The Story that Needs Changing

In the last few weeks I've given a number of talks on college campuses about the self-feeding devolutionary spiral in puliic university funding.  I've tried to describe the mechanisms that are continuing to accelerate decline, and identify points of resistance that could help with rebuilding.   The goal must remain mass quality rather than limited access to premium content.  Our higher ed system is stratified enough as it is, and "private good" solutions only make it worse.

Robert Mejia offers an overview of my "Rebuiling the Public University" talk at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.  By coincidence, I spoke in the same room a few hours after UI-Urbana faculty had met their new systemwide president for the first time, and heard him speak directly about his plan to take control of enrollments away from each campus and centralize them systemwide.  This struck me as the kind of administrative exercise that makes an executive's mark without improving the institution itself, and that distracts attention from the deeper issues of rebuilding funding and upgrading academic goals.

An example of the deeper issue occurred the day after the coverage of the Illinois faculty meeting, in an article in the Los Angeles Times on how California public universities are leading the way in public tuition increases averaging over 8% last year.  The article started with a causal connection between legislative cuts to public funding and increases to student tuition.  But it then cited an expert saying that the real problem wasn't public funding cuts but public campus inefficiencies, particularly the inefficiency of faculty who don't teach enough.


My critique of the elements of this damaging story is posted on the University of Illinois Faculty Association page.  I would like such critiques to be part of a broader effort to change the public narrative about the everyday work of public universities, so that yahoo solutions can't so easily get dropped into the middle of articles to distract the reader from the real issue.

The real issue is that imposing higher teaching loads and more on-line instruction on public universities won't reverse the relentlessly growing gulf between elite privates and their once-elite public peers.  The economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman, in their recent book Why Does College Cost So Much?, note that the inaugural, 1987 edition of the U.S. News and World Report rankings had eight public universities in their top 25. In 2010 the top-25 includes exactly 1 public university (UC Berkeley, at #21). 

The rankings are of course rather silly, but they do include measures such a per-student expenditures and average student-teacher ratios. On these measures of quality, public universities have been allowed to decline for decades. The decline is directly connected to falling public funding, which has never been replaced by the private sources so ardently discussed, in spite of the decades their advocates have had to achieve this replacement.

The result is stark, in Archibald and Feldman's terms:

In 1980, public universities spend roughly seventy cents per full-time equivalent student for every dollar that private schools spent.  By the middle of the 1990s, that figure had fallen to fifty-three cents per dollar.  These changes have consequences (p. 237)

We already know where the combination of cuts and "efficiencies"is taking us -- towards a class hierarchy of private over public, in which the latter, who teach close to 4/5ths of all college students, are forced to lower quality further while pretending they are not.

Teaching processes can always be improved, but public university executives need a much tighter focus on closing the funding gap with private universities so that we can close the gap in quality of service. Playing around with alternatives to rebuilding funding will only make the public-private gap that much wider .

Statement from Three Members of Academic Council on Preserving Quality (7/16)

The statement below was drafted by the following members of the Academic Council, but it has been neither reviewed nor approved by the Council. It is what we intend to keep saying in meetings, and it is what we would like to see the Senate say, at every opportunity.

Jim Chalfant, Chair, University Committee on Planning and Budget
Mary Gauvain, Chair, Academic Senate, UC Riverside Division
Susan Gillman, Chair, Academic Senate, UC Santa Cruz Division


When state budget cuts force UC to choose among access, affordability and quality, we believe that the Academic Senate should fight for quality as the University’s top priority. This means taking all possible measures to prevent further erosion of UC’s excellence, especially for undergraduates, and to prevent jeopardizing the future of the University as a whole. The state’s abandonment of the Master Plan extends well beyond consequences for the public and private shares of the cost of a UC degree.



The faculty of the University of California has the responsibility to ensure that students receive the highest quality education, grounded in research excellence. To do so calls for continued rejection of efficiency measures that emphasize throughput and degree production, while ignoring the quality of those degrees. It calls for protecting the research excellence that supports a UC-quality degree. The faculty cannot stand by and accept further diminutions in quality and will not enable the state or the University to hide the effects of the cuts from public view. Erosion of instructional quality is visible in the form of decreased course availability, fewer specialized elective courses and reduced student involvement in research, increased class sizes that reflect higher student-faculty ratios, decreased feedback to students on written assignments and during office hours, decreased faculty size and layoffs of temporary faculty and staff: in the aggregate, a watered-down education.

Budgets and measures such as student-faculty ratios are clear to all as indicators of the problem, but it is the faculty who also see first-hand the many cutbacks and compromises that are hardest to measure and continue to deprive students of opportunities that earlier generations enjoyed. The withdrawal of state funding thus forces students and their families to shoulder more of the financial burden of a UC education, at a time of decreasing educational quality.
We believe that the University must urgently communicate the alarm of both faculty and administration at the state's retreat from its responsibility to preserve UC as the world’s leading public institution of higher education. Beyond communication, as Senate faculty we advocate continual monitoring of other potential, longer term effects of the cuts on the quality of undergraduate instruction. This requires monitoring not only critical measures such as time-to-degree and campus selectivity, but also developing measures of the quality of UC degrees—a set of lagging indicators that will become evident only after the damage is done.

Despite the damaging effects of years of fee increases, we support the Academic Council statement of June 30, 2011. We must stand for academic quality rather than pretending it is possible to maintain access, affordability, and quality with grossly inadequate state funding.

We Need UC Uncut

What the state really needs is UC Uncut  - not UC down another $500 million next year on top of previous rounds of similar cuts.  For the twenty years that I have been in the system, UC has steadily squeezed undergraduate instruction, with the effect of herding students into huge lectures and relying on the testing of passively acquired knowledge because it couldn't or wouldn't spend its resources on the small-scale forms of active learning in the tutorials and seminars that the world associates with US higher education because that kind of active learning-to-create happens at Harvard and Reed and Occidental and Stanford.  UC's nominal student-faculty ratio of 17:1 or 20.7:1 or whatever it is in a given chopping-block year has meant in actual practice offering one seminar of 20.7:1 to each major over the course of four years. What students are largely getting instead are 35-student courses that now have 70-80 students in them, 400 person lectures with 1 TA for every 100 students instead of for 50 or 25, and the near total absence of individual mentoring by a regular faculty member.

This latter is a special tragedy for a public university that does not take its students exclusively from the ranks of the top few percent of test takers on the international scale. 
Most UC campuses are comprised of up to nearly 1/3 of Pell-eligible students from families with incomes of less than $45,000 a year (UCLA's 30% is triple the Ivy League norm) . Most of the rest of the student body is broadly middle-class, from California public high schools that no longer have courses for special interests in math or art or music or journalism, no longer have courses for the cultivation of the specific genius of people who will create the next economies and the next cultures.  The broad mass of public university students did not get piano lessons and one-on-one tutoring in Spanish and Mandarin, they have not had four years of shop plus mechanical and architectural drawing.  That is what we have public education for - to get everyone to the level where their interests and visions deserve to be. These students have enormous intelligence and energy, and yet we are neglecting them. We are not doing this willingly. We have no choice. We do not have the people and time and infrastructure to bring everyone on line in the global economy and world culture able to do all that they can do.

 I say this on the basis of direct experience. Over the past three years, I have met several times one-on-one with each of over 350 students from nine UC campuses. These are students who have studied in France through UC's Education Abroad Program.  My goal has been to orient them to a different university system, but also to help them develop an individual academic project. Our students are brilliant at checking the boxes of their requirements as required courses get added and subtracted.  They need to be, since signing up for classes means hitting a moving and shrinking target.  These students generally know what their overall topic of interest is. They are also as a group completely inspiring, the most multilingual, international, multiracial, spontaneously democratic, and transformationally-oriented generation I have seen.

But what about the individual academic project that expresses their specific interests and their unique profile? What about the individual project that would allow them to write a statement of purpose to get into grad school or stand out among the 480 other applicants for an internship at UNESCO, or to apply for a job that will develop their talents?  In about three-quarters of the cases, I am the first senior faculty member with whom these students have every had a sustained conversation.  I  estimate that 90% have had no faculty advising on their course of study. They are increasingly unable to get the more focused and advanced courses that would allow them to develop a true expertise in something before they graduate.  Because finding these courses is now so hard, they have no incentive to develop an individual and special program of study that depends on them.

The bitter irony is that this system of deindividualized education is less functional than ever before.  Large public universities took on the obligation of mass quality -- high quality for mass enrollments -- at a time when corporate America would hire intelligent but generically-trained college grads by the hundreds of thousands. They staffed their gigantic multidivisional organizations, which John Kenneth Galbraith called the "technostructure."  These jobs required varying ratios of conformity and creativity, and UC graduates were its prototypical members: bright, cooperative, motivated, possessed of strong foundations for further specialist training through their college combination of a specific major laid on top of general education.

But the technostructure for which State U was preparing its masses of intelligent students has largely disappeared. Since the 1990s, the corporate world has been applying 'knowledge management" to its workforce under various names. The goal of this practice is to find niche geniuses that invent new products which directly impact the bottom line, on whom the company will lavish great working conditions and pay, while squeezing the positions and pay of the broader white-collar workforce, those millions of smart graduates who nonetheless are not "unique" (see Thomas A. Stewart or my Unmaking chapter 8).  For this among other reasons, elite universities are individualizing undergraduate study even more than they already have.  As just one simple example, several years ago M.I.T. "replaced the traditional large introductory [physics]  lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning."  In doing so, M.I.T. reduced the course's failure rate by 50%.

UC is headed in the opposite direction, towards massification and deindividuation.  Lack of financial resources is the number 1 reason why.

We need UC Uncut, and CSU Uncut, and the community colleges uncut.  Accepting the $500 million cut, as UC officials appear to have done, betrays our responsbility to the current generation of California students.