In Defense of Higher Education

Open Letter to Chancellor Charles Reed about the “CSU Online” Plan

2011-08-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

Why is Chancellor Reed developing a separate and competing system to the California State University?

In 1960 California launched a highly successful Master Plan for higher education. This Master Plan underwrote the costs for those able to fulfill admission requirements into higher education based on the conviction that an educated populace not only made the state more informed and able, it would - and did - fuel a remarkable economic renaissance. For every dollar invested in higher education, more than five dollars of enhanced economic activity result. What business ventures can boast such a return of five times what you put in?

Despite the Master Plan’s extraordinary success, however, California’s public higher education system is now in danger of being irrevocably damaged. This danger emanates from the so far successful imposition of the privatize-everything agenda of very powerful individuals and groups. Over the last four decades, the public sector has been systematically starved of tax revenue while the wealthy have become rich beyond reason. One manifestation of this shift in priorities has been the appointment to the California State University’s (CSU) highest administrative posts individuals who want to run the CSU – a public good intended to serve the public interest - in the manner of a private business devoted to following the logic of profit-making.

CSU system Chancellor Charles Reed is now pushing an initiative that represents nothing less than an opening wedge in an effort to enlist the CSU’s resources and good name in damaging the CSU’s own status as a public entity. For-profit “education” companies are being brought in the back door, as Reed proposes to enter into a partnership with corporations to offer online courses, dubbed “CSU Online.” Were Reed genuinely interested in coping with the perceived shortfall in the CSU’s ability to meet the next generation’s higher educational needs, he would be proposing that CSU enhance its existing offerings in house, both online and traditional face-to-face courses, including through CSU’s long-standing Extended/Open University.

Instead of taking that logical and reasonable step, Reed is laying the groundwork for “CSU Online” to compete with the existing CSU, funneling revenue away from the CSU into for-profit companies’ coffers.

Education is a critical part of any good society. CSU faculty came into the CSU to foster the people’s collective educational interests, not to become personally wealthy. For-profit companies have a very different goal: spending as little as possible in order to make as much money as possible. Their objective is only tangentially learning. Their real goal is profit. That is why for-profits are known for producing poorly educated and trained graduates.

“CSU Online” represents nothing less than a Trojan Horse for the CSU put forth by those who wish to undo the CSU as a public good. As another sign of his true motives, Reed has kept faculty out of his proposal and seeks to impose it upon the CSU without any real consultation with faculty. As a glaring example of the contempt that Reed feels for faculty and his belief that universities would be perfect if he could just get rid of the professors and their Collective Bargaining Agreement, at the “CSU Online Learning Initiative: Kickoff Meeting, February 16, 2011,” the outside team hired by Reed to promote “CSU Online,” features as its very first content slide the following: “CSU Online: Why Do This?” accompanied by a picture of an imaginary robot teacher and the words: “I have designed the teacher of the future. Instead of using people I have chosen cyborgs because they don’t need to be paid.”

We, the undersigned, demand that Reed drop his proposal to bring for-profits into the CSU system. No public money or CSU funds should be used for such an enterprise, nor should the good name of the California State University be stolen by applying it to this destructive scheme. An online university run in whole or in part by for-profits is divorced from the development of CSU campuses dedicated to public education as laid out in the Master Plan. Instead, the twenty-three campuses’ infrastructure should be enhanced in order to continue to provide quality education both in person and online. An online university that shreds the Collective Bargaining Agreement and gets rid of faculty governance and control of curriculum cannot assure either quality education for students or fair and equitable working conditions for staff and faculty. Any further attempts by Charles Reed to develop an online university with for-profits with the intent to undermine collective bargaining in the CSU should result in his resignation as Chancellor of the CSU system.

Signed by the "CSU Online" Faculty Task Force consisting of some eighty faculty across the CSU system campuses

Cooking the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs: California's Public Higher Education System in Peril; A Master White Paper for the CSU

2011-05-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

[Executive Summary of the following can be found here.]

Dennis Loo (CSU Pomona), Dorothy D. Wills (CSU Pomona), Yasha Karant (CSU San Bernardino), Mayra Besosa (CSU San Marcos), Päivi Hoikkala (CSU Pomona), Chris Nagel (CSU Stanislaus), Nicholas von Glahn (CSU Pomona), Ranjeeta Basu (CSU San Marcos), Ralph Westfall (CSU Pomona).

“It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

--A U.S. Major on laying waste to Ben Tre Village during the Vietnam War

Introduction

California’s public higher education system, the world’s largest and the pride of the state and nation, confronts an unprecedented threat. That threat emanates from the trend of de-funding, privatizing, and dismantling of public institutions. The course and outcome of this contest over higher education between radically different visions of what constitutes the public interest will have major repercussions for California, the nation, and the world.

Education offers a ticket to extraordinary riches: knowledge, skills, opportunity, and the passing on and further development of prior generations’ accumulated experience over millennia worldwide. It is the door that opens access to, appreciation for, and participation in the previously unavailable, inaccessible, and unknown, and the bedrock basis for genuine democratic participation and self-governance by an informed, thoughtful, analytical and therefore free-thinking public. A poorly-informed and -educated people can only bring about the nation’s material and intellectual impoverishment.

Education functions as a key venue through which new generations are exposed to and develop the necessary skills and wisdom to assume the mantle of responsibility for the society, passed down from previous generations. Universities also function as sites that concentrate and support many of society’s best minds, carrying out research and creating scholarship, in part in collaboration with their students. As vital as education, and higher education in particular, is to society, its highest administrative levels at public universities have been and are perversely destroying it “in order to save it.”

We must not and will not allow this to continue. We rise in defense of education as a precious public good. We call upon the people of California and all those who value education to do likewise. It will take nothing less than a collective and determined movement of people from all walks of life to accomplish the critical task of saving public higher education from the disaster of privatization, commodification, and McDonaldization.

Contrary to common perception, the underlying threat to higher education does not arise from the present budget crisis. The crisis itself and the measures being implemented by the California State University (CSU)[1] system’s executives are each the product of a long-standing agenda to promote private interests and private profit at the expense of public goods. Should these executives get their way, the immensely successful public good that the California higher educational system has been for so long will be irreparably damaged.

Our Goal

This study is an analysis of CSU’s situation conducted by faculty and students, a unifying call to action on behalf of faculty, students, and the larger community, and a source of ideas and programs for communicating with the public and educating the legislature on what is required to salvage the situation. Manager-bureaucrats say that professors waste a lot of time looking into causes and histories. This is because looking into causes and histories and examining actual consequences result in a searing indictment of the current system, the philosophy that has come to dominate that system, those who run it, and those who improperly profit from hijacking public goods for their own selfish interests. The process that is uprooting educational traditions effective for millennia and replacing them with the superficial order of the factory is called variously “re-structuring,” transformation, “prioritization and recovery,” and/or accountability.[2] These harmless, even reasonable-sounding epithets shroud a grimmer truth: the university of today (especially the public university or college) is being remade in the image of Wall Street, not of Socrates.

A University’s Mission

The mission of any university is straightforward: learning and the further advance and transmission of knowledge. Without the mission to instruct, including the dissemination of research to other specialists in the research fields’ endeavor, to students, and to the general public, an institution does not a university make. By the same token, without research – including research as an intellectual pursuit that may have no evident immediate practical economic benefit – an institution is not a university. The core of any institution that deserves the name “university” is instruction and research. One informs and enriches the other. The pursuit of knowledge and the sharing of that pursuit’s findings and the processes involved in discovery are as much an integrated whole as the two legs that we use to walk. Learning broadly understood is not merely skill acquisition but the development of critical thinking and a consciousness of the individual as part of a broader social body as well as the ability to apply social awareness from the local to the global level.

Learning is a combination of research and teaching. The CSU is a system of universities, and thus, teaching and research – that is, learning – is the central mission. Faculty and their students are, therefore, the most precious and core assets for the achievement of these dual goals. One would think, given this, that in a time of crisis, instruction and research would be protected over all other less critical activities, and jobs not related to them would be cut back or sacrificed first, just as emergency medicine must address the most critical life functions, leaving till later to deal with non-critical matters when a person’s life hangs in the balance.

The View from the CSU Administration

In direct contravention to this self-evident reasoning, CSU executives have been doing the exact opposite. We are experiencing sharply reduced class offerings, major layoffs and furloughs of faculty, bloated class sizes, department, program and even college eliminations, and a reduction of the numbers of students being admitted into the CSU system alone by tens of thousands - disproportionately adversely affecting historically under-represented minorities and the disadvantaged. In addition, CSU executives are attempting to concentrate historically unprecedented powers in their hands to hire, fire, and “discipline” faculty in an attempt to render faculty (and students) impotent in the face of executive fiat.

When devastating budget cuts risk the integrity and mission of California’s higher educational system, CSU executives have refused to reduce administrative ranks. Indeed, they have been expanding overpaid vice-presidential and mid-level management positions for years, awarding themselves fat pay raises annually, and are still squandering precious resources on boondoggles and corrupt projects (a recent example being the misuse of millions of dollars of general fund fees),[3] hiring expensive, unnecessary and unsuitable outside consultants, and loading on perks for themselves, ex-presidents, and their corporate friends.[4] Where academic services should see the least cuts or none at all, it has instead been subjected to the most cuts.

Administrators have reduced research opportunities and support for both faculty and students. Research, like teaching, takes time and requires resources. If there is little support for the space and materials (including the opportunity for focused energy) necessary to conduct research, the technical staff to maintain equipment, funding for the presentation and dissemination of results, and base of support for library collections, then there is no viable support for the research mission. The latest research fad pushed by administration is the “scholarship of pedagogy.” This refers to studies of the teaching process and student behavior. Obviously, not all scholars can or should be engaging in this kind of research. It should be left to education specialists. Its widespread recommendation by educational “leaders” is a thinly veiled attempt to substitute on-site, classroom-based research for field, laboratory, library, and community research, the latter group being more expensive and demanding.

In order to secure a stable funding source for California’s higher public education (CSU, UC and CC) in the face of the severe and debilitating budget cuts, Rep. Ron Torrico introduced AB 656 in early 2009. Rep. Warren Furutani introduced AB 1326 (Fair Share for Fair Tuition) in the California Assembly early this year (2011) to replace AB 656. AB 1326, as did AB 656, would tax oil companies for their extraction of oil and natural gas, something that other states such as Texas and Alaska have done for years. In Texas, the tax undergirds their excellent public university system. California is the only major oil-producing state that does not impose such a tax on oil companies. If passed, AB 1326 would generate some $2 billion annually, thereby solving the UC, CSU and CCC’s budget shortfall. Given this prospect, CSU executives should be welcoming AB 1326 with open arms and should have done the same with AB 656.

Instead, CSU administrators publicly opposed AB 656 (AB 1326’s predecessor). They said that they opposed the bill because AB 626 would mandate that the monies raised by it go exclusively to teaching. As Karen Zamarripa, Cal State's assistant vice chancellor for advocacy and state relations, stated, justifying the Chancellor’s Office’s hostility to AB 626:

"We have things that need to be done that aren't just about hiring faculty."[5]

The CSU Chancellor’s Office’s argument against AB 626/1326 makes no sense: AB 1326’s funding of teaching would support the central mission of the CSU and free up other resources that the CSU could spend where necessary. [6]

The CSU Chancellor and various CSU campus presidents have also offered other unreasonable and illegitimate reasons for their opposition to AB 626. They have, for example, predicted that if AB 626 passed, the legislature would simply undo its effect by taking away other monies presently going to the universities. CSU executives would have us believe that the same legislative body that had just passed a bill designed to support higher education in California would then immediately turn around and deprive higher education of funds they just voted to send to them. Our higher education leaders may be concerned about capricious and ideological legislators’ whim, but if the very figures that the state expects to be the strongest proponents on behalf of higher education are voluntarily accepting defeat ahead of time, then what kind of leaders must these executives be?

Instead of supporting efforts to increase funding to higher education, such as that represented by AB 626/1326, and by their persisting in slashing teaching ranks and classes, CSU executives are embracing as their solution to the crisis “Deliverology.” Deliverology is an invention of Sir Michael Barber, a former assistant to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, hired as a consultant by CSU Chancellor Reed. Deliverology is an efficiency concept drawn from business practice and applied to government agencies (Barber 2007). Barber and Reed say that Deliverology will allegedly accelerate time to graduation and graduation rates for the historically underrepresented and for all students.

Certainly, improving graduation rates overall and bridging achievement gaps is a fine idea. But is it a fine idea to adopt this as your major policy initiative in the midst of the worst budget crisis in the system’s history, ignoring the need for more faculty members to offer the needed classes to improve the rates, a real way to achieve those ends? And why was it necessary to address the graduation rate issue by hiring an expensive foreign consultant who prides himself on getting the “trains to run on time” (by having trains skip stations when they were running behind schedule) when he has CSU faculty who are experienced and experts at what students need to graduate? Barber’s critics in England point out that his initiatives in education led to teachers teaching to the test and ambulances keeping patients in the ambulances longer so that they appeared to be handled more quickly once ER staff could attend to them in the hospital itself (Seddon 2008).

Several months before Reed’s December 2009 announcement that he was imposing Deliverology upon the CSU, in a widely circulated, discussed, and reportedly influential White Paper by CSU East Bay’s President Mohammed H. Qayoumi stated explicitly what was reasonable to expect as a result of the budget cuts.[7] Qayoumi said, "I think we can expect that average student course loads will decrease, time to degree will increase, lines (or digital queues) will get longer, and traditionally under-represented groups will be hit disproportionately harder than others." [Emphasis added.]

The only way that Deliverology can produce the results claimed for it by CSU executives is by cutting back on what is expected from students to get their degree. This is why administrators, for example, have been floating the idea of reducing General Education requirements and the number of courses required for a degree. Doing this would cheapen the value of a CSU degree.

Even some educators have joined in the obfuscation of education’s purposes. A new plan produced by Robert Zemsky and Joni Finney at the University of Pennsylvania was nearly adopted by the CSU to transform the CSU into something more recognizably business-like (2010). Zemsky and Finney provide a “Deliverology”-style analysis of education’s problems (cf. Barber 2007). They identify the core problems as cost and outcomes – the same problems supposedly justifying Deliverology and the sweeping changes in the CSU.[8] Zemsky and Finney complain of the need for a better match between institutional resources and student needs. Administrations interpret this as a call for more courses in business and engineering. Few students think they need French literature, anthropology, or physics. Defining education as a product for students to purchase in order to get a job degrades it to just another commodity.

Administrators also like Zemsky and Finney’s other “innovations” associated with their proposal to re-structure or re-engineer the curriculum, as the key to solving the resources/outcomes problem. In addition to a lock-step pathway through a major involving fewer side journeys and alternatives, they would award credit for demonstrated competence in subjects not taken and much greater use of information technology (to achieve what are touted as better learning outcomes and verify specific competencies, i.e., via testing). These are old favorites of our CSU administration, since both potentially diminish the role of faculty and speed up and itemize the process of education. They cheer the prospect of students graduating in three years. In a situation in which the number of people who graduate within six years from colleges such as at Cal Poly Pomona is in the low thirty percentile, and where difficulty finding courses and poor pre-college preparation are principally to blame, the very notion of speeding up graduation to three years can only be achieved through degrading what education students actually receive and participate in.

In an attempt to obfuscate the disparagement and disempowerment of faculty contained in their proposal, Zemsky and Finney state that faculty are the key to this re-engineering. They comment that their hypothesis is not susceptible to analysis by traditional research methods, but instead requires an elaborate national demonstration plan involving many institutions, state legislatures, executive personnel, and faculty. The goal is to test whether we can raise graduation rates (Barber’s goal, too). That seems to be the sole measure. If one’s measure for learning is graduation rates per se, without first and foremost examining the content of the process to graduation, then the goal of graduation can become and will become a goal in and of itself a faux stand in for real learning, thus undermining the actual real content of a higher education. Zemsky and Finney’s plan’s activities are the assessment protocols and methods with which we are all too familiar. The other question is whether faculty “would [be willing to?] provide the necessary curricular design the innovation requires.” If their plan can show this, they will be able to “demonstrate statistically that the curricular structure we have in mind will allow a publicly-funded institution to increase enrollment without requiring an increase in state appropriation.” In other words, do more with less – the mantra of the management class who award themselves more every year but ask the faculty and students to make do with less and less.

Students and their families know from hard personal experience that before the budget crisis, getting the classes needed to graduate in a timely fashion (i.e., six years or less) was a major problem. The very idea that you could accelerate graduation rates and bridge achievement gaps with the massive budget cuts resulting in many fewer faculty and far fewer classes being offered therefore makes no sense. The very suggestion of such an idea in this context demonstrates at the very best extraordinary incompetence and at the worst deceitfulness by CSU executives.

A careful examination of Deliverology reveals that its real objective is not to improve services. As this Master White Paper demonstrates, Deliverology fits into the philosophy and policies of the last three decades, based upon a radically wrong view of education’s (and government’s) purpose. Education is a public good, part of the commons, not a business, nor a job-training factory. Higher education should not abandon this historic mission so that a relatively small number of wealthy individuals and corporations can enrich themselves at the cost of the public interest.[9] Tax cuts for them equal budget cuts for the rest of us and an increasingly circumscribed life.

While UC administrators publicly supported AB 1326's predecessor AB 656 (as they should), even though most of the money would go to the CSU system, CSU administrators’ hostility to AB 656 places them in opposition to the very institutions that they are charged with protecting and advancing. Their opposition to AB 656, advocacy of Deliverology (which they have renamed the innocuous sounding Early Start and Graduation Initiative programs),[10] and other egregious actions and statements (which we analyze in detail in this Master White Paper), reveal that the budget crisis actually serves as an excuse for them to institute “restructuring.” Executives attempted unsuccessfully to impose restructuring prior to the budget crisis. These “reforms” are aimed at transforming the CSU into something more akin to the University of Phoenix, a system that top CSU administrators openly admire. When asked, for instance, in the summer of 2009 what the solution to the budget crisis was, Cal Poly Pomona’s President Michael Ortiz declared: “Privatization. It’s the only way.”[11] It’s the only way to turn a public good into private profit, by making the universities into training divisions for corporations that the latter do not have to pay for. The private sector only supports things that serve its narrow interest.

This is exactly the opposite of what higher education needs, both materially and philosophically.

A Mutiny Against Our Bounty

Every dollar invested in California’s higher educational system produces three or more dollars down the road in tax revenue and productivity, based on average lifetime earnings of graduates versus high school diploma holders (e.g., Porter 2002). California’s innovation and powerful economic role can be directly attributed to the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, about which we have more to say shortly. Those who are charged with safeguarding this treasure at the executive level (chancellor, presidents, vice presidents) are, nonetheless, now intent on imposing a business model upon higher education and running it like a for-profit Wall Street corporation. This strategy, if allowed to continue, will be ruinous. We are living through the wreckage all around us created by a deregulated financial sector, corporate corruption, and private greed. One would therefore think that privatization and profiteer Wall Street-style bottom-line logic would be the last approaches education would want to adopt. On the contrary, education executives want to take the goose that lays the golden egg, chop off its head, pluck its feathers, and cook it. They believe that education can be understood and treated as an assembly-line process in which students are turned out like cookie-cutter piecework.

In its essence, education has not changed fundamentally since the time of Socrates. It is a process of human, mostly face-to-face, interactions involving exploration, investigation, debate, and trying on and learning through trial and error. Education is not something to be simply bought like any other purchase. Education is something to work for, struggle for, and earn by hard effort. A meaningful diploma cannot simply be bought. It is not something that you can just be handed like a mass-produced hamburger and fries. You can no more become educated by your paying someone to stamp you as “educated” than you can become an accomplished musician, athlete or writer by having someone give you those abilities and achievements - without your having to work extremely hard for them to become part of who you are.

What is at stake is more than education, however, as important as education is. What is at stake is the kind of society in which we want to live. Education’s impact is deep and wide: the kind of broadening that people receive through the educational system – and more generally through media, art and culture, child-rearing, governmental statements and actions, and so on – bears directly and substantially upon the way that young (and not so young) people learn to think, gather, evaluate information, recognize disinformation, and make choices about political, economic and social issues.

Life does not come with an answer key. The correct and best answers to all questions are not always definitively known in life at any given point before the fact, and incomplete and indirect information is the norm rather than the exception. Primarily due to the influence of the privateers, the educational system is increasingly becoming one in which the main emphasis is memorization and giving back to the teacher what the teacher has dispensed as the answers in order to pass the tests. Students are not being properly and adequately taught how to analyze, weigh information, think holistically, decide between competing claims, and make wise choices based on frequently incomplete information. This grows all the more significant when there is a growing storm of false or misleading information emanating from people and organizations trying to seduce people into buying their wares, whether those wares are commodities or ideas. Should this trend persist it will mean that our society will become increasingly intellectually impoverished, because its citizenry has become vulnerable to being manipulated by hucksters, opportunists, and those who have more ready access to mass media by virtue of their owning media, possessing a lot of money, and/or having friends in high places.

We must not underestimate the importance of training people how to think, as opposed to training them in tasks, memorizing facts, and getting them test-ready. Basic skills are important. But there is a hierarchy of intellectual stages that surpasses understanding education as merely the inculcation of answers and formulae. The first author of this Master White Paper gives an annotated primer based upon Benjamin Bloom entitled “On Giving and Getting a Higher Education” to his students which elaborates on the concept of the development of stages of thinking.[12] The handout ends with this:

“Bloom argues that if college classes do not call for undergraduates to develop the higher-level cognitive skills [of Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation], then the student has not received a higher education. Course expectations that require you to use higher level cognitive skills are of course more difficult, but if you are only being tested for recognition and recall then you may never develop higher order intellectual skills. Thus, for example, a professor who tells you beforehand exactly what you should know (for example, for a test) is in effect telling you what you can afford to ignore in what he/she was trying to teach you. This would be the equivalent of going to someone to teach you how to hit a baseball who told you ahead of each pitch exactly what kind of pitch he was going to throw. You’d think that you were a really great hitter based on this until you got into an actual game where the pitcher didn’t tell you beforehand what he was going to send your way. Life is a little bit like that pitcher, sending curves, sliders, fastballs and even screwballs your way. A proper higher education will help you deal with all of those pitches and situations. This is what you can expect in my class. You have a right to expect nothing less.”

CSU Executives Have Shown They Are Unfit to Lead a University

CSU executives’ actions and most recently their stand on and response to the budget crisis and their advocacy at this time of Deliverology present us with dramatic testimony of their unfitness to lead. Deliverology is the antithesis of teaching people how to think; its attitude to student learning is, “head ’em up, move ’em out.” CSU’s decision-makers’ philosophy and policies present a grave danger to the treasure that California’s Public Higher Education System represents. Not only do they need to be removed from their positions, the philosophy and practices that have been imposed from above for the last three plus decades upon higher education (and education more generally) and that have brought on this crisis, need to be thoroughly understood, exposed and reversed, and the criteria by which these executives’ replacements are selected - and remunerated - need to be transformed.

Consider an anecdotal example from the previous employment experience of one of the authors – the same problems are manifest in the CSU administration. This person worked for a major bank for twenty-four years. The workload in the bank branches varied substantially from day to day and by day of the month. To deal with that in a cost-effective fashion, the bank hired part-time workers on Mondays and Fridays, and on the first and last days of the month. The CSU does not need very many twelve-month administrators, and it does not need to pay any of them a salary much higher than the highest-paid full professor.

Mismanaging Education

Managed education is working about as well as for-profit managed health, food, and finance. That is to say, disastrously. Since President Ronald Reagan’s Commission “A Nation at Risk” launched the era of educational “reform” in the 1980s, schools and colleges have been subjected to an ever-tightening net of controls over curriculum, time in class, subjects, pedagogy, use of technology, tests and standards, not to mention funding. The modern education management organization (EMO) has more in common with McDonald’s than with a traditional school. Its values are efficiency, cheapness, quantification, standardization, replacement of human abilities with non-human technology, and top-down control of every aspect of “production.” All these features of “fast food” production are present in “fast education” production, to the detriment of actual student engagement and learning, though the latter two phrases have become mantras of the managerial class with which they attempt to brand “their” institutions.

As administrations talk more and more about student engagement and learning, and use these slogans as cattle prods on the faculty to keep them in line, the actions of public schools and universities all have the opposite effect - to crowd students into classes, make education more expensive for families, replace full-time with part-time teaching personnel, shrink general education requirements in favor of alleged job-specific preparation, reduce faculty autonomy, pay, teaching and research support, and benefits, force teaching to the test, enforce standardized and streamlined, seriated curricula, rush graduation, replace human contact with technology, refer derogatorily to the classroom experience as “seat time,” as if schools were like McDonald’s where the seats are deliberately designed to be uncomfortable so that the customers will not stay long, attack and undermine teachers and malign the teaching profession, intensively focus on private fund-raising (requiring revision of education’s actual role and activities so that the wealthy will feel at home with them), and reduce funding for instruction while increasing funding for administration and technology.

We constantly hear the refrain today that universities should consult business to find out what we should be doing. Business, which triggered the economic wreckage most of us are experiencing so that financial moguls could make a Wall Street killing, honors not knowledge, critical thinking, scientific inquiry or anything but the bottom line. Profit-seeking and self-centeredness as values should not be placed in charge of our youth and our future. Preparing students for specific slots in the employment structure is fine, but it is far more important and necessary for students to share in the collective wisdom and experience of humanity. Anything less than that promotes narrowness and self-regard at the expense of the community and the public interest. Education finds its mission and role in achieving this.

The famous educator-theorist Ivan Illich said that learning requires four things: materials (books, tools, artifacts, any things associated with a field of study) for the student to use; one or more practitioners of the field, who model it and instruct students in its technology, ideas, history, and so on; peers or fellow learners who stimulate the student and reinforce learning; and one or more mentors, gurus, or guides who inspire and encourage the student in a more general sense (who could be practitioners at the same time).[13]

The CSU and other public institutions, and certainly private ones, can still offer these supports for learning, if the administration, the Department of Education, the legislature, and the accreditation establishment would stop erecting the accountability platform on top of them, which merely installs the apparatus of corporate control with its appearance of productivity, but which has adversely affected and threatens to crush and/or distort the mission to which faculty are committed. Faculty as a whole are better at and more knowledgeable about this mission than anyone else: they selected their career because they love and respect teaching and learning; they interact directly with students constantly, which no other segment in the university or society does; and faculty are the ones most experienced at carrying out this extraordinarily important mission of passing on and further developing the collective wisdom of humanity to our youth. Youth are the nation’s next generation, the leaders who inherit society’s mantle of responsibility. Harming this mission injures the entire society and endangers that society’s very viability.

Changes We Need to Make

A. Administrative control and overall leadership of the universities must be firmly in faculty hands.

Problem 1: So-called “shared governance” whereby faculty are supposed to share governing responsibilities with executive administrators has been an unqualified failure, providing the pretence of faculty co-leadership with executives exercising de facto authoritarian control. Since “shared governance” has been a failure, who should be in charge of the universities and how should they be run? To answer this question we should first ask what segment of the university community is indispensable, without which a university would no longer be a university. Would it be a body of administrators? No, certainly not. We would have a university with no teaching, no scholarship, and no learning. Would a university be a student body? No. Students alone could not make a university, for they are not yet scholars nor are they yet teachers. A community of scholars is the only segment that could by itself constitute a university.

Faculty, moreover, are devoted by their career choices and the nature of their protracted training to serving the interests and needs of the community, the most important public good that exists. Faculty entered academia because we are devoted to serving the community’s interests. Faculty do not become scholars and teachers because we are attracted to becoming personally wealthy; the pay and working conditions do not appeal to those seeking personal material wealth. Under the current system, executives, by contrast, are expressly sought out, compensated, and retained based on the inducements of material wealth. Their perspective on higher education often is that it should be run like a business for profit, both institutional and personal, rather than as a community good in the community’s interests. In a time of budgets being slashed and the universities’ access to the people and ongoing viability under dire threat, the university’s central mission of learning and teaching must be protected above all else. It is shocking to see huge and ever-widening pay differentials between faculty and administrators, especially in times of extreme budget deficits. This must change.

If the center of gravity of power is to be restored to those who are central to higher education’s mission, the faculty, if the highest and best values of education are to be re-established, and if highly distorted pay differentials and shifts in power to executive/managers/administrators are a prime example of wrong values, then a necessary part of the solution is to bring pay levels between executives and faculty more in line with each other. In a time of scarce resources, all superfluous or harmful factors must be eliminated, beginning with administrative bloat and administrators’ bloated salaries. Devotion to the universities’ fundamental purpose and mission must be maintained. Selection and continued service by administrators should be on the basis of their desire and ability to serve the largest interests of higher education and the community, present and future.[14] Some administrators can also teach. Part-time administration would produce a more learning-focused institution. This model works well at the department level. Why not higher? CSU faculty are extremely tired of being accused of laziness, refusal to change, self-interest, and inefficiency, when these are actually the traits of the administration. CSU faculty have a lower pay scale than community college faculty, and higher job demands.

We recognize that there is a difference in the nature of the responsibilities for those in managerial positions versus those who are faculty-scholars-teachers. The people who take on the responsibilities for truly indispensable managerial and administrative roles (such as outreach, fundraising, co-ordination, record-keeping, and accounting) are not taking on responsibilities of the same kind as faculty-scholars-teachers. But the people who occupy the newly defined and slimmed-down administrative positions, as we are herein advocating, must be those who are genuinely motivated by the same educational goals as the faculty. There should not be a disguised authoritarian regime by administrators over faculty under the cover of so-called “shared governance” as now exists, nor should administrators and faculty be at odds with one another as is now the case, with administrators attempting to constrain the role of faculty and subordinate educational goals to those of private, moneyed interests.

Faculty should make the decisions about the curriculum and research directions in their disciplines, not managers or even an academic officer who has an earned terminal degree. The lack of true shared governance has meant dominance of these decisions by administrators. Imposed doctrines, top down, from managers, may be the paradigm of a for-profit corporation – the failure of which may result in a combination of unemployment and loss for the investors – but it does not work for the People’s University. A failure of the People’s University has much worse consequences than a failure of any for-profit corporation.

Recommendation. We should require the campus Presidents to consult and get approval from the campus Senate for all education- and research-related new initiatives, rather than imposing discretionary mandates and projects the President may want, but which may not in fact be in the university community’s best interests. Keep curriculum and programs in the hands of those who know the material the best: the faculty. Shared governance will include shared control of the budget, not just some adversarial bargaining with no real authority in faculty hands.

Results. The University will represent the educational needs of the students, not the immediate fad that may be popular with management. Money will go first to instruction.

Problem 2. We need public control of the People’s University.[15] In actual fact, the Board of Trustees (BOT) and the BOT-selected Chancellor (management head of the entire CSU system) and their selected executive for each campus (President) largely control the CSU. The faculty have little if any say in this operation or selection, except through the limited powers of the academic Senates and the California Faculty Association (CFA), a SEIU-affiliated labor union that has exclusive bargaining representation for the faculty labor unit over issues of salary and certain other working conditions. Unlike a conventional management-union relationship, management (that is, the BOT and Chancellor) have the right to impose a contract upon the faculty, allowing the faculty the only option of a work action (“strike”) when no agreement is reached, knowing full well that such an action would cause the faculty to at least temporarily abrogate the very core responsibilities of a university faculty: teaching and research. It is wise to have the BOT separate from direct political control of whoever occupies the Statehouse; it is not wise to have a BOT over which the People have no real input – a BOT answerable primarily to the Governor who appointed most of them and many of whom have specific special interests in mind rather than the general good of the People's University and the People.

Recommendation. A majority of the members of the BOT should be nominated and elected by faculty. The present state-elected positions that are entitled to serve on the BOT need to be retained, as do some appointments from the Governor, and a faculty Trustee nominated by the CSU Statewide Academic Senate. Given the fact that the CSU is a public, secular, non-partisan institution, the People's University, the Board of Trustees should not be political appointees of the governor. The BOT should serve the universities and the community and be made up of people who are educators and students. One faculty member and one student could be nominated and elected from each CSU campus. Campus Presidents, also serving faculty with temporary appointments, should be subject to approval by the campus Senate and be selected on the basis of their clear commitments to the mission of the university. The BOT must cease to be an extension of the Business Roundtable.

Result. The CSU under the BOT will be answerable to the people whom it serves, rather than to special interests that fund a particular Governor or political agenda. The University will represent students’ educational needs and the faculty’s pursuit of knowledge for society, not the immediate fad that may be popular with management.

B. Discard the Education Management Organization (EMO) Model: It has Demonstrated Its Unsuitability for a Public Good Like Higher Education.

Problem. Thirty years of “reform” have done nothing to enrich students’ educational experience or performance. They have enriched a lot of education consulting companies, education bureaucrats, and test companies such as the suppliers of the $660 million PeopleSoft program (CMS). The only “stakeholders” in the operation who have benefited from the corporatization regimen are administrators and managers, not students, faculty, staff, or the public. Whatever reforms have been instituted at all levels of education have not improved it as a learning environment, a workplace, or even a simulated factory for future employees. We must look to what we already know about the best approaches to teaching and learning, many of them traditional that have stood the test of time, some of them new.

We know that the following techniques work: small class sizes, reading- and writing-intensive instruction, hands-on and interactive teaching, face-to-face time, individual and group projects, academic freedom and diversity, emphasis on students pursuing ideas and interests of their own, good libraries, labs, data bases, field experiences, connectedness with communities, support for students who need more assistance to meet academic demands, and students given many choices of programs and activities.

Most faculty at CSU campuses have the experience of workload inflation. The requirements for success have been ratcheted up beyond reason. This is a classic characteristic of the corporate work environment, where “continuous improvement” and constant planning, monitoring, and reporting are the hallmarks of production, performance, and output. In our case, though the CSUs are teaching institutions first and foremost, the research expectation of most faculty has steadily grown, while support for it (release from courses, grants, travel money) is negligible. Full teaching loads prevent most people from doing any kind of meaningful research during the academic year.

The service component of our assignment has also grown into a juggernaut of committee work, assessment, advising, administrative initiatives, outreach, and efforts to participate in shared governance. For this, we receive three weighted teaching units (WTUs), while teaching carries the remaining twelve of our allotted full-time load of fifteen WTUs (for example, three four-unit classes per quarter). Some faculty have suggested that, if the administration is serious about our research, that we carry three WTUs of research in lieu of three WTUs of teaching (see Recommendation H).

Recommendation. Ensure that those who serve in administrative capacities explicitly reject the EMO approach as inimical to education. Carry out educational campaigns in the university system involving the entire university community about the problems of the EMO, creating an explicit consensus for a university that is allowed to do what universities do best: educate and expand knowledge.

Result. A university that is no longer weighed down by the negative consequences of EMO’s philosophy, policies and practices and is united in purpose rather than divided against itself.

C. Reduce stratification of faculty.

Problem. The caste system of tenured/tenure-track and lecturers (aka adjunct) faculty is inimical to building good academic programs and making academic governance effective. The CSU should begin immediately to convert many adjunct faculty ranks who possess their discipline’s terminal degrees to tenure-track employment so that we have at least three-fourths tenured/tenure-track teaching staff. The constantly claimed goal of two-thirds tenured/tenure-track faculty is a good step, but even it is not honored.

The long-term effect of drying up tenure-line employment at universities, in favor of paying people as little as possible and giving them no security, will be to turn future scholars away from graduate school. It is unfair to the students and unfair to the faculty who must teach for low wages and must therefore carry too many classes, often at more than one school simultaneously (thus their nickname “Freeway Flyers”), giving them little time to give the same attention to students as tenure-track faculty can. The world needs highly educated people, as it faces increasingly dangerous and tricky situations in the climate, environment, conflict, poverty, health, natural disasters, and economic collapse. (See Appendices 1 and 2 for further detailed discussion of this situation.)

We recognize, however, that there is not a consensus among tenure-track faculty as to the following recommendations. Many of them are ambivalent about adjunct faculty: they need the latter to staff courses they cannot teach, owing to their low numbers relative to target demands, but they wish to retain the management prerogative of hiring and firing them at will. It is vital to provide stable employment with adequate remuneration for all faculty. It is often said, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” This cannot apply only to tenure-track professors. The existing caste system among faculty serves only to dilute our power and enable administration to pick us apart. Nor does it serve students well.

Recommendation. Fixing the “lecturer problem” will also help us fix a related problem: insufficient tenure-stream faculty with direct instructional and research responsibilities; these positions do not include managers who happen to have retreat rights to a regular tenure-stream faculty line. In the CSU, tenure-stream faculty are in the Professor series (Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor), although certain professional service staff also are granted tenure and considered part of the faculty (e.g., professional staff Librarians, professional staff psychological Counselors). This issue refers to the Professor positions. This issue was addressed by a resolution of the California Assembly, ACR 73 (Strom Martin) in September 2001 that put the appropriate fraction of tenure-stream faculty appointments (as contrasted with lecturers, who do not have tenure-stream appointments) at seventy-five percent of the total number of faculty. At present, the CSU is below fifty percent tenure-stream by head count.

Replace separating tenure-stream faculty members by new faculty members; separating faculty members are those who retire, those who voluntarily leave, and those who are denied tenure and thus leave. Recruit additional tenure-stream faculty. For those current CSU lecturers who have a terminal degree appropriate for a university faculty appointment, and are willing and able to teach at all levels (lower division, upper division, graduate) as well as to conduct an active program of research, a serious program of conversion from lecturer to tenure-stream should be instituted to take advantage of an extant pool of faculty members requiring none of the costs associated with a typical search for a tenure-stream position. By serious program, we do not mean merely a cosmetic statement of such a program where the fact that a present lecturer with an earned terminal degree is a lecturer is thus “damaged goods,” and in particular has had no recent active research record given the exclusive teaching load of a lecturer position, and is thus unqualified compared to a recent terminal degree graduate with a current research portfolio. Rather, once it can be established by a lecturer that she/he will be able to initiate a program of research as well as maintaining quality instruction, such an internal candidate should be considered before any external (and costly) search is conducted.

This is not a program of “inside track” or “preferential treatment,” but rather a means to reduce the cost of a search, retain lecturers who have provided years of service to the CSU, and to address the excessive use of lecturers in the CSU, as recognized by ACR 73. Since it was founded in 1915, the AAUP has conceived of tenure as the means to ensure academic freedom for faculty - as a right of all faculty, not as a privilege for the few. As the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure observes, tenure is “indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.”[16] Thus, the Association’s position on tenure holds that: all faculty work is tenurable; tenure can be granted at any professional rank (or without rank); tenure-line positions can be either part- or full-time.[17]

Results. Classes will be taught by faculty members who have both a permanent commitment to the university and who have in return a permanent commitment from the university – real mutual stakeholders. Students will be advised by tenure-stream faculty who are familiar with the institution and with the student throughout the career of the student at the campus. Quality of instruction will improve because a tenured faculty can be more concerned with the level of material and student learning than the constant need for great performance on what amount to customer satisfaction surveys – the student evaluation of the instructor. Although student input is important, a demanding, rigorous course with honest grading – not grade inflation – often will cause dissatisfaction from students who want the diploma, and not so much the hard work required by a legitimate education.

D. Call things what they are.

“Restructuring GE” means stripping it down. It should say that. “Assessment” is testing, perhaps in some new forms, but none requiring an elaborate bureaucracy to manage them. Do not say that you believe in “quality” or “excellence” of education if you are overloading classrooms and cutting sections. “Efficiency” according to executives now in charge means eliminating small programs. The vision of “teacher/scholar” or other claims by executives is disingenuous. It means “doing more with less.” Our public documents describe a great university, but really mask a mission gone astray. “Restructuring the CSU” means a command-and-control maneuver to assign niches to campuses or regions, standardize all sorts of academic and administrative operations (including faculty evaluations at all levels, calendars, admission, programs …), and produce efficiency (i.e., convenience to management, usually the opposite of quality education). “Budget crisis” means the corporations and wealthy class have successfully engaged in predation of the resources formerly belonging to the commonwealth of the people, leaving the latter with no jobs, homes, health care, etc. Calling faculty “Instructional Delivery Technicians” or “Learning Environment Designers” means we have replaced human experts with unsalaried non-human technology.

E. Support public services, programs and institutions.

Problem. The CSU and other public institutions have moved from a state-supported, to a state-assisted, to a rapidly privatizing funding basis. The evidence of the failure of for-profit education is abundant. The failure of the business model for education (or for society in general) is a lived reality of most people. The majority of Californians qualified to pursue higher education cannot resort to private institutions with high tuition. We must therefore continue to demand publicly-supported education. Whether through income tax, corporate taxes such as the oil extraction tax (AB 1326), and/or other levies on excess profit, property, capital, or luxury purchases such as restoring the dramatically cut back corporate taxes while retaining Prop 13’s tax relief for homeowners, we must return our state to a rational footing by creating community wealth again. We know it is not fashionable to request taxation of the rich and the corporations, since they threaten to leave the state if we do. Others less wealthy do not have this prerogative of extorting personal gain from the community. The rich should not have it, either.

We recognize that the funding situation is serious. Given the limitations on the ability of the Legislature to increase taxation, and the unwillingness of one of the political parties that controls over one-third of the Legislature to have equitable taxation upon those who can afford such taxation but and rather demands a curtailment of state functions, the reality is that the epoch of a state-supported CSU – as required by the original Master Plan – is over. At present, the CSU is state-subsidized, and soon may merely be state-located. This is different from the UC that has been at best state-subsidized almost from the first Master Plan and today is in fact state-located, but highly dependent upon support other than from the State. For better or worse, the UC funding model must be allowed to the CSU.

There is discussion of a new raw materials (primarily oil) separation revenue stream, similar to what is used in a number of states to fund the public universities therein. This certainly will help, and we strongly encourage such a revenue stream. Nonetheless, without a state Constitutional Amendment, it is unlikely that the minority party in the Legislature will support such a new revenue stream, unless it can be done through the initiative process, in which case those who would have to pay the new state revenue – for example, major petroleum extracting for-profit corporations – would muster all of their resources to cause the initiative to fail. Under the Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court, a for-profit corporation can spend as much as it wishes to influence a political outcome, short of direct bribery or extortion.

However, without sufficient funding, the CSU’s ability to hire and retain quality tenure-stream faculty members and to have those faculty members engage in both teaching and research is strongly diminished. A reduction in the overhead represented by the bloated CSU management structure will recoup some of the funds needed, but even this will not be enough. Thus, other revenue streams are needed to maintain and expand (as the number of students increase) the capabilities of the CSU.

Recommendation. The most cost-efficient solution might be as follows. The original Master Plan envisioned a three-tiered system of public higher education. In this system, the UC was designed and supported to compete and compare with elite institutions worldwide – institutions such as Harvard or Oxford – to serve the elite of the state. The UC was to have a complete monopoly on public advanced and terminal degrees – doctorates and the production of attorneys, medical doctors, dentists, and the like – only allowing independent (private) institutions to compete with the UC. Although the infrastructure is in place for the public production of the medical, dental, and veterinary doctor for state licensure strictly within the UC, for the other fields (such as Ph.D.), it is much less clear that these should be reserved for the elite. If the state cannot afford a viable CSU – as a university – then the only cost-effective thing to do is to merge the UC and CSU, much as in systems in other states (e.g., Wisconsin, New York), similar to what is present in the SUNY system in the State of New York.

This approach may cause howls of anguish and much politicking against it by the management of both the UC and CSU, and by many faculty members in the UC who regard CSU faculty as unworthy and inferior, and faculty in the CSU who regard UC faculty as professional researchers and external funding specialists, but with little or no interest in undergraduate instruction. However, the UC and the CSU management– the Regents and the BOT and all of the rest of the tiers of management – are not the People of California, and do not have to endure the inherent duplication of two senior university systems. The People do. Because of the elite nature of the UC, it is reasonable for present UC campuses to maintain this elite status and not serve ALL of the People, while the present CSU campuses would serve ALL of the People.

The CSU’s enforcement of only the upper 1/3 of high school graduates is more fiction than reality, whereas the UC is much more steadfast in maintaining the upper twelve percent that it admits, with the “upper” being measured by some combination of high school grades as well as college entrance examination (e.g., SAT) scores, provided that the high school transcript also shows completion of the high school courses (curriculum) required by the UC for admission. Thus, in the sense of nearly open admissions, the CSU is much closer to a People's University. This merger would lead to dramatic cost reductions through the elimination of unnecessary management and facilities duplication. There is no reason to have a UC Riverside a short distance from a CSU San Bernardino, a UC Merced formed out of whole cloth at great expense when there is a CSU Fresno a short distance away.

A multi-prong approach is needed. First, a dedicated secure revenue stream, such as that on the separation of resources from the state (e.g., petroleum extraction), must be identified and drawn upon.

Second, there seems to be no choice but to vitiate the original Master Plan and have the students pay for a larger portion of their education, comparable to what is charged by public institutions in many other States. This approach is strongly opposed by CFA – but short of increased taxes, CFA has no fiscally viable solution. It is true that the reduction in CSU managers and the overhead costs these positions represent, a position on which we agree with CFA, would help, but it simply is not sufficient to meet fair compensation and sane workloads for a majority tenure-stream faculty composition. However, there are a number of considerations for increased student fees/tuition that must be addressed. The state and the People need an educated population in fields that do not pay extremely well – not everyone can be a corporate attorney, a medical doctor, or a for-profit corporate executive. If the state is not willing to tax those with excessive wealth so as to support public institutions, the people will have to accept the idea that many young people capable of doing college-level work will not get the chance to do it, if they cannot afford the tuition. Thus, we dispel the illusion of a public university.

The state needs K-12 teachers, CSU tenure-stream faculty members, and persons otherwise working more in the public interest (even if in the private sector) than simply out of avarice. However, if the cost of an education, particularly an education in the CSU – the People's University – is such that the student loans required to complete such an education make the graduate a permanent indentured servant to pay for those loans, then only those persons planning on careers in very high-paying fields will stay, and the needs of the state and the People will not be met. Thus, the CSU must have a sensible forgivable loan program where the payments correspond to a pre-agreed-upon fraction of the salary/income of the student. This is not an income tax, but rather a means to allow graduates to pursue careers – vital to the state and the People – that are not extremely lucrative and do not have the expectation of allowing the graduate a reasonable standard of living for a professional with academic training rather than mostly servicing an excessive debt burden.

Third, additional revenue streams must be generated. A public university has four sources of revenue: state funds that are dependent upon some sort of taxation by the state (the only source of revenue to a state), student fees, external grants and contracts (from federal, state, private, corporate, and international sources – some truly competitive and others essentially “earmarked”), and private (non-state) donations. The latter two, but especially private donations, are controlled by the CSU management and under little control or direction of the faculty. This must change.

Private donations can be used to fund tenure-stream positions and research and instructional facilities. Obviously, a public secular university must place constraints on restrictions by a donor – a faculty position or research or instructional support dedicated to the defense and promulgation, say, of Aryan Racial Supremacy, is not proper nor should be accepted. At present, each campus President keeps tight control of which programs may seek external funding, not allowing all to go forward but setting the priorities. The priorities for donors need to be set by the faculty, perhaps through each campus Senate as well as through the Statewide CSU Senate, not by the Presidents. These programs must represent the needs of the faculty in both research and instruction, as well as students’ needs to defray fees. There must be an aggressive campaign to seek out support for the People's University.

Grants and contracts are the other source of external funding. In many cases, even to be allowed to submit a grant with a faculty member as Principal Investigator, the submission must meet the priorities of management. If there is no priority, either the grant will not be submitted or the university will offer none of the earnestness needed for a successful (awarded) grant – such earnestness will be kept as a management prerogative for those programs, other managers, and even faculty members that the management favors, both in violation of the academic mission and shared governance. This is waste of resources of the CSU, often establishing management boondoggles that in the long run offer little benefit for the amount of funds received.

Result. A stable funding stream for the CSU, allowing the faculty to conduct instruction and research, while at the same time providing sensible class sizes for both undergraduate and graduate students, actually taught in these sensible sizes by faculty, not teaching assistants – faculty of whom most are tenure-stream appointments. This will enable predictable costs to students; by providing loan forgiveness to those students who otherwise would need loans but who want to pursue relatively low-paying careers that are vital to society, and such careers could then still remain attractive.

F. Fix the middle class financial aid problem.

Federal and state student aid programs do not help students whose family earnings exceed about $80,000 per annum. With the high expense of housing and transportation these days, this is not a very high income, especially for families with more than one student in college. The fee increases at the UC, CSU and community colleges will soon put them out of reach for even more Californians. Fees of students who can pay them end up supporting financial aid for those who cannot. We have all seen the scandals surrounding for-profit schools whose exorbitant fees are exceeded only by the worthlessness of the promises of future employment used to lure students. Such students end up with a huge burden of debt and little means to pay it off; the school has extracted the profit; the taxpayer holds the bag in the end. Student loan debt now exceeds that of credit card debt in the U.S. Insofar as some CSU campuses target the vocational/professional market and emphasize practical, applied, or technical programs to the detriment of traditional majors, we are using the same marketing strategy. The steadily rising tuition suggests students should find any means to pay, or not attend. In a reduced grant and scholarship setting, this means more loans and indebtedness created by the public university. We must change the calculus for student financial assistance.

Recommendation. Raise the ceiling to $100,000 for family earnings and a specified amount for each additional student enrolled in college.

Result. More students go to college.

G. Significantly revamp the administration.

Problem. The cost of the CSU Chancellor’s Office is the equivalent of a small CSU campus. When we add to that the costs that are being regularly squandered by wrong-headed policies by the Chancellor’s Office (such as the $660 million squandered on the boondoggle of PeopleSoft and the $4.3 million Chancellor Reed is now spending to hire an outside, anti-faculty union consultant to represent him in his duties at the bargaining table with the faculty union), eliminating these functionaries would make a very big difference both financially and even more importantly would end the current destructively antagonistic stance of the Chancellor’s Office and his various Campus Presidents to the core mission of the universities. The CSU system is a house divided and cannot continue in such a fashion. We have an excessive number of managers, academic and non-academic, as contrasted with faculty who both teach and conduct research. In the CSU, these positions are termed MPP for Management Plan Personnel.

1975-2008 (CSU full and part-time)

Service and Maintenance -33%

Clerical and Secretarial -29%

Technical and Paraprofessional - 4%

Skilled Crafts +18%

Faculty +28%

Managerial and Professional +229%

Source: California State University – Statistical Abstract – 2008-2009 - Table 166

Ethnicity and Gender of Total CSU Employees by Occupational Group, 1975-1976 through 2008-2009

http://www.calstate.edu/as/stat_abstract/stat0809/pdf/z7a09.pdf (pp. 296-298)

Recommendation. Reduce the number of managers, eliminating many of the non-essential MPP positions. For example, every University campus needs an executive (in the CSU, President, an executive, not MPP), a Provost, and each college within a university (arts and letters, natural sciences, engineering, business, etc.) needs a Dean. One also needs a manager with academic retreat rights and credentials in charge of graduate programs as well as having access to research support. In the CSU, there is a central administrator in charge of the official mechanisms of Academic Personnel (such as a formal binding offer letter, answering questions about specifics of the administration view on faculty employment issues); this position is needed. Most other matters can be handled by staff appointments, not management.

Outside of the academic sector, one needs a manager in charge of the physical plant (including custodians, grounds maintenance, and building and related infrastructure repair) as well as a manager over the financial matters, typically an accounting position. Many administrators have retreat rights (job reassignment) to either the tenured faculty or the permanent staff, and such current administrators either should retreat or separate (including retirement for those who are eligible to retire and do not wish to retreat). The Chancellor must resign and other administrators who do not perform their duties in line with the highest needs of the university system must go. The highly distorted pay for top administrators must be curtailed. The Chancellor now is paid more than the President of the United States. We do not think that this is appropriate, especially for a system in financial crisis. He does not protect or effectively advocate for the university.

Results. Increased number of operational faculty and staff, helping to address item two below. Decreased overhead and thus a reduction in cost towards operational goals.

We suggest that operational staff should be allowed to decrease through attrition, and then that administrative personnel work in operational functions as needed to handle cyclical peaks. In addition, administrative functions need to be evaluated for effectiveness just as academic programs are currently being evaluated. If they cannot demonstrate clear-cut benefits in excess of costs, they need to be eliminated or reorganized in ways that reduce the need for highly paid personnel.

The benefits of revamping the administration along the lines suggested would be:

1. Reduce administrative costs, and thus lessen the need to cut academic programs and faculty.

2. Make the administrators experientially aware of the impacts of the budget cuts on our students, and hopefully more concerned about reducing non-essential spending.

3. Help public relations. Many members of the public feel that there is a lot of administrative bloat and waste in the system. This would demonstrate a commitment on our part to address such problems rather than demanding money that would go into overhead rather than benefitting the students. (We have no problems with asking for more money. However, we should do what we can to reassure the voters that it will go where it would do the most good.)

Restoring the CSU Faculty

In light of not only AAUP findings and HEERA, but also of Public Employees Relations Board Decision No. 173-H and ACR 73, this CSU Master White Paper makes short- and long-term recommendations regarding the hiring practices and working conditions of instructors with the goal of stabilizing the CSU faculty for the benefit of student learning and faculty careers. These recommendations aim at accomplishing the restoration of the integrity of faculty work, academic freedom and shared governance, as well as the stability and permanency of all faculty employment - as the only way for the CSU to fulfill its social contract.

H. Regularization of actual programs of the CSU with the actual RTP (aka RPT)[18] requirements.

Problem. The original Master Plan had one real university system in California, the University of California (UC), and then two teaching college systems: the California State Colleges (CSC) and the Community Colleges (CC). The vitality of a real university was deemed so important that the UC was made quasi-independent of the State with a payroll system from the UC Regents (not the State) and to which the Legislature may only suggest and request, but not actually require any action. The CSC was not intended to be a real university, but rather a six year version (through the Master degree) of the academic (non-vocational, non-remedial) portion of the CC, preparing K-12 teachers and many others for whom a 4 year undergraduate education and degree was sufficient to provide the needs of society. The CC nominally had the first two years of the academic curriculum of the CSC and UC systems, but also offered purely vocational fields (e.g., automotive repair technician training) as well as completion of the high school diploma for those who had not completed the secondary school curriculum. Typically, a UC Faculty appointment required a terminal degree (e.g., PhD), whereas a CSC Faculty appointment – as strictly a teaching institution, not a university – would often only need a Master degree without any real research “training” or the proof that one is a scholar and can conduct original research. Such “proof” of scholarly attainment is represented by the PhD dissertation (thesis) that has been reviewed and accepted by the academic research community of scholars.

The preceding is simply no longer the case, as the CSC became the California State University (CSU). The modern CSU tenure-stream Faculty member generally has a terminal degree that is often a condition of employment (no terminal degree, no tenure stream appointment), typically a PhD from a research background with a research dissertation. Intellectually and academically, a modern CSU tenure-stream Faculty member is as competent and as much a scholar as is the equivalent tenure-stream Faculty member at a typical PhD granting university, including the general UC. Then what is the difference? Why do CSU tenure-stream Faculty members often have fewer scholarly outputs than their equivalent at PhD institutions? In the CSU, the only work assignment allowed by the BOT under the CFA contract is teaching. The load is measured in a metric called the Weighted Teaching Unit (WTU); although some current chicanery attempts to claim that WTUs are not used, these are very much in place. The base load for a tenure-stream CSU Faculty member is 15 WTUs – 12 WTUs of direct instructional responsibility and 3 WTUs of advising, service, and other activities. Perhaps, and only perhaps, 1 WTU might sometimes in practice be allocated to research, and even that would be unofficial. On a semester calendar, 12 WTUs of direct instruction corresponds to four courses every semester. At a typical research university, such as the UC, the direct instructional load is one course every semester, and in universities that keep a balanced approach between teaching and research, the direct instructional load may be two courses per semester, but not four courses. What institutions have an instructional responsibility of four courses per semester? Community colleges and other strictly teaching institutions – except for the CSU.

Recommendation Support the research mission required under the RPT process in the CSU through a teaching responsibility under which such research realistically is possible. As an interim, for a 15 WTU load, 3 WTUs of advising and other non-research responsibilities, 3 WTUs of research, and 9 WTUs of direct instruction, with an eventual goal of these categories respectively becoming 3, 6, and 6.

A research active program requires PhD or equivalent terminal degree students and programs. The present Master Plan allows the CSU to have such programs (except for the EdD degree recent allowed to the CSU) only as a joint program with a unit of the UC or any independent (private, including those that are affiliated with or supported by a religious organization) accredited college or university located within the State of California. In general, under this provision, the “senior” PhD-granting-allowed University treats the CSU campus and faculty as very “junior” partners. This approach is a leftover throwback to the CSC, and simply is not appropriate to the CSU. The CSU must be allowed either to initiate independent terminal degree programs or the “joint” programs must be expanded so that a UC or private institution cannot hold the CSU forever hostage – otherwise the People will not have the opportunities to a true higher education that the People's University must be allowed to provide. Research is a fundamental part of a true higher education for those students who truly want to understand the field they have selected.

Alternatively, if this is not to be the case, then turn back the clock: eliminate research as a RPT requirement or activity from a re-established CSC (not CSU, not a university), do not require a terminal research degree for appointment and tenure to the tenure-stream Faculty, and become once again a six-year, teaching-only college. Because the Legislature has this control over the CSU, the return to the CSC can be done, although we feel it should not be done. However, such a return would be better than to demand the maintenance of research and a research capable and active Faculty without any meaningful provisions to succor such activities. Note that the Carnegie Foundation (that evaluates the actual mission and niche of a university) places one CSU campus, San Diego State University (SDSU), as a research university, the only CSU campus so placed by Carnegie. In the event that the CSC is re-established, SDSU should be given exceptional status – perhaps merged with the UC.

Results: A university in which the actual mission under which Faculty are evaluated and expected to perform will be consistent with the mandated mission under the Master Plan.

Protecting the CSU as the People's University

We have made recommendations regarding the management role and organization, the mission and direction of the CSU and public higher education in California, and alternative means of funding this branch of education. We offer our critique and ideas in the most collegial spirit and out of our dedication to our institutions and the youth, communities, and future of California. All of these analyses and recommendations will work together to protect this precious social good for the people of California.

***

Appendix 1

PERB Decision No. 173-H, September 22, 1981:

Composition of CSU Bargaining Unit 3[19]

In 1981, the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) determined the composition of bargaining Unit 3 employees based on “the internal and occupational community of interest among the employees” and not on the basis of tenure-/non-tenure-track status:

After careful consideration of the evidence and the arguments of the parties, and the recommendations of the hearing officer, we have concluded that the purposes and policies embodied in HEERA [Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act] will be best served by placing all instructional faculty, full-time and part-time, tenured and non-tenured, including coaches and librarians, together in a comprehensive unit. It is important to note that the Decision refers to all Unit 3 employees as “instructional faculty.”

The community of interest shared by all faculty groups includes the following factors: (1) instruction as the primary function and goal; (2) supervision by means of a common scheme; (3) teaching ability as the primary qualification for employment and retention; (4) preference of advanced degrees as a basic qualification. While the Decision notes that there are a community of interest factors that differ among the faculty groups, they are insufficient to outweigh the “substantial similarity.” Tenure is not considered “so important as to overcome the community of interest which exists between tenured and non-tenured faculty.” In regards to participation in shared governance, the Decision observes that

Because the membership and participation rights of faculty members in the campus and statewide academic senates do not fully conform to their status as tenured, full-time temporary, or part-time temporary faculty . . . we do not find that the degree to which faculty participate in these governance bodies provides a basis for splitting faculty along such lines.

Assembly Concurrent Resolution (ACR) 73[20]

In 2001, the California Assembly passed a resolution urging the CSU Trustees (1) to “study its faculty hiring practices over the past decade in order to effectuate improvements in those practices” and (2) “along with the Academic Senate of the California State University and the California Faculty Association, to jointly develop a plan to raise the percentage of tenured or tenure-track faculty to at least 75%. . . .” The Resolution acknowledges that, contrary to contingent (lecturer) appointments,

Appointments of faculty to tenured and tenure-track positions recognize a mutually beneficial relationship that contributes to the long-term development of the faculty member and the quality of the instructional program available to California State University students…

It urges the Board of Trustees, the statewide Academic Senate and the California Faculty Association to develop a plan providing that “no lecturers currently employed by the university will lose their jobs as a result of implementing the plan” and that “qualified lecturers will be seriously considered for tenure-track positions.”

Appendix 2. Recommendations for Lecturers.

For the Short Term

1. The CSU should follow best practices with respect to lecturer provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

· Offer unconditional appointments to part-time lecturers with six or more years of service in a department/program with the view of extending layoff rights to them. Although not mandated by the CBA, present CSU practice is to offer all part-time lecturers conditional appointments (Articles 12 & 38).

· Consult with lecturers regarding availability and preference for classes (Article 12), and issue assignments on a timely fashion so that lecturer names may appear on the class schedule when student enrollment begins.

· Incorporate service and scholarship in lecturer assignments so as to ‘re-bundle’ faculty work.[21] The CBA does not prohibit this practice and there is precedent.

· In terms of workload, institute lecturer class caps that are the same as for tenure-track faculty and based on the principle that “educational quality is a function of the number and quality of faculty resources” and that a lower student-faculty ratio (SFR) improves the quality of instruction (Article 20).

· Upon initial hire, appoint lecturers to the highest salary range available to them based on qualifications, recommendations and experience (Salary Schedule).

2. The CSU should consider statewide implementation of these other best practices from individual campuses.

· Grant an automatic range elevation to lecturers who complete a terminal degree

· Include lecturers in Emerita/Emeritus Faculty programs

· Allow lecturers to bank units towards SSI’s

· Extend to lecturers eligibility for travel, professional development and research funding/grants

· Upon hiring, provide lecturers with a joint CSU-CFA orientation

· Train department Chairs regarding lecturer rights and, in particular, correct application of the preference for work provisions in Article 12 of the CBA

· Provide appointment letters in a timely fashion[22]

· Provide notification of non-reappointment[23] and of assignment reduction in a timely fashion

· Provide access to office space, phones, instructional technology and support, etc.

3. Academic Senates should:

· Officially recognize all lecturers as faculty for the purpose of representation at all levels of shared governance in accordance with CSU Senate Resolution AS-2674-04.[24]

· Inform lecturer faculty about the university’s commitment to the protection of their academic freedom, and encourage them to report violations.

· Develop a plan for achieving equity between lecturers and tenure-track faculty.[25]

4. Departments should:

· Encourage eligible full-time lecturers to participate in difference-in-pay and sabbatical leaves and in other programs that provide opportunities for professional development (CBA Articles 27 & 28).

· Give lecturers priority consideration for tenure-track positions, in the spirit of ACR 73.

For the Long Term

HEERA, PERB Decision No. 173-H and ACR 73 provide compelling arguments in support of implementing AAUP recommendations on conversion of part- and full-time lecturers in the CSU.

The CSU, the CFA and the academic senates should jointly develop and implement a plan for the conversion of qualified lecturers to tenured and tenure-eligible status based on the principles and guidelines set forth by the AAUP in Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession (2003) and Conversion of Appointments to the Tenure Track (2009). The former includes guidelines for the development of a conversion plan (for example, through the “grandfathering” of positions) and recommends that “plans for conversion…be addressed by duly constituted faculty bodies that invite the participation of contingent faculty.”[26] The latter contains an appendix on existing conversion practices and proposals. Like ACR-73, both documents emphasize that conversion of appointments can and should be carried out without negative consequences for faculty currently serving in contingent positions.[27]

References

American Association of University Professors, “Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession,” statement adopted November, 2003. http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/conting-stmt.htm.

Bandura, A. 1977. Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Barber, M. 2007. Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to Transform Britain’s Public Services. Politico’s Publishing: London.

Baum, Sandy and Kathleen Payea. 2005 (rev. ed.) “The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society,” Education Pays 2004, Trends in Higher Education Series. College Board.

Brechin, Gray, “Republic of Dunces: Why and Who is Dismantling California’s Public Education System, with a Sidelong Glance at how the New Deal Built it during the last Depression,” UC Berkeley, Sept. 24, 2009.
Callahan, R.E. 1962. Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, J. 1938. Experience and education. Indianapolis: Kappa Delta Pi.

Douglass, John Aubrey. 2010. “Re-Imagining California Higher Education,” Research and Occasional Paper Series, Center for Studies in Higher Education 14: 10, University of California, Berkeley, October.

Douglass, John Aubrey. 2010. “From Chaos to Order and Back? A Revisionist Reflection on the California Master Plan for Higher Education@50 and Thoughts About Its Future,” Research and Occasional Paper Series, Center for Studies in Higher Education7:10, University of California, Berkeley, May.

Miller, Shazia, Elaine Allensworth, and Julie Kochanek. May, 2002. The State of Chicago Public High Schools: 1993 to 2000, Student Performance: Course Taking, Test Scores, and Outcomes. Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Nelson, Cary. 2010. No University is an Island. New York: NYU Press.

Porter, Kathleen. 2002. The Value of a College Degree. ERIC Digest, http://www.ericdigests.org/2003-3/value.htm.

Ravitch, Diane. 2010. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.

Seddon, John. 2008. Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: The Failure of the Reform Regime.... and a Manifesto for a Better Way United Kingdom: Triarchy Press

Tyack, D.B. 1974. The one best system: A history of American urban education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. 1997. Collected works. New York: Plenum Press.

Yamada, Teri. 2010. “Restructuring the California State University: A Call to Action,” Thought and Action Fall, V. 26: 91-107.

Zemsky, Robert and Joni Finney, “Changing the Subject: Costs, Graduation Rates, and the Importance of Re-engineering the Undergraduate Curriculum,” Institute for Research on Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania, Feb. 2010.

[1] The authors all teach at CSU campuses, so much of our argument refers to the CSU, though we make the same kinds of observations about the University of California and the California Community College systems. We have collaborators from these other branches of the public higher education establishment, whose input is greatly valued.

[2] We owe to Teri Yamada a thoroughgoing and precise historical overview of the re-structuring ‘movement’ in the CSU (2010).

[3] At Cal State Sacramento, administrators used general fund money to cover an investment that went bad. See Jack Dolan, “California public universities tap student fees of unintended projects,” Los Angeles Times online, April 4, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/04/local/la-me-student-funds4-2010apr04.

[4] An on-going example of these practices is the hiring of a retired administrator into a half-time administrative post at CSU Fullerton. The individual is earning $165,104 for this half-time position, while his retirement income is $105,129. Were a faculty member to have this kind of opportunity or income, the trustees and public would be up at arms. Examples of this costly double standard abound on all campuses and at the CSU system headquarters.

[5] Contra Costa Times 2/8/10

[6] If someone offered you money, and the only strings attached to it were that you had to spend the money that they gave you on food, your hands would not be tied regarding the rest of your budget. The gift would free you to reallocate funds, such as towards your other bills that were going unpaid because you previously had to devote your inadequate funds to food. California’s higher educational system could do the equivalent of this. The CSU Chancellor’s Office’s rejection of AB 1326 on these grounds thus surpasses all understanding.

[7] "Perspectives on CSU Budget Gap," July 24, 2009. His view that reorganization, increased class size, changes in admission policy, program elimination, and more distance learning were a natural response to budget cuts, was echoed in a later memorandum from Vice Chancellor and CFO Benjamin Quillian (2009).

[8] Every entity in a resource-limited environment must deal with costs, and outcomes are a reasonable approach to a cost-benefit analysis. However, it is the benefits – the outcomes – that are not properly constructed in the CSU model, nor are all of the costs – such as the extravagantly expensive CMS (Common Management System software) that cost the CSU over $660 million – justifiable.

[9] Public Citizen provides a comprehensive analysis of the transition of higher education from public service to global service industry, “WTO U: GATs and Higher Education Policy,” http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=1213.

[10] These programs can be easily found on the web sites of any CSU institutions.

[11] This was at a public gathering attended by some of the authors.

[12] Benjamin Bloom has described two basic stages to cognitive development. The first and lower stage consists of recognition and recall, comprehension and application. The second, and higher, stage consists of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Higher education should be designed to ensure that students achieve this higher stage.

Stage I:

Recognition and recall is what you are being tested for when you are asked on a test, for example, to repeat a definition for a term. Rote memorization is an example of this process. When you know a second language enough to understand some words and phrases, you are using recognition and recall. To actually speak well in that second language, you need to understand the language better, using stage II skills (see below).

Comprehension means that you understand what you are reading, hearing or seeing on the level of “it makes sense to me.” This is the level at which students often stop in their studying. Comprehension is not yet at the level at which you can fully explain a concept to someone else.

Application means taking a concept and using that concept in a specific and concrete way. This goes beyond being able to recite a definition for a concept since in application one is actually using the concept. When you are given a question that cites a hypothetical or real situation, and you are asked which concept best explains that situation, you are being asked to apply your knowledge.

Stage II:

Analysis means taking something apart, and understanding its component parts and their inter-relationships. For example, analysis of a car might involve taking that car apart, and being able to explain what each part does. Analysis of a language could involve looking at sentence structure and the rules for forming sentences. Analysis of a movie would be movie criticism.

Synthesis means being able to create something new from disparate parts. Synthesis occurs on the basis of analysis, but is a higher stage in that it involves the creation of something that did not exist before. For example, synthesis would be to take certain parts of a car and by using some other parts put together a tractor or some other machine. When you take words and write a new poem, you have done synthesis. If instead of simply analyzing a movie or play, you wrote a screenplay or play, this would be synthesis.

Evaluation is the highest stage of cognitive development in Bloom's taxonomy. It builds upon all of the preceding. It is the ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of an argument and compare and contrast different arguments. It is Meta-Analysis. Without this, you would be unable to reach a true independent judgment. Instead, you would have to accept the opinions of others. A plethora of information is available today, and information is, of course, important. But what is even more important is the ability to sift through the information and sources and the ability to figure out what’s valid and what is not.

[13] Ivan Illich makes this argument in several of his works, but especially DeSchooling Society, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).

[14] One of us was surprised and pleased to see that her alma mater, Mount Holyoke College, was undertaking a President’s Commission on Work-Life Balance, cf. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/hr/docs/hr/work-life_summit.pdf . Such a community-oriented, collegial initiative would never occur to the corporate leadership of the modern CSU.

[15] A true People’s University would have universal access, i.e., no financial restriction on those who are qualified to attend. We are far from this goal in our country.

[16] American Association of University Professors, “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/1940statement.htm

[17] American Association of University Professors, “Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments (2010), http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/conversion.htm.

[18] Retention, Promotion, and Tenure.

[19] State of California Decision of the Public Employment Relations Board, PERB Decision No. 173-H, September 22, 1981, 1http://www.perb.ca.gov/decisionbank/pdfs/0173h.pdf.

[20] Assembly Concurrent Resolution No. 73--Relative to the California State University, May 15, 2001, http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/asm/ab_0051-0100/acr_73_bill_20010924_chaptered.html.

[21] ‘To support the essential mission of higher education, faculty appointments, including contingent appointments, should incorporate all aspects of university life: active engagement with an academic discipline, teaching or mentoring of undergraduate or graduate students, participation in academic decision making, and service on campus and to the surrounding community. Faculty who are appointed to less-than-full-time positions should participate at least to some extent in the full range of faculty responsibilities. For all faculty members in contingent positions, this participation should be supported by compensation and institutional resources and recognized in the processes of evaluation and peer review’. Policy Statement on Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession (2003), http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/conting-stmt.htm

[22] For part-time faculty, the AAUP recommends that ‘Written notice of reappointment or non-reappointment…be issued no later than one month before the end of the existing appointment.’ Regulation 13 on ‘Part-Time Faculty Appointments’ in Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure (2006), http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/RIR.htm. For full-time faculty, the AAUP recommends greater advance notice. 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/1940statement.htm.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Service of Lecturer Faculty on Campus Academic Senates, AS-2674-04/FA, November 11-12, 2004, http://www.calstate.edu/AcadSen/Records/Resolutions/2003-2004/2674.shtml.

[25] ‘The isolation of contingent faculty from opportunities to interact with their tenured or tenure-track colleagues and to participate in faculty governance, professional development, and scholarly pursuits promotes divisions and distinctions that undermine the collegial nature of the academic community. Taken together, these inequities weaken the whole profession and diminish its capacity to serve the public good’. Policy Statement on Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession (2003), http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/conting-stmt.htm

[26] Ibid.

[27] American Association of University Professionals, Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments (2010), http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/conversion.htm.

The Master White Paper Executive Summary

2011-04-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

Cooking the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs:

California’s Public Higher Education System in Peril

A Master White Paper for the CSU

The crisis today in California’s public higher education, a system that until now has been the envy of the nation, is not the lack of money, bad instructors, or stupid students; the problem is that the executives in charge embrace values that will destroy the very system they are charged with representing. Their championing of a path toward privatization and corporatization of public universities is leading to the impoverishment of the student learning experience, curtailed research, and the degradation of the teaching and scholarly community, undermining the future of our youth and of our state. California stands at a crossroads. We face a choice between two radically different visions: those who uphold and celebrate private interests versus those who believe in the public interest and in public goods.

Learning and scholarship cannot be equated with the delivery of manufactured goods on an assembly line, like selling hamburgers at a fast food restaurant. The effort to emulate the assembly-line model will lead to the diminution not only of what university degrees mean but the general shrinkage of our people’s ability to think holistically, creatively, and to distinguish truth from falsehood. What is at stake, in other words, is not just the health and fate of our until now extraordinarily successful public higher education system. What is at stake is what kind of people and society we will be.

The faculty who author this policy paper present our criticisms and recommendations for the solution to the problems in the public higher education sector based upon our caring deeply for our students and for the future of the state, both of which are tragically and needlessly being jeopardized by the current austerity regime.

Our indictment herein of the leadership of the public higher education system and the State of California arises from our commitment as academics to the truth. Our observation that the current leadership has not been truthful about the major factors affecting us today, and the fact that they are leading us down a path of destruction, forces us to speak up, no matter what power is arrayed against us. It is not teachers, public employees, unions, or workers in general who have created the great recession. It is the grossly irresponsible financial sector, the gluttonous wealthy and their craven political representatives, and the unregulated, shortsighted business world who have savaged our economy. They have been rewarded for their recklessness and selfishness with massive tax breaks, historic bailouts, and more deregulation. In order to maintain the enormous gains being reaped by the wealthy and corporations, the State of California is taking a giant step backwards in deciding to decimate the public higher education system, along with other services that should be provided by the state. This is a fateful and fatal choice.

Thirty years of “reform” by the state and higher education administrators have not produced an improvement in the educational potential of higher education institutions or in students’ academic performance, learning, or knowledge. This is because the “reform” measures all lead higher education closer to the business models at the heart of the political philosophy that has dominated and degraded the country for over thirty years. While the teacher/scholars of higher education are expected to work for the love of education, the executives who actually run the system are recruited and retained on the basis of personal financial wealth and perks. You cannot run a system that is supposed to serve the public interest under the leadership of people whose primary interest is private enrichment. This upside-down value system mirrors the one that rules the business world. These values do not work for education and will destroy it. The faculty are the heart and soul of higher education and must have greater say in educational matters; the management that has made such a mess of things and who are attempting to make an even grander mess must take a back seat. Those who are in charge now should resign and those who would replace the current managers must be recruited and retained on the basis of their devotion to education and the public interest, not their envy and emulation of the CEO world.

The current contract bargaining process between the California Faculty Association (CFA) and the California State University System (CSU) has so far been characterized by CSU executives attempting to further strip faculty of power so that they can exercise even more control over education. They seek to rob the universities of all the values associated with academic careers: tenure (and thereby academic freedom), sabbatical leave, and any job security associated with length of service or seniority in order to implement their private over the public ideology. The CSU administration’s dream university would have a teaching staff of temporary lecturers who receive no benefits, can be fired at will, and earn poor salaries, and the doors that are now open to many students who seek and can perform in higher education will be closed. These executives wish to turn California’s esteemed public higher education system into a version of the University of Phoenix. Generations of experience with traditions such as academic freedom and tenure tell us that these elements are critical components of quality teaching, research, and an educated and sophisticated citizenry.

The CSU administration has conducted itself dishonorably and incompetently vis-à-vis the budget situation, shockingly opposing any measures such as AB 1326’s oil extraction tax which would solve the budget crisis for higher education, measures that have worked well in Alaska and Texas for decades. These administrators have done a miserable job of defending the university against destructive budget cuts and have failed to promote the fundamental interest of the public in educating our youth. These things must change. We call on all members of the public who care about their state’s future to join us in this effort. It will take a movement to accomplish these goals.

Problems/Recommendations/Results

A. Leadership.

1. Problem: “Shared governance” at the level of the individual university is a failure.

Recommendations: Administration must consult with faculty on all matters that pertain to the educational and research missions of the university. Current administrators should resign, beginning with the Chancellor and his respective presidents and provosts, and their replacements recruited on the basis of their devotion to education and the public good, not their personal material enrichment. Pay for administrators should be brought closer to that of faculty and the other differentials between the two reduced drastically. The power shift to administrators away from faculty for the last thirty years must be reversed.

Results: University will represent educational needs of students and the community and achieve greater cost effectiveness.

2. Problem: Board of Trustees (BOT) and system leadership have wrecked the CSU.

Recommendations: The majority of BOT should sit for popular election by the campuses; more faculty and student members.

Results: CSU answerable to people it serves, not the special financial interests who export good jobs out of California.

B. “Educational Management Organization” model.

Problem: Thirty years of educational “reform,” all based on business efficiency thinking, have failed.

Recommendation: Universities adopt a collegial, student-centered educational approach modeled on a scholarly community whose purpose is to expand knowledge.

Results: University united in purpose, greatly diversified and decentralized in activity, not distracted by administrative fads and power grabs.

C. Stratification of faculty.

Problem: Decline of tenure-track faculty numbers has placed greater pressure on both them and lecturers, and increased tension between them.

Recommendation: Tenure-track faculty should comprise ¾ of the teaching staff. Lecturers’ issues of compensation and security should be addressed seriously. Research-qualified lecturers should be considered for tenure-track positions immediately.

Results: Students receive instruction and advising from faculty who have a permanent commitment to the university and the time to give them full attention. Cost of national searches can be reduced by aggressive hiring from advanced lecturer ranks.

D. Call things what they are.

Problem: Policies and programs with innocuous names disguise their true purpose. Examples, “re-structuring” = elimination of programs; “assessment” = measurement for executive control over faculty; “efficiency” = cutting resources, reducing quality; “doing more with less” = cutting resources and speed-ups that reduce quality.

Recommendation: use terms that reflect their true purposes.

Results: Transparency that thereby enables accountability

E. Support public programs, services, and institutions.

Problem: Withdrawal of funding from public higher education is necessitated by nothing other than ideology and greed.

Recommendation: Dedicated revenue stream (such as oil tax AB 1326). Consider merging CSU and UC where necessary. Increase faculty participation in the process and distribution of private donations. Work to reverse the trend of privatizing public services.

Results: Stable funding stream assuring reasonable class sizes, more tenure stream faculty, program growth, greater student access.

F. Fix the middle class financial aid problem. Raise the ceiling on grants and scholarships to accommodate the real cost of a middle class lifestyle in urban and suburban California.

G. Revamp the administrative ranks.

Problem: The system administration and campus administrations are too costly and wasteful; MPPs (Management Plan Personnel) are over-paid and too numerous, with many of their positions and duties unnecessary.

Recommendation: Eliminate non-essential managers (whose functions are unrelated to instruction) and the expanding pay gaps, bring salaries and perks down to near-faculty levels, make some administrators part-time (especially those who can also teach and do research).

Results: Greater efficiency, lower cost, more instructors and operational, not management, staff in critical areas.

H. Regularization of actual programs of the CSU with actual RTP (aka RPT) requirements.

Problem: Current practice for faculty job requirements and load is out of line with the original concept of the CSU, as a teaching university.

Recommendation: Support the research mission of faculty by awarding Weighted Teaching Units to scholarly and creative activity. Alternatively, return the description and requirements for retention, tenure and promotion to the original model (more like a six-year community college).

Results: A university in which the actual mission under which Faculty are evaluated and expected to perform will be consistent with the mandated mission under the Master Plan.

CHANCELLOR SOUGHT TO COVER UP STANISLAUS CONTROVERSY

2010-05-11T21:32:00.001-07:00

CFA HEADLINES

May 11, 2010 - SPECIAL EDITION FROM CFA

Emails released by CSU Stanislaus reveal Chancellor Reed ordered secrecy of Palin contract in an attempt to avoid bad publicity

Documents released earlier this week implicate CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed in the ongoing controversy at CSU Stanislaus regarding Sarah Palin’s planned visit.

Among several documents released by California State University Stanislaus regarding the upcoming visit by Palin is an email correspondence between Reed and Bernie Swain, chairman of the Washington Speakers Bureau, the entity with which the university contracted for the Palin event. The email exchanges reveal that documents were withheld simply to avoid “another round of newspaper stories.”

In an email to Reed, Swain states: “The release of the fee, while well-intentioned to share all details, will likely only serve as the financial headline for a new round of stories rather than the intended purpose of clearing the air and making the stories go away. Your event needs fewer story lines, less oxygen for the fuel, not more. We believe, as others have said, any real damage has already been done and after a few days these inquires and stories will slowly, but surely, end…You are a dear friend and I wish I could make this instantly better for you.”

Reed responded and copied other CSU officials: “Bernie, I agree with you that the damage is done and the disclosure will just cause another round of newspaper stories. The campus should have worked this through with you all in the beginning. I will try and call you the next time I am in Washington and see if we can have lunch or a cup of coffee.”

Kristen Olsen, who heads the Stanislaus campus public relations office, responded to Reed’s email: “Good news. The Chancellor is satisfied now with not disclosing the fee.”

State Senator Leland Yee, who is author of a bill to bring more transparency to CSU auxiliaries, is apparently incensed by the latest revelation in the CSU Stanislaus Foundation’s secrecy saga.

“More and more evidence is demonstrating a clear violation of the public records act by CSU officials, and now there is proof that Chancellor Reed was complicit in it,” said Yee in a news release. “Chancellor Reed and President Shirvani were more concerned with covering up an embarrassing story than complying with state law.”

“There is absolutely no doubt that public funds – through the use of university resources and employees – have been used for this event and yet the taxpayers are being kept in the dark,” Yee said, adding, “Chancellor Reed is well aware of the law that requires foundation documents in the possession of university employees to be disclosed. The administration has failed the taxpayers and the students. It is now imperative that the Board of Trustees hold these executives accountable.”

View these emails online at: http://calfac.org/allpdf/newsreleas/2010_pressrel/ReedEmailsonStanislaus.pdf

FACULTY REACTION

Upon hearing about the most recent twist in the Stanislaus saga, CFA President Lillian Taiz, a professor of history at CSU Los Angeles issued this statement:

"We have seen many of questionable activities in the California State University, especially involving the foundations and other auxiliaries.

"But even we are stunned to learn that CSU Chancellor Charles Reed himself made the decision to cover up the amount of the speaker fee being paid to Sarah Palin by the CSU Stanislaus Foundation.

"The Chancellor’s intimate involvement in avoiding public information requests made under state law because of his fear of negative publicity is a shocking demonstration of poor judgment and questionable leadership.

"His lack of commitment to openness in the governance of our public university system harms not only his image but the credibility of our entire system. Revelations like this embarrass all of us who have spent our careers building this great university.
"CFA calls upon the Attorney General Jerry Brown to expand the scope of his investigation into CSU auxiliaries to include Chancellor Charles Reed and his office at Golden Shores. Apparently campuses hiding information from taxpayers is not only campus policy, but is also the chancellor's system wide policy."
SHOWS THE NEED FOR CSU TRANSPARENCY

CFA emphasizes that the controversy at Stanislaus – which centers around the campus foundation – shows the pressing need for the passage of CSU transparency legislation Senate Bill 330.

SB 330 – which is currently being considered by the state legislature – will bring greater transparency and accountability to how private donations and student campus fees are used at the California State University, University of California and California Community Colleges. It will place the institutions’ subsidiary organizations – known as “auxiliaries” – under the scope of the California Public Records Act (CPRA) without creating new state costs.

Under existing law, although the CSU, UC and community colleges are already subject to the CPRA, almost all of their auxiliaries are not. This allows these public institutions to hide billions of dollars in “private” entities funded by student campus fees and private donations that have little, if any, transparency or accountability to the public or elected state leaders.

This secrecy has encouraged colleges and universities to create an increasing number of auxiliaries to run campus operations such as food services, parking facilities, housing and bookstores – all of which would be subject to the CPRA and public oversight if they were administered directly by the college or university rather than an auxiliary.

By its own admission, 20 percent of the CSU’s operating budget – or $1.34 billion – is funded by the hidden budgets of its campus and system auxiliaries.

Cal Poly Pomona Provost Wants to Ax Fine Arts

2010-05-07T11:34:00.000-07:00

In an article posted at Furlough Fridays on the meeting between the Provost and students and faculty protesting his proposal to eliminate the Fine Arts option at Cal Poly Pomona, the intrepid Furlough Friday reporter states:
"Once again during the lunch-time forum, support for AB 656, a proposed oil extraction tax bill was mentioned by students as a possible solution, but [Martin] den Boer came out strongly against the bill saying funding from the bill would not lead to a net increase in Higher Education, but would just lead to 'a reallocation of funding.'”
This is the comment that I left on the article:
"Provost denBoer’s assertion that passage of AB 656 would only result in the legislature’s reallocation of funds away from higher education echoes the talking points that originate from Chancellor Reed’s office. President Ortiz made the same ridiculous claim in his exchange with me last month during the Brown Bags with the President.
"If AB 656 passed the state assembly then why would the same body that just passed the bill turn around and take money away from what they just gave money to? And if AB 656 passes and the governor tried to reallocate money away from higher education, then what kind of reaction do you think the governor would have to deal with from the assembly and from the public?
"It is dishonest and disgraceful for Reed, Ortiz, denBoer and the rest of the high administrators to be opposing AB 656 and slashing programs such as Fine Arts, slashing faculty and cutting classes and students. Students organized by SQE were going to hold a 10-day hunger strike this week demanding restoration of the $305 million that was cut from the budget this year. When word leaked out about this strike before it started, the governor’s office quickly issued word that they would restore the $305 million. The point is, that political action makes a difference and is the only thing that will do any good."
--
I am reminded of the role played by the infamous BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) when considering the role played by our ostensible CSU administrative leaders. Like the BIA, they are supposed to see to the interests of their charges - in their case American Indians and in our case, the faculty, staff, students and the community that makes up and depends upon the CSU. Like the BIA, they consistently betray the interests of those they supposedly represent. Lying about why they continue to oppose the solution to the budget crisis is shameful behavior. They should resign or be forced from office.

Privateers Strike Out Again

2010-05-02T10:07:00.000-07:00

From Firedoglake, May 2, 2010:

"Charter Schools: Yet Another 'Free Market' Innovation That Can't Stand on Its Own Two Feet"

Ho-hum. Another day, another "free market solution" that just can’t stand on its own two feet:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.
Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.

It’s not like this is a new or unusual thing with the charter school movement. The only thing that kept Edison Schools alive was constant propping up by outside sources (such as when Jeb Bush raided the pension funds of Florida’s genuine public-school teachers to subsidize Edison when it was about to go belly-up), as well as a dependence on Wall Streeters to be unusually forgiving of financial failure:

According to the company’s September 2001 proxy statement, the company lent [Edison CEO Chris] Whittle $6.6 million on November 15, 1999 and $1.2 million on April 13, 2000 to exercise options to purchase stock in the company. In other words, the company was loaning him money to purchase stock in itself — not an uncommon practice. By September 30th, 2001 the combined principal and interest on those two loans totalled $9.2 million.

So far so good.

Now what’s interesting is the collateral Whittle put up for these two loans. It turns out it was the shares themselves, the shares he was buying with the loans. As the proxy statement says "The loans are collateralized only by the shares …"

Now the problem is, like the Chicago Bulls and ten year old beer, that stock ain’t what it used to be. In fact, as you can see from this handy diagram, Edison’s stock is now virtually worthless. A year ago shares in Edison went for about $23 a pop. Today the stock closed at 85 cents, its lowest close all year.

What all of this means of course is that there now isn’t any collateral for those loans. That stock is now worth only a fraction of what it was back in the day. In the real world, Whittle would now be facing the dreaded margin call.

So why, if this thing is such an utter failure by free-market, get-government-out-of-our-lives standards, has it been kept on life support for the past decade?

Simple: It’s all about destroying yet another set of unions — in this case, the teachers’ unions. That’s why so many rich people and Third Way (or what we know as DINO) types back it — and why the recent push for unions to organize charter-school teachers is freaking out the people who back these schools.

***

I would differ about the rationale here being just about destroying unions. It is about that, but it is also, and mainly about attempting to destroy public education and public goods and the public interest more generally. This agenda is what animates and drives those who are leading the CSU system as well: privatize, privatize, privatize.

On Deliverology's Claims That Graduation Rates Can Be Accelerated and the Achievement Gap Narrowed

2010-04-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

The CSU administration, as most people know, is attempting to impose Sir Michael Barber's Deliverology upon the CSU system. Chancellor Reed and his loyal lieutenants claim that they can thereby accelerate time to degree and bridge the achievement gap with this fine British import. How they think they can accomplish those goals when they are slashing the budget for academic services, reducing class offerings, reducing admissions by forty thousand students, furloughing faculty and laying off staff and faculty, and eliminating programs such as CalWorks (designed to help parents on welfare get a college degree and get off of welfare), is beyond my feeble comprehension. But then, Deliverology perhaps can violate commonsense and pull a rabbit out of the hat.

In a widely circulated, discussed, and reportedly influential White Paper by one of the CSU presidents in July 2009, however, author President Qayoumi stated explicitly what was reasonable to expect as a result of the budget cuts:

From "Perspectives on CSU Budget Gap," July 24, 2009 by Mohammad H. Qayoumi, President California State University, East Bay, reprinted on this blog here: "I think we can expect that average student course loads will decrease, time to degree will increase, lines (or digital queues) will get longer, and traditionally under-represented groups will be hit disproportionately harder than others."

The only way that Deliverology can produce the results they are claiming that it can produce - and the top CSU administrators know this - is by cutting back on what is expected from students to get their degree. This is why the administrators, for example, have been floating the idea of reducing GE requirements and number of courses required for a degree. They want to cheapen a CSU degree's value, in other words.

You don't sensibly advocate having someone running faster when the person in question is having trouble walking in the first place.

Deliverology is a sham. It is not a misguided program with laudable goals but poor implementation. It is a program that from its inception, from its practice in England, and from its premises, is designed not to improve performance but to tighten command and control from the top. Deliverology's imposition upon the CSU would be a disaster for this reason. It must be opposed.

CSU Palin Controversy Incites Hate Messages

2010-04-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

Update, April 21, 2010: See also this very good article at the LA Progressive by Joseph Palermo, "Cal State Stanislaus: Let Sarah Palin Speak - Somewhere Else." The comments to his article as reposted at Reader Supported News are particularly good as well, such as this one: "Actually, there are two other options available to CSUS. If there's no contract, CSUS doesn't have to pay Palin a dime! Or if there is a contract, CSUS officials responsible for its shredding can go to jail."

Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Yee threatened with racist, homophobic phone calls and faxes
From Sen. Leland Yee's website

SACRAMENTO – The controversy surrounding an upcoming Sarah Palin event at California State University Stanislaus and calls for greater transparency from Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) has spurred several racist and homophobic phone calls to Yee’s office and even a fax threatening the Senator’s life.

An expletive-laden fax received yesterday in the Senator’s San Francisco and Sacramento offices says, “To: JoBama Rectum Sniffer Fish Head Leland Yee” and then in all capital letters, “WERE YOU TO EXTRACT YOUR HEAD FROM TREASONOUS MARXIST NIG**R HUSSEIN OBAMA’S RECTUM, YOUR BRAIN WOULD STILL FUNCTION AT ITS PRESENT MUCH DIMINISHED LEVEL BUT AT LEAST THE NIG**R SH*T SMELL WOULD EVENTUALLY DISSIPATE.”

The fax, which included a graphic of an American flag adorned pickup truck dragging a noose, also states “FIGHTING The Marxist Nig**r Thug Hussein Obama” and “Safeguard the Constitution, Death of all Domestic Marxists!”

Another fax received by the Senator’s office with a similar graphic says, “NEW WEBSITE COMING SOON: lyeesucksobamasnig**ras*.com,” as well as “JoBama. HE IS BRAVE ENOUGH TO KILL OUR UNBORN, JUST NOT BRAVE ENOUGH TO CALL OUR ENEMIES WHAT THEY ARE: Muslim Terrorists!” The fax also includes a rifle scope targeting a shirt with the communist hammer and sickle symbol dripping with blood.

One of the phone messages left after hours in Yee’s office voicemail says, “You know, I heard that Senator Yee wants to nix Sarah Palin from speaking at Stanislaus State…Maybe we ought to have a homosexual with a long enough di*k to where he can stick it up his as* and fu*k himself while he is on stage giving a speech. That would be acceptable to Leland Yee. So, good thing you run in San Francisco ‘cause you’d never make it anywhere else.”

These and other messages have been forward[ed] to the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms to investigate.

“It is quite disturbing that such racist and homophobic sentiment still exists in our country,” said Yee. “It is unfortunate acts like these that demonstrate why we must continue to be vigilant against hate and intolerance.”

The hate messages come after Yee has demanded greater transparency of the CSU Stanislaus administration regarding an upcoming visit from the former Alaska governor. After the university claimed they had no documents or correspondence pertaining to the Palin visit, students testified that they found pages 4 through 9 of the Palin contract in the administration’s dumpster, which show her visit requirements include a hotel suite, first class airfare or a private Lear jet, pre-screened questions, and “bendable straws.”

The Attorney General has since launched a formal investigation and Californians Aware has filed a lawsuit.

And from Sen. Yee's website on April 13, 2010:

Documents Surface in CSU Stanislaus Palin Case

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Students uncover Palin contract, other public documents – some shredded by university administrators

SACRAMENTO – Students from California State University Stanislaus have uncovered several public documents pertaining to the upcoming controversial visit by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

The documents – including parts of the university’s speaking contract with Palin – were found in the dumpster outside the university’s administration building two days after Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) and Californians Aware were denied such public information by the university, resulting in a request of the Attorney General’s office to investigate.

On Friday, April 9, CSU student Ashli Briggs was informed that suspicious activity (specifically, document purging) was taking place within the administration building. Alicia Lewis and other students then found the documents after seeing several administrators’ cars in the parking lot on the university’s scheduled furlough day. Many of the public documents were shredded, presumably by university personnel.

“It is truly shocking and a gross violation of the public trust that such documents would be thrown away and destroyed during a pending investigation,” said Yee. “Found within the same files as regular university business were financial statements and documents of the CSU Stanislaus Foundation – demonstrating that the foundation is operated by taxpayer-funded employees within the university itself. How can they possibly claim that no tax dollars are being used for the Palin event when state employees are called in on their furlough day to help avoid public scrutiny?”

“Turning over this information to the Attorney General is important so that any wrongdoing can be addressed and prevented from reoccurring in the future,” said Lewis. “If this helps push for financial transparency on college campuses, then those of us involved know we did the right thing.”

“My hat is off to these students who had the courage to come forward and report such information,” said Yee. “They are to be commended for protecting our precious and limited public resources.”

Among the documents found intact where pages 4 through 9 of the university’s contract with Palin. While the actual compensation – suspected to be nearly $100,000 – cannot be found within the intact documents, pages 4 through 9 shows that Palin is expected to receive:

• “Round-trip, first class commercial air travel for two between Anchorage, Alaska and event city”
• Presumably for Palin’s guests, “full, unrestricted round-trip coach airfare for two between event city and lower 48 US States.”
• If the university chooses to use a private jet, “the Speaker, their traveling party and the plane crew will be the only passengers.”
• Ground transportation in both the originating city and the event city “will be by SUV(s) from a professionally licensed and insured car service.”
• “security arrangements as deemed necessary by [Washington Speakers Bureau] and the Speaker.”
• Accommodations are to include “a one-bedroom suite and two single rooms in a deluxe hotel” as well as a “laptop computer and printer (fully stocked with paper) and high speed internet” and “all meals and incidentals.”
• “For Q&A, the questions are to be collected from the audience in advance, pre-screened and a designated representative shall ask questions directly of the Speaker.”
• The contract also includes other stipulations regarding autographs, photographs, press releases, advertising, recording, lighting, bottled water and “bendable straws.”
Among the papers found shredded are documents dated as recently as March 2010, the same date as on the Palin contract.
Today, Lewis was submitting the documents to the Attorney General’s office to assist in their investigation regarding violation of the California Public Records Act (CPRA), and now potential tampering and destroying of evidence relevant to an ongoing investigation.

CSU Stanislaus Office of the President last week denied public records requests made by Yee and Californians Aware to disclose how much Palin is getting paid for an upcoming speaking engagement as well as documents and correspondence regarding the university’s 50th Anniversary Gala.

The responses from Campus Compliance Officer Gina Leguria state, “The University has no documents that are responsive to your request.”

CSU officials have often declared foundations as separate private entities even though the CSU Stanislaus Foundation is entirely located within the public university:

• the foundation chair is campus president Hamid Shirvani, a state employee who makes upwards of $300,000/year;
• the executive officer, the treasurer, and the secretary of the board are all employees of CSU Stanislaus;
• every staff member listed on the foundation website are CSU Stanislaus employees, with the exception of one;
• the foundation’s website and the Palin Gala website are located at the taxpayer-fundedwww.csustan.edu;
• the Palin fundraiser solicitation and information line is a university telephone number at the university advancement office;
• the foundation’s offices are housed within the campus administration’s building and fully staffed by university employees;
• the work of the foundation is conducted using CSU Stanislaus email accounts, telephones, computers and other taxpayer-funded resources.

“There is not a fine line or even a blurry line between the foundation and the public university; there is absolutely no line,” said Yee.

Prior to denying the CPRA request by Yee and Californians Aware, CSU Stanislaus officials stated that they could not release Palin’s compensation due to a confidentiality term in her contract. State law, however, specifically prohibits a state or local agency from allowing an outside entity to control the disclosure of information that is otherwise subject to the CPRA. In addition, a 2001 case involving Fresno State required the university to disclose documents they held regarding the operations of their foundation.

Several recent examples demonstrate the need for increased public oversight and accountability at public college and university foundations and auxiliary organizations:

• At Sonoma State, a $1.25 million loan issued to a former foundation board member two days after he resigned. He has since defaulted on that loan, which leaves less money in the foundation’s endowment for scholarships and other important causes.
• At Fresno State, a no-bid managing contract was given to a foundation member to build a theatre complex in which he held a financial interest.
• At San Francisco City College, a campus executive has been indicted for using money from the San Francisco City College Foundation for personal and political purposes.
• At San Jose/Evergreen Community College, the chancellor recently resigned after it was found she engaged in several financial improprieties at the foundation’s expense, including lavish travel, purchasing expensive art pieces, and even buying coffee and mints on her work credit card.
• Sacramento State recently acknowledged their campus is being audited by the Attorney General in relation to inappropriate expenditures of campus auxiliary money, including $200,000 to remodel the school president's kitchen in 2007. Additionally at Sacramento State, $6.3 million of public funds was transferred to University Enterprises Inc., a campus auxiliary, to backfill losses from a property acquisition.

According to the CSU Chancellor’s Office, 20 percent of its $6.7 billion budget, or $1.34 billion, is held in their 87 auxiliaries and foundations.

“It is time for CSU and UC administrators to stop acting like they are running private country clubs,” said Yee. “These are public institutions that should embrace transparency and accountability, and not be finding creative ways to do the public’s business behind closed doors.”

This session, Yee is authoring SB 330 to clarify that campus foundations and auxiliary must adhere to the CPRA.
###
Contact: Adam J. Keigwin
(916) 651-4008

Et Tu, Ortiz?

2010-04-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

The following Letter to the Editor appeared today, April 13, 2010, in the Poly Post newspaper. There is also another Poly Post news story entitled: "Tempers Flare at Brown Bag," (a follow-up to their initial article), about the April 6 Brown Bags event. The story reports some of the students' and staff's comments and reactions to the administration's actions, conveying a sense of the stakes for students and staff due to these cuts and the perversity of the administration's statements and actions.

I wrote this Letter to the Editor below a few days ago, prior to Ortiz's Monday, April 12, 2010, message that's the subject of my previous post here on this blog.

Et Tu, Ortiz?

By Dennis Loo

California’s higher educational system faces an unparalleled crisis. The CSU administration speaks of radical, transformative changes and the cuts of CalWorks, the tennis teams, and so on [at Cal Poly Pomona], are only part of the deep cuts that are coming.

What, in the face of this terrible news, are our top administrators doing to protect the CSU system? Rep. Torrico introduced a bill to protect California’s universities, AB 656. AB 656 would impose a severance tax on the oil companies.

California’s the only state that doesn’t impose this tax. Under Sarah Palin as Alaska governor, Alaska hiked its severance tax to over 20%, more than twice the rate that AB 656 would impose. Texas supports its well-endowed public university system with their severance tax. AB 656 would solve our problems entirely, as it would raise between $1-2 billion annually. This would be a tax on oil companies whose quarterly profits run in the tens of billions of dollars.

So there is a way to prevent students from being blocked from realizing their dreams. There is a way to prevent more faculty from being furloughed and laid off. We can even hire the people who’ve been laid off and we can hire more badly needed professors. There is a way to protect this system that has been California’s pride and joy. You would think that our administrators would be pushing for AB 656’s passage with all their might, wouldn’t you?

But Chancellor Reed is opposed to AB 656. Reed says he doesn’t want to be forced to spend the money raised only on teaching. The Chancellor’s Office has, they say, many other things they want to spend the money on besides teaching.

This is like my offering to pay my friend’s grocery bills and having my friend refuse the offer because he wants to have no strings attached to what he can spend the money I’m giving him on.

When I pressed President Ortiz last Tuesday to declare in favor of AB 656 he offered various extraordinary excuses not to support it and then finally declared that he was for it after all. I was pleased to hear this, as were the others in the crowd. Shortly after this public declaration his spokesman, Ron Fremont, informed the Poly Post that Ortiz’s declaration in support of AB 656 was only his personal opinion and it did not reflect the views of the Cal Poly Administration.

Here is my question for President Ortiz: If the Cal Poly Administration can take a position contrary to your own on a question so vital to Cal Poly as AB 656, then who is really running Cal Poly? Is it Chancellor Reed? If it’s Chancellor Reed, then why are we paying your nearly $300,000 salary annually? Why don’t we dispense with your position and have Reed order what he wants directly? And if Reed refuses to support a bill that would save our system, why are we paying him more than twice what Obama’s paid? Why don’t we ask for his resignation?

Cal Poly Pomona President Ortiz's Comments on April 6 Brown Bag Event

2010-04-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

As I wrote on this blog here, a rather fiery exchange took place between myself and President Ortiz during the April 6 Brown Bags with the President's event. During that exchange, part of which is visible in this video at the Poly Post's website (right hand column) with the Post's story on the left, Ortiz came out for the first time publicly and on the record supporting AB 656. AB 656 is a severance tax on oil companies, the monies from which would go to California's higher educational system, with the majority of the funding going to the CSU. AB 656 has been endorsed by the UC system leadership, even though they wouldn't get most of the money. CSU Chancellor Reed is opposed to AB 656, and all of his loyal lieutenants, the presidents of the twenty-three CSU campuses, and their provosts, are also against AB 656. I do not know if the CC administration has come out for AB 656, but here is the list of those endorsing it as of April 5, 2010:

"[T]he 700,000-member Courage Campaign, the University of California Student Association, the California State Student Association, the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, California Faculty Association, Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, California Teachers Association and the Service Employees International Union."

AB 656 would raise upwards of $2 billion a year and solve entirely the budget crisis engulfing California's Higher Educational System. Texas uses its severance tax to fund its very well-endowed university system. Alaska under Governor Sarah Palin raised its severance tax to over 20%. AB 656 would impose a 12.5% tax on Big Oil.

Shortly after the Brown Bags event, Ortiz (apparently) instructed his spokesman, Ron Fremont, to tell the Poly Post that his public endorsement of AB 656 was Ortiz's personal opinion only and not that of the "Cal Poly Pomona administration," of which, of course, Ortiz is the head.

Since he didn't want to express a position on AB 656 at first during the Brown Bags, and since he began by misrepresenting AB 656, by saying, among other things, that the oil companies were already overtaxed in California, and since I basically shamed him into declaring his support for 656, the fact that he would turn around shortly afterwards and have his spokesman disavow his administration's support for what he had just publicly claimed support for, was, shall I say, disappointing? Or, perhaps, I should say, it was revealing of whose hand feeds Ortiz's mouth.

Ortiz's further remarks on this are below in his message to Cal Poly released today:

Monday’s Message – April 12, 2010

Good afternoon everyone… Thank you for joining me today.

At last week’s Brown Bag with the Presidents, we heard – firsthand – how relatively small programmatic cuts can cause severe pain to those affected. When you are forced to cut nearly $31 million, there is no magic fix, no way to delay until things get better, and no way to postpone planning. This is what keeps me up at night.

As announced recently, the Division of Student Affairs must cut $3.2 million. The first wave of those reductions came with the decision to close the CalWorks office, the National Student Exchange, the Visitor Center and to discontinue intercollegiate tennis. These four programs will account for less than a quarter of the total cuts in Student Affairs. What’s more, these cuts pale in comparison to the fiscal challenges and reduction plans facing Academic Affairs, the largest division on campus. Every division is facing similar challenges. These cuts hurt – at a deep, personal level.

If you were in the Quad last Tuesday at noon, you heard emotional and heartfelt stories from our CalWorks students. If you don’t know, these are student‐parents who are seeking to move out of the welfare system through the pursuit of a college degree. Many have experienced countless challenges in their lives, and they cannot understand why their program has been targeted. While Vice President Freer and others have developed a strong contingency plan for CalWorks, the students feel as if they have been sacrificed.

I only wish our state representatives could hear their stories and come to grips with the real outcomes of their decisions to underfund higher education.

What is equally frustrating is the well‐intentioned, but uninformed impression that there is an easy solution to the crisis. It disturbs me when members of our community irresponsibly tell students, faculty and staff that the Chancellor’s Office is not doing everything in its power to prevent these cuts and acquire new revenue.

That kind of reckless rhetoric and finger pointing only damages our efforts to achieve real change in Sacramento. Just as important, it creates a false sense of reality. It’s not you versus me. It’s not us versus them. We ALL clearly care about this university.

Once again, there is no magic fix to the very real and very painful budget cuts we must endure. Greater support for higher education in California will only come from a united front of passionate educators, students and parents as well as industry and civic leaders.

From my perspective, the only real solution to our long‐term funding crisis is the Governor’s proposal to amend the California Constitution. Under his proposal, no less than 10 percent of taxpayer money would be allocated to fund public higher education and no more than 7 percent would be allocated to support the state prison system.

To give you a point of reference, this year the CSU received only 1.8 percent of the state general fund budget. In 2009‐10, California spent 45 percent more on prisons than universities. Those are the types of facts that should make each of you angry.

I remain committed to fighting the good fight for our students. I am calling on each of you to work with me so we can collectively achieve a better future.

Again, thank you for joining me.

Sacto Bee's Editorial on the Cal Chamber of Commerce

2010-04-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

The Sacramento Bee

Editorial: Cal Chamber goes on an ad attack

Published Thursday, Apr. 08, 2010

Over the last year, UC President Mark Yudof and other higher education leaders have been crisscrossing the state, making the case for Californians to reinvest in their public universities and community colleges.

Speaking to the UCLA Daily Bruin in October, Yudof noted that extra tax revenue may be needed. "I wish they'd pay a little bit more in taxes and support us, but we've been unwilling to do that," he said.

Why are taxpayers reluctant? One reason is the rhetoric and aggressive campaign tactics of anti-tax groups, who relentlessly claim that new taxes and fees - whether on oil extraction, alcohol sales or other vices - are disastrous to the state economy.

One of these groups is the California Chamber of Commerce, which, as it turns out, has a large board of directors that includes Yudof, CSU Chancellor Charlie Reed and Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott.

This week, the Cal Chamber fired off its latest cannonball of dishonesty, by claiming that the state's current economic troubles have something to do with Jerry Brown's past support for tax increases.

"California's lost 1 million jobs," says a female narrator in an attack ad financed by the Cal Chamber. "We're $200 billion in debt. And Jerry Brown has a 35-year record of higher spending and taxes."

We have no problems with the chamber taking shots at Jerry Brown. He has an extensive track record, and all of it is fair game for groups that want California to be more business friendly.

Yet on the issue of taxes, the chamber's television ad is both misleading and hypocritical. While Brown supported tax increases as governor, so did Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson (another chamber board member) during their terms in office.

The ad also hits Brown for initially opposing Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative that limited property taxes. Apparently the chamber has forgotten its own opposition to Proposition 13, with its president at the time calling the initiative "a can of worms, horribly flawed, poorly
written and researched."

Soon after the chamber launched this week's hit on Brown, we contacted Yudof to see if he had reviewed the advertisement beforehand or supported its message.

"President Yudof was not aware of this ad and did not participate in its approval," Yudof's office said in a statement. "As a leader of a public university, he is nonpartisan. He is looking into the circumstances surrounding the advertisement."

We hope he does.

But he shouldn't stop there. Yudof, Reed and Scott need to send a clear message to the chamber's executive team that its attack ads are unacceptable. They stamp out debate on how California can rebuild itself, and undermine the credibility of higher education leaders who
are trying to spark this debate.

CSU President Declares Support for AB 656

2010-04-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

Additional material at the end added 4/7/10 at 12:21 pm PST:

If you go to the Poly Post page with the article, in the right hand column of the page there is a video entitled "Brown Bag with the Presidents" of parts of the event, including the impassioned protests of CalWorks staff and students, the students who arrived with chants and signs/banner, part of the very colorful exchange I had with President Ortiz, and the insightful commentary on Ortiz's "declaration" by Student President Richard Liu.

From the [Cal] Poly Post on its website:

BREAKING NEWS: Ortiz declares support for new tax to fund higher education

By JUSTIN VELASCO - News Editor

Published: Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Updated: Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Jonny Tai/Poly Post

President Michael Ortiz addresses the crowd during Brown Bag with the Presidents on Tuesday, April 6.

President Michael Ortiz declared at today’s Brown Bag with the Presidents that he supports a proposed oil extraction tax aimed at providing funding for higher education in California.

California Assemblyman Alberto Torrico (D-Fremont), who has sponsored AB 656, said the bill, if passed, would generate up to $2 billion.

Ortiz was initially reluctant to take a position on the bill, but after being pressed by Dennis Loo, a Cal Poly sociology professor, he said he would support it.

"Why aren't you taking a position on a bill that was specifically introduced to fund the budget shortfall for the university system?" Loo asked.

"I believe that if you are to secure that funding, it would just be removed from our general fund dollars," Ortiz said.

The verbal exchange between the two men continued for several more minutes before Ortiz clarified his position.

Loo: How come the CSU, which is going to get most of the money is against [AB 656]?

Ortiz: You have taken a position and taken the chancellor's position to indicate that is the position of all 23 presidents.

Loo: It is!

Ortiz: That is an error.

Loo: Who supports [AB 656] then?

Ortiz: I do

Loo: You support AB 656?

Ortiz: I do

Loo: You're on the record?

Ortiz: I'm on the record.

Loo: I'm glad to hear that.

Update:

University Spokesman Ron Fremont later told the Poly Post that Ortiz's support for the bill reflected only his personal opinion and was not indicative of the Cal Poly administration's position.

More details coming soon.

***

Here's the comment that I left today at the Poly Post's website on their article:

Thank you Justin and Poly Post.

Ron Fremont's "clarification" of Ortiz's position after the fact doesn't even make sense. How can Ortiz's position be to support AB 656, but the Cal Poly administration, of which Ortiz is the head, be against it? This would be the equivalent of the White House spokesman saying to the nation, "President Obama personally is in favor of ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but his administration wants to continue the wars, so the wars are going to continue."

It is a major embarrassment for the top CSU administrators, beginning with Chancellor Reed, and on down, that they are against AB 656. It reveals what side they are really on, and that is not on the side of the students and faculty and of protecting higher education.

Ortiz, to his credit, recognized the non-tenability of that position in the exchange yesterday before everyone and had to back down from his position of being against the very bill that would solve the budget crisis entirely.

Who, I wonder, ordered Fremont to issue this denial afterwards? Ortiz? Chancellor Reed? Why, we should ask, is the CSU administration opposing restoring funding to the CSU system? If this were basketball, it would be the equivalent of having the referees determine that the ball belongs to Cal Poly and the Cal Poly coach (Ortiz), refusing the ball and saying, give the ball to the other team. The state legislature, led by Rep. Torrico is offering a solution to the CSU system and our "leaders" won't have it. As I said yesterday at the event, Reed's office's sorry excuse for opposing AB 656 (a bill that the UC system supports, by the way, as they should) is that they "have other things they want to spend the money on, not just on teaching."

One simple solution for our schools? A captivating promise, but a false one.

2010-03-14T18:55:00.000-07:00

By Diane Ravitch, LA Times

March 14, 2010

There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea -- a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.

Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicated teachers and supportive families, as well as a coherent curriculum.

As an education historian, I have often warned against the seductive lure of grand ideas to reform education. Our national infatuation with education fads and reforms distracts us from the steady work that must be done.

Our era is no different. We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.

Once again, I find myself sounding the alarm that the latest vision of education reform is deeply flawed. But this time my warning carries a personal rebuke. For much of the last two decades, I was among those who jumped aboard the choice and accountability bandwagon. Choice and accountability, I believed, would offer a chance for poor children to escape failing schools. Testing and accountability, I thought, would cast sunshine on low-performing schools and lead to improvement. It all seemed to make sense, even if there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope.

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform -- codified in its signature Race to the Top program -- that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better.

Those who do not follow education closely may be tempted to think that, at long last, we're finally turning the corner. What could be wrong with promoting charter schools to compete with public schools? Why shouldn't we demand accountability from educators and use test scores to reward our best teachers and identify those who should find another job?

Like the grand plans of previous eras, they sound sensible but will leave education no better off. Charter schools are no panacea. The nation now has about 5,000 of them, and they vary in quality. Some are excellent, some terrible; most are in between. Most studies have found that charters, on average, are no better than public schools.

On the federal tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from 2003 to 2009, charters have never outperformed public schools. Nor have black and Latino students in charter schools performed better than their counterparts in public schools.

This is surprising, because charter schools have many advantages over public schools. Most charters choose their students by lottery. Those who sign up to win seats tend to be the most motivated students and families in the poorest communities. Charters are also free to "counsel out" students who are unable or unwilling to meet expectations. A study of KIPP charters in the San Francisco area found that 60% of those students who started the fifth grade were gone before the end of eighth grade. Most of those who left were low performers.

...

So we're left with the knowledge that a dramatic expansion in the number of privately managed schools is not likely to raise student achievement. Meanwhile, public schools will become schools of last resort for the unmotivated, the hardest to teach and those who didn't win a seat in a charter school. If our goal is to destroy public education in America, this is precisely the right path.

Nor is there evidence that student achievement will improve if teachers are evaluated by their students' test scores. Some economists say that when students have four or five "great" teachers in a row, the achievement gap between racial groups disappears. The difficulty with this theory is that we do not have adequate measures of teacher excellence.

...

The Obama education reform plan is an aggressive version of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind, under which many schools have narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects of reading and math. This poor substitute for a well-rounded education, which includes subjects such as the arts, history, geography, civics, science and foreign language, hits low-income children the hardest, since they are the most likely to attend the kind of "failing school" that drills kids relentlessly on the basics. Emphasis on test scores already compels teachers to focus on test preparation. Holding teachers personally and exclusively accountable for test scores -- a key feature of Race to the Top -- will make this situation even worse. Test scores will determine salary, tenure, bonuses and sanctions, as teachers and schools compete with each other, survival-of-the-fittest style.

Frustrated by a chronic lack of progress, business leaders and politicians expect that a stern dose of this sort of competition and incentives will improve education, but they are wrong. No other nation is taking such harsh lessons from the corporate sector and applying them to their schools. No nation with successful schools ignores everything but basic skills and testing. Schools work best when teachers collaborate to help their students and strive together for common goals, not when they compete for higher scores and bonuses.

Having embraced the Republican agenda of choice, competition and accountability, the Obama administration is promoting the privatization of large segments of American education and undermining the profession of teaching. This toxic combination is the latest Big Idea in education reform. Like so many of its predecessors, it is not likely to improve education.

Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."

A Simple Question for Charley Reed

2010-03-10T11:45:00.000-08:00

Dear Charley:

Let us suppose you were a sprinter from a poor country preparing for the Summer Olympics. You have recently been having trouble getting enough to eat, making it much harder for you could keep up your strength and maintain a training regimen. Your coach has just spent money for an outside consultant from the tiny budget you and the team have to draw upon for food and other critical items.

The outside consultant, whose name is Sir Michael Barber, comes in and says: "Good news! I'm going to help you run faster than ever."

You say: "Great. What do I have to do?"

He says: "We're going to further restrict your dietary intake below what you've been eating, reduce the number of days that you can train AND we're going to take you away from the track you've been using and put you in a paved parking lot to train. Don't mind the cars coming and going; they'll just make you more agile. Don't you think these are great ideas? I call it Deliverology."

So, Charley, my question to you is this: Would you wonder if your coach had gone insane? Would you follow his advice and that of the outside consultant? Would you get yourself another coach?

March 4th, 2010: “The World is On Fire!”: The Fight To Defend Higher Education

2010-03-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

By Dennis Loo

(See also Marion Brady's article "Falling into the Ditch.")

To this house where nearly all of the light has been cut off because the windows are boarded up, choking off the air, comes now a large crew of carpenters to rip down these cursed boards. The vermin and mold that have been filling the suffocating air with their toxic fumes can then be exposed to the sunlight and the house cleansed by powerful gusts, the winds of genuine change.

The March 4th demonstrations to defend public education involved hundreds of thousands of students, faculty, staff, workers, and community members in thirty plus U.S. cities. The call for these protests originated in California in November 2009, and was taken up not only by many other states, but also in a number of countries.

These actions in the streets and on the campuses mark a vital and overdue development. They are the harbingers, if the organizing efforts move forward and escalate as planned, of a very different political landscape. The battle for public education represents nothing less than a major part of the cutting edge of a movement that could potentially unravel McWorld.

The people in charge of this dysfunctional McWorld have been riding high for some thirty years, doing grievous damage to everything they touch. They are about to be taken on the ride of, and for, their lives.

What a refreshing development, this taste of a different future! Many of the people coming into the streets on March 4th are new to political actions, probably the vast majority of them. It certainly looked that way to me in the streets of L.A. The age range was about as wide as could be, with, of course, many young people intermingled with red-shirted UTLA teachers, white-and-black shirted CSU students, and yet another variant of red-shirted CSU faculty. Signs ranged from “Defend Public Education” to “Revolution.” The intensity of the feelings here was remarkable. As one student leader put it in her spoken word poem in a Cal Poly Pomona rally prior to boarding buses and cars to attend the L.A. downtown march/rally, “The world is on fire!” This powerful sense of urgency also comes through in the student poem that I end this essay with.

The bankrupting of public goods such as public education from Kindergarten to University, which has reached a critical point here in California, has been a deliberate strategy by those who run this country. After withholding the requisite funds for public goods in order to strangle these services, public officials and educational administrators have been busy privatizing everything they can, on the grounds that the institutions and organizations are “failing.” Public education and higher education in particular have been enormously successful for a very long time. California’s K-12 system, until the privateers engineered the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, was the foremost school system in the nation, the envy of the world.

Because of Proposition 13, a major part of the “Reagan Revolution” of starving public services and the public domain in the interest of private capital and private interest that has led nationally and state by state, to bankruptcy and mind-boggling deficits, California’s K-12 system has gone from first to last: it is now at the bottom along with Guam and Mississippi.

This awful outcome has not shamed the privateers – the neoliberals and the neoconservatives – who have taken their disasters and parlayed them into grist for furthering their destructive agenda: “We’ve made a grand mess of things. Now give us more power to do even more of the same! Let us do to higher education what we’ve done to K-12.”

The privateers’ cure for their induced – iatrogenic - disease is to kill the patient. Their target has been from the beginning to eliminate public education and all other public goods. But because they can’t attack these public goods straight on they have to be circumspect about it and attack them indirectly, using ploys.

Their strategy has been and is the equivalent of a doctor applying a tourniquet to a healthy limb, thereby inducing gangrene, and then declaring that he has to amputate to save the patient because the limb’s gone bad. And now, after amputating two limbs, they are tying a noose around the neck of the patient, claiming that the head is diseased and it’s a tourniquet that’s needed to save the body.

Even before this current “budget crisis,” brought on by the policies of those who claim to have the solution to this crisis, the leadership of California’s higher education attempted to carry out “restructuring” – that is, department and program eliminations - under the signboard of “Prioritization and Recovery.” Faculty fought these plans successfully and the administration had to back off.

Now that the budget crisis has hit full-force, the administration has reintroduced their restructuring measures, now citing the budget as the compelling reason for their draconian cuts – annihilating departments, programs, colleges, faculty, raising student fees and denying places for students, even while they refuse to cut administrative bloat and curb their grossly extravagant self-dealing and corrupt contracts with corporate friends.

The decimation of the public interest by private, for-profit corporations means that nothing but naked cash transactions are supposed to rule our mean spirited McWorld. The McWorld clown is, however, an evil clown. The goods, this malignant clown says, shall go to those who already have a lot (think Goldman Sachs) and when they get into trouble the filthy rich will be bailed out, using the public’s money. But when precious public goods like public education are in trouble, precisely because the largesse has been going to the big corporations through tax breaks and subsidies and thereby slowly strangling the public sector (California is the only state in the union that doesn’t tax the oil and gas companies for extracting oil and gas), they scurry in like rats to put private corporate entities in charge.

This is wholesale theft. It is a crime. The people presiding over it are criminals. These criminals are far worse than the criminals depicted in crime dramas.

Not only is this the taking of wealth and resources and hoarding it for the few, like a giant vacuum scooping up whatever isn’t anchored down, governmental and business elites’ goal is grander than this: to dictate to society as a whole with no institutional opposition to their power. They’re instituting a plutocracy, plain and simple. After all, as the Supreme Court just said, corporations are people too!

The last remaining major institution that has not yet been brought to heel by these privateers is higher education. The privateers have already, through taking over school boards and the Board of Education, under Bush and now Obama, turned K-12 public schools into test-taking mills in which the teachers “don’t have time to teach,” and history, music, art, P.E., and social studies have been cut back sharply or eliminated altogether, because there’s yet another high-stakes test they have to administer every few weeks. Students coming out of this system, trained under No Child Left Behind (aka No Child Left Unharmed), have real difficulty knowing how to see the whole picture and the parts within that larger context, the basis for critical thought, because they have been so inculcated with being told what to memorize and what the answer is.

The privateers themselves don’t tend to go into education as faculty because the money isn’t enough to satisfy their large appetites for material goods. The people who gravitate to education as teachers and professors tend to value non-material things more than cold hard cash. Silly things like knowledge, being mentors for the young and for the disadvantaged, curiosity, skepticism, learning about and from history, exploration, co-operation, dissent, debate, flexibility of thought, consideration of alternative viewpoints, empirical data, and open-mindedness.

In order to take over this arena, the privateers have thus had to do so from the very top, via highly over paid, ridiculously privileged, perk-ridden, high administration positions, as Trustees, as Chancellors, as Presidents and as Provosts. These are the people who have little or no appreciation for education, for what teaching is, and what true learning is and requires. Either that or they, like many or all of the Provosts, have turned their back on their academic backgrounds. Their orientation, and in many cases, their occupational backgrounds, are as business-people, not as educators. They think that education is no different than a business.

The roots of the troubles here stretch back several decades.

The targets of the privateers are the public interest and public goods. They wish to dismantle New Deal programs such as welfare, unemployment compensation, and social security and reverse the 1960s movements’ gains that challenged the old boy network and authority: programs such as affirmative action, women’s rights, abortion rights, the movement to end the Vietnam War, anti-imperialist soldier movements, Miranda Rights, FISA, exposures of and restrictions on programs, such as COINTELPRO, of police agents provocateurs, and the Watergate scandal that revealed the skullduggery and dirty deeds just beneath the surface. The problem with the 1930s and 1960s, from these privateers’ perspective, is that the people challenged authority altogether too well. They demanded too much, became “entitled,” and dared to think that they could be more than pawns in the game of the rich and powerful.

The neoliberal attempts to annihilate these programs and reverse these gains achieved by the people and mass struggles are part of their larger effort to quell dissent, free thought and inquiry, critical thinking, and behaviors that don’t promote the world as they want it to be: a populace consumed by consumption, oblivious to the predations and inequities of capital’s relentless march to exploit everywhere it goes, the savage measures taken to protect and advance imperialist Empire, and obscene further gross enrichment of the plutocracy.

Under their mantra of privatization and doing things the way business does them, these free marketers ought to be shamed by the dramatic evidence of the bankruptcy of their policies – depression level unemployment, a financial crisis that threatened to bring the entire economy down, Katrina’s devastation worsened by Bush’s neoliberal policies, and the debacle of California going from #1 in the nation in K-12 to next to last.

Movements of the people often lag behind events since mass mobilizations are very difficult to accomplish, especially in a country such as this where protest actions aren’t a customary thing. It sometimes takes matters getting very bad first before people will rouse themselves into sufficient action. That time is now for education.

The carpenters are on the move, ready to tear down these boards.

The fight for public education is a battle for all of us because it concentrates all of the elements of what ails the rest of society. Young people, who have always played an indispensible leading role in awakening the rest of society, are in motion. Who can stop them?

The following is a poem by Giezi Perez, read by him at the Cal Poly Pomona campus rally on March 4:

Mi nombre,
No es AB 540
Y mis esfuerzos y mis ganas,
No las vas a degradar con tu dinero
I said my name
Is not AB 540
And you will not degrade my determination and my struggle with your currency
Because currently, you pamper special interests and men in suits who juggle the people’s trust and hopes
Jesters making gestures ridiculing the masses behind classes
We hold you accountable for the future of this state
Where you’d rather incarcerate criminals than invest in the education of the youths so they won’t become one in the first place
The cost of housing an inmate is over $30 thousand per year
And putting a student through college is around half that
It’s apparent where your priorities lie
You focus on people who have done
And not on those who can do
Yet expect me to forget the past
We see through your intentions behind expensive framed glasses and listen past your over intellectualized rhetoric
I hear I have to be patient, to have faith
But you are full of deceit
Like the LIE hidden in the middle of the word “beLIEve”
You’ve given the people a sweet tooth with all the sugar coating of the truth that you’ve done
And you have the audacity to try to blame us for the cavity
Ya Basta
We are people, not statistics
Estudiantes who are tired of being tucked in bed by idle hands from idle lands
But only a people who have been asleep for too long will accept Dream Acts instead of rightful progress
Some of us are waking up
See I, like most of us had no choice but to be brought along to our ancient territory which was invaded by greed and borders
Roadblocks made by gluttonous to provide the sufferer with more struggles
Your belly full but we hungry!
Your ThanksTaking day tables are infested with food, most of which most likely will go to waste
You would rather threaten to take the meals of school children and eliminate 200 of California’s 279 state parks than find better ways to make up for your mistakes
But I refuse to give my seat to someone who is more privileged
Because a transcript cannot transcribe my life and my story and my will to learn and to succeed
Just because someone else can pay you off doesn’t mean he can help build a better society
You are pimpin education and I aint trickin for my knowledge
My name is not AB 540
But I do have an identity, and it on aint laminated paper
No I don’t have a greencard, no I can’t get no license, no I don’t qualify for financial aid at school, I can’t even open an account with Blockbuster how can you expect me to find some legal labor?
For the same reason that when I was a kid they’d hardly let me play outside with the neighbors
And I wish I could truly put to words how much it hurts
Metaphorically it’s like, my life has been dirt
But I’ve made it fertile enough to germinate this heart underneath my secondhand shirt
And cultivate the destiny I was given at my birth
See poverty is my other mother and she raised me to believe
Mi segundo padre es mi patria y me enseño como resitir
Now I guess I conduct felonies everytime I (exhale) breathe (inhale)
And with every criminal intent, I speak, because I know that it’s their intentions to make me feel weak
See I was born a Soul Rebel so forever my spirit fights when I breathe
Because “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees”
Yo soy Joaquin
I am the stories in the news that you hear about but never see
This is for them, for the hungry and the meek
This is for the sixth year elementary school graduate my father never got to be
This is for all the opportunities that have eluded me
For the strife this life is giving to my entire family
For the dreams my younger brothers have that they will never see
For the WIC coupons that mama got to give us something to eat
For those first years that we lived in garages and hid from cops out on the streets
I breathe, and with each breath I move suns like Quetzalcoatl because we all have god inside us
And I know there aint no law against divinity

The Magic of Deliverology

2010-03-06T06:36:00.000-08:00

This ran as a Letter to the Editor in the [Cal] Poly Post 2/16/10 issue on p. 11.

By Dennis Loo, Professor of Sociology

The CSU administration wants to accelerate graduation rates - through the magic of Deliverology – while also reducing faculty, programs, and class offerings. This makes as much sense as a ship’s captain ordering his ship to go faster when the boat is already in danger of sinking.

When faculty asked Provost denBoer why he’s cutting academic services most and administration not at all, he said “regulatory requirements” protect administrative ranks. When asked to explain, he said that they have to report to the government the size and pay of administrators, and the government has yet to complain. An inventive tale, I’ll give him that.

You don’t pay outside consultants like Michael “Deliverology” Barber to tell you about teaching in a time of fiscal crisis when you have twenty-three CSU campuses full of teachers who can tell you what’s needed. You don’t oppose increased funding of the CSU - via AB 656 taxing the oil companies - because you don’t like that the bill mandates increased monies be spent on instruction only.

In 2005 and 2006 I was faculty chair of the Academic Quality and Support Subcommittee of the Enrollment Management Advisory Council. I played a leading role in creating a survey in which we attempted to determine what was standing in the way of students' graduation.

Our survey showed that students’ two most often-cited reasons for delaying graduation were both related to the fact that they couldn't get the courses that they needed. Several of the other people within EMAC were convinced, despite what the survey said, that the main reason was that students were frittering away their time and taking courses they didn't need or refusing to take courses because they didn’t want to inconvenience their schedule. The problem, according to our administration, is the students.

A hint of the real agenda at work behind the administration’s attempt to impose “Deliverology” is their talk of loosening up graduation requirements. They want, in other words, to make a degree easier to get – and therefore less valuable. Deliverology treats education as if teaching and learning could be reduced to the assembly production of widgets. Education isn’t something you can just deliver. It is, and has always been, a relationship between human beings, between mentor and mentee. It is something that requires effort to attain. It’s not something that you can package, reproduce like Xerox, and sell to the highest bidder. Yet this is what Chancellor Reed and his loyal lieutenants believe – to them, education is simply a business, the cheaper, the better. Education isn’t a business, it’s a public good and it is under unprecedented assault.

March 4th is a day of action to stand up for higher education and to oppose the elimination of programs and the wrong-headed approach to education that the administration represents. Go to http://calfac.org/march4.html and http://defendthecsu.blogspot.com to learn more.

Two Anecdotes on the Issues Facing the CSU's and Like Institutions

2010-02-25T16:57:00.000-08:00

By Yasha Karant

Colleagues,

Two recent anecdotes that help illustrate the issues, one from outside the CSU and one from inside.

From a tenured colleague at an R1 in the Southeast: (X is substituted for the institution, although the State is obvious from context)

However, we too have serious budget cuts heading our way again. At this point in time, I am fairly sure that the state provides less than 25% of the funding that we have to run X. The rest is provided by tuition, fees, grants, for-profit programs/degrees and our endowment. The one good thing is that as the state cuts more, the cuts affect us less and less. So far, we have not had to take pay cuts or increased teaching loads. However, it looks like starting next budget cycle (this fall) this will change. You must remember, I'm in the "Old South" where higher education is valued slightly below K-12 education which is valued way below fixing the potholes. And, given the winter weather this year, there are lots of potholes that need to be fixed. Furthermore, we are a "no new taxes" state. We only cut "optional" services, such as education (K-12 is being hammered in the new governor's budget). In all seriousness, with the exception of South Carolina and Texas, I think Virginia may be the most conservative state.

As far as PhD students goes, my "last" PhD student will graduate in August. The accountants, which control the PhD committee, will not accept any more IS students. Our IS PhD seminar has not been taught in 3 years and there are no plans to offer it in the future. However, the real scary thing has been our general lack of students in all of our programs. from what I can tell, at this point in time, we have less than 15, yes fifteen, students majoring in IS. That includes all undergraduates, masters, and our 1 PhD student. That is why I am now teaching mostly accounting students.

***

Prior to the current ultra-right Republicans, this colleague was a Republican fiscal conservative and originally from a State in the former Confederate States of America, and of the overclass racial/ethnic group of that region. I mention these facts lest one assume that he might be a "leftist" from a minority (underclass) group -- to give some context. As for funding, note that Virginia provides less than 25 percent of the funds. Note also that although he is in a primary R1 [Research 1] (not just PhD granting such as SIUC), he in fact has no PhD students. It is obvious from the discussion that he is in a business discipline.

My point of the anecdote is threefold: (1) non-PhD programs can continue alongside PhD programs, albeit one may have to "fight" for them; (2) it is an illusion to assume that disciplinary research may be conducted strictly on Stateside support; (3) the situation in some other States, even for R1s, is as bad as in California, save that these institutions have the right and ability to pursue viable funding streams (denied to the CSU under the Master Plan).

Second anecdote. I am of the firm opinion that RPT [Retention, Promotion and Tenure] guidelines must follow the actual mission(s) of the CSU, and that funding must as well. I noted on the door of a colleague in Mathematics an announcement for an Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, in part funded by NSF [National Science Foundation]. A senior tenured full colleague in Mathematics happened to be present, so I asked him the following question: would this conference count for Professional Growth in his Department for RPT (Professional Growth is the official CSUSB RPT category for research)? After much hemming and hawing, his answer was "no" unless the Faculty member specifically was appointed as Mathematics Education (K-12 education), not regular disciplinary Mathematics. Under the original Master Plan, and under a model in which the CSU returns to the CSC, this sort of conference precisely is the CSC category of "research", in part because all of the Mathematicians are supposed to be Math Ed. Yet, today, even in a Department without any PhD programs, this sort of conference is in fact devalued. Note that Mathematics only has three Math Ed faculty members, two of whom are tenured fulls and thus effectively immune to the RPT process.

My point is that as we craft the White Paper, I am of the opinion that we need to consider the reality of RPT criteria in the CSU as actually applied, not in some artificial context.

Thanks,

Yasha Karant

Rhode Island School Board Fires All the Teachers

2010-02-24T20:20:00.000-08:00

From Randi Kaye, CNN's AC360°

(CNN) -- A school board in Rhode Island has voted to fire all teachers at a struggling high school, a dramatic move aimed at shoring up education in a poverty-ridden school district.

In a 5-2 vote Tuesday night, the board approved the plan by Frances Gallo, superintendent at Central Falls School District, to discharge the teachers, administrators and other personnel at Central Falls High School.

The firings, which will be effective at the end of this school year, came after the district said it failed to reach an agreement with the teachers' union on a plan for the teachers to spend more time with students to improve test scores.

A union spokesman called the firings drastic and cited a 21 percent rise in reading scores and a 3 percent increase in math scores in the past two years.

...

Central Falls High is one of the lowest-performing schools in Rhode Island. It is in a community where median income is $22,000, census figures show.

Of the 800 students, 65 percent are Hispanic and for most of them, English is a second language. Half the students are failing every subject, with 55 percent skilled in reading and 7 percent proficient in math, officials said.

In a proposal based on federal guidelines, Gallo asked teachers to work a longer school day of seven hours and tutor students weekly for one hour outside school time. She proposed teachers have lunch with students often, meet for 90 minutes every week to discuss education and set aside two weeks during summer break for paid professional development.

A spokesman for the union said the teachers had accepted most of the changes, but wanted to work out compensation for the extra hours of work.

...

When the negotiations on those changes failed at Central Falls High, the superintendent switched to another option: the turnaround model, which means firing every teacher at the troubled school.

Kathy May, a teacher at Central Falls High, said she's disheartened. "I feel like, after 20 years, I can see some progress beginning to be made. And I'm sad that we're not going to be around to follow that through, to push that forward."

...

At a community rally before the school board meeting on Tuesday, supporters of the teachers slammed the plan.

Jane Sessums, president of the Central Falls Teachers Union, said teachers have been unfairly targeted and scapegoated and the union will fight to have them reinstated.

"We want genuine reforms, not quick fixes that do nothing but create a wedge between teachers, our school and our community," said Sessums. She added that "teachers have agreed to numerous solutions and reforms."

George McLaughlin, a guidance counselor who was fired along with his wife, a chemistry teacher, said the school has been inaccurately cast as a place with low graduation rates.

"We have the most transient population in this state. Nobody comes close to us. So when they say that 50 percent of the people graduate, a very high percentage of our students leave our school. They return. They leave again. They go back to other countries," he said, noting that three times as many of the school's students are accepted to colleges now than they were five years ago.

...

McLaughlin said the negotiations were about job security, not pay, and said the teachers are ready to resume talks.

Deliverology Renamed by CSU ... But It Still Smells the Same

2010-02-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

See also "Chancellor Wants to Speed Graduation But Doesn't Want to Spend More Money on Instruction, Even When Offered the Money"

This is a copy of a comment I just left at the Poly Post Newspaper's website in response to the below-mentioned article. My comment has been very slightly edited for purposes of this site.

I am rather astonished that Provost Martin denBoer is cited in today's (February 10, 2010) Poly Post story (“CSU system launches ‘Deliverology’-based graduation initiative,”) as stating: "Deliverology is a more sarcastic term."

Since Sir Michael Barber was invited by the Chancellor as an outside consultant on teaching and learning (a subject, by the way, that Barber has no direct experience with as a teacher since he isn't a teacher), why would his hosts describe the term that Barber himself invented and uses to describe his own system as "sarcastic"? Certainly Barber doesn't think it's sarcastic. He uses the term without any hint of irony and says it and writes about it, one must presume, with a straight face.

Does our administration think that they will make the program sound more legitimate by calling it "ACE" (Advising, Curriculum and Engagement)?

Between 2003 and 2006 I served on Cal Poly Pomona’s Enrollment Management Advisory Council Executive Committee and as Faculty Co-Chair of the Academic Quality and Support Subcommittee. I reported to President Ortiz and Provost Morales in 2006 that graduation rates for male enrollees within six years of entrance of CPP was in the low 30 percentile. I was shocked to find that the figure was so low. This oral report of mine about the graduation rates was part of my larger analysis of the results of an EMAC survey that I played a leading role in initiating and writing in which our subcommittee attempted to determine what was standing in the way of students' graduation.

The results of the survey indicated that the two most often-cited reasons were both related to the fact that students couldn't get the courses that they needed. Several of the other people within EMAC were convinced, despite what the survey said, that the main reason was that students were frittering away their time and taking courses they didn't need or refusing to take courses that they could take because they didn’t want to inconvenience themselves schedule-wise. This opinion was contrary to the survey findings and was based on anecdotal data alone.

Ortiz and Morales didn't even blink at my report. Morales described it as "interesting." President Ortiz's response was to suggest that we have more online classes.

A hint of the real agenda at work here behind their attempt to impose “Deliverology” upon the CSU is the administration’s talk of loosening up graduation requirements ("There will be more flexibility with skipping classes for a speedier graduation for certain students..."). The only way you can accelerate graduation rates in a time when faculty ranks are being sharply reduced, programs and departments and classes cut, and so on, is to make a degree easier to get – and therefore less valuable. Deliverology treats education as if teaching and learning could be reduced to the assembly production of widgets. Thus, its name: Deliverology. It’s aptly named. Education isn’t something you can just deliver. It is, and has always been, a relationship between human beings, between mentor and mentee. It is, and has always been, something that required effort to attain. Teaching is an art and a craft. It’s not something that you can package, reproduce like Xerox, and sell to the highest bidder. An education is not something that you are simply handed. Deliverology is a hoax, whether you call it ACE or you call it by its real name.

Chancellor Wants to Speed Graduation But Doesn't Want to Spend More Money on Instruction, Even When Offered the Money

2010-02-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

In explaining why the Chancellor opposes AB 656, which would tax the oil companies, who aren't now being assessed an extraction tax (the only place in the country where they aren't), the Contra Costa Times, February 8, 2010 reported:

"Even the Cal State system, which would be the main beneficiary of the tax, has had trouble backing it. The 23-campus university has bristled at the requirement that it spend the money on instruction.

“‘We have things that need to be done that aren't just about hiring faculty,’ said Karen Zamarripa, Cal State's assistant vice chancellor for advocacy and state relations.”

Of all things! Instruction. Imagine that. We don't want more money for instruction, even if we don't have to spend any less on anything else because of the bill, even though this would just be more money purely for instruction. Why, if we got more money purely for instruction and were forced to spend it on that alone, can't you see how this would distort the CSU system? Can't you see that this constitutes sufficient grounds for us to oppose the bill?

What do you think higher education is principally about, teaching and learning (and related scholarship and research)? My lord. What planet are you from? We in the Chancellor's Office, why we have much better things to spend the taxpayer's money on such as half a billion or more on a software program (PeopleSoft) (that doesn't even work very well and works less well than its predecessor), hiring outside consultants like Sir Michael Barber from England (who is not a teacher and knows nothing about teaching and learning) to teach us about teaching and learning (why would we ask our own faculty about such esoterica?), paying outside lobbyists (which even the UC system doesn't do) to lobby for us in Sacramento, funding the free housing and cars that top administrators get (after all, the work they do is so very hard), giving large sums to ex-presidents for unspecified work (after all, the work they used to do was so very hard), arranging (sweetheart) deals and further privatizing the system? Why, if you gave us more money that had to be spent on instruction, we might not be able to reduce further the courses we presently require for general education and we might not be able to reduce the number of faculty further.

Globalization and Education as a Commodity

2010-02-08T20:02:00.000-08:00

This is an essay about the struggle in NYC over the state and future of higher education. Those of us who are seeing this fight unfold in California will find it unerringly familiar. It was written in Summer 2001 and appears in the "Clarion." It reads as if it could easily have been written yesterday. I have boldfaced certain passages.

It bears repeating that the efforts, by all too many public officials and by high administration figures, to implement neoliberal policies - unleashing market forces, dismantling (starving) public goods and replacing them with private interest and private goods (aka privatization), standardization (Taylorization), attacking and destroying tenure (job security) and replacing tenured ranks with contingent labor (lecturers), and replacing face-to-face learning with online, distance learning - preceded the current budget crisis.

They are now seizing on the budget crisis, which neoliberal policies brought upon us in the first place, to justify implementing their draconian agenda.

One of neoliberalism's original founding figures in the political arena, Britain's former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, liked to roll over those who opposed her with the slogan "There Is No Alternative" (TINA). Keep this in mind as we hear and read the neoliberals of our state (and their imported representatives such as Sir Michael "Deliverology" Barber) tell us that there is no alternative.

By William Tabb, Queens College and the Grad Center

When people think about globalization, most focus on sweatshop labor and the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas. It is easy to understand the race to the bottom that results as factory workers in one place face more intense competition from lower-cost labor on the other side of the world. College teachers would do well, however, to include their own future prospects as they consider the impact of globalization over the coming years. The university will be a very different place in another decade or two, and what it will look like depends to a large degree on what version of globalization wins out.

Today we are often told that education must be made more efficient by being forced into the market model, moving away from the traditional concept of education as a publicly provided social good. This neoliberalism—the belief that today’s problems are best addressed by the market, and that government regulation and the public sector should both be as minimal as possible—is not unique to debates over education: it dominates economics, politics and ideology in the U.S. and most of the world.

There are three elements involved in the neoliberal model of education: making the provision of education more cost-efficient by commodifying the product; testing performance by standardizing the experience in a way that allows for multiple-choice testing of results; and focusing on marketable skills. The three elements are combined in different policies—cutbacks in the public sector, closing “inefficient” programs that don’t directly meet business needs for a trained workforce, and the use of computers and distance learning, in which courses and degrees are packaged for delivery over the Internet by for-profit corporations.

Market Mantra: Cut, Cut, Cut

Corporate provision of education will seem increasingly appealing as traditional schools are deprived of funds. The corporate model stresses rewarding winners and letting losers adjust. “In the 1990s U.S. companies cut costs, jettisoned marginal efforts, bolstered internal cooperation and formed strategic alliances. Hold on to your hats—universities are set to do the same.” This was how Robert Buderi, writing last year in Technology Review, began “From the Ivory Tower to the Bottom Line,” one of many essays on how today’s university doesn’t jibe with today’s competitive environment, and requires market-oriented reorganization. Buderi makes clear that the kind of selective excellence being pitched in the CUNY Board of Trustees’ Master Plan is part of the corporatization of the university which, like globalization itself, is being touted as both inevitable and desirable.

What is the rationale for this program of cut, cut, cut? Why has it been considered necessary for public education to tighten its belt, year after year? The drive for “market solutions” is not the result of some force of nature, as its proponents pretend. It is a policy decision to abandon the needs of the poor and leave them to shift for themselves. It is the same logic that forces the poorest countries of the world into the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, with their drastic cuts in public services. The Third World may have been hit first and hardest, but the same pattern can be seen in New York State, in the de-funding of CUNY and the disinvestments in public education as a whole.

Justice Leland DeGrasse’s landmark ruling of January 2001 in fact declared that the state has deprived New York City’s children of the “sound, basic education” guaranteed by the state constitution. “The majority of the city’s public school students leave high school unprepared for more than low-paying work, unprepared for college and unprepared for the duties placed upon them by a democratic society.” CUNY faculty know this all too well as we are blamed and penalized for not being able to make up for the years of deprivation, thanks to these same officials. This might seem to be a local problem—except that public education is under attack in many places, as part of a neoliberal strategy that uses reform as a cover for cutback.

In practice, the principal objective of such reforms is to begin a process of privatizing education by starving public-sector schools in the name of forcing them to compete. The Civil Society Network for Public Education in the Americas, a group that brings together South, Central and North American workers in education, notes that “in developing countries that apply austerity measures, this system has generally led to the reduction of educational resources for the poorest regions.”

Serge Jonque

Educators and other public workers joined FTAA protests in Quebec.

Here is where globalization enters the picture. The proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (the recent target of protests by educators and others in Quebec) would demand equal treatment for corporate providers of public services. Thus, a company like Edison, whose bid to take over several public schools in New York was rejected by a vote of parents, could appeal to an international tribunal and sue the city for being treated “unfairly.” Government “subsidies” to CUNY could be challenged as providing an “unfair” advantage over for-profit companies that want to offer competitive educational services. These agreements define educational services as a tradable commodity and so require it to be treated like any other product.

Taking Away Control

The idea of wresting academic control from the faculty is at the heart of such business models. It adds up to educational Taylorism—treating the art of teaching in the same way that Henry Ford treated the manufacture of automobiles, breaking skilled labor down into a series of lower-skilled tasks, assigning some tasks to machines and imposing strict managerial control over the rest.

One important tool for transforming the educational workplace is distance learning. The idea is to develop learning modules in which the knowledge of the faculty is extracted and implanted into on-line programs owned and controlled by management. This requires the kind of standardization that typifies the commodified model of education: standardized testing and straight-jacket learning plans. Already imposed on high school teachers, the higher-education counterpart can be found in new corporate providers of college degrees. The plan is to take knowledge from the heads and hearts of teachers and put it into CDs and online courses, creating an interchangeable education that can be as standardized as Starbucks or Wal-Mart.

Fearful that such new “brands” such as Phoenix University and other providers will drive them from the distance-learning market, many colleges and universities have created their own for-profit subsidiaries. Such education can be sold globally. Distance is no longer an obstacle. Education markets merge as distance becomes irrelevant to this commodified credentialing.

“For online education to become mainstream is kind of a depressing thought, because it is such a crappy experience,” Marc Eisenstadt, a distance learning researcher in the UK recently told The Wall Street Journal. “The bottom line is that learning online is a soul-destroying experience. . . . It’s always second-best” to face-to-face learning. But if governments won’t pay for first-best, most students will end in private-company college “equivalent” facilities with interchangeable adjunct instructors teaching out of corporate-designed lesson plans, or being “educated” by a computer screen and a one-size-fits-all course package from some other for-profit corporation. It is CUNY students who will be relegated to such second- or third-class choices. The children of the affluent will attend traditional colleges and universities. This scenario is not far away if we let current trends continue.

Destroying the quality of public-sector education is necessary for the full marketization of education. There is ample polling evidence that the politics that pays for tax cuts with service cuts is not favored by most Americans and other citizens around the world. What corporate globalization has done is tell us there is no alternative. But if we think government exists to serve all of the people, not just the rich and powerful, the neoliberal model must be resisted. This struggle goes on globally, but it will be decided in a series of struggles which are local. What is happening to CUNY is not unique. The bumper sticker that tells us to “Think Globally – Act Locally” is good advice.

The PSC is on to something. The union’s new focus on the need to rebuild CUNY as a great university recognizes that it is inadequate to oppose marketization without offering an alternative. Our alternative is a counter-understanding of the goals of education, as enhancing critical citizenship, personal development and the participation in culture that is the right of all students in a democracy. Instead of a race to the bottom and growing inequality, a healthy public sector can redistribute opportunity so that we can have a leveling up. This, after all, is the historic mission of the City University. Our union is leading the way in defending public education, and with it a democratic vision of the future of our city and global society. The PSC’s success will depend in significant measure on our participation.

One Reason Why Online Classes Aren't Some Kind of Panacea

2010-02-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

This comment on the CFANet at Cal Poly Pomona was in response to administration proposals that we facilitate graduation and deal with overcrowded classes and budget cuts by going online with more classes.

Reprinted by permission:

Here's my own personal history lesson. In 1976, yes, that's a long time ago, I graduated with my B.S. in biology from Cal Poly Pomona. My father, a design engineer, sent me to CPP because he wanted me to be an engineer and CPP engineers were hired over grads from other institutions due to the polytechnic, learn by doing, practice. In other words, he wanted me to get a job and move on. I didn't want to be an engineer, I wanted to be an environmental scientist and later a high school biology teacher.

So I majored in biology. My educational experience was amazing, I felt so prepared to enter the job market.

Dad was right, I graduated and was hired right away by Engineering- Science/ Ralph M. Parsons where I worked for 5 years as an environmental scientist. They straight away told me that I was hired because I had hands-on experience from a polytechnic university. When I left to be a teacher (with my M.A. and teaching credential also from CPP), I was told right away again, that my educational background made me the preferred candidate.

I was hired in a recession in the 1970's, it was a tough time then too (not as tough as now) and the competition was great. But I had the edge over others to be a promising employee. We need to be that same resource in these tough times and that CANNOT happen on-line in science or in education (I can't speak for other areas).

Now, in addition to teaching at CPP, I work with the Pomona USD [Unified School District] and interview and recommend teaching candidates. We tend to hire CPP candidates over others because many (not all) candidates from other institutions quit within 2-3 years. CPP candidates do not quit because they have a better preparation due to the polytechnic, hands-on pedagogy of our institution.

I was not as erudite in my message as Jared, but that's the practical view.

Forge ahead, all!

Stephanie Saccomen

Cal Poly Provost on Why Administrators Are Sacrosanct

2010-02-07T07:23:00.000-08:00

At Cal Poly Pomona, CFA representatives and other concerned faculty have been meeting with our provost about the budget cuts and the programs he is trying to eliminate (such as Physics) in order, he claims, to save money.

The fact that academic services are facing more severe cuts than administrative services has provoked a lot of consternation among faculty. How can so many highly paid VPs be justified when classes are being cut, faculty are losing their jobs, faculty pay raises gone by the wayside, furloughs instituted, and students can't get into classes that they need to graduate? The provost's rationales for this disproportionality have been varied.

At one point he said that they have to maintain the size of the administrative ranks because of "regulatory requirements." When asked what those "regulatory requirements" were, his answer was that the university needs to report annually to the federal government the allotment of personnel and compensation and the university hasn't yet gotten back an adverse federal response on that report. In other words, because the federal government hasn't said to him that the university has too many administrators being paid too much money, the university is in regulatory compliance!

I'm reminded of what the Bush White House (aka Bush Regime) did when it informed a select group of Senators and Congressional Representatives in 2002 that it was a) waterboarding detainees, and b) wiretapping everybody in the U.S. As a result of that meeting, since they let some people in Congress in on their dirty secrets, they could then tell everyone that they were in "regulatory compliance!"

Our provost has also said that the numbers and compensation of administrators at Cal Poly Pomona are similar to peer institutions. This is rather like saying that we have similar numbers of people suffering from AIDS as other comparable countries, so our numbers are fine.

He has further justified the number of administrators by saying that someone is needed to keep the buildings running and the bulbs replaced. When it was pointed out to him that he was conflating maintenance and clerical tasks with administrators, who don't screw in bulbs, he said that someone has to supervise the people who screw in the bulbs.

Which provokes the question: "How many administrators do you need to screw the faculty and students?"

Another Rip-Off: Privatizing Student Payments

2010-02-05T20:40:00.000-08:00

This just in. Just like Ticketmaster's "Convenience Fees" Rip-Off, Cal Poly Pomona's announced that it's turning over fee and tuition payments to a Third-Party Vendor. (CSU Long Beach is also doing this and it's quite likely, other CSUs too.) There is no good reason why Cal Poly Pomona's Cashiers Office can't continue to receive student payments directly, without enriching a private corporation, in this case, CASHNet, by over $1.5 million (assuming that 60% of our 20,000 students pay by credit card).

This is adding insult to injury at a time when students have to pay more but get less: the administration is tacking on even more charges that do nothing for the students. Another good reason why the people in charge, the privateers, need to find an honest job elsewhere (or perhaps retire with their unearned pensions) and stop ripping off students and the community for private interests.

From: Student Accounting & Cashiering Services
Date: Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:14 PM
Subject: IMPORTANT CHANGE ON CREDIT CARD PAYMENTS
To: students@csupomona.edu

Cal Poly Pomona is introducing a new credit card payment process beginning in Spring 2010 which will impact how you pay for both registration fees and fees that you currently pay in person or by mail for transcripts, GWT, and graduation applications. Online payments will significantly reduce the time and inconvenience of paying these fees either in person or by mail.

Registration Fees and Tuition Payments

Beginning with the Spring 2010 quarter, credit card payments for registration fees and tuition made online via BroncoDirect will use a new third party vendor, CASHNet/Smartpay. CASHNet will accept MasterCard, Discover and American Express (Visa will no longer be accepted). With this new service, the Cashier’s Office will no longer accept credit card payments in person for registration fees and tuition.

To provide this online service, CASHNet will charge a convenience fee of 2.9% for registration fees and tuition. As an example, if your fees are $949.64 for part-time enrollment, a fee of $27.54 will be added by CASHNet to your transaction.

The following payment options will continue to be available for payment of registration fees and tuition::

· Cash at the cashiers’ windows

· Checks at the cashiers’ windows or by mail

· Money order at the cashiers’ windows or by mail

· Electronic checks or e-checks via BroncoDirect (no convenience fee)

· Installment Payment Plans

Parking, Housing, Transcripts, Graduation Application, Graduate Writing Test (GWT) and Other Fees

The Cashiers’ Office will continue to accept credit card payments for parking, housing both online and in person at no additional cost to you. For your convenience, you will be able to make the following online payments by credit card beginning in April. (We will email you once these are available online.)

· Transcripts

· Graduation Application fees

· Graduate Writing Test (GWT) fees

· Orientation

· Enrollment Deposit

Questions regarding this new service should be directed to Student Accounting and Cashiering Services, sacs@csupomona.edu or (909) 869-2010. Thank you.

Student Accounting and Cashiering Services

What Shall We Do? "Privatize" He Said

2010-02-04T20:04:00.000-08:00

When Cal Poly Pomona President Michael Ortiz was asked by a student this past summer what could be done about the budget crisis, he replied: "Privatize. It seems the only way."

In light of this, and since Sir Michael Barber, last of the Tony Blair Administration, is now being touted as the solution to our ills, I came across this posting from a British website named "Campaign for Public Ownership" as I searched the term "privateer," a word that I thought would convey the nature of those whose solution to all ills, perceived and illusory, is privatization. For such people, things that are working just fine are to be broken by their "fixes." As an illustration of this fact, the effort to restructure the university predates the budget crisis, an effort by the top administration that they dubbed "Prioritization and Recovery" on my campus. The budget crisis is now being cited as the rationale for restructuring.

As it turns out, the term "privateer" already exists, prior to my coining it. (Alas, the advantages and disadvantages of the web!) Its denotative definition, however, does not convey the pirate-like connotation that I am using the term for.

This excerpt from the Campaign for Public Ownership is from last summer:

"[T]he leading parties ignore public opinion on the most important issues of the day.

"Take public ownership. Despite opinion polls showing a clear majority in favour of renationalising the railways, not one of our leading parties even considers the measure.

"The neoliberal, pro-privatisation model has never been so unpopular, yet here we have an election where the four leading parties, according to opinion polls, can only offer more of the same.

"Labour offers little for supporters of public ownership - the Labour government, despite Britain's disastrous experience of privatised railways, has been pushing for other European countries to 'liberalise' their excellent domestic rail services.

"The prospect of Virgin Trains, First Great Western and Arriva being allowed to run services in countries like Belgium is too depressing for words, but if Labour has its way, it could be happening a few years down the line.

"In their Euro manifesto, the staunchly neoliberal Conservatives boast of being 'strong defenders of the single market' and say that their aim is 'working to open up new markets.'

"At the top of the party's list in the South East region in the poll, is MEP Daniel Hannan, an enthusiastic privateer.

"In a recent appearance on Fox News in the US, Hannan claimed the NHS was a 60-year 'mistake,' which made people 'iller' and he urged US viewers not to support plans for socialised health care.

"The Liberal Democrats are singing from the same pro-competition hymn sheet. While the party did call for the renationalisation of Britain's railways in its 2005 manifesto, it has embraced a more 'free-market' approach since the elevation to leadership of the Blairite banker's son Nick Clegg."

For the rest of this entertaining essay, see here.

Share Your Experiences/Observations: There's Richness in Many Voices and Power in Numbers

2010-01-31T20:47:00.000-08:00

The Master White Paper intends to reflect the richness of the voices from our twenty three campuses' populations of faculty, students, and staff. Your comments here as well as suggestions for materials to post on this site (such as relevant articles) can become a deep pool from which we can draw for the MWP. Please contribute, even if you think it's just a small part. Together these contributions, whether small or not, add up to something potentially immense.

"Doing More with Less"? Cold Fusion and Education

2010-01-28T11:42:00.000-08:00

In today's LA Times, January 28, 2010, Carla Rivera reports on the Board of Trustees latest meeting in which they announced their plans to speed up graduation. According to the article, the consensus opinion among the BOT and high administration officials is that the university needs to remind students of why they're in school. The problem isn't that students can't get the classes that they need and that many have not been well-prepared for college level work. The problem is that we've been too "laissez-faire" with dawdling students. The problem isn't drastic budget cuts, fewer faculty members, larger classes, higher fees, and fewer classes. No, the problem is wayward students who don't know how to navigate college and are spending too much time taking classes they don't need. As if that were the main problem!

The notion of doing more with less, which is the code phrase for budget cuts, furloughs, layoffs, program elimination, and restructuring from administrators, reminds me of the notion of cold fusion: that you can get energy from nothing.

From the story:

Students attending California State University may be in for a dose of tough love as they are asked to choose majors more quickly, be more disciplined about attending class and be willing to sacrifice family time and outside activities to earn their degrees, several campus presidents said Wednesday.

They spoke during a meeting of Cal State's Board of Trustees at which university officials formally announced an ambitious initiative to raise graduation rates, particularly for students who are from minority groups and low-income households.

Cal State is setting a goal of increasing its six-year graduation rate 8% by 2016, raising it to 54%, as well as cutting in half the achievement gap in degree completion by under-represented minority students. Each of the giant university's 23 campuses is scheduled to have a plan in place by this fall.

Although each campus will implement a plan that fits the special needs of its student body, some common themes emerged Wednesday: Students will be given more individualized support such as counseling, more information about required course work and resources such as online tracking of their progress.

But the students will have to be more focused about their goals and understand that, given the university's fiscal constraints, the longer they stay in school, the less opportunity there will be for others to enroll, the presidents said.

To some extent, campus administrators have been "enablers" for many students, allowing them to dawdle in choosing majors and progressing toward their degrees, Cal State L.A. President James M. Rosser said in an interview.

"We're looking at how we've done our business and whether we've become too laissez faire," he said. "In high school they have workshops on how to get to college. We want to tell students how to get out of college. That might mean some intrusive advisement.

CSU Executives Benefits Summary

2010-01-27T10:47:00.000-08:00

An Excerpt from the 2006 version of the recruitment brochure used by the CSU to attract new executives.

As you read this, it might be useful to keep in mind the following from our Call for a Master White Paper:

"In particular, this MWP would call for a dramatic cutback in the number, power, pay and purpose of administrative positions within the system based on the principle that a) in times of crisis the most important functions must be safeguarded - such as teaching, scholarship, and access for students - functions that are at the heart of the universities, and the least important functions - such as the burgeoning and overpaid high administrative posts - should be cut first, and b) even if we were not in the throes of a budget crisis, the growth of administrative posts in number, their share of resources, their agenda, and their power vis a vis faculty and students in recent decades and years has been detrimental to the CSU system and its official purpose of being a part (along with the UC system) of providing the best possible higher educational system for California.

"We would propose, in contrast to the prevailing ethic that high administrative posts, such as Chancellor and Presidents, must be paid very large salaries in order to attract (i.e., bribe) the best talent to serve in education, while faculty are expected to serve principally for the love of education, that these high administrative posts be filled with those whose first and foremost purpose is to serve education and not primarily for the power, prestige, pay and perks. We will push for the same ethic that faculty are expected to live by to be explicitly the criteria for administrators and that the pay for high administrators be cut substantially and be tied to a formula relative to faculty pay. We expect that such a change would attract a very different kind of person to these administrative posts and that the relationship between administration and faculty will become cooperative rather than adversarial, benefiting the system, the state and the nation as a whole."

The California State University
January 2006

The Benefits of Working at the CSU

This summary of executive perquisites, relocation benefits, and general benefits provides an overview of systemwide benefits generally available to executives of the California State University (CSU).

Executive Perquisites

Trustee policy recognizes the extensive business-related, public relations, and institutional development obligations of executives and provides special executive perquisites in recognition of these obligations. Campus foundations may supplement perquisites for presidents based on existing campus practice and local community preferences.

Executive perquisites may be taxable income to the recipient, and executives are encouraged to seek individual consultation with competent tax advisors regarding the potential impact of executive benefits and allowances.

Housing and Housing Allowances

The CSU campus presidents are provided with an official CSU residence where available. If an official residence is not available, a housing allowance is provided to assist the campus president in securing a residence. Housing allowances vary by campus.

Automobile and Automobile Allowances

The CSU campus presidents have a vehicle available for business use, and the campus provides automobile insurance, maintenance, and gasoline expenses for that vehicle. In lieu of a university vehicle, the CSU campus presidents have the option of electing an automobile
allowance of $1000 per month. Automobile allowances may be available to executives in the Chancellor’s Office.

Entertainment Allowance

Campus presidents receive an entertainment allowance of $300 per month from the state’s general fund to defray entertainment costs incurred in the course of conducting official business and institutional development activities. Additionally, funds are also available from the state general fund for community relations expenses. Executives in the Office of the Chancellor have access to funds for community related expenses. Campus foundations may supplement general fund
entertainment allowances and community relations activities.

AB 656

2010-01-25T09:40:00.000-08:00

The following is from CFA Headlines concerning AB 656 which would have imposed an oil and gas severance tax and direct these monies to fund higher education in California, thus providing higher ed with a stable source of funding. California is the only state that does not tax the oil and gas companies for their extracting these precious state resources. Given the record profits of oil companies, in the billions of dollars quarterly, and the desperate state that higher ed is in, the status quo is manifestly unjust. The same kind of pressure brought on the state and the board of regents that students and faculty brought in the demonstrations of last term and that led to Schwarzenegger's announcement that he would not cut the UC and CSU budgets further is what needs to be broadened and escalated.

“Those protests on the U.C. campuses were the tipping point,” the governor’s chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, said in an interview after the [Governor's 1/6/10] speech. “Our university system is going to get the support it deserves.”

AB 656 HALTED BY APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE

On Thursday, [1/21/10] the [California] Assembly Appropriations Committee took action on CFA-sponsored Assembly Bill 656 that essentially defeats the bill for this legislative cycle.

The committee deleted the oil and gas severance tax portion of the bill earmarked for public higher education and replaced it with a simple reporting requirement. The amendments require the state Board of Equalization to annually report to the legislature the amount of revenue that would be generated for public higher education if the oil and gas tax was implemented.

The inability to garner a two-thirds vote that would have been required for Assembly passage – only possible with the support of Assembly Republicans – coupled with the bill’s potential costs to the state general fund, directly led to this outcome.

When AB 656, authored by Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, was first introduced, CFA understood efforts to enact this bill would be a multi-year process.

CFA leaders expressed disappointment that the bill was not approved as originally proposed, but stressed how critical the months of lobbying and grassroots efforts by faculty, students and community members in supporting this measure were to influencing state policymakers about the need to fund public higher education.

The dialogue created by this collective action was instrumental in the Governor’s decision to increase the CSU budget by at least $305 million in his January budget proposal.

“Many in the legislature didn’t expect us to move AB 656 as far as we did,” stated CFA President Lillian Taiz. “We have not given up on our efforts to provide a stable source of funding for the CSU, and will continue to forcefully and effectively pursue avenues that will provide us these needed funds.”

Taiz added, “AB 656, coupled with our years of efforts to inform the public about the problems facing CSU, has placed higher education at the forefront of the state’s concerns. We will continue our efforts to ensure the long term health of the CSU is not sacrificed in the name of short-term economic expediency.”

CFA is continuing legislative efforts to provide oversight and accountability of the $1.34 billion in hidden funds held by CSU campus auxiliaries and foundations. The bi-partisan SB 330, authored by Senator Leland Yee - a reintroduction of last year’s SB 218 - was unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and is awaiting a vote by the full Senate next week.

Deliver Us From Deliverology

2010-01-21T14:55:00.000-08:00

Updated: 1/22/10 at 2:35 pm PST

In late November 2009, when the edict from Chancellor Reed came down that the CSU would be adopting Sir Michael Barber's Deliverology, a conversation on my campus' CFA email list ensued. The discussion prompted me to contact John Seddon whose critique of Barber from his book on Public Service Sector Policies in England can be viewed here. Some of the rest of that elist conversation I plan to post here on this site.

The two below are the first ones I've selected from that discussion. The first comes from John Edlund, the second from Nicholas Van Glahn. Please weigh in on this, as some of you already have begun to on this site, either by sharing an observation or raising a question.

Entering Phantom Logs About Phantom Logs

"It has been a while since I have read Solzhenitsyn but at some point in The Gulag Archipelago he is assigned to a labor camp that cuts timber and rolls the logs into the river to float down to the sawmill. The camp has production quotas that are physically impossible to meet, but politically impossible not to meet. Thus the camp commander meets the quotas by reporting phantom logs.

"Everyone in the supply chain understands this perfectly well, so the sawmill eliminates some of the phantom logs through various accounting fictions, but to meet its own quota reports phantom lumber made from the phantom logs. Downstream, construction units get some of the phantom lumber off the books by reporting damage and loss, but also build phantom houses out of phantom lumber. It's crazy, but it is the system.

"My reading of articles about Deliverology so far indicates that it results in a very similar system, where managers face losing their jobs if they cannot meet the targets imposed from above. It actually seems like administrators have more to fear from this than faculty, but it doesn't sound good." - John Edlund

"What makes this [Deliverology] obnoxious is that this presupposes that a degree is a product to be delivered more efficiently. It is not! A degree is something one earns. I understand wanting to make sure we retain students and find new ways to help students earn those degrees in the face of a paucity of resources, but you can not make a demand that a certain percentage of people must get degrees. I can't see how such a demand will not inevitably lead to administrators (and perhaps faculty with enough 'gentle pressure') making more and more concessions on curriculum and rigor." -- Nicholas Van Glahn

First Time Visitors

2010-01-20T19:29:00.000-08:00

If this is your first visit to this site, the Call for participating in the Master White Paper on the CSU System can be found here. An invitation to share your experiences can be found here.

On "Deliverology," in Highlander, UC Riverside's Paper

2010-01-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

State universities to adopt 'Deliverology'
By: Shawn Bakshi
Posted: 1/19/10

CSU Chancellor Dr. Charles B. Reed announced earlier this month that the CSU system has adopted a plan to close achievement gaps and raise graduation rates through a system founded and coined by Sir Michael Barber of England: Deliverology. Deliverology was first introduced by Barber during Tony Blair's second term in England in order to improve performance and goal-meeting in the UK's public sector.

This new system focuses on an apparently simple approach to managing accountability and reaching goals set by education officials in the CSU system. In essence, Deliverology seeks to improve education by forcing educators to clarify their goals through identifying problem areas, developing a strategy to improve those areas, and setting up benchmarks in order to monitor their progress.

...

The system is termed Deliverology as the perceived end result of the system is to deliver results on a scale which can be constantly measured.

In England during what some Britons have called "the reign of Sir Barber," Deliverology seemed effective in increasing literacy rates of children 11 and younger. Proponents of this new system also claim that Deliverology will work in the CSU system in the same fashion it did in England's public sector as a main impetus for the program centers on the idea that people want better public services but are rarely willing to pay more for them.

Not everyone is on board with the Chancellor, however, as some CSU professors have voiced their concerns with what they feel may be an arbitrary change to a system which has been in place for so long.

"Deliverology would be a disaster for the CSU… We are coming up with a counter-plan to that of the Chancellor for the CSU system that goes beyond just a critique of Deliverology; a Master White Paper that will set forth, among other things, a very different vision for the CSU system," said California State Polytechnic University, Pomona sociology professor Dennis Loo, according to The Poly Post.

For the rest of the story, see here.

New York Times: Ballot Issues Attest to Anger in California

2010-01-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

As today's NY Times article indicates, the mood in California is angry and open to change, including radical change. The CSU administration wants to introduce radical change that will transform the CSU system, but not in a good way. The Master White Paper for the CSU system that we propose, on the other hand, is needed in such a time in order to point the way forward to a very different vision in the face of this crisis.

January 10, 2010

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — From San Diego to Mount Shasta, voters are expressing mounting disgust over California’s fiscal meltdown and deteriorating services, and they are offering scores of voter initiatives that seek to change the way the state does business.

Over 30 such initiatives — among over 60 total initiatives so far — are now wending their way toward the ballot box. Every day, it seems another vexed voter adds a proposal to the fray.

Some verge on the radical, like one to establish the state’s first constitutional convention in over a century, to rewrite California’s most fundamental legislative rules. There are initiatives in circulation that would reduce the time the Legislature is in session, punish legislators for late budgets and criminalize “false statements about legislative acts.”

Other states, of course, are also suffering through red ink, but none have quite the same mechanism as California’s to let voters get involved with the process. Despite the fact that past initiatives helped get California into its budget crisis — forcing spending in some areas while limiting taxation in others — the pileup of new ones suggests that many voters still believe they hold the solution to the state’s mess. Few seem to believe that elected officials are up to the job.

Some initiatives, in fact, could even limit the initiative process itself, or erase old ones.

The number of initiatives so far, while high, is not the largest in history. But the rage that underlies them has not been seen in decades, said lawmakers, pollsters, political consultants and the proponents.

“The feeling is one of revolt,” said John Grubb, the campaign director for Repair California, a coalition behind a pair of initiatives to call a constitutional convention. “And come January, they will start negotiating the budget again, and there will be more fear and loathing. The feeling here is that California state government is broken, and we need not a little fix, but a big fix.”

…

The public university system, once the crown jewel of California, is struggling with layoffs, tuition increases and outright student and faculty revolts. In the public secondary schools, classroom sizes have swelled and program cuts are rampant.

And everything costs more: sales taxes went up last year, as did many user fees.

On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released his latest executive budget, with pay reductions for state workers and more draconian service cuts.

California voters are distinctly unimpressed with the roles played in the crisis by the governor and legislators. Many lawmakers cater to the fringe elements of their respective political parties and are beholden to special interests that finance their campaigns. A paltry 13 percent of registered voters approve of the job the Legislature does, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

And so the efforts to take matters into their own hands.

“It is a very California moment,” said Robert Hertzberg, co-chairman of California Forward, a group of business, political and academic leaders that seeks to change the state’s budget processes. “It is almost like there are a bunch of weapons on the battlefield, and the bullets will be the funding of these initiatives.”

...

The initiatives concerning the state budget are most in the spotlight, particularly the one that calls for a convention to rewrite the state’s constitution. Delegates to such a convention would quite likely change the law requiring a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to pass a budget, and they could impose limitations on the initiative process and undo earlier initiatives that require spending for certain programs.

A constitutional convention could also alter the balance of power between state and local governments by giving cities greater control over their portion of the state budget. Many critics of the current system deplore Sacramento’s centralized spending power and policy making for issues like education and local public safety.

Other ballot efforts would put stringent spending limits on the government, require a rainy-day fund and end $2 billion in corporate tax breaks.

Much of the anger in the ballot ideas is aimed straight at the Legislature. There are proposals to cut the pay of lawmakers in half and to prohibit them from voting on legislation that would have a financial impact on their contributors. (One that would force them to get drug tests recently failed to pass muster.)

Gabriella Holt, president of Citizens for California Reform, an advocacy group behind proposals to cut the pay of the Legislature and shorten its term, said, “We decided we should put the question to voters.”

“I think people are very, very angry and very, very frustrated,” Ms. Holt added, “and they want to send a message that they want to take back their government.”

…

“Lots of people are unhappy, but for so many different and conflicting reasons that it is hard to envision where we will end up,” said Bruce E. Cain, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. “It could be a chaotic jumble.”

From Science Magazine: Destruction At Florida State University

2010-01-10T06:41:00.000-08:00

Science 1 January 2010:
Vol. 327. no. 5961, pp. 24 - 25
DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5961.24

Recession Hits Some Sciences Hard At Florida State University
Richard A. Kerr

Philip Froelich, 63, is the tenured Francis Eppes Professor of Oceanography at Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee. He won't be much longer. Despite a distinguished 31-year career as a researcher and administrator, he will be laid off next May. And despite a positive external evaluation within the past year, his department — much diminished by layoffs — will be no more, folded along with the geological sciences department into a new department dominated by meteorology. "Why would you cut Flip Froelich? It doesn't make any sense," says geologist Michael Perfit of the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville.

It's all about money, of course. When the cash-strapped Florida state legislature recently slashed funds for higher education for the third straight year, big across-the-board cuts spilled down through individual state university budgets. But at FSU—one of the "big four" Florida state schools—the fiscal crisis has turned into a ravaging torrent for a few departments, most of them in the sciences.

In the end, unlike at other universities, FSU administrators balanced their budget by firing many faculty members, including many tenured professors like Froelich. That decimated the geological sciences, oceanography, and anthropology departments. "The layoffs at FSU have truly devastated faculty morale across the campus," says anthropologist Cheryl Ward of Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, who left FSU before the cuts. They "caused lasting harm to science programs."

But to the FSU administration, slashing small departments that were far from supporting themselves was the only way to avoid permanently undermining education across the university. The deep, targeted cuts were unfortunately the best option, says FSU Provost Lawrence Abele. "I don't believe in cutting across the board; that weakens everything," he says.

There's no disagreement on the 39,000-student FSU campus that the budget situation has gone from serious to dire. The big, tax-generating housing bubble burst early in Florida, which has no state income tax to cushion the loss. The Florida legislature cut the state university system's annual $380 million budget by $82 million over 2007 to 2010—$55 million of it in this academic year. That budget, plus tuition, pays all salaries in the state system. And at slightly over $3100 last year (up 15% this year), tuition at Florida state universities was the lowest in the nation, notes Joseph Travis, FSU's dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "We're trying to run a Major League Baseball operation on a AAA or AA [minor league] budget," he says.

Across-the-board cuts "could cripple the institutional missions, starving everybody," says Travis, so "you do elaborate cost-benefit analyses. Which of the programs are the weakest?" FSU President T. K. Wetherell made the criteria for judging the strength of a department or
program explicit: student credit hours generated, degrees awarded, contract and grant expenditures, and tuition collected, all on a per-faculty as well as an absolute basis.

The state legislature funds FSU "based on enrollment," Travis notes. The departments of geological sciences, meteorology, and oceanography came in at the bottom of 15 Arts and Sciences departments with about 6000 student credit hours per year each, according to Travis. Anthropology was fourth from the bottom with 11,000 hours; English, for example, had 50,000. "Sciences never pay for themselves," says Travis. "There's always a subsidy arrangement" in which larger departments in effect help support smaller ones. But in the third straight year of budget cutting, "the subsidy gets harder to find," says Travis.

Targeted departments and programs within departments took heavy hits. Geological Sciences and Oceanography will be merged with Meteorology at the end of this academic year to form a new department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Froelich thinks the merger is a reasonable idea but says "the university should have done it 2 to 5 years ago," when more favorable economic conditions would have given any merged department better prospects. Anthropology barely survived elimination but will be diminished and restructured.

The numerous and often focused faculty firings have been much more controversial. Of the faculty laid off from 2007 to 2010 in the 10,700-faculty Florida State University System, 60% were laid off from FSU's approximately 1750 faculty alone, according to data collected by FSU faculty members and provided by Froelich. Approximately 43 tenured or tenure-track faculty were laid off across the system. But according to FSU English professor and Faculty Senate President Eric Walker, 35 of those 43 "tenure-line" faculty were lost at FSU.

Of about 21 tenured faculty let go across the system, all or all but one were at FSU. The College of Education was hit hard, but 10 of that 21 came out of the College of Arts and Sciences, all of them scientists in the relatively small departments of geological sciences, oceanography, and anthropology. Oceanography, at least, had just this spring received a "glowing" evaluation from the university that included an external reviewer, according to Froelich.

Elsewhere in the Florida state system, faculty fared better. At UF, "we did not cut a lot of existing people," says Provost Joseph Glover. "We did cut a lot of vacant and newly vacant positions. And we've spread [the cuts] over a period of time, [so] this year we only have left a small amount to do." The geological sciences department was on the block for a while, notes Perfit, its chair. The problem, as he sees it, was that "we were just small. Some of the best [geoscience] schools in the nation are being cut just because they're small" and would therefore seem to create only small losses to the university. His department survived, though for now the university is using stimulus money to pay everyone in the department.

FSU was the only university in the system to lean so heavily on faculty layoffs, but FSU's Travis still sees no way around that. As to Oceanography in particular, "the discussion was never about ... value of research," he writes in an e-mail. "The discussion was always about
whether we could continue to afford to subsidize" a department generating so few undergraduate credit hours and relatively few graduate degrees. And in 40 years the legislature has never come back and restored funds it cut from the budget, he says. Other Florida universities like UF may be using stimulus money to avoid extensive faculty firings until budget cuts are restored or tuition increases accumulate, he says, but "we at FSU chose not to take this kind of chance."

Higher Education in California - Time for a New Master Plan II?

2010-01-09T21:31:00.000-08:00

The upshot of what Mark Shapiro points out below about William Tierney's January 3, 2010 LA Times Op Ed - in which Tierney calls for replacing the Master Plan with a "high cost/high aid" system - would be, if implemented, the dismantling of the gigantic public good that California's higher educational system has been and was intended to be. Tierney's proposal represents the logic of privatization supplanting public welfare. His suggestion about providing a truly college prep curriculum to high school students makes sense. But the rest of it is very bad. You cannot replace a system that is based on the funding of a public good with a system that's based on privatizing everyone's interests and expect not to lose a great deal in the translation.

There are many, many problems with Tierney's argument. For instance, he states in his Op Ed "there are no objective criteria to determine what students should take away from their learning." What he means to imply here is that there should be assessment tools to measure performance - in other words, there should be No Child Left Behind high stakes test equivalents.

What is "objective"? A standardized test? That is undoubtedly what he means to imply. But what makes a uniformly used, standardized test more "objective" than the criteria applied by faculty to their students? Is a standardized test a better measure of how well a student has learned to think? Does it make he or she better at utilizing the content that they have learned in diverse activities? How is that better than the evaluation by individual faculty of their students? What makes Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Stages, the standard that I use, non-objective? Bloom's approach is based on the view that our goal as educators is to get students to reach the highest stage of cognitive development of what Bloom called "evaluation." Evaluation is what most people mean in essence when they talk about the goal of becoming a critical thinker. Standardized tests of the kind that Tierney and his ilk desire don't measure for that. Indeed, the experience of NCLB and its equivalent in England under Sir Michael Barber's "Deliverology" has been to undermine critical thinking and teaching and replace it with teaching to the test and promoting memorization.

© 2010 Dr. Mark H. Shapiro, reposted by permission.

Irreverent Commentary on the State of Education in America Today

by Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"If we keep treating our most important values as meaningless relics, that's exactly what they'll become. "... ...Michael Josephson.

Commentary of the Day - January 10, 2010: Higher Education in California - Time for a New Master Plan I?

In a recent op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times William Tierney, professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, suggested that the current Master Plan for Public Higher Education in California is obsolete and needs to be replaced with a master plan that "better reflects the times."

Tierney argued in his op-ed piece that the current Master Plan, which was adopted in 1960 was based on four assumptions that reflected the conditions of that era; namely,

* High school education was separate from the higher education system, an end in itself.

* UC, Cal State and community colleges were largely funded by taxpayers.

* Accumulating credits and fulfilling credit requirements, regardless of their relevance, was equated with learning.

* Degree requirements and course content varied significantly across UC, Cal State and the community colleges.

He goes on to argue that owing to the exigencies of the California budget crisis and the largely dysfunction status of state government, the current Master Plan should be replaced by one based on the following assumptions:

* High school and higher education must be linked to ensure that when students graduate from high school, they are prepared for college.

* Students, not institutions, are funded.

* Classes are offered in a variety of settings and times, and at the students' pace.

* Course content, and what students are expected to know to acquire a specific degree, is standardized or closely related across the system. Meeting those expectations, rather than acquiring credits, would be the key to getting a degree.

The IP would argue that Tierney substantially mischaracterizes the current Master Plan in order to set up a "straw man" argument that favors his underlying precept about how public higher education in California should be funded. Basically, Tierney wants to replace the current funding model that uses taxpayer funds to keep the immediate costs of attending a University of California, California State University, or California Community College campus as low as possible with a "high-cost - high-aid" model similar to that found in the realm of private higher education. He argues in his piece that those who can afford it should pay the "market cost" of their education, while those who can't afford to pay the "market-cost" should receive enough financial aid to allow them to attend. Presumably, under Tierney's funding model the taxpayer would fund only a portion of student financial aid, and the public universities and colleges in the state would be on their own to raise the funds necessary to cover their operating costs.

In subsequent commentaries the Irascible Professor will examine the remainder of the assumptions, both old and new, that Tierney makes. This article will focus on the fallacies that are inherent in Tierney's funding model.

First Tierney doesn't make clear what he means by "market cost." Does he mean the actual cost of education for each individual student who can afford to pay? In that version of "every student on his own" funding tuitions charges would vary from student to student depending on the costs to offer the actual courses a student takes, where they are offered, and how they are offered. Presumably, an engineering student would pay much higher costs than an English major. (Unfortunately, differential fees already are being charged in the University of California system for several "high-cost" programs.) Or, does Tierney suggest that the "market cost" simply reflect the tuition charges of comparable private universities? This would raise the "market cost" for UC and CSU undergraduates to something like the nearly $38,000 per year for tuition and fees that universities like USC and Stanford charge for those who can afford to pay.

More than likely, the market cost that Tierney intends is closer to the tuition and fee levels of the private colleges and universities, which is roughly four times the tuition and fees that University of California students pay and roughly eight times what California State University students now pay. It's a little more difficult to determine the "market cost" for community college courses. Currently, community colleges in California charge roughly $20 per semester unit. Some "for-profit" vocational colleges that offer comparable courses charge as much as $550 per semester unit, though a rough figure of about $300 per semester unit can be used for comparison. That's about 15 times what community college students now pay.

But, the problem with using private college tuition charges as a proxy for the "market cost" of education is that it captures only a fraction of what it actually costs to run a large college or university. Substantial contributions to the costs of educating students at large private colleges and universities comes from earnings on endowments, grants, and overhead charged to outside agencies like the federal government. Even the sons and daughters of the wealthy who pay the full tuition rates are being subsidized to some extent.

Most importantly, even at the most prestigious private colleges and universities the majority of students do not pay full tuition. The majority receive some form of student aid. In the high-cost - high-aid model that is typical for large private colleges and universities aid comes in four forms; grants and scholarships, work-study funds, tax credits, and loans. The first three of these do not have to be paid back, while loans must be paid off. According to the College Board's Trends in Student Aid (2007) about half of student aid is in the form of government and private loans that must be repaid. Thus, the majority of graduates (and parents of graduates) from large private colleges and universities accumulate substantial amounts of debt that must be paid off with interest following graduation.

In contrast, in the low-tuition - low-to-moderate aid model that is typical of California's public institutions of higher education student aid comes in five forms. The first, and perhaps most significant, is the indirect tax-payer subsidy that covers a significant fraction of the cost of education. The other four forms of student aid in the public colleges are the same as for private college students; grants and scholarships, work-study funds, tax credits, and loans. However, the proportions typically are different. The fastest rising component of student-aid in recent years for both private and public college students is the loan component. But, because overall costs are much lower in the public institutions, student indebtedness upon graduation usually is much more manageable.

If California were to adopt a high-cost - high-aid model to fund its three systems of public higher education, low- and moderate-income students surely would find it much more difficult to afford a college education. The reasons for this outcome should be obvious to even the most casual observer of higher education funding in. First, the impetus to adopt such a funding system would have to come from political pressures to reduce the cost of these institutions to the taxpayer. The change would be sold quite cynically as a way to lower taxes using the usual, but fallacious, claim that Californians are overtaxed (in fact some 35 states have higher state and local taxes than California). Clearly, if such a change were to come about the Legislature would hardly turn around and spend an equivalent amount of tax dollars on student aid.

Second, it's highly unlikely that collecting "market cost" tuition from the minority of U.C., CSU, and community college students who might be able to afford such high tuition rates would come close to covering the cost of operations. Thus, little of that money would be available for student aid for the majority of students who would need it. The only hope for the three systems would be to recover "market cost" tuition from those receiving student-aid; and, that would happen only if those students are willing to take on much higher levels of student loan indebtedness. There are some who might be willing to chance that. Others, will choose to reduce the number of units that they take so that they can work more hours to obtain the funds they need to pay the much higher tuition. In the process this group will take much longer to complete their degrees, raising the likelihood that they will drop out before graduating.

But many students from the poorest families will find the prospect of a lifetime of indebtedness to pay for a college education so daunting that they simply would give up any hope for obtaining a college degree.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of Tierney's proposal to radically change the way in which public higher education is funded in California is that it considers only the costs to the taxpayer of funding the U.C., CSU, and community college system and does not consider the value that taxpayers receive in return for their support. In addition, Tierney's proposal does not take into account the possible unintended consequences of moving entirely to a high-cost - high-aid model.

From a purely financial standpoint taxpayer support of public higher education is an investment, not a cost. It has been well established that for every tax dollar spent on public higher education the state receives more than three dollars in increased tax revenues. It is no secret that college graduates generally earn more money than those who do not go to college. As a consequence, they pay more in taxes. However, the increased tax revenues are only a part of the picture. The public systems of higher education produce a wide range of educated people who are needed to help make society function -- teachers, nurses, social workers and the like. These are not the highest paid of professions, but they are necessary nevertheless. The most severe unintended consequence of moving to a high-cost - high-aid model would be to deter students from choosing careers such as these. After all, when a student graduates from college with tens of thousands of dollars of loans to pay off, he or she is going to look for the best paying job available.

It seems to the IP that biggest losers under Tierney's funding proposal will be students from low- and middle-income families; and, the biggest winners will be the money lenders who would stand to collect thousands of dollars in interest payments from each student who is forced to use large loans to fund his or her education.

Gov. Schwarzenegger's Proposal

2010-01-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

It's telling that Arnold has to actually try to mandate that the state spend more on higher education than on prisons. What kind of state spends more to incarcerate its people than to educate them? The US, by the way, is responsible for incarcerating one out of four of the people on this planet who are incarcerated, even though we have less than 5% of the world's population.

In the LA Times article about his January 6, 2010 speech, the reporters state that "lawmakers have been unable to trim the corrections budget for years. Voters and politicians alike have approved years of stiffer sentences and stricter rules for parolees -- driving up the prison population. The result has been a prison network bursting at the seams, with federal judges taking control of prisoners' healthcare and ordering the state to either release tens of thousands of inmates or boost prison spending by billions. Lawmakers so far have chosen to keep spending."

This is partly true and partly false. The public has been systematically misled into believing that it is making itself safer by supporting more punitive laws and policies. Survey data of the public indicate that when asked if they support alternatives to prisons and capital punishment, a surprising majority favor alternatives. But the voters aren't offered these options by public officials, so they end up choosing based on distorted information and truncated options.

While I welcome Arnold's rhetoric about education versus prisons, it would have been nice if in 2006 when people tried to repeal the most problematic portions of Three Strikes (Prop 66) Arnold had backed this. Prior to the vote those in favor of changing Three Strikes were in the majority. Arnold came out against Prop 66 and played a major role in turning the tide to defeat it. Three Strikes has proven to be extraordinarily expensive and, contrary to most people's expectations and beliefs, two-thirds of those sentenced to the third strike have been for non-violent, non-serious offenses.

From FACTS (Families to Amend California's Three Strikes), July 19, 2009:

The Justice Policy Institute estimates the costs of enforcing the Three-Strikes law between March 1994 and September 2003 was $8.1 billion. Of that amount, $4.9 billion is paying for inmates serving for nonviolent offenses.

California's prison population has increased sevenfold in the past 25 years because of America's "war on drugs". In 1980 California housed 25,000 prisoners, today it's over 175,000 and while it is appropriate to put violent offenders away for a long time, prisons are overcrowded mainly because so many marginal activities have been criminalized. If we're serious about creating a more humane society and a prison system that is not simply a graduate school in how to get away with it the next time, we need to look at reforming drug laws, the "three strikes" law, and harsh sentences for marginally harmful activities.

At a cost of $1 million to incarcerate each prisoner (more if they're elderly or sick), Californians are finally recognizing the billions for prisons is an expense the state cannot afford.

In 2004, Proposition 66 would have averted the present budget crisis by limiting felonies that triggered the second and third strike to violent or serious crimes. It would have eliminated residential burglary from the list of serious felonies that qualify as strikes (except when prosecutors prove someone was in the home at the time of the burglary). It would have also allowed prosecutors to count only one strike per prosecution instead of one strike per conviction, as current law requires, and it would have increased penalties for child molesters.

Instead of supporting Proposition 66, you stood with Henry Nicholas III to defeat Proposition 66 by alleging "over 26,000 "murderers and rapists" would be released into the community."

An Invitation to Share Experiences

2010-01-07T22:58:00.000-08:00

I invite all visitors to leave accounts of their experiences and observations regarding the changes that have been occurring in our universities. For example, faculty could share what has been happening to the faculty-student ratio, the difficulties that students report in getting into classes, the actions and statements of their campus administrators, the impact of No Child Left Behind on the students' preparation for critical thinking in college, and so on. If any students wish to leave comments that would be most helpful as well.

Sharing these stories and analyses will be very helpful to us collectively and can also be drawn upon for possible use in the Master White Paper.

A Call for a Master White Paper for the California State University System

2009-12-29T06:20:00.000-08:00

This is a call for contributors to a Master White Paper authored by CSU faculty, reflective of the values and vision of faculty and of the interests of students and the larger community for higher education. This MWP would be not only a thorough critique of the CSU Chancellor’s Office’s plan but a fully worked out alternative to his plan. It would be an alternative narrative, as the CFA’s White Paper has called for. This Master White Paper would include, besides a vision and a critique, a proposed system budget, a funding mechanism to support that plan, and a radically different allotment of power within the CSU.

In particular, this MWP would call for a dramatic cutback in the number, power, pay and purpose of administrative positions within the system based on the principle that a) in times of crisis the most important functions must be safeguarded - such as teaching, scholarship, and access for students - functions that are at the heart of the universities, and the least important functions - such as the burgeoning and overpaid high administrative posts - should be cut first, and b) even if we were not in the throes of a budget crisis, the growth of administrative posts in number, their share of resources, their agenda, and their power vis a vis faculty and students in recent decades and years has been detrimental to the CSU system and its official purpose of being a part (along with the UC system) of providing the best possible higher educational system for California.

We would propose, in contrast to the prevailing ethic that high administrative posts, such as Chancellor and Presidents, must be paid very large salaries in order to attract (i.e., bribe) the best talent to serve in education, while faculty are expected to serve principally for the love of education, that these high administrative posts be filled with those whose first and foremost purpose is to serve education and not primarily for the power, prestige, pay and perks. We will push for the same ethic that faculty are expected to live by to be explicitly the criteria for administrators and that the pay for high administrators be cut substantially and be tied to a formula relative to faculty pay. We expect that such a change would attract a very different kind of person to these administrative posts and that the relationship between administration and faculty will become cooperative rather than adversarial, benefiting the system, the state and the nation as a whole.

The current crisis and the top administrators’ tack in response to this crisis – reducing student access, exploding class size, slashing departments, programs and faculty positions and pay while refusing to even entertain the idea that administrative ranks should be culled – shows that we are, like it or not, embroiled in a war over the future of the CSU (and UC) systems with our top administrators. If the policies that led to this debacle in the first place are allowed to carry the day, then the nature of California’s higher educational system, once the pride of the state and the nation, will be irrevocably damaged. We rise in defense of a precious resource and refuse to allow the Chancellor’s destructive vision to prevail. We do so not only on behalf of all higher education faculty, not only on behalf of current and future students, not only on behalf of California’s higher education, but on behalf of all those who are experiencing the invidious impact of policies that elevate private interests over the public good. When those who claim leadership do so in a way that is profoundly harmful to those that they lead, then the led must take on the mantle of leadership themselves. That is the task that stands before us.

This MWP should include at least the following major elements.

1) A concentrated but detailed history of the actions and statements of high administration officials, beginning with Reed and continuing on through and including campus presidents and provosts, that shows their underlying philosophy and the gulf between their view about higher education and that of faculty/students/community. One recent indication of this is Reed’s initiative to invite, pay undoubtedly high consultant fees for, and impose Sir Michael Barber’s "Deliverology" on the CSU, his call for more courses to be taught by faculty (“if people taught one more class a semester, the efficiency of that is tremendous” – see text of this article at the end) as a “solution,” his assertions that even full-time faculty work essentially part-time, his history of destroying tenure in Florida, his wasteful spending on bad projects such as the approximately half a billion dollar boondoggle of People Soft, self-dealing (the series of raises for himself and others in his ranks), corruption, lack of accountability and proper supervision, etc. Adopting “Deliverology,” incredibly and absurdly, as a way of accelerating time to graduation at a time when massive budget cuts are wrecking havoc on the schools, is consistent with the views embodied in the East Bay CSU President’s July 24, 2009 White Paper that seeks to eliminate a 'seat-time’ model for a ‘proficiency-based’ model - that is, impose the neoliberal solution of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on higher education. This approach of theirs of treating education as if it were an assembly line process and knowledge as a “deliverable” shows their lack of understanding of how teaching and learning occurs and the relationships that need to be fostered and nurtured in a real educational process. We need to expose, delegitimate, and seek to relieve of their duties these folks and their agenda.

2) A detailing of administrative bloat and how it's grown over the last many years.

3) A counter-vision that places academic services at the heart of and the essence of what the universities should be about and that preserves them as the means for disadvantaged and those who want to get an education to do so. This counter-vision necessarily involves the rejection of the now dominant and creeping business model for education.

4) Advocates a dramatic and sharp cut in administrative tasks, ranks, pay, and power so that the really necessary administrative tasks such as registrar and bursar are maintained and the presence of high-handed administration is scaled back tremendously. This means that we would be going after very different people for administrative posts and that we would fire those now in charge, with the exception of those who are willing to accept the new terms and new pay.

5) The direction of top administration’s efforts both before this crisis and in this crisis has been to adopt measures in the CSU that have already, regrettably, been adopted at the K-12 level – as exemplified by NCLB in which teaching to the test rather than helping students learn how to learn and think become the main content of educators’ work. The defense of higher education necessarily involves a thorough critique of the underlying philosophy of NCLB and the corollary erroneous view that higher education should be viewed as a business, with students as our customers and professors as service providers.

6) A proposal of what should be kept and what changed and that offers an alternative budget, including the advocacy of AB 656. We should propose a budget with AB 656 and a budget if AB 656 doesn't pass. This proposal could and should include a formula that links faculty to administrative pay and the size of administrative ranks relative to faculty. This would be counter-posed to the vision that Reed et al have for the "crisis" and what the university system would look like if they get their way.

In short, we have to show why those in charge now are incompetent and dangerous and uncover their underlying philosophy and counter it with a very different philosophy. This MWP would be part of a counter-offensive of a PR campaign statewide.

Since the campaign to eliminate programs et al is already underway, we are aiming for this MWP to be completed, at least in fairly well fleshed out, if not entirely detailed, form in March 2010. We have twenty-three campuses in the CSU system. If even one person per campus participates actively in putting this MWP together, we will have a very substantial team to bring this to completion. We also can draw upon the contributions of scores of people who can add to this effort, even in the form of small additions such as suggested phrases or evidence.

Please post comments here and/or send an email to ddloo@csupomona.edu.

--
November 5, 2009
College Leaders Offer Blunt Advice for Campuses Hit by Hard Times
By Goldie Blumenstyk
New York
Chronicle of Higher Education

"Dumb public policies," like mandatory-sentencing laws that drive up states' costs for prisons and leave less for education, may be part of the reason colleges are in such financial straits, the leader of the California State University system said at a forum here on Thursday, but that's just a piece of the problem.

The bigger issue is that most colleges are too concerned with trying to compete for prestige rather than serve their students and their communities, said Cal State's chancellor, Charles B. Reed. He and Arizona State University's president, Michael M. Crow, spoke on a panel at the "Smart Leadership in Difficult Times" forum, sponsored by the TIAA-CREF Institute.

"Public higher education has done it to itself with generic state institutions" that all try to do the same thing, Mr. Crow told the gathering of 130-plus college presidents and other leaders. The duplication of expenses among so many colleges that are "insufficiently differentiated" adds to states' costs and leaves legislators and other potential supporters with little inspiration to support colleges when they come looking for money, said Mr. Crow. "People fall asleep," he said.

Mr. Reed noted that the racial and economic diversity of the Cal State system's 440,000 students reflects a wave of changing student demographics across the country. Rather than worry about how they rank against their peers, he said, "public universities need to get off their campuses" and into local schools˜"way down to the fifth and sixth grade"˜to help ensure that young people prepare for college before it's too late and they drop out.

The two leaders' comments came during a panel called "What's the New Normal?" Both Mr. Reed and Mr. Crow offered their typically blunt assessments.

"The sky is not falling. We just have less money," said Mr. Crow.

"We're never going to go back to the way it's been for the last 20 years," said Mr. Reed.

Mr. Reed said he had been criticized by faculty members for not lobbying harder in the state capital for money. "Well, you know what? There isn't any money in Sacramento," he said.

Instead, Cal State and the State of California will have to find money by becoming more entrepreneurial, more creative, and more efficient, he said. For example, "if people taught one more class a semester, the efficiency of that is tremendous."

Another idea, Mr. Reed said, is to eliminate 12th grade˜"the biggest waste of time" for many students˜and reallocate those resources for schools and colleges. "We need a different model," he said.

'No State of Normal'

Mr. Crow, who has overseen changes at Arizona State that include the transformation of traditional departments into interdisciplinary ones that relate to contemporary issues, said worrying about getting back to "normal" isn't productive. For universities, "there should be no state of normal," he said. They should be innovating and adapting all the time.

Arizona State is doing that, he said, by seeking more support from nearby cities and from the local business community, with a new research effort called ASU Challenges.

The meeting, which continues on Friday, also featured advice from several other college leaders on managing change.

J. Michael Adams, president of Fairleigh Dickinson University, said college leaders should remember that "the real agents of change are faculty." Wise presidents, he suggested, would do well to let the most dynamic and powerful faculty members lead new ventures if they fit within the mission of the institution.

Other techniques work, too, Mr. Adams said. "One of my mentors told me, 'Money is the root of all excellence in higher education.'" At Fairleigh Dickinson, he said, a published policy says that if a staff member proposes a program that fits the need, fits the mission, and can generate revenue, "we'll fund it."

Devorah Lieberman, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Wagner College, said she had found it productive and easier to "appeal to the scholarly intellect of our faculty" to solve problems.

She has instituted monthly dinners primarily for faculty members, at which the first question is always, What have you heard? and the second is, What do you want to know?

The events have opened up communication, at times in surprising directions. "As more wine flows, the questions are shocking sometimes," she said. But that helps to clear the air of rumors, and it keeps her plugged in: "They don't leave until they tell me something I don't know."