Rebuilding Higher Education after Earthquake Arnold: Kamenetz, Yudof, and other Concern Trolls
by zunguzungu
I don’t regard Anya Kamenetz’s book as particularly credible — you can read a nice take-down here* — and since it’s raining and I can‘t go sit by the lake and read my shiny new hardback copy of Empires in World History, let us turn instead to Mark Yudof, the guy who is in the position of actually implementing the sort of technocratic neoliberalism she only hyperbolizes.
But first, some contextualizing numbers. This is a graph showing what has happened in the last ten years to the amount of money the UC system receives from the state of California, the revenue stream on which the entire edifice is built:
If that spaghetti-monster doesn’t immediately make everything clear to you, the upshot is this:
- The light blue line at the top, the benchmark, represents what the funding situation would be if the amount of revenue the UC received remained the same steady proportion of the total state general fund since 2001-2. No increases, no decreases; as the state’s general fund rises and falls, the benchmark measures a constant percentage of the total.
- The very lowest number, the gray line representing “extreme Arnold,” the last budget is where we actually are. Note that it is substantially below the benchmark number; public higher ed in California is receiving a substantially lower percentage of the state’s general fund than it used to.
- All the other lines represent various budget projections which have been proposed and implemented in the meantime — plans for returning the UC and CSU to solvency — and which were then abandoned, leaving us where we are now, in the worst of all possible worlds scenario.
Now Chris Newfield, whose graph it is, admits that the numbers aren’t perfect; there should be a bit of a dip in 2009 to represent the Great Recession. But that actually demonstrates the falsity of one of the great myths of the UC crisis, showing quite clearly that even before you factor in the 2009 financial crisis, the UC’s funding was already deep in the toilet. The revenue stream on which public higher education in California is based had already been chipped away, bit by bit, for the good part of a decade.
To pick just the most flagrant example, the red line represents the budget numbers for the “Compact for Higher Education” agreement, an agreement cut between the University and the State of California to stabilize what had already become, in 2004, a real crisis of funding. You can read it here, but the upshot is this: the state and the UC made an agreement on how to manage the situation, in which, basically, the UC and CSU systems accepted some budget cuts and committed to raising money from “other revenue sources” (i.e. student fees and wealthy donors), in exchange for some promises on the part of the state government that they would moderate the extent to which they were cutting the university budgets. And this was a real and substantive compromise on the part of the universities, by the way; while the blueprint for public higher ed in California has always been the idea that the state was on the hook for “core educational functions” (things like “instruction”), the UC/CSU side of the compact included accepting that the Universities would take responsibility for a portion of those core functions, to raise some of the money itself that the state was choosing to withhold. It was, in other words, a compromise on a basic principle in exchange for some short-term promises. And then, having gotten the UC and CSU to accept a broad retreat on this basic principle, Schwarzenegger broke the compact and cut the budget to the boneanyway (to such an extent that even the UC president, who was appointed by regents appointed by Schwarzenegger has called state government an “unreliable partner”). In effect, the Universities gave up a great deal and got nothing.
Which brings us Mark Yudof. Now, you wouldn’t want to be him; he is the figurehead for a university system which is being systematically starved to death by his own boss. He’s the most visible lobbyist for and representative of the many students and employees of the University, but as he negotiates with the guy who appointed the people who appointed him, he has virtually no cards to play. He can only take what they give him and hope they don’t take it all back away the moment it suits them to do so.
But, that said, this is how Mark Yudof framed the problems facing public Higher Ed in 2002, long before he was actually the guy holding the bag when California reneged on its commitments:
“As higher education comprises a smaller and smaller portion of state budgets, and as state dollars make up a narrowing slice of university budgets, the central implication is that, for the foreseeable future, public research universities will look to students to pay more of their educational costs. These students will be part of what I have dubbed the hybrid university, an institution with many traditions and functions still within the public realm, but with other characteristics that are more in line with those of private colleges and universities. The challenge for these hybrid institutions will be to retain the best of their public traditions while adapting to a more privatized model.
Essentially, his position in 2002 — long before he was appointed czar of the UC — was that public education was already a dinosaur. In 2002, he had already accepted the reality of permanent budget cuts, and had proposed, therefore, what he called the “hybrid university,” an institution which would essentially take subsidies from the state, but would, in sharp variance with the traditional model for public higher education, try to raise as much funding as it could from its students to make up the difference. Sound familiar? It would, in effect, behave more like a corporation — treating its students more like customers and less like investments for the state itself — but since it was happy to take whatever remnants of state funding were left, it would be a tax-payer subsidized private university, one which would not, in return, keep its fees low enough for middle class people to attend without substantial debt.
In other words, there is good reason to suspect that Yudof is not very committed to public education as such, or, to put this another way, there is good reason to think that he was appointed (in 2008) by the people Schwarzenegger appointed because they all knew he was the sort of person who would effectively privatize the university when the governor cut its public funding, all with a minimum of fuss and hassle. They knew that, also, because he’d already done the same thing at the University of Texas. And they’ve been right, too.
For example, he’s even said on several occasions — here for example, and here — variations on the idea that
“sometimes a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
And I thought of that when I saw this comment exchange on Anya Kamenetz’s blog, on a post about how the UC is striding forth into the new millennium by expanding online coursework.
Commenter Bryce: …My hope is that, because California schools are facing a real budget crisis, and because institutions are facing a genuine crisis of legitimacy, that real reform is possible. My fear is that they’ll let this crisis go to waste.
Kamenetz: Hi Bryce, All good points. Better to have the UC doing it themselves than have Kaplan U providing the online courses though, right?
Rest easy, commenter Bryce! (edit: Bryce responds) They have not, in fact, let the crisis go to waste. Because, to go back to where I started, an unbiased look at the funding cuts of the last ten years demonstrate pretty clearly that the writing was on the wall for the UC long before the 2009 financial crisis; facedwith a republican governor hostile to the idea of public education, a set of governor-appointed regents appointing a president amenable to effective privatization, and a state legislature perfectly willing to pass along the governor’s massive cuts to the UC and CSU systems (not to mention the community colleges, which get screwed most of all, and what’s left of the state’s support for public K-12), public education in the state of California was basically insolvent already. But when the downturn came — as it always does — it provided the perfect excuse to deliver the coup de grace, to bring the self-fulfilling prophecy of the failure of public education to its conclusion and pretend like it was inevitable. But as we in California know, when an earthquake knocks a building down, it’s because it wasn’t built right in the first place.
Which is why it’s worth returning to and re-emphasizing how absurdly bad-faithed the language of “wasting a crisis” really is. The people who want to make hay on skyrocketing student fees — and the spiraling student debt that follows as smoke to fire — are people who were so fundamentally and ideologically antipathetic to public education in the first place that their rosy-colored visions of a techno-tastic future seem to me like the very worst kind of concern trolling. And while people like Kamenetz — blessed with Ivy league educations, by the way — talk about how the earthquake that’s shaken California public education to the ground is an opportunity, we need to be paying close attention as political hacks like Yudof take charge of that opportunity to fundamentally re-shape, re-structure, and (by the way) privatize it out of existence.
* I’m fascinated by the different reaction Kamenetz had to that review than, for example, Reihan Salam’s full-throated repudiation of “Dean Dead”: to her profound credit, Kamenetz wrote that he “makes some great points” (a very open-minded thing to say about a review that pretty thoroughly took her to task), while Salam’s scorched earth response, well, can one really adopt the rhetoric of “Dean Dad is wrong because he personalizes his disagreement, and let me prove that he’s wrong by personalizing the argument”? Apparently one can. It makes me tend to want to extend as much as possible the assumption that she’s operating in good faith, whether or not I’m able to find any value in her back (I tend to not be able to).
ZZ,
I am “Commenter Bryce.” I am not a neoliberal in any sense of the word. I work at a non-profit food co-op. I put more miles on my bike than my car. I don’t know if I could beat Glenn Beck in a fistfight, but I pray nightly to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I will get the opportunity to find out. I am a wealth-spreading, war-protesting, Burning Man-going, union-supporting, capitalist-loathing, treehugging neo-Marxist. Calling me a neoliberal is, well, ouch.
I am a firm believer in public resources of all sorts, especially education. I think that, were you and I to sit down and discuss our visions of what education means, why it is important, and who it should serve, we would find little to disagree about.
My comment was too short to really encompass all that. It was expressing frustration with the number of people — mostly college educators — whose comments hinted that they felt threatened by the very idea of online education, or who damned them as inherently inferior products, ignoring the role they might play in bringing education to a wider audience.
I see online-ification and privatization as essentially unrelated concepts. If you think that UC’s online courses are part of a broader privatization movement, then explain the link. I’ll probably sympathize.
When I talk about “not letting a crisis go to waste,” I mean that a crisis is a good time to direct attention to the structural problems that brought it into being. It galvanizes people to take interest, to take action, and if the crisis ends without addressing those issues, rest assured that another crisis will come.
I’ve read Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” so I’m well aware of the other side of the crisis-not-wasting coin. There are those who see crises as opportunities to extract wealth from the public sphere and funnel it into their own already-obese pockets. FSM willing, they’ll be the first with their backs to the wall when the revolution comes, so I hope you understand why I’m insulted that you think I might sympathize with them.
Hi Bryce,
Thanks for responding and clarifying your position; my intention was not to declare you to be a neoliberal concern troll, but to attack the language of “wasting a crisis.” I’ll try to explain why I find it pernicious, and hopefully you’ll understand why I grabbed onto you as a rhetorical straw man, a sin for which I hereby do penance at the alter of the FSM.
The problem, perhaps, is that I do think there’s an organic link between privatization and online education in practice, if not a categorically necessary one. Which is why I think we need to place the stuff Kamenetz is saying side by side to the stuff people like Yudof are saying: she frames what she’s doing as a way of breaking out of old institutional boxes, but she’s essentially just one person and one book. The people who are actually driving this process — as it’s actually happening — are people like Yudof, who (and I speak as someone employed by the UC) I’m pretty convinced is operating in bad faith, someone operating to effectively privatize the UC under the smokescreen of the sorts of rhetoric used by Kamenetz and others.
I don’t know whether you’d disagree with that or not, but I do know that the explicit rationale for the UC’s new venture into online education is cost saving, about spending less money on educating students and getting more customers to boot. It’s part of a broader effort he’s overseeing to diminish the UC’s particular relationship with the state (bringing in more out of state students, for example, thereby improving its finances in the same act as it reduces its value to the california taxpayers), an effort which is all about bringing in more “customers” and, as such, a broad shifting of the university’s fiscal model towards seeing its relationship with students in market terms. That’s neoliberalism. In that context, all his talk about how great online classes seems like lipstick on a pig to me.
And I do, by the way, think that online education of the sort they’re planning is an inherently inferior product. Not because there isn’t a lot of great stuff you can do online — believe me, I’m all about using the online infrastructures in education — but because while classroom education can incorporate the best of online into its model, an online class cannot, by definition, incorporate the best aspects of classroom education. In other words, since the best of both worlds is both — and classroom educators are learning very quickly how to use online platforms as part of their classes — choosing one or the other is, pretty much by definition, to limit the possibilities of what can be done.
Now, whether or not online classes are better than no classes is a separate issue, but in the context of the online initiative Yudof is spearheading here, it’s not really the right comparison. The people who are going to be taking these classes are UC students who are already in the system or who eventually will be; instead of going to classrooms to be taught, in other words, they are going to save the university money by staying at home. And Kamenetz’ description of the initiative as resucitating the master plan is simply obtuse: the master plan codified into policy the assumption that the state would spend public money to invest in the future of california students, while this initiative starts from the assumption that the university’s fiscal problems are to be solved by bringing in more customers. Klein’s shock doctrine nicely describes the broad contours of what’s happening.
I appreciate the detail of your response, and I’m sure that your penance to the FSM will be accepted. A little extra parmesan never hurts, of course.
The “don’t waste a crisis” phrasing is something I started using for two reasons:
1) It drives wingnuts crazy because Rahm Emmanuel said it, and thus they think it has conspiratorial overtones.
2) When they go crazy, I get to point out all the ways Republicans used crises (both real and manufactured) to implement their own agenda, from invading Iraq to trying to privatize Social Security, to using Katrina to implement free market and education “reforms” in the Gulf region. Then I get to move into other Shock Doctrine territory.
You’ve really opened my eyes to why California educators seem to have this siege mentality: they’re under siege.
How do we solve this? I mean, it’s clear that people like Yudof don’t belong in the driver’s seat. It’s also clear that there is huge potential for technology to alter the education landscape and make education more accessible and more affordable. I think that a lot of education is going to move online, one way or another.
If the free marketeers are in charge of the shift, there will be trouble. The current education system has a monopoly on the accreditation process, which gives them effective power to decide what systems are allowed to compete in the education space. Couple monopoly power with a profit motive, and you spell the death knell of serious education reform.
I’d like to see the change come with a shift toward recommitting to universal higher education. But as you said elsewhere, we live in an age where Obama has somehow become the far left of respectable political discourse. Such a recommitment seems unlikely in such an environment, no matter how ardently I wish for it.
I mentioned elsewhere that I thought that online courses do carry some inherent advantages. It’s not all downside. But if you were running things, rather than Yudof, what would you do to make online courses that were really outstanding and effective? What specific barriers do you see to making online courses equal to the classroom experience?* More broadly, is there a vision for DIY U that you would find palatable, or even exciting? And once we have that vision, do you see a way to redirect momentum toward those goals, and away from the privatized dystopia that you fear is coming?
Also, while I have your attention, do you have any opinions on the open textbook movement?
That might not make a bad blog post. Anyhow, I hope to hear from you again.
* I’ll admit, I got less out of “the classroom experience” than I might have in my education. I didn’t ask many questions, or really develop relationships with any of my professors or more than a handful of my classmates. Social anxieties blah blah. The point is, I may have a rather blinkered view of the advantages of the physical classroom.
[...] of California, and there’s some debate about whether or not this is part of his vision. See zunguzungu for more on Yudof and changing the U-Cal. [...]
Let there be light! Sorry Tale of UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Office: easily grasped by the public, lost on University of California’s President Yudof. The UC Berkley budget gap has grown to $150 million, & still the Chancellor is spending money that isn’t there on $3,000,000 consultants. His reasons range from the need for impartiality to requiring the consultants “thinking, expertise, & new knowledge”.
Does this mean that the faculty & management of UC Berkeley – flagship campus of the greatest public system of higher education in the world – lack the knowledge, integrity, impartiality, innovation, skills to come up with solutions? Have they been fudging their research for years? The consultants will glean their recommendations from faculty interviews & the senior management that hired them; yet $ 150 million of inefficiencies and solutions could be found internally if the Chancellor & Provost Breslauer were doing the work of their jobs (This simple point is lost on UC’s leadership).
The victims of this folly are Faculty and Students. $ 3 million consultant fees would be far better spent on students & faculty.
There can be only one conclusion as to why inefficiencies & solutions have not been forthcoming from faculty & staff: Chancellor Birgeneau has lost credibility & the trust of the faculty & Academic Senate leadership (C. Kutz, F. Doyle). Even if the faculty agrees with the consultants’ recommendations – disagreeing might put their jobs in jeopardy – the underlying problem of lost credibility & trust will remain. (Context: greatest recession in modern times)
Contact your representatives in Sacramento: tell them of the hefty self-serving $’s being spent by UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau & Provost Breslauer.
[...] are so maddeningly and consistently mis-guided when they talk about education reform, and why a deeply flawed project like Anya Kamenetz’ has gotten the hearts of the policy wonk twitterati aflutter [...]