In 1960, the Master Plan for Higher Education in California was adopted, with Democratic Governor Pat Brown having played the key role in brokering the deals that produced the remarkable document. Among its core principles were access – from the guarantees of UC or CSU acceptance for students in the top levels of their high school classes, to community college transfers – as well as affordability with an outright ban on tuition and the expectation that “student fees” would be limited, and used for things such as student activities and dorms. The state would provide the support for instruction.

But ever since Reagan took office in 1967, these promises have been under attack. In a political or especially an economic crisis, state politicians have repeatedly undermined the Master Plan, limiting access by reducing affordability. After a truce in the 1990s, the budget crisis of the 2000s saw another sustained attack on higher ed and the first acknowledged abrogations of the Master Plan’s promises. Today, a UC or CSU education is no longer affordable, and reduced state support not only limits access, but is impoverishing those who work in its ranks.

All this is the subject of a fantastic LA Times article this morning titled “Less to Bank on at State Universities: Educators fear a 2004 funding deal has schools sliding toward mediocrity.” But the article is about more than just the problems of reduced funding. Instead it outlines how this is a deliberate policy of the Schwarzenegger administration, an effort to privatize California colleges and put them out of the reach of those who have been promised access to them.

The story does not end there. An unstated, but equally important aspect of the piece also shows how this crisis is also the product of a stunning failure of public officials to protect the institutions and historic policies they have been charged with defending. Whether it is the UC Regents, the State Legislature, or the Democratic Party, these officials have done little to nothing to protect one of the most important projects in California history.

One of the best aspects of this article is how it foregrounds the suffering of those working at the colleges. Many of us are familiar with the costs of college facing a student in California – hell, most of us were or still are students at a California public university in the recent past – but the problems of university staff have gone comparatively unrecognized.

Library assistant Linda Snook isn’t usually someone to stand up in front of hundreds of people and discuss her personal finances. But when the UC Board of Regents met here this summer, she pleaded for help.

Snook told the regents that she makes $26,000 a year working full time at UC Santa Barbara and pays more than half of that in rent. Her supervisors have recommended her for raises, she said, but there is never enough money in the budget. She’d like to enroll in graduate school at UCSB, but, on her pay, that’s a distant dream.

“I am barely making it,” she told the regents. “We’re not paid what the private sector would make. We desperately, desperately need help. Please.”

As anyone familiar with Santa Barbara knows, $26K is WOEFULLY inadequate. And her inability to pursue a graduate degree shows just how much access has been reduced. These days, when one needs not just a BA, but a Master’s degree, to be competitive for professional jobs, denying workers such as Linda Snook the opportunity to get that education is a direct failure of the state to meet its promises.

Higher education is the key to a strong, successful, and prosperous California. It promotes long-term growth, provides new technologies and entrepreneurship, trains skilled workers, and itself keeps economies afloat in towns as diverse as Riverside, Chico, and San Luis Obispo.

Without affordable access to higher education, California will slide into a kind of caste system where only those who already have wealth can afford to send their kids to college, and everyone else either cannot go at all, or must take out so many loans that they become shackled to their debt, unable to contribute meaningfully to the state economy.

The bulk of the article is dedicated to explaining this problem. In previous financial crises, such as those in the early ’80s and early ’90s, cuts made in lean times to higher ed budgets were restored in boom years. The crippling cuts of 1991-92 were reversed by 1996-97, for example. As recently as 2001 “the universities were in relatively good fiscal health.”

But that changed with the most recent budget disaster. Both Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger hit higher ed with massive cuts, partly enabled by the fact that neither the UC nor the CSU have guaranteed funding minimums, a necessity in this age of a foolish unwillingness to consider new taxation.

As a result of this crisis, UC and CSU leaders sought a new “compact” with Arnold, and in May 2004 they got it:

The two university chiefs struck a deal with the governor: They agreed to slash spending that year by hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for a funding formula lasting until 2011. Titled the “Higher Education Compact,” the agreement calls for modest annual increases in state funds, private fundraising to help pay for basic programs, and large student fee hikes, especially for graduate and professional students.

There was no hearing on the pact; no legislative discussion; no vote. Many UC regents were not told of the deal until it was done. Richard C. Blum, who became the regents’ chairman this year, called the lack of disclosure “an error in judgment.”

The problem is that the amount of funding Arnold promised is LOWER than what was given in 2001. For 7 years – 2004-2011 – UC and CSU have to either accept this lower amount that leaves them at least $1 billion short of what is actually needed, or break the deal with Arnold and thereby face worse cuts.

The effect of this is to cut back the level of state support for public education – privatization through the back door:

In 1970, the state spent 6.9% of its budget on the University of California. Today it spends 3.2%. In 1965, the state covered 94.4% of a UC student’s education. Last year it paid 58.5%.

This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much — $9.9 billion — to run the state’s prisons.

And it is a deliberate privatization. ALL of this is in fact quite deliberate. It is not a reaction to a fiscal crisis. Instead it is a carefully planned effort to destroy mobility and access for the mass of Californians in order to allow those who have already prospered to keep their wealth while shutting the door behind them to those who wish to follow.

It goes back to Donna Arduin. Brought in as Arnold’s finance director in 2003, she is an ardent advocate of privatization. In order to “balance” budgets in Michigan, New York, and Florida under Republican governors, she advocated the gutting of social and educational spending so as to prevent a tax increase. As the LA Times notes, she took a similar approach to higher ed in CA:

Her budget plan for UC and CSU called for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts for the third consecutive year, major student fee hikes, a reduction in enrollment and a plan to steer thousands of students to community colleges instead of the universities.

And in fact that is what happened. The results have been catastrophic.

• Students are burdened with enormous loan debt, but as the California Budget Project noted in its recent report A Generation of Inequality, young college educated Californians have had a harder time finding work than those with just a high school diploma. Students are saddled with debts they cannot pay off.
• Workers are left behind as the California economy and even its society are increasingly geared toward serving those who have wealth. The library assistant described above trying to survive on $26K in Santa Barbara is but one example of how higher ed workers are increasingly treated as servants – people expected to work extremely hard, but not paid enough to live in a state with a high cost of living.
• The quality of education suffers. In order to continue to educate students, all three branches of higher ed are turning to part-time, adjunct instructors – the “field hands” of academia. Although these part-timers work diligently to provide the best possible instruction, their working conditions are very difficult, and as a result the use of part-time instructors has been proved to adversely affect graduation rates at both community colleges and four-year schools.
• The privatization plan also overwhelms community colleges, who have a more difficult time handling the influx. I currently teach at a community college, and will defend its quality of education against any critic. But without more resources – from classrooms to tech equipment to full-time faculty – it is nearly impossible to keep up.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donna Arduin’s privatization plans are a major culprit in all of this. But their plans would not have had success if they didn’t have help. Leaders at the UC and the CSU system, the state legislature, and Democrats have all played their role in abandoning California’s commitment to affordable, accessible higher education.

UC and CSU leaders have frequently gone along with budget cuts, refusing to rally the public against them. The tone was likely set in 1967, when one of Reagan’s first acts as governor was to fire UC President Clark Kerr. UC Regents, CSU Board members, and all the other campus heads, are very aware of their dependence on politicians.

So instead of fighting these cuts, university administrators have instead chosen to fight others in the university community over the remains, massively increasing student fees and trying to gut workers’ wages and benefits. Just last week the graduate student employees’ union, UAW 2865, won a contract protecting their benefits and wages, providing even an annual cost of living increase. Earlier this year CSU faculty won a major victory in getting a wage increase, as high as 20% when it is fully phased in. And the campus staff, from those who work in the offices and libraries to those in the food service sector, have been continuously organizing to get wage increases.

As the university administrations fight students and workers instead of rallying to their cause, neither the state legislature nor Democrats have put up a meaningful fight to reverse this alarming trend. Legislators are afraid of reopening the tax question, despite the fact that the question of taxes usually only ever comes up when Republicans are trying to win a particular election. Democratic legislators make a major error when they think that voters are interested in holding the line on taxes at the cost of soaring college costs – the middle and lower-class households that still make up the bedrock of the Democratic coalition in California are hurt far more by the planned privatization of California higher education than any tax increase.

Ultimately this privatization, planned in the governor’s office, signed off in secret by the UC and CSU leaders, and tacitly accepted by Democratic legislators, is nothing more than an effort to preserve the wealth of those who currently have it and to ensure that nobody else in this or future generations will ever have the opportunities they had again.

Bill Lockyer, who recently proposed outright privatization of UC as a budget deficit “solution,” graduated from UC Berkeley in 1965. He and/or his family would have only paid $880 in student fees for his 4-year education from 1961 to 1965. The equivalent of that in 2007 dollars would be, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, $5,808. Currently undergraduate fees at UC are $6,141 – a four year total is $24,564. That’s over a 300% increase beyond the rate of inflation. That’s nearly $20,000 that individuals must pay now that the state, through distributed taxation, paid in previous years.

It is shameful that so many who benefited from state subsidies are now arguing that current and future generations should not have the same opportunity. Perhaps we should ask Bill Lockyer and other California politicians who argue for privatization to reimburse the state $20,000 for the cost of their education.

Or perhaps we should instead demand that California live up to its historic promises of affordable, accessible higher education. If a strong economy with a equitable distribution of wealth, financially secure families, and opportunities for advancement and creativity is what we want in our society, then we must restore the broken promises of the 1960 Master Plan. But if we instead want a neo-feudal California, where those with wealth are the only ones able to enjoy security and prosperity, where everyone else is not only poor and struggling to get by but also shut out from the education they need to get out of that condition, well, all we have to do is…nothing. Maintain the status quo, and that ugly outcome will quickly become an ugly reality.

Of course, we *could* look to other solutions, such as those wu ming proposed, to deal with the state’s budget crisis an enable us to restore these broken promises. But why do that when it’s so much easier to create a new inequality?!