UC's Zero-Degree State Budget, and What the University Should Do

(From Remaking the University)

By Chris Newfield

The central facts about UC's budget for next year are first, that tuition will not go up, and second, that the state will provide no new operating funds after last year's 25% cut.

Both of these outcomes remain hog-tied to the passage of Gov Jerry Brown's tax initiative in November.  If it fails, UC will receive a "trigger cut" of another 10% of its remaining state funding (or $250 million), and students will see tuition go up, probably around 20%.

UC's status as a political football puts it in the company of the entire educational sector of California. The California Budget Project offers a graphic (above) showing that Jerry Brown's trigger cuts would fall on education in a proportion of 98.4 percent.

Politicians continue to trumpet their commitment to an educated California workforce, since it is obviously stupid to produce an ever-less-qualified population in a global economy in which everyone else is elevating theirs.  But in practice, both parties have lumped all levels of education together with public health and welfare and downgraded their quality and scope year after year.  The reality of the New California is reversion to a (declining) American mean.

In the context of the state's well-known failure as a political entity, it's understandable that UC officials would want to decouple the University from the state. But this decoupling only further degrades UC's fiscal, educational, political and ethical position, and we have to say for the hundredth time that the Office of the President needs to resist the decoupling temptation.

Read the rest of the article at Remaking the University.