The Center for American Progress released two reports on higher education recently.  One explored the dramatic state disinvestment in higher education that accompanied the Great Recession.  The other demonstrated the particularly intense effects of this disinvestment on community colleges. You can see the numbers for your state in this interactive display.

In most ways, these reports will not surprise anyone who has been following higher education news. As they make clear, the long term reduction in state funding to public higher education institutions has intensified since 2008. Tuition has gone up, the percentage of students taking on debt has increased, and between 2008-2012 the size of the annual individual debt grew about 25%. (1)  In the aggregate none of this will strike anyone as new.

But what is crucial in these reports is the focus on the impact of these changes on lower-income students.  And here the reports are telling.  For one thing, for decades the rate of lower-income college attendance grew, but that has now been reversed and in the last several years the rate has dropped nearly 10% (Note that Figure 1 below describes attendance rather than completion rates, which are far lower--compare Tom Mortenson's graphic in Chris's post on Free UC as a cure for low-income student debt.)

If we note that the community colleges have borne the greatest brunt of the cuts, we can give the lie to those arguments that claim that high tuition/high financial aid systems are enough to ensure that higher education is open to all and that it retains its role as a crucial site for delivering mass capability, social and intellectual mobility, and the democratization of knowledge.

That these reports came out during election season is not surprising, but that they came out during this election season is notable.  After all, this is an election year in which GOP controlled legislatures have taken repeated steps to suppress the voting rates of people of color, the poor, the elderly, and students, not primarily through outright repression (although sometimes that does occur) but through raising the costs of voting.  Indeed one recent study has argued that the costs imposed by the new voter identification rules are actually greater than the poll taxes struck down in the 1960s.  If we add that to the efforts to shorten or eliminate early voting, the reduction in the numbers of voting places, the threatening mailers, etc. we can see a concerted effort to raise the costs--economic and social--of voting to the end of discouraging participation.

Now, while the efforts to suppress voting is being done overwhelmingly in Republican controlled states, the process of higher education disinvestment is a bi-partisan endeavor (as shown over and over and over and over again by Governor Brown).  I don't think that the effort to shift costs onto students and discourage poor students from attending 2 and 4 year institutions is a conscious effort to decrease their education.  At least I don't think that yet.

But unpleasant parallels are there.  They point to a political and economic elite that is willing to use market or market-like mechanisms not to increase "choice" as they often claim but to increase burdens.  The results overlap: we have been seeing higher costs for accessing both the political and the educational systems. We have also been seeing a relentless growth of economic inequality, which is in effect a way of pushing more of the burden of a declining economy onto a larger and larger portion of our society. From this perspective, the entrenched sclerosis of our political institutions ushers higher education towards its new role of lesser mobility for the overcharged majority.

High tuition, state disinvestment, voter ID laws, reduced voting times--these are linked.  They are the common currency of politics and higher education policy from Sacramento through Oakland onto Tallahassee.  It is a linkage that must be broken.

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

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

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

Part I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Part II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UC is still on that path today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part III.

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

I found two organizational charts that illustrate the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part IV.  

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

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

This slide described five general areas of activity. 

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

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

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

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

by Amanda Armstrong, Rhetoric Department, UC Berkeley.  5th of 5 talks from The Operation of the Machine panel, UC Berkeley October 1, introduced by Prof. Colleen Lye.  Cross-posted from Reclaim UC

Photo: Outside the office of UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Real Estate, October 1, 2014 

I’m going to be talking today about the operation of the UC machine then, versus its operation now. But notthen as in 1965. More like then as in 2009.

I still have vivid memories from fall 2009—a semester when students, workers, and professors built assemblies, walked out of classes, and took direct actions to challenge austerity measures being imposed by the newly-appointed UC President, Mark Yudof. These austerity measures included a 32% tuition increase, furloughs for faculty and staff, and layoffs of over 2,000 service workers across the UC system.

At one of the first walkout planning meetings I attended that fall, people were talking about something called the “Meister report,” which I later learned was named after its author, UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister. The Report talked about how UC administrators were able to take out low-interest construction bonds because they essentially pledged to Moody’s and other rating agencies that they would raise student tuition if necessary to pay back the bonds.

The Meister Report challenged the official story of the 2009 tuition hikes, which claimed that the hikes were necessary given the state’s defunding of public education. The report suggested that, in hiking tuition so drastically, UC administrators weren’t only making up for state defunding – they were also showing bond rating agencies that they had the political will and capacity to deliver steep fee hikes if necessary. And they were protecting their ability to carry on with construction projects, even if this meant trimming funds for basic instruction and saddling students with more debt.

In this way, the Meister Report opened up questions about how and in whose interests UC administrators were managing the money they did have, and about why so many construction projects were moving forward even at a moment of financial crisis. 2009 was thus defined by the politicization both of UC real estate development and of rising student debt levels; it was also a period of significant political mobilization. Even so, we did not succeed in stopping the fee hikes, or otherwise reversing austerity on a large scale. There were some minor victories though: at Berkeley, some of the demands of those who occupied Wheeler Hall on November 20^thwere realized. The University renewed its essentially no-cost lease to the Rochdale co-op, and a number of custodial workers who had been laid off were rehired.

The larger political victory came in 2011 and 2012. Facing another round of steep fee hikes, students linked their organizing against privatization to the larger occupy movement. We set up encampments on the campuses, and, after acts of police violence, held massive strikes at Berkeley and Davis. The movement broadened through the spring, with people in all sectors of education marching to the capitol building in Sacramento and occupying it, in order to build support for progressive taxation and for the refunding of public education and social services. Ultimately, a ballot initiative for progressive taxation passed and, with guarantees of more state funding, the regents agreed to freeze in-state tuition for at least four years.

Since the political victory of 2012, some things have changed. In the aftermath of the in-state tuition freeze, the priorities and practices of UC administrators have mutated somewhat, which, I want to suggest, presents an altered political context, and some ambiguities, for those of us interested in challenging University privatization. To begin to get a sense of this new terrain, we can look at recent bond rating reports and UC financial documents.

This year, two rating agencies, Moodys and Fitch, downgraded the UC’s bond rating. In explaining their decision, Moodys noted that, while “The university's debt doubled over the last eight years,…. Political and public scrutiny of the rising cost of higher education will constrain UC's ability to grow net tuition revenue.” They continued: “The university's relatively low cost compared to other market leading universities and expansive geographic draw of students help offset these pressures.” In other words, UC administrators aren’t politically able to raise enough tuition revenue to offset their debts, but at least they can make money on out-of-state tuition, and maybe sometime soon they’ll be able to raise in-state tuition as well.

These bond rating reports, in addition to vindicating Bob Meister’s analysis from 2009, help clarify and explain a couple strategies recently undertaken by UC administrators—strategies that are spelled out fairly explicitly in UC’s financial documents. First: In the absence of a political context conducive to across-the-board tuition hikes, administrators have nevertheless tried to increase tuition and fee revenues by admitting more out of state students and by increasing other costs students have to pay (including for housing and healthcare). And Second: In an attempt to decrease their debt levels, administrators have begun to aggressively promote the privatization of development. Instead of generally taking on debt to construct buildings themselves, they are now often working to rent out university-owned land to developers who are willing to build, and in some cases manage, dorms, labs, and other facilities.

In what follows, I will discuss these two administrative strategies, as well as some of their possible political implications.  

First, on UC administrators’ recent attempts to salvage tuition and fee income. This really varies by campus, and I’m going to focus mostly on Berkeley. Following the crisis of 2009, Berkeley administrators started actively recruiting out of state and international students, who paid more in tuition. In the last couple years, as the cost of out-of-state tuition has risen to almost three times that of in-state tuition, administrators continued to admit progressively more out-of-state students. Last year, a third of new admits came from outside of California.

Like other public universities, Berkeley has started “leveraging” student aid to compete to enroll higher-income, out-of-state students. The new Middle Class Access Plan, the cutoff for which was just raised to include those from families making up to $150,000, leverages relatively small grants in exchange for the higher return of out-of-state tuition revenues. Berkeley has also selectively increased housing costs since 2012, raising rents dramatically on the most desirable housing options, while keeping other rents relatively flat. This follows a period of dramatic rent hikes; between 2001 and 2011, room and board rates nearly doubled. Finally, as part of the restructuring of SHIP in 2013, Berkeley raised healthcare premiums by thirteen percent for undergraduates and twenty percent for graduate students—a cost increase that mostly falls on grad students in professional schools, whose tuition rates have also continued to increase.    

Thinking politically about this situation, it’s worth saying initially that a politics organized around the principles of racial justice, class equality, and affordable public education remain critical. Since 2009, the admission and enrollment rates of black students have declined even further than in the immediate aftermath of Proposition 209. Over this period, the class composition of the student body has also been shifting; there are relatively fewer low-income students but significantly more from the highest income brackets. Since 2001, the costs borne by all students have continued to rise, even for those receiving the maximum support from Pell Grants and the Blue and Gold plan. For these and other reasons, it’s critical that we continue to target the race and class exclusions that are only becoming more entrenched in the admissions process.

But I think we also should be thoughtful about how politically to address the fact that the bulk of new tuitionand fee revenues has been coming from out-of-state and international students, who now make up a greater percentage of the student body and have the potential to take on a greater role—as either protagonists or antagonists—of any student movement against privatization that might reemerge. Perhaps advocating for across the board rent and tuition reductions, including for out-of-state tuition, would be a generally compelling way to address affordability issues, which would push back as well against UC administrators’ post-2012 strategy for increasing tuition and fee revenues.   

         

The second post-2012 administrative strategy concerns the privatization of development. In June 2012, right around the time the Regents announced that they would freeze in-state tuition if Proposition 30 passed, Berkeley housing administrators announced that, in order to limit their construction-related debt, they would begin seeking out private developers to build new dorms. This kind of privatization of dorm construction had been happening for some time at Irvine and Davis. And Berkeley had done something similar with the Blum Center, as well as in partnering with BP to fund the construction of the Energy Biosciences Institute building on Hearst and Oxford.

Just in the last couple of years though, the privatization of construction has significantly intensified across the UC system. The UC Office of the President recently posted on their website documents outlining the various partnerships, or rent agreements, the campuses are looking to make with private developers. At Berkeley, housing administrators announced that the Martinez commons would be the final dorm funded and built in-house, and they recently leased Bowles Hall to a private entity interested in redeveloping the building. They are working now on finding a developer interested in building and managing a new dorm on Ellsworth and Channing. The Berkeley rent stabilization board has expressed concern that such privately developed and managed dorms could further drive up student rents, especially when other privately-run dorms, such as the newly-constructed Metropolitan on Dana and Durant, charge rents higher than the cost of room and board. Construction workers’ unions have also raised concerns about the fact that, unlike building projects on campus, these development projects won’t be bound by state prevailing wage laws, and so could involve more dangerous and exploitative building practices.

UC Berkeley administrators have also been working to make arrangements with private firms for the development of portions of the Gill Tract, in Albany. So far, the efforts of Occupy the Farm have stalled this development, and have put on the agenda the conversion of the Gill tract into space for community-based farming, research, and education.

Berkeley administrators, including the newly appointed Vice Chancellor of real estate Robert Lalanne, are also working on coordinating a massive development project on 109 acres of land owned by the University in Richmond Bay. They are saying this project will involve private construction and management of some of the research facilities, and recently published an “Infrastructure Master Plan,” outlining ways for private companies to buy space and influence at the Richmond Bay campus. 

A coalition of labor and community groups has issued a number of demands around this development project including the payment of prevailing wages to construction workers, the promise that all service workers employed in the facilities will be represented by AFSCME, the opening up of space for community-based and community-driven research, that those profiting from the project help fund affordable housing in Richmond, and that formerly incarcerated people be hired for some of the construction and other work set to occur. These are demands that students and workers on campus can help amplify. And in general, I think it’s imperative that we respond to UC’s efforts to privatize construction by building relations of solidarity with local communities and making the case for a kind of public knowledge making.

I can imagine some ambiguities and difficulties that might accompany such a project, aside from just the myriad practical challenges of coalition building and of building power sufficient to interrupt administrative agendas. It might also be hard to know when to oppose new development outright and when to try and direct it to less damaging, more accessible and public-oriented ends. And there’s a question as well about federal research money, which is public in one sense but is often linked to military or other state interests. In a power-point presentation last spring, Robert Lalanne, the Vice Chancellor of real estate, noted that drone development and testing is part of the research agenda for Richmond Bay. Given the entailments of much federal research, how can we envision and struggle for a kind of public knowledge making that is resolutely anti-militarist?

Any renewed movement against university privatization will need to work through these ambiguities and difficulties. But if the last six years have shown us anything, it’s that concerted action on the part of students, workers, and instructors can fundamentally shift the operations of the university, and can block the worst effects of university privatization, if not reverse this process outright. So there is reason to try, and to hope.