Last fall, University of California President Mark Yudof concluded in a New York Times interview that because “the shine is off” our university in the eyes of the public, and state funding was dropping, which in turn necessitated “fee” increases of over 40 percent in one year.
With an attitude like that, who could blame state legislators for being unkind to the UC budget in recent years? Mark Yudof should be our main lobbyist in Sacramento, not peddling morbid snark to the national press comparing the UC to a cemetery, or telling New University reporters — as president of the best public university system in the nation if not the world — that his life has been “downhill all the way.”
Who could blame Californians for a dimmer view of the UC when their taxes are used to support a university that becomes less accessible to the very public that funds it? Outreach and academic preparation programs get chopped early in the budget-cutting process. A UC education becomes more financially selective. The teaching mission suffers cut courses, sections and entire minors, which leads to fewer, more crowded classes and campus services, instructors with records of distinction and experience fired —while a D.C. image disaster cleanup artist is hired. There are more cuts slated, and a proposed waiting list tied to an incoming class even smaller than last year’s group. The shine is indeed off of this privatized vision of the UC.
Yudof’s fatalist tale of a lost era of a superior yet affordable public education is a fiction presented as a fait accompli. It is easier to maintain that fatalism when campus-wide e-mails vaguely threaten punishment for peaceful assemblies, when experienced, award-winning lecturers and TAs who have seen friends and colleagues fired must reapply annually for their jobs, when students are paying 40 percent more for less, when they have found that the best sign that UCI is listening is how many police officers arrive at a rally.
Yet, in the face of this gloomy, officially sanctioned paradox of increasing fees and decreasing quality, students, professors, lecturers and other campus workers have been holding teach-ins and rallies, offering compelling evidence for other paths. There are reserve accounts and properties whose sale could help weather the crisis, planned capital projects to postpone, or profits generated by UC medical facilities that could be used to close gaps in the core mission of teaching. How about a hiring freeze in public relations before another academic employee is fired? Or, as some zombies put it before Halloween, “Prioritize Brains!” There are brighter visions of what the UC can be, and the majority of people in California recognize that a high-quality public education is a public good that will drive the economic success of our state.
On Thursday, March 4, at public universities and community colleges all across the state, in quads and streets, in classrooms and libraries, students and workers dedicated to educating California will stand and show that the shine is not off us. As a lecturer dedicated to the quality, availability and diversity of students’ classroom experiences, I will stand with them.
I will stand with my colleagues in the University Council of the American Federation of Teachers, but also in place of a student who came to the first day of my class last fall, then withdrew; despite his nationally known scholarship, after fee increases and 50 percent cuts in Cal Grants, he couldn’t afford what would have been his graduating year. Lecturers teach the majority of classes at UCI, yet we are often among the first employees to be cut; with few exceptions, we don’t enjoy the security of tenured posts. Our dedication to the instructional mission of the university persists and flourishes, in spite of our tenuous status here.
We need look no further than our school’s motto — Let There Be Light — to know that its current president’s vision is obscured.
Brook Haley is UCI’s 2009 Lecturer of the Year and currently teaches in the Humanities Core Course. He can be reached at jbhaley@uci.edu.
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Tiamoyo Peterson Says:
Thank you Brook. Let There Be Light. Indeed!
Posted on March 2nd, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Juan Miramontes Says:
Meh. Another anti-Yudof screed. How easy it is to grow tired of these rambling, poorly reasoned blasts of retch.
Two sentences in this puffy bombast actually tackle the subject by offering pointed suggestions, beginning “There are reserve accounts …,” and ending with “… before another academic employee is fired?” Before and after these sentences, the inflated rhetoric here is, as usual, impressively shrill.
Why shouldn’t academic employees be fired? Is the money there or not? I have friends outside the academy who have suffered: engineers, advertising company executives, graphic designers. It’s crazy, though, I haven’t seen or heard of a single engineering rally outside the Linksys offices in Irvine. Nor have I driven past a group of sign-wielding graphic designers arguing the critical necessity of clear visual communication. But as someone who has taught comp at UC Irvine, I can assure you that these professions are very representative of where my students will end up. I do understand, though. Teachers are special.
And, boy, do academics love to light a fire-ring around Yudof’s “shine is off it” comment. Except that I can’t see where Yudof is wrong, really. He didn’t say education isn’t important. Nor did he claim that education wasn’t effective or profoundly critical. He said that priorities have changed. Have priorities not changed, nationally and locally? Are people not worried about health care and paying their basic bills? While his stance should certainly be noted for the purposes of tracking university goals, I would love to see more academics engage with Yudof on points rather than ecstatically rolling in the gooey, vitriolic pastry dough that’s usually offered in response. Outrage! I shake my fist at thee! Where is my other fist?! Here it is! A ha! This other fist I also at thee shake!
God.
In the future, it’d be nice to hear something from an academic about the future of the university that doesn’t rise and fall along with the many rhetorical inflations and slippery slopes university lecturers are typically charged with correcting. As for this post, the sentences are pretty good, but the content is weak. C-.
Posted on March 3rd, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Brook Haley Says:
Thank you for engaging, Juan Miramontes. If my “puffy bombast” got you to type in some of your own, then something I wrote caused you to react.
You are right: Yudof is not saying that education is unimportant, only that it should be an exclusive privilege of the moneyed, and that it should be defined strictly in terms of its ability to generate profit for those already flush with capital. For Yudof, the UC is a privatized university, not a public trust with a mission of public education. Do not be deceived by sleights of hand like the Blue and Gold Program, or his claim to stand with students and workers on March 4. If he were standing with next to my students, I would recommend that they check their wallets.
I am sorry that your friends in other fields have not found a way to organize and to show their situations and goals, and I hope that you were able to witness firsthand some of the March 4 actions for some ideas to share with them. If all you saw were shaking fists, then you were not close enough. You will have other opportunities–March 4 was just the largest yet in a series that will grow.
The future that you mention in your last paragraph is already here. If you have not heard any of it, then I worry that you have either decided not to engage in research to answer your questions, or that you do not know how to begin research of this kind. As a suggestion in passing, I offer a kind of omnibus blog as a place to start: Remaking the University at http://www.utotherescue.blogspot.com/
And thank you for the grade and comments. I disagree with your self-critique: “As for this post, the sentences are pretty good, but the content is weak. C-.” I think that any online response that begins with “Meh” has already scored in the A range for conforming to the genre’s basic conventions.
Posted on March 6th, 2010 at 9:47 am