to teach and to do research.  Universities depend on values of openness and debate, and flourish when the community as a whole searches for answers; state bureaucracies are top down and, in the case of Homeland Security or Attorney General Offices, deeply concerned with controlling information.  The Regents simply do not understand the nature of the institution they rule.

3).  If the Regents seem not to understand the nature of Universities in general, they also do not seem to understand the structure of the University of California in particular.  It is only by ignoring their own Standing Orders that they could conceive of the Presidency as primarily a political position whose fundamental role is in Sacramento.  In reality President Napoitano will have tremendous power over the internal life of the University.  Perhaps the Regents  have not read their own description of her power as laid out in Standing Order 100.4.

Here is Standing Order 100.4 (a)

The President shall be the executive head of the University and shall have full authority and responsibility over the administration of all affairs and operations of the University, excluding only those activities which are the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, Chief Investment Officer, General Counsel of The Regents, and Senior Vice President - Chief Compliance and Audit Officer. The President may delegate any of the duties of the office except service as an ex officio Regent.  

100.4 (a) is the heart of Presidential power and it grants to the President authority "over the administration of all affairs and operations of the University."  As we have seen under President Yudof, this power extends deeply into the educational life of the University:  from online education, through the privatization of Anderson, onto tuition, the creation of new schools and unfunded mandates on campus and the explosion in the numbers of non-resident students.  The President is also (100.4.(i)) "authorized to make awards of fellowships, scholarships, and prizes" and we are told (100.4(j)) that she "shall present recommendations to the Board concerning the academic plans of the University and of the several campuses."

It is true that the President is charged with negotiating with Sacramento.  It is the 12th section of Presidential powers.  For the Regents, though, it appears that section (a) is an afterthought and section (l) the crucial issue.

Now no one would deny that making the case for the University to the Legislature and the Governor is a crucial task of the President.  The weak cases that have been made under the last two Presidential administrations are proof of that.  But the question is whether or not that case is made most effectively by someone who can represent and explain the fundamental activities of the University or by someone whose expertise lies elsewhere.  The Regents, themselves without effective knowledge of the University community think the latter.  And with that approach they turn their backs on the University itself.

This criticism is not, I think, academic snobbery.  It is instead a recognition that the rule of the professional managers has brought us to the pass we are at: with the value of higher education and of scholarship under attack, with tuition rising, with pressures on students, staff, and faculty increasing, and with bloated administrations.  The truly unconventional choice, one that thought outside of the box, would be a person deeply engaged with the life of scholarship (both teaching and research) and able to make the case to the public and the legislature of the value of a public research university that was more than a patent producer.   It is no surprise that the Regents cannot see this point: they are themselves representatives of the professional managers.  But it is a sign of their lack of competency in leading the University.

It has been just over a year since the University Board of Visitors under the leadership of Rector Dragas tried to purge Teresa Sullivan for over-valuing the importance of undergraduate education and undervaluing the wisdom of Thomas Friedman.   The Virginia Visitors were seeking to remove a President and the UC Regents are putting one into office.  But the similarities are more striking than the differences.  In each case, a Board moved on the conventional wisdom of the chattering classes to trod over the deepest traditions of the Universities they were supposed to protect and in so doing revealed their disregard for the traditions of scholarship and academic life.   In each they proceeded in secret to prevent any successful opposition.  The Virginia Board of Visitors failed in their efforts to remove President Sullivan.  It looks as if the Board of Regents have succeeded in installing President Napolitano.

But like the Virginia Board of Visitors, the UC Board of Regents have failed as stewards of the traditions and values of the Institution they have been appointed to shepherd.  

The spirit of the University of California is the closed, top-down process through which the Regents divulged the nomination of Janet Napolitano only six days before the final vote, and then approved her while, in the words of one old Oakland hand, appearing “completely unaffected by the testimony that they heard.” 

The spirit of the University of California is the outpouring of critique, questioning, and protest at the appointment discussion itself, captured by this photo of Alex Aldana being led out of the meeting by police, which the LA Times used as its image of the meeting.  If nothing else, the Regents’ meetings are now producing the UC system’s best protests.  As as result, we were able to offer Ms. Napolitano a full UC welcome. 

Now that the decision is over and done, we need to get real answers to the major questions that were completely absent from the official proceedings. 

Many of the strongest objections addressed Ms. Napolitano's status as a top player in the national security establishment.  I too had a hard time fathoming that our next president was coming directly from running the Department of Homeland Security. But I won't discuss these questions here: I did one post partially on this, and there are more thorough treatments of the issue by Professors Joe Kiskis (UC Davis) and Mark LeVine (UC Irvine), among others.

The other major problem is her lack of expertise in university affairs. Public universities are still up the creek, and UC, with its very high standards, its full-spectrum research, and its bipartisan austerity politicians, is up it farther than most. What is this A-list Democrat politician going to do that the also-politically oriented Mark Yudof couldn't do before her?  What is she going to do given that the core threats come from corporate reformers in her own party? What is she going to do when the threats come from inside the house? When they come from people with whom we have to assume she bascially agrees?

The problem with politicians like Ms. Napolitano is not just the medium but the message. UC's current president, Mark Yudof, was hired with exactly the same theory--we need someone who can work with legislatures.   He had a good track record dealing with statehouses in Minnesota and Texas, not to mention with the wrestler-governor Jesse Ventura.  But in spite of his experience with the political medium he didn't have the right academic message.  

Can Ms. Napolitano do better with major questions that the public and politicians are asking, day in day out? Just having more clout and connections than Mr. Yudof isn't going to do the trick.

1. Why should public universities have public funding restored? Why can't they just do more with less--perhaps by using more technology like everybody else? 
2. Why should public universities and not just wealthy privates like Stanford and Harvard conduct expensive scientific research? What are the public purposes, or huge scale, or something, that requires lots of public support in the public sector? 
3. What specific types of undergraduate educational improvements would result from restored funding?  How would students benefit, exactly, from public reinvestment?
4. What are the limits of online education for public university students? Why shouldn't UC students spend, say, two of twelve quarters studying off site and online to make better use of resources? What exactly is the harm in that?  
5. What are the limits of competency-based education?  Why shouldn't we disaggregate our public colleges into skill-oriented units with semi-routinized instructors and an emphasis on peer-to-peer instruction? Why isn't a collection of "badges" as good as a college degree?
6. Do we really need as many PhD trained faculty teaching 20 year olds as we have? What do they do that technicians running MOOCs can't do?  
7. Do we really need so much academic research? What are we really learning from political science? Or art history? Or environmental biology?
8. What is wrong with using post-graduate salary data to grow and shrink majors by statistical evaluation and administrative decree? 
9. Why should the state pay more money when so much is just going into employee pensions, which most Americans no longer have? 
10. What are the educational, intellectual, or social benefits of allowing students to protest?   Why should taxpayers support institutions that disgruntled young people use to launch attacks on society? On the other hand, why can't UC keep non-UC police off campus and create a safe space for political speech? 
11. What is the payoff of academic freedom, beyond giving professors protection that few Americans have in their own workplaces? 

This is a start on the core questions about the nature, mission, promise, and vision of public universities.  The past twenty years of semi-privatization has confused everyone and made them much tougher to answer.  Privatization, continuous financial anxiety, and the solicitation of an unending series of sponsors who now call the tune have obscured what the unique public missions actually are.   Universities used to be bastions against political influence, and now they aren't, and seem to most of the public to be as political as any other governmental entity or corporation.  Universities, thanks to all of their compromises, have not sustained the arguments for public support.  This is the world that Ms. Napolitano has inherited, and inherited it without knowledge of its inner workings.

We already know the likely path if she and we can't answer these questions correctly. It's mediocrity--Mark Yudof was right to worry about this--in the institutions being offered to a great generation of students, often first generation, working-class, of color, undocumented, who need more, higher, education from us rather than lesser and lower.   

This downgrade is completely unnecessary, and it is something we can stop. I hope that the shame of it--the shame of ripping off this new generation of students--will galvanize Ms. Napolitano and the rest of us into laying the intellectual groundwork for a policy about-face. 

By Joe Kiskis, (Professor of Physics, UC Davis)

Less than one week before the Regents confirmation vote scheduled for Thursday, we were presented with a surprise nomination for the next President of the University of California. Regent Lansing, chair of the search committee and with a background in the movie industry, has characterized the choice as "unconventional," indeed. For the first time since 1888, the nominee is a person who has neither experience as an academic nor experience in the University. What Ms Napolitano does have is name recognition at a national level and a record as a successful politician and competent Secretary of Homeland Security.

As an introduction to this nomination, we have been presented with an uncharacteristically well orchestrated PR campaign of short blurbs from prominent individuals and a summary of her experience as a politician and government administrator. It is disappointing that neither the Regents search committee nor our academic leaders who were advisory to the search have presented a cogent, substantive explanation of their rationale for this selection. So what can we make of this on our own and what questions should be addressed before the Regent vote?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) includes includes customs and border patrol, immigration, coast guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Secret Service, and has responsibility for cybersecurity. Its record on civil liberties and civil rights is controversial. For example, DHS continues to assert and exercise power to confiscate the computers and phones of US citizens at the border without a warrant, probable cause, or suspicion of a crime. They claim and exercise power to search the information content of these devices. They can exercise these extra-constitutional powers within 100 miles of an actual border. When asked to do a Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment, they produced a report that is well summarized by this quote from the executive summary:

"We conclude that CBP’s and ICE’s current border search policies comply with the Fourth Amendment. We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits."

The Obama administration in which the nominee has served since its beginning has an extremely controversial record on surveillance, drone strikes on US citizens, civil liberties, and privacy.

We must ask how a record of deep connections to federal law enforcement and national security and a questionable commitment to civil liberties matches the values of the university, which privilege the free exchange of ideas, open and public expressions of dissent, the first amendment, the fourth amendment, and the privacy rights of faculty, students, and staff.

Since we have not been provided with the thinking behind this nomination and the strategic shift that it represents, we are left to speculations based on the record of the nominee.

Does this represent a new strategy to justify support for the University by the prioritization of political connections rather than the academic mission?

Does it represent a shift in emphasis from serving the people of California through the Master Plan to serving the needs of the federal government including especially its national security sector with its vast array of industry partners?

What does it say about future tolerance for dissent on campus and about the law enforcement responses to campus protest?

The University community and the people of California deserve a substantive justification for this nomination and an opportunity for dialog before a Regental vote.

The UC Regents' busy week includes hiring a new president and also voting on more routine matters, including one that has become routine fairly recently.  That is a proposal to increase employer and employee contributions to the pension again next year.    Each of these increases helps make the pension fund (UCRP) more solvent. Each also amounts to annual cuts to staff and faculty take-home pay.

In 1990, the Regents stopped pension contributions from both the University and from its faculty and staff, when the pension was overfunded, and did not restart them until April 2010, at least ten years after the pension began its decline towards the underfunded state it's in today.  The outcome for staff and faculty was summarized in an April 2013 letter from the University Committee on Faculty Welfare (UCFW) to Senate Chair Bob Powell (scroll down past the cover letter):

Between April 2010, the time that employee contributions were restarted, and July 2013, the value of take-home pay will have declined by a total of 10% due to inflation (6.5%) plus the restart of employee contributions (an additional 6.5%), off-set by only one 3% salary increase, in October 2011.

The employee contribution increased 1.5% in the year just started (bringing it to 6.5% of gross pay.  The proposal this Wednesday is to increase the employee contribution another 1.5% in 2014-15. In that year, each employee will send a total of 8% of their gross pay to the pension fund.

The Senate has had three general positions on this. The first is that contributions need to be ramped up quickly to fix UCRP's underfunding. To that end, Academic Council voted unanimously to support the proposed 2014-15 rates of 14% from the University and 8% from the employees (cover letter). 

The second position has been that the ratio of employee:employer contributions should never be more than 1:2.  That principle has now been temporarily set aside by the endorsement of the ratio of 8:14.

Finally, by a vote of 14-3-1, Council ratified UCFW's proposal that Senate approval be contingent on

the increase in employee contributions to 8% [being] accompanied by an across the board pay raise for faculty (and non represented staff) of at least 3%. A 3% increase would merely compensate for the two most recent 1.5% increases in employee contribution rates effective on July 1, 2013 and July 1, 2014; any increase greater than 3% would constitute a small step toward restoring competitive salaries

Unfortunately, such a pay increase has not been budgeted by the state, which foresees a 5% general fund increase (still well below 2007-08 levels) and no tuition increase (page 4).

I hate to depress my colleagues, but we may well be looking at another 1.5% cut in take-home pay next year, bringing the UC cuts to 8% since 2010, or say 12% when we count inflation and subtract the one-time 3% salary increase .

UC's 2013 Accountability report claims that faculty salaries are 85-89% of their comparators (page 70). The net pay gap  may be closer to negative 25%. 

UC commissions compensation studies, and in the 2000s they generally concluded that while UC faculty and staff salaries lagged, total compensation was as good or better, because pension and health benefits were so good. That was then. As employees pay more to support the pension, the pension becomes a smaller benefit. 

At a UCLA event last fall, former Senate chair and benefits guru Bob Anderson reported that the pension became "slightly uncompetitive" with comparison universities when employee contributions hit 5%.  At the 2013-14 rate of 6.5%, they are "definitely uncompetitive." So the solution to the uncompetitive salaries--the pension--has now become part of the problem.  (The same thing has happened to retiree health benefits, as UC contribution to current employee health costs was also cut from 89% to 70% of total cost over time.)

The state of UC's salary scales is even worse than that of actual salaries.  The reason is that 2/3rd of general campus faculty are off-scale.  The only way to keep a competitive individual salary is to be off scale, and if you didn't get hired with a large off-scale increment then in general you need to go on the job market, get an offer with a higher salary from a university that is good enough for UC to want to match, and get a salary match in return. 

This situation creates a "loyalty penalty" in which faculty who serve the institution more than they serve their own careers are in effect punished for service with lower salaries.  In addition, when faculty play the market, administrators need a bigger war chest to retain them.  They grow their reserves by keeping allocated lines unfilled and by failing to put any new salary money into fixing the scales.  One of the reasons fixing the scales overall has not been a priority is because many executive vice chancellors have opposed it, on the plausible grounds that the fix would come out of their campus funds and reduce their funds for faculty retention and related needs.

Prof. Anderson pointed out that when the University stopped contributing to the pension, it was engaging in hidden deficit spending. Employees were incurring $1.5 billion in annual service credit, a third of that tied to state funding. So at the 1:2 employee:employer ratio, UC artificially suppressed its state funding need by at least $333 million a year. 

The same can be said about salaries.  The university needs enthusiastically self-overworking loyalists to function at a high level.  The avoidance of a two-speed faculty has over decades increased both equity and efficiency, and in particular helped shrink gender-based pay gaps. The new practice of having negative to zero overall net pay increases establishes a two- or three-class structure within the faculty, with attendant operational and equity problems.  And it perversely allows the University to lowball its real state funding need in a way that insures correct state funding will never be there.

The salary scales need to be fixed, loyalist pay brought back into line with comparison schools, and faculty in this way encouraged to put more rather than less time developing the university overall.  The only way to fix scales (and the pension) is to get state funding back to normal levels.  But no one is making the case clearly enough that UC, without renewed investment, is still on the verge of being permanently downgraded as a university.

Salaries and scales are one of those issues where conventional wisdom is wrong, and where you need deep experience to understand why.  Pay gaps will be along the new president's major challenges, and I hope the issue will be presented correctly to her.