Mission shrinking

Shrinking the mission

The objections lawmakers raise to the University of California, however, do not appear to revolve solely around its success or failure in saving money, but around the system’s essential profile and purpose. Critics in the state legislature say that given the deficit, the University should drastically pare down its ambitions, and focus on a “core” mission. Their view of that core mission, however, is not so much a return to its roots — which, in this case, would restore the university to its towering stature in American higher education — so much as a wholesale severing of its limbs.

Jean Fuller, a Republican state assemblywoman representing Bakersfield, suggests the UC system should “return to core values and core services.”  The University of California, Fuller contends, should conduct a review of the needs of employers throughout the state. Then, taking into account the strengths of each campus, it should tailor academic programs to provide the education and expertise to meet the demands of business.  Currently, she said, the state was facing an acute shortage of engineers and nurses with advanced degrees. 

 “To me, when you get to the point where you’re trying to do everything for everybody, you lose sight of what your niche is,” said Fuller, a former schools superintendent in Bakersfield. 

But wouldn’t such a narrowing of the university’s mission shatter world class research and teaching institutions that Californians have built up over generations?   Should California be satisfied with educating its citizens to compete primarily for jobs in-state, particularly with unemployment hovering near 10 percent?

Fuller believes so. “When the taxpayer sends money to Sacramento, that money is supposed to be directed at increasing the state’s productivity,” she said. “The educational system needs to be very focused on what are the occupational needs of the state. Are we doing what we can to attract the best professors in the fields that we need, like engineering?”

“Sometimes,” Fuller said, “you have to go back to the basics.”

Fuller added that she had voted against the state budget that restored some $300 million to the University of California. The university, she recalled, had given administrators raises just before the first round of cuts, and she objected to professor salaries that could, in medicine and law, approach $200,000 a year. (Supporters of such high salaries argue that academic stars bring in many times their salaries in research grants, which help support the university and have a multiplier effect on the local economy.)

Fuller is not alone in her belief that California’s public university system should scale back its ambitions, and its spending. Bob Dutton, the Republican leader in the California state senate, said he would not dismantle programs, but he contended that the system should focus incentives (like scholarships) on encouraging the production of engineers and nurses.

“If you have limited resources, you put them in an area that will generate revenue,” Dutton told Remapping Debate. “There are certain majors that have greater value to the public as a whole. Creative writing may not be a priority right now.”

Dutton said he did not consider his view a departure from the initial mission of the state’s public university system. “I do actually think that’s what they were originally set up for, to build the workforce for the next century.” 

While the law ceding federal land for public colleges and universities, which President Lincoln signed in 1862, envisioned the primary mission of such land grant colleges as training for agriculture and engineering, it also included “other scientific and classical studies,” as well as courses in military tactics, in their charge.  Nearly a century later, California’s Master Plan of 1960 did not contemplate narrowing their offerings to match the most pressing needs of industry in the state at the time.

Jackie Goldberg, a leader of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus in the 1960s, said there were voices by the mid- to late-1960s calling for the universities to focus more on professional training, but they did not prevail.  Then-Governor Brown “knew that the state universities were economic engines for the state, and I don’t mean by having teachers and engineers and nurses coming out of them,” said Goldberg, who also served on the Education Committee of the State Assembly from 2000 to 2006. “He knew it because he knew that when you have a well-educated population, people want to move their businesses here.”

The focus on immediate economic conditions, said Smelser, a scholar of the master plan, is antithetical to the aspirations that fired the University of California’s growth in the 1960s, both in enrollment and intellectually.  “The university, the liberal university as we know it, has been conceived and reached its greatest heights by carrying out the literal implications of the word university: university means universal. This means not only technical knowledge, but knowledge of the most esoteric fields: historical knowledge, general education, the humanities, dead languages,” he said.

“Top-tier universities, like the University of California, are extremely important because they lead the way in innovation,” Smelser added.

Unlike Fuller, Dutton voted for the most recent budget that restored some $300 million to the University of California’s coffers, but he did so reluctantly. The money was included in a larger state budget bill, and Schwarzenegger had indicated early on that he would not sign a budget without the 10 percent increase for public universities that he had put in. But Dutton was not happy about it. “If it would have been up to me,” he said, “I would have cut funding to the University of California again this year.”

Dutton said that he would like to see the two most sought-after institutions in the University of California system, UCLA and UC-Berkeley, cease operating as public universities altogether—and go private.  “I think it’s just worth exploring at what point do you say, ‘Okay, you’ve reached that top tier and it’s time now to cut you loose, so you can actually go beyond that next step.’ I think Berkeley and UCLA have reached those levels.” The quality of their programs, he contends, is on a par with private institutions like Stanford University, and would allow them to succeed without public support.

While many in California speak about privatization as shorthand for the trend toward students and donors carrying a greater share of university costs, Dutton’s proposal would cut UCLA and Berkeley off from public funding altogether, with profound implications for the universal access contemplated by the Master Plan.  

Neither UCLA nor Berkeley boast endowments anywhere near their private counterparts. Berdahl, Berkeley’s former chancellor, noted that Berkeley has twice the number of students as Harvard, but an endowment that is only one-tenth the size. “It would be impossible for Berkeley to ultimately be a total private university without a complete abandonment of its model of providing access to students in California,” Berdahl said.

Dutton said the state had more pressing needs. “Right now,” Dutton said, “we’re having a hard enough time funding our [kindergarten through 12th grade] and the California State University system.”

A December 2006 analysis of various scenarios for the future of the UC system, one of them a freeze in public funding and gradual shift toward privatization of the University of California campuses, concluded that the student body on the UC campuses would alter dramatically.

As tuition increases rapidly, and a college education comes to be seen as more of a personal privilege than a public good, access and economic diversity would suffer, the study predicted.  Lower-income students would flood toward the California State and community college campuses, while more students from families with upper middle-class incomes flock toward the University of California’s top three institutions, Los Angeles, Berkeley and San Diego.

“This scenario, the report said, “would end the UC system as we know it.”