2012 was like all years full of heroic efforts and thoughtless abetting of great evil.  In American higher education, it was the year in which the worst didn't happen.

Here are my candidates for this year's major trends. My New Year's Resolution is not to let my higher ed thinking be shaped by major trends. Resolution 2 is to map a comprehensive alternative funding structure and agenda. But that's for 2013.  Here's 2012.

1.Mitt Romney defeated.  Higher education won't have to face the ice-age austerity that Romney-Ryan would have imposed on higher ed along with the rest of the public sector, or his plan to reprivatize student loans among other things.

2. Austerity from Obama.  Now that he has been liberated from the need to win elections, Obama is doing exactly what he did before this liberation, which is negotiating in back rooms over how few resources to restore to the middle classes and public agencies.  Although various public university officials have called for new federal support for public universities, there was no sign of any interest in politics in additional support for public universities.

As Scrooge leaves his counting-house on Christmas Eve, he encounters his cheerful nephew, who tells his Uncle Scrooge that Christmas is one of those "many things from which I might have derived good, [but] by which I have not profited, I dare say."   The good, the nephew continues, is to have the one moment in the year in which "men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

Scrooge dismisses this feeling and, with a final dig at his long-suffering clerk, leaves his office, only to be confronted by two amiable gentlemen who are soliciting "some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time."

Scrooge asks them, "are there no prisons?"  "Plenty of prisons" one replies.  "And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operaton"? Yes, he hears.  "The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour then? said Scrooge." Yes.  Well that is enough then, Scrooge replies.  "I help to support the establishments I have mentioned--they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."  The gentleman responds, "Many can't go there; and many would rather die."  "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

For some time now, the humanities and the interpretive social sciences have been the canaries in the mineshaft of higher education.   Language departments have been eliminated or consolidated, plans put in place to charge students higher tuition for taking the time to study the humanities, a general mantra of the irrelevance of humanistic knowledge for the job market has descended upon our heads from politicians, and administrators continue to insist that the humanities are a drain upon university budgets.  Apparently the fact that you can make more money as a doctor than as a translator is a sudden and blinding insight that demands a fundamental rethinking of the value of knowledge.  The humanities now are supposed to return to being an ornament for the rich.

At the heart of the attack on the humanities is the assumption that the new global economy and the rise of the digital makes what we do indulgent and unproductive.  From this perspective, the support of the humanities and the social sciences was an effect of the modernist welfare state that followed the New Deal.  In that world of publicly endowed solidarity and expert knowledge, the humanities and social sciences flourished because they were signs of the shared possibility of social life and crucial aspects of society's steering mechanisms.  But that world, so we are told, is now gone forever: the state may exist as a military and political entity but it cannot control its economy and the global economy's destruction of all that seemed solid condemns everyone to an existence bound at most by family.  In this world view, the humanities are at best a distraction and at worst a block to the development of economy and technology.  The triumph of short-term finance over long-term management has succeeded where the culture war failed: with the delegitimation of the knowledge produced in the humanities.

But none of the attacks on the humanities, from their alleged irrelevance, to their elite qualities, on to their drain on university finances are true (well it is true that doctors make more money than translators but aside from that..).  Chris has just commented on some of the infrastructural problems with countering these false images in the world at large.  But I want to approach the problem from another direction:  suggesting that those of us working in the humanities and social sciences have simply been too defensive about the concrete social utility of what we do.  And that we need to stop being defensive if we are going to change the arguments and debates over the humanities and humanities funding.   Humanities scholars need to name their knowledge as such and to insist on its deeply productive role in the contemporary world.

I agree with Mark Yudof: one of many reasons never to leave Austin Texas is the "easy access to breakfast tacos."  

After an excessive helping of these, and before my anti-devolution lecture on fixing public universities, I spent an hour drinking coffee with some UT Austin grad students, along with several faculty and an undergrad who could have been getting his PhD for all I could tell.  Inevitably we got into the status of the humanities, since grads are the first to feel the effects of funding cuts and have been doused with the general backwash of disrespect for their forms of knowledge and practice.  As one put it, "I'm already doing way too much to acquire the difficult specialized skills that nobody wants."

My response was that they don't know that they do want them because they don't know what those skills are.  They don't know the knowledge that these skills produce. They don't know this because we don't do a good enough job of telling them.  (They also often don't want to know, since humanities findings challenge so many orthodoxies, but we didn't go down that road.)

As part of the continuing effort to remake UC in the vision of modern advertising and finance where the only important activity is the constant exchange of meaningless images, UCOP has decided to remove the old seal of the University and replace it with a brand new pointless logo.  Welcome to the 21st Century University I guess:

Let's see: on the left there is a book, a name, a tradition, and a commitment to increasing knowledge and to disseminating knowledge.  On the right there is.....

Maybe this is what Peter Taylor means when he talks about transparency and innovation at the University. 

PART 2  of GOVERNOR BROWN GOES ONLINE
By Toby Higbie, Department of History, UCLA

Mulling over Jerry Brown’s recent comments on the disruptive impact of digital technology on education, I’m reminded of the lead character in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. Another spokesman for the California Dream, The Dude lumbers through a mystifying course of events that seem to be related, but are not. At one point he thinks he’s figured it all out and quips, “My thinking had become very uptight.”

Yes, Governor Brown’s thinking has become very uptight, myopic, and apparently funneled through the tiny screen of his iPhone. When he thinks about the digital revolution in education, he sees only online courses. When he reads an old out of print book on his iPhone, he sees Only Google Books and not the library that contributed the book. When he Googles “university education online” he just reads the hits, and doesn’t see the educational infrastructure that trained the computer scientists who wrote algorithms and designed his iPhone.

by Toby Higbie, Prof. of History, UCLA

At the last Regents meeting, Governor Brown mounted the digital barricades and sent a shot across the bow of every University of California professor and administrator.  Tossing a mixed green salad of metaphors about technology, education, capitalism, and revolution, he warned us to embrace online education or go the way of the Post Office and the daily newspaper.  Fossilized. Downsized. Out of business.  Also, we need to "fix this" in the next two years, and don't expect any money from Prop. 30.  

Helpfully, he's planning to recruit business and technology advocates of online education to make an hour-long presentation to the next Regents meeting (and maybe faculty will be able to reply).  Thanks Governor!

Listening to this eight-minute clip from the Regents meeting, I was struck by the reality that UC faculty should not count on our administrators to defend our interests, or those of students.

I understand why Gov. Jerry Brown went to the University of California and California State University board meetings this week. He wants to protect the political meaning of his Proposition 30 victory, which is that state funds will not be cut, so student tuition should not go up.  He knows that in the death grip binding higher ed officials to state politicians, fee increases are annual and automatic. Naturally, the UC Regents and the CSU Trustees were slated to celebrate the Prop 30 victory with some variable tuition increases for professional degrees.  Gov. Brown headed these off by saying they need more study.  Hence Nanette Asimov's headline writer at the San Francisco Chronicle entitled her coverage, "Brown Makes Sure Regents on the Right Path." Gov. Brown was cast in the role of the Regents' AA sponsor keeping them away from the fee-hike vino.

But they were also supposed to stay away from the state-funding mineral water as well.

Florida Governor Rick Scott's "Blue Ribbon Task Force on Higher Education Reform" has finally issued its final report.  Designed "to advance the State University System's Constitutional charge to operate, regulate, and control, and be fully responsible for the management of the whole university system" the report has already generated considerable controversy.  And well it should, because the Report proposes two fundamental changes in the relationship of higher education and society each of which are ideologically driven with little, if any, evidence to suggest that they make sense.

About 10 minutes ago, I dropped into the Finance Committee discussion (streaming here), to hear either Peter Taylor or Nathan Bostrom, UCOP's finance chiefs, talking about savings to campuses from e-purchasing and strategic sourcing in the hundred of millions of dollars.  The published figure is $20 million. A comment from President Yudof clarified that the $300 million or  so expected savings this year is on the $23 billion total budget and mostly concerns medical centers and other non-campus operations.  So Finance is being taken up with the same exact discussion the Regents have every two months about administrative savings, which in fact have very little to do with UC's actual campuses.

Back to my real job.

Since the passage of Proposition 30 prevented another 10% cut to state funding for the University of California, blocked similar cuts to CSU, and blocked still larger ones to the community colleges, the higher leadership guidance has been "curb your enthusiasm." 

The new head of the California Community College system, Brice Davis, said, "We are guardedly optimistic that we're beginning to find a bottom here in California." UC president Mark Yudof stated that the vote "put public higher education back on a pathway toward fiscal stability."  These are obviously not battle cries but expressions of relieved exhaustion.  What does that look like, for UC?

Here's a simplified version of our traditional chart, since you love to see it as much as I love to update it:

As we know, investment in UC has long been falling behind growth in state per capita income.  This is not a response to downturns but is an erratic yet secular trend of disinvestment.  After years of turmoil, UC is slated to wind up next year exactly where it would have been had the state capped its share at 2005-06 and never increased this sum for enrollment growth or inflation.  What we have had for years, and what we will continue to have with the Prop 30 track, is de facto privatization.   It is privatization American style, will a hefty dose of public subsidy, but however much we don't like to say it, that is what it is.

This won't work, it sticks us with a new normal of assured mediocrity, its coping mechanisms will suppress new state investment, and it guarantees that students and faculty will gradually seek and find better venues than UC for that unique prerequisite to a non-plutocratic society that we call public higher ed.  We now need to fight the Prop 30 norm as hard as we worked to install it.  

 First, in this post, let's look at where the UCOP budget proposal puts us.

The Regents are meeting this week.  Among the central issues they will discuss are the short- and long-range budgetary situation of the University of California.  We will have more extensive discussion over the coming week but I wanted to provide you with links so that you could start reading for yourselves.  The bottom line: UCOP continues to be more forthright about the damage that defunding has done to the University although they refuse to take full stock of the damage done to access and affordability.  But despite their insistence that the University needs to improve its undergraduate education, their actual budget proposals will do little more than maintain the University in its present diminished state.  And that is true only if the State provides the funding that the University is hoping for.

The Executive Summary of the Current Operations and Capital Budget Proposal for 2013-14 can be found here.

The full Current Operations Budget Proposal can be found here.

The Capital Financial Plan can be found here.

The full Potpourri of Regents' discussions can be found here.

"University of California President Mark G. Yudof announced today (Nov. 8) that he has selected Nicholas B. Dirks, Columbia University’s executive vice president and dean of the faculty of  Arts and Sciences, as UC Berkeley’s 10th chancellor." The rest of the official statement is here.

With close to 99% of precincts reporting, Proposition 30 has won with 53.9% of the vote, or nearly a 7 point spread.  KCET's map is at left, with green indicating a majority of Prop 30 yes votes. It trained by over four points at the start of the night.  For everyone wanting to avoid another 10% cut to UC's general fund, and similar cuts to CSU and the rest of California's already lagging education sector, this is an obvious relief.  Many thanks to all of the people who were part of the ground game that got this fairly solid result. Molly Munger's Prop 38 lost by a surprisingly large margin of nearly 3:1.

Kevin Kiley's coverage at Inside Higher Ed gets the right tone:

After four consecutive years of appropriations cuts, tuition increases, constricted enrollment, and concern that one of the best systems of higher education was suffering a death by a million cuts, higher education leaders in California got a bit of good news Tuesday night when state voters passed a tax hike that averts what many called potentially disastrous cuts. . . .

The measure's passage is not a panacea for the problems California higher education faces. Because the measure was designed to address previous cuts, and because the state is still struggling with multiple fiscal challenges, including entitlement and public safety costs, there is a a chance that the state's colleges and universities could see further cuts in coming years.

Quite true. There were some positive statewide shifts for education, including a possible Democratic supermajority in both houses of the legislature. But have a huge amount of work to do.

I'm speaking about next steps at a UCLA FA panel today, and we'll be back with more analysis when we've had a chance to go through the data. I'll enjoy the results at least for today.

Both of the education propositions on the California ballot may lose today.  The higher ed communities have focused on Gov Jerry Brown's Proposition 30, whose passage will avoid "trigger cuts" that will reduce Cal State and UC state funds by another $250 million beyond the cuts that Gov. Brown has already delivered to them. (Failure for Prop 30 will also mean another $338 million cut to the community college system.)  Prop 30 "buys out" any tuition increase this year for UC students. Prop 30's failure will result in a mid-year tuition increase for UC students: the number I keep hearing is a tuition increase of 20%. Given UC's ongoing structural deficit, this would put in-state tuition on track to rise to $20,000 by around 2015-2016, if not sooner

If Molly Munger's competition Prop 38 gets more votes than Prop 30, it nullifies Prop 30 even if Prop 30 has majority support.  Both propositions have quite a bit of money for K-12 but Prop 38 has more.  Prop 30 mixes seven years of income tax increases for the top brackets (starting at $500,000 for joint filers) with four years of a quarter-percent increase in the sales tax.  Prop 30 is also linked to the state budget, and is to provide $6 billion to balance the budget we are already in.  Hence its failure would require cutting $6 billion mid-year, and 98% of the cuts will come out of all levels of education.

Prop 38 offers more thoughtful support for schools, and funds quite a bit of early education (see the LAO analysis). There are also requirements that local school boards consult with their community over budgetary decisions and that they put their budgets on line, presumably so that parents can monitor the share of school funds that goes to instruction and related programs as opposed to administration and so on.  The duration of the income tax supplement is nearly twice as long, and it is a general tax on the population.  I find that politically and philosophically preferably to soaking the rich (all should pay for all). I would prefer a much more progressive income tax structure than California has, but this is beyond Prop 38's control.

I have disliked Prop 38 partly because it does nothing directly for higher education--which the Schwarenegger-Brown Axis of Mediocrity has been slowly strangling--and also because I am revolted by the plutocracy politics that has enabled two children of Warren Buffet's business partner Charlie Munger to saddle us with two propositions (Prop 32 and Prop 38) that they can fund with tens of millions of their personal dollars, and in general manipulate the political process as though they were landed aristocrats of ancient times.  I was also worried that Prop 38 would beat Prop 30 and cancel it.

I've changed my mind.  Prop 38 addresses a range of real problems with primary, secondary, and preschool education--now funded 47th out of the 50 states-- and does so relatively well.  It's polling well behind Prop 30, so I am less worried that it will trigger the shotgun that Jerry Brown has kindly trained at higher ed's head. On Warren Olney's show that covered the two propostions, Munger noted that Prop 38 sets aside around $3 billion for contributions to the state General Fund, which the legislature could freely use to reverse cuts to the three higher education systems it has been gouging for years.   There is of course no guarantee.  So I'm swallowing my irritation will both of these propositions and with the asinine education politics that has completely destroyed California's educational advantage and am voting yes on both.