Earlier posts on this blog have noted an idea developed by some UC-Riverside students to make tuition free in exchange for a percentage of future student earnings. (Actually, the idea has been around for a long time.) In any event, although UCOP is supposedly studying the proposal, it seems to have found its way to Oregon where it is being considered in the legislature. From Inside Higher Ed today:
...The Oregon plan is similar to, and has its origins in, one proposed by students at the University of California at [sic] Riverside that made headlines last year. Since last winter, a group of University of California students have been in talks with the system administration to address some of the logistical challenges raised by the plan, but there has been little public movement.In contrast, the Oregon plan moved quickly from being an idea to getting legislative approval. Chris LoCascio, one of the students involved in the UC effort, said he and his team worked with the Economic Opportunity Institute, a liberal think tank in Seattle, to help develop the plan. The institute then proposed a version of the plan for Washington...
The Chronicle of Higher Ed published the chart above back in January based on national freshmen reports about the neighborhoods from which they came. [http://chronicle.com/article/BackgroundsBeliefs-of/136771] The data were gathered by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). [Click on the chart to enlarge and clarify.] It was around that time that UCOP sponsored a "campus climate" survey of all the campuses. The survey had been announced with great fanfare after various racial incidents: http://www.ucop.edu/newsroom/newswire/img/16/16489629294e7b6333135a8.pdf. As we have pointed out on this blog from time to time, there is no sign of any results from that survey as yet despite the considerable expense in taking it. (At least yours truly found no data from the survey on the UCOP website as of this morning.) UCLA's faculty welfare committee expressed reservations about the survey methodology, particularly its length and whether a representative sample would result.
But maybe there is no use in wondering about what happened to the survey:
You may have missed the op ed by Prof. David Myers, chair of the UCLA History Dept. in yesterday's LA Times. In it, he took note of the imminent departure of UC president Yudof to call for a substantial scaling back of UC's headquarters operation in Oakland and more campus-level autonomy. He also called for local boards of oversight for the resulting more-autonomous campuses. Excerpt:
As the University of California regents get down to the hard work of recruiting a new president before Mark G. Yudof retires in August, they might consider an even bolder move: a dramatic downsizing of the president's office. The current University of California Office of the President, or UCOP, is a labyrinthine bureaucracy that takes money from the 10 campuses where actual teaching and research happen... The 10 UC institutions are already, for all intents and purposes, autonomous units. We set our own curricula, hire our own faculty and pay for our own physical plants, and now we also raise our own money to support our operations. Accordingly, as dwindling state funding is replaced by private money, the great challenge is to retain a robust sense of public mission at each UC. One of the most important ways that we can do so is by focusing on the local communities where we are embedded... Devolving power and transferring resources from the centralized administration may be a painful pill for the new UC president. But these steps are key to ensuring that the 10 UC campuses will be more responsive, accessible and competitive in the new age of public higher education.
If you are wondering about the official UC response to the governor's May Revise budget proposal, here it is:
Patrick Lenz, the University of California system's vice president for budget and capital resources:
With this proposal, the governor is continuing his multi-year funding commitment to increase the University of California by 5 percent in the 2013-14 fiscal year and then 5 percent, 4 percent, and 4 percent in the subsequent fiscal years. In addition, the administration is continuing its support for UC restructuring debt to achieve $80 million in annual savings. Those savings will provide not only the additional fiscal stability to meet UC mandatory costs, but also funding to re-invest in the quality initiatives that will support the governor's plan for additional performance outcome measures. Source: Capitol Alert blog of the Sacramento Bee: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/05/post-36.html
Or, put another way:
Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/05/post-36.html#storylink=cpy
As readers of this blog will know, UC is looking for a new president to replace Mark Yudof who is resigning in August. What you may not know is that there is talk in university circles that the next president should be someone atypical with political skills rather than an academic. Such thinking characterizes not only the UC search but similar searches at other public universities. An example is columnist suggestion that UC should choose Gray Davis:
...(D)oesn’t this sound like a job for Gray Davis? Say what you want about California’s only recalled governor, but he knows politics and state government. He’s got the brains and academic credentials to raise universities. And he’s a former chief of staff to Brown. And you want to talk fundraising? Davis was so effective as a fundraiser that it became a political liability for him. He’s also the right personality for this moment. And that personality is prickly. He’ll yell at people who get in his way. That’s usually not an effective way to lead, but the UC badly needs someone who won’t be stepped on...
Just a note to whoever is in charge that we are waiting to see the results of the campus climate survey taken last winter. The survey was sponsored by UCOP in response to Regental concerns relating to certain campus-level incidents. Results are supposed to be available "sometime in spring 2013" according to http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/28359. At the time the survey was under consideration, the UCLA faculty welfare committee raised some concerns about response rates and response bias so we will assume those issues will be addressed in the report on the survey results. The rumored cost of the survey informally conveyed to the committee was $1 million. Perhaps, since UC is a research institution, the data will be made available to any faculty who might have use for them.
But maybe there is no point in wondering about the results:
The LA Times today carries an article about the search for a new UC president to replace Mark Yudof who is resigning in August. It's a slam on the current crop of UC campus chancellors and UCOP administrators since apparently the Regents think they have no feasible inside candidates.
...The search is secretive; officials say the selection process is a confidential personnel matter. Leading the effort is a committee of 10 UC regents, including Gov. Jerry Brown and student and alumni representatives. Its members declined to comment and so did the executive search firm—Isaacson, Miller. Matthew Haney, executive director of the UC Student Assn., said he expected the next UC president to come from outside the state, as did Yudof, who previously led state university systems in Texas and Minnesota. (Yudof is retiring in late August after five years in the UC job.) "It doesn't seem as if [the UC regents] have elevated internal administrators for systemwide leadership to prepare them for this role," Haney said. The campus chancellors "don't have a significant or noticeable systemwide leadership presence," he said, and other top administrators don't have the national prestige that the faculty seeks in a president...
SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO CONSIDER THE SELECTION OF A PRESIDENT, March 14, 2013
TO THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
The Committee presents the following from its meeting of March 13, 2013
CRITERIA FOR SELECTION OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP
The President of the University of California must be a visionary leader with the judgment, creativity, and courage to enhance the quality and reputation of the University as one of the preeminent public research universities in the world. The President represents the University in its role as an international, national, and state exemplar in the education policy arena. The President will inspire public support of the University in its three missions of education, research, and public service, and demonstrate a commitment to excellence, diversity and inclusion, affordability, and accessibility. To provide this leadership, the President must understand and have demonstrated support for outstanding scholarship and possess the highest intellectual capacity; have extraordinary communication skills; exhibit the leadership qualities necessary to instill the highest ethical standards and conduct throughout the University; have the experience and reputation to command the respect of all the University’s constituents; and maintain limitless energy and enthusiasm, courage, and stamina.
The new President will have the capacity to lead change; have the ability to listen to those affected and make a decision; and the dexterity to identify a path forward and motivate others to follow. The President will have a vision for where the University is going (e.g. global innovations; application and uses of new and different technologies; social, economic, and health challenges), as well as the ability to be the face of the University and a strong spokesperson who will explain to all Californians why the University is of particular importance to the social, political, and economic vibrancy of the State.
MANAGEMENT
The quality and complexity of the University, a multi-dimensional, public research, land-grant institution which includes ten campuses, five academic medical centers, the management of three distinguished national laboratories, and an agricultural division with operations in all 58 counties in California, requires a President who has the ability to attract and retain an exceptional, dedicated and ethical management team whose members come from prestigious careers in both the public and private sectors.
In a cooperative environment, the President will develop and implement long-range plans and policies and build teams across the University system. The President should have a proven ability and commitment to attract, promote, maintain, and support staff, as demonstrated by leadership of an organization with best practices in recruitment, retention, and financial support for staff professional development.
The President needs to exhibit a comprehension of the magnitude and complexity of the University’s financial environment and be able to utilize the resources available to the University effectively and efficiently. This includes recognizing that UC, and public universities in general, have seen a gradual, but continued and significant reduction in financial support by the state over many years. The President must be innovative in addressing this constraint through private fundraising and creative revenue generation, administrative and educational delivery efficiencies, and many other solutions in order to maintain the mission and excellence of the University of California.
The ability to provide an affordable education for students within this overall financial environment is a critical component. To provide management excellence, the President must be able to inspire, mobilize, and consult effectively with the chancellors, faculty, students, staff, and alumni; guide the accurate allocation of authorities and responsibilities between the campuses and the Office of the President; be committed to the University’s tradition of shared governance with the Academic Senate; have respect for the collective bargaining process; and execute timely and full consultation on issues of concern to the Regents while recognizing the appropriate division of authority between the Board of Regents and the administration.
EXPERIENCE
These necessary leadership and management skills will be most effective in a President who has demonstrated an ability to anticipate and direct change; who has experience interacting successfully with both state and federal government and is able to establish effective relationships with the Governor, the Legislature, federal officials, and all government agencies important to the success of the University, as well as with other public policymakers and California’s business community; who has the ability to increase public and private funding for the University; who has served as an effective representative and speaker in a variety of public settings; who has the ability to communicate effectively with the public and the media, the capacity to inspire all of UC’s internal constituent groups, the political acumen to develop, sustain, and encourage effective working relationships with the Regents, policymakers, the press, and stakeholder groups, including those who may oppose or be critical of administrative actions, and the intellectual stature to command the respect of the faculty.
...The University of California badly needs a president who knows how to fight. For 25 years, the UC has been playing nice and doing the right thing. And that’s gotten the system nowhere. The UC opted to be responsible and not buy the kind of Prop 98-style protection that the K-14 system bought. The result: UC made itself easy to cut. The UC made a series of compacts with governors on cuts and spending – only to see those cuts exceed what was agreed to. And more recently, the UC has stood back, meekly, as the governor and legislators have used it as a punching bag, blaming the system for tuition increases that are, in fact, the result of decisions by the governor and legislators to cut funding. It is well past time for someone who is less academic, less “responsible” – and way more hard-edged...
Now, a lot of people, reasonable people, will say this is bad advice. They’ll say that you don’t want to get into a war with the people who fund you. But the answer to that is easy. Being nice hasn’t gotten the UC anywhere. Indeed, diplomacy has made the UC easier to cut. It’s time for new rules. You mess with the UC, you pay a political and public relations price...
[Joe Mathews: Journalist and California Editor, Zócalo Public Square, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010)]
Obviously, the next UC president should get in there and fight:
The Regents are meeting today. Not all of them. However, the Committee on Investments is meeting at 1:30 pm.
On its agenda is possible changed guidance for investment of the UC pension plan portfolio. My impression is that there has not been much Academic Senate involvement in the process of coming up with recommendations, although we have some well-known financial experts on the faculty. You can find the Committee's agenda and background documents at:
Yours truly particularly liked the last link just above which says the new investment policy is slated to go into effect on April Fools Day. In any case, we do have some advance audio from the meeting:
Also meeting today is a special (closed) committee on the search for a new UC president:
Inside Higher Ed today has a long piece on UC's "rebenching" approach which would change the formula by which UC funding is allocated to the various campuses. As the article notes, some of the disparate funding that tends to favor older campuses such as UCLA is due to the graduate/undergraduate mix. But even if you adjust for that effect, the older campuses get more. That fact means that if you equalize, in the end the older campuses will get less than otherwise. You can phase it in. But the logic is unavoidable. Phasing it in just means that the older campuses get less than under the current formula gradually.
Is rebenching going to be tied to differential tuition? So far, that possibility has not been part of rebenching. It is likely, of course, that the older campuses could - if allowed - charge more. But with the governor's current attitude (see earlier posts), tuition increases are off the table.
And from the Inside Higher Ed article: ...The Academic Senate... argued that “that monies allocated to the UC should not be subjected to rebenching until and unless the UC reaches its previous maximum funding levels,” since the system is currently operating with about 30 percent less state funding than it had in 2007-08. The Senate also argued that the formula is too simplistic, since educating some undergraduates, such as those in engineering or music, is much more expensive than others... The Inside Higher Ed article is at: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/subscription/13c910fa60456adf
I will allow myself an editorial comment on rebenching:
They don't seem to be looking in the same direction.
President Yudof resigned shortly after last week's Regents meeting. Undoubtedly, the resignation was planned earlier so nothing that specifically happened at the meeting could have been the triggering event. The official press release mentioned health, family, etc., obliquely.
While the Regents meeting was not the trigger, I would guess that what happened at the meeting was no surprise and could have been anticipated by anyone who heard or attended prior meetings. The governor wants to take a bigger role than have prior governors. That's fine by itself, but the question is how should that role be played out. There can't be two presidents of UC. (We noted in an earlier blog that the governor at one point at an earlier meeting said he was the President of UC, although he is President of the Board of Regents.) But there seemed to be little push-back from the Regents about the governor's intentions. If I were Yudof in that circumstance, I would quit, too.
A key role of the Regents is providing a degree of insulation from state politics for UC. Obviously, that insulation can never be total. Indeed, the fact that the Regents include key political leaders as ex officio members suggests the ambiguity. Nonetheless, issues such as online education, while sexy and of obvious interest to the governor, are ultimately getting close to crossing the fine line of micro-management. There need to be improvements in UC management, to be sure, but micro-managing is not one of them.
If there is to be a new relationship between UC and the state, it cannot be developed by the governor, or the president of UC, or even the Regents in some unilateral fashion. As we noted in a prior post, the only way it can be done is a process something like the one that produced the Master Plan originally. It may be that we need a restructuring of the way in which UC is managed and the way the Regents are structured. And let's keep in mind that the state is putting in only about $1 dollar in $10 of the UC budget. Students are putting in a roughly similar amount. So there is a big institution to be considered, much of which is outside the purview of state attention.
The Yudof resignation announcement says "UC remains the premier public university system in the world..." Note that the qualifier - premier PUBLIC university - has crept into the description in recent years. And yet the official comparison-8 universities on which UC is supposedly benchmarked are half public and half private. The governor's statement that UC wants 11.6% as a state budget increase but will only get 5% - which he implies is a long-term indicator of budgetary reality - suggests the obvious. The state can't afford the old UC/Master Plan model. So a new model is needed and, at the moment, we can't get there from here.
UPDATE: The LA Times today carries a story about how the governor wants to reshape the community colleges. Again, this is Master Plan stuff. The original Master Plan was intended to coordinate the three segments of higher ed: UC, what is now CSU, and the community colleges. The article is at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adv-college-budget-20130121,0,904916.story
An earlier post noted an op ed in the Daily Bruin by Laura Lake on the grand hotel project slated to occupy a location roughly across from Ackerman where a parking structure now sits. A rebuttal op ed ran yesterday by Steve Olsen, UCLA's chief financial officer (and a very capable individual). Here is an excerpt:
The Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference and Guest Center will become a reality at UCLA in 2016 thanks to a generous gift from two alumni who share UCLA’s vision of creating a place where academics from all across the world can gather to share ideas, host world-class conferences and stay on our campus, experiencing the inspiration and vitality that are part of UCLA. Once built, it will be a boon both to the campus and the larger Westwood community. It is unfortunate that Save Westwood Village and its co-president, Laura Lake, are trying to impede that progress with a lawsuit. In fact, they have a long history of opposing projects on campus and in the community that have ultimately gone on to successfully serve UCLA and Westwood Village. UCLA believes their lawsuit is utterly without merit and we fully expect to prevail...
But the problem is that the rebuttal misses the larger key point. There could have been alternatives, less grand to be sure, that would have met UCLA's needs and would have been in total compliance with the wishes of the donors. Instead, a grandiose project was put before the donors and sold to them as the best use of their money. There is no way that the donors would have approached UCLA and said what we really want is a grand hotel. It simply didn't happen that way. The project was proposed to them by high level campus administrators. No one has ever asserted a different history.
The original plan would have replaced the Faculty Center and was so grandiose that it led to a faculty outcry. It was justified by a contrived and indefensible consulting report containing glaring errors. As a result of the outcry, the project was then slightly scaled back and relocated.
The Regents were very skeptical of the revised project as the recording of the March meeting posted on this blog makes clear. They were then subject to a campaign to convince them otherwise, the culmination of which was a letter - ostensibly spontaneously written by the donors - that essentially said it would be the grand hotel or nothing. Not wanting to reject $50 million, the Regents approved the project and put the best face they could on their change of heart. What choice did they have? Again, all of this is in the public record: the letter, the Regents meetings (with the audio we posted), etc.
If you look at the Regents' procedures for capital projects - a general topic noted in this blog in earlier posts - they in fact have no capacity for real oversight. Campuses send up grand plans with Excel sheets that pencil out and pretty architectural drawings. There is no independent auditing capacity at the Regents. There is no mechanism to go back and review whether the promises made were actually delivered once the structures are built. We are talking really big bucks here in an age where dollars are scarce. If you want real oversight, well meaning, part-time Regents cannot provide it. They would need professional auditors, independent of UCOP.
We noted in our previous post on the governor's budget that he is very interested in efficiency and cost saving. And he expresses an explicit concern about UC's capital projects process. The building and bond bureaucracies on the campuses are artifacts of an earlier age of UC physical expansion - which the state no longer will support. That age ended in the 1990s, but the incentives to build-and-bond remain. The needs of UC and UCLA are more in the human capital area now, not physical capital. We need scholarships, research grants, endowed chairs, etc., far more than we need brick and mortar.
In a sense, the grand hotel and the Regents' initial resistance to it should be the canary in the coal mine for the old approach. But it is not clear that the message has gotten through. It will require leadership - in Oakland and in Murphy Hall and at the Regents - to change the system. What the governor's budget message is saying is that if the system isn't fixed internally, there will be changes imposed from outside. It may be painful to do the fixing internally and so far there has been little sign of it. It will be more painful if the fix comes from outside UC.
Inside Higher Ed today has an interesting and lengthy article on a pending NYU faculty vote of no-confidence in that university's president which relates to a construction project of the university.We have reported in this blog about the large capital project agenda that is routinely approved by the Board of Regents for UC campuses without real independent oversight capability on the part of the Board.Perhaps there are lessons from NYU to be learned.The recent extended brouhaha about the UC logo – clearly a minor issue compared to the NYU matter – suggests that folks in Murphy Hall, in Oakland, and on the Board of Regents should do some reflecting on current procedures.Grand campus hotels and similar projects could eventually trigger something more than the logo affair at the campus, systemwide, and regental levels, particularly if the business plans for these projects don't work out.
Blog readers may recall that some UC-Riverside students came up with a proposal to have “free” tuition at UC in exchange for a tax on graduates’ future incomes.This idea has actually been around for some time but more typically at the federal level, i.e., a program involving all universities.
There are a variety of issues such as the lack of a cash flow immediately until the future graduates begin being taxed.If such a plan were done only for one university system in one state, there are enforcement issues.How would the tax be collected from graduates who moved out of state and didn’t pay California income tax?Could there be federal cooperation?
In short, the idea applied just to UC is not a simple proposal.Nonetheless, the Regents claimed – when the Riverside proposal first surfaced – to be interested.But at their September retreat when all sorts of unusual ideas were batted around (e.g., give the parking services to the pension fund), I don’t recall that the Riverside plan came up for discussion.
The Riverside Press-Enterprise has some coverage of the plan in its latest incarnation and says that UC has “participated” in looking at the plan but it does not seem have lent much support:
…Although UC officials have participated in those discussions, they say they have not been convinced that the plan is viable.In March, the student group issued a revised proposal, addressing some of the initial questions surrounding the idea. The 5 percent that would come out of graduates’ paychecks would apply only to those making more than $30,000 annually, and it would be applied only to the first $200,000 in yearly income…
“Frankly, it doesn’t seem like a viable option for UC right now,” (UC spokesperson Steve) Montiel said. “It’s something we’ve looked at, but it’s hard to see how it could be done with a single university (system).” Montiel said if UC schools were the only ones offering such a pay model, they very well might be flooded by applicants from across the country, particularly those in lower-paying fields. He said officials also are concerned about the logistics of being able to collect from graduates. It would require the involvement of the federal government…
