California higher education has not been having a good decade. When Arnold first took office a series of major cuts were made to the UC, CSU, and community college budgets. In 2004 a compact was agreed to between the UC and CSU leaders and Arnold, guaranteeing a stable, if low, level of funding. That agreement has been heavily criticized for having accepted a lower standard of state support – and that criticism looks to be merited, as Arnold now proposes to violate that agreement with his 10% cut of higher ed funding.

As a new study by the Campaign for College Opportunity shows, the proposed cuts would have the effect of severely curtailing enrollment by as much as 27,000 over the next two years, which is the size of an average UC or CSU undergraduate campus enrollment. And a study by the UC Academic Senate  found that “to maintain educational quality” student fees would have to rise from $7,500 to $10,500 – a staggering increase from an already high level.

“The Schwarzenegger revision accelerates the redefinition of the University of California away from a public university and toward a ‘public-private partnership,’ ” the UC study said. “The university becomes dependent on high student fees for delivering its core educational mission. . . . The university becomes quasi-private or poor — or perhaps both at once.”

UC has been suffering for years from what the Academic Senate study called a “hollowing out” because of lack of money. “From a distance, all appears normal; once one goes inside, the damage is clear,” it said. Leaky roofs go unrepaired; valuable faculty leave for better-paying universities…

The problem of “faculty brain drain” from public to private institutions is a serious one across the country but is hitting UC and CSU the hardest, as their funding has been the most dramatically impacted.

The study and the cuts were the subject of an article in today’s LA Times which contained some quotes from higher ed leaders about the impact of these cuts:

Diane Woodruff, chancellor of the California Community Colleges, said the governor’s proposed cut would mean those campuses would not be able to provide classes for more than 50,000 students. An additional 18,500 would not receive financial aid.

The cutbacks would most affect low-income, first-generation and nonwhite students, who generally depend more on university services, she said…

“By 2025. if we continue on this same course of cumulative budget cuts on a cyclical basis, the California workforce will be 3 million short and California will not be competitive,” Cal State Chancellor [Charles] Reed said.

In other words, Arnold’s proposed 10% cut of higher education would have a crippling effect on California’s economy. The student fees increases would squeeze middle-class families even more dramatically, and would be difficult for young students to pay – especially as student loan availability is shrinking due to the credit cruch – even the notorious Sallie Mae claimed “we’re at the cusp of peak lending.”

But this is sadly part of a larger pattern for Arnold and his Republican allies. Don’t let their occasional bickering and infighting fool you – they stand shoulder to shoulder when it comes to this state’s future. They all agree that our economy and the middle- and working-classes should be sacrificed for the sake of a few wealthy Californians who don’t want to pay more taxes. They agree that to save voters $150 a year in vehicle license fees, public education – from kindergarten to undergraduate – should be destroyed.

The article notes that “Despite the dire situation the universities and community colleges find themselves in, education leaders have been reluctant to challenge the governor.” It looks like that task is going to fall to the students who, abandoned by their schools’ administrators, are launching a statewide protest on Monday, April 21 to oppose these cuts.

At CSU San Bernardino we had over 1000 faculty, staff, and students gather in a standing room only meeting to discuss the budget cuts for the CSU that are on the table.  The CFA campus president (who has been very active in CFA for 25 years or so) said that he’d never seen the CFA and CSU work together on something as they are working now.  (You’ll recall that faculty nearly struck a year ago over egregiously poor salaries and other problems.)

They’ve set up a website to help stand up for the CSU:

http://www.allianceforthecsu.org/

I encourage all of you to speak up for the CSU and to encourage others to do the same.

It won’t be easy.  Just yesterday I received a newsletter from my Senator (Margett) which read like an internal memo to GOP loyalists  written by Grover Norquist.  Really strong stuff; I was pretty shocked that it was coming out in a general newsletter.  I’m getting similar stuff from my Assemblyman.

But we have to win this fight.  I grew up in Illinois in a family that wasn’t rich.  When I was a child, I wished I lived in California.  It had such amazing public high schools, and after that, I would have a chance to go to some of the greatest public universities  virtually free of cost.  It was an educational beacon on a hill to people outside the state.  No longer.  We can’t let it get any worse.

( – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a brilliant metaphor for how the debate over problems often totally misses the root of a given problem itself: “How Best to Fill a Sieve With Water”:

There are many arguments over which is the correct course of action which I liken to debating how best to fill a sieve with water. By this I mean that they ignore the fact that their premise is wrong.

Obviously the first thing an impartial observer would say when the two camps are debating whether to use a spoon or a cup would be to point out that one can’t fill a sieve without first plugging the holes. This seems to be my current role, pointing out assumptions which are either wrong or taken as being obvious without any examination.

Here are a few current (and not so current) examples.

The best way to stimulate the domestic economy is by raising/lowering taxes. Perhaps the best thing is not to stimulate the economy at all but to redistribute the present wealth better or to shrink the economy to a sustainable level. “Growth is good” is the sieve.

The best way to aid the development in the third world is by foreign investment/local projects. That the goal should be “development” goes without saying. What development means is the sieve.

[…]

The way to control foreign powers is by the use of military might/diplomacy. That other states need to be “controlled” is the sieve. Perhaps they just need to be left alone.

The writer, rdf, offers a bunch of other examples, but the principle is clear enough.

Then, I came across this post at Davis Vanguard that brings out one such example of debating the filling of sieves with water, in the context of intra-educational battles over California’s Proposition 92, which would set minimum levels of Community College funding and limit tuition to $15 per unit, paying for it out of prop. 98 funds.

There is no doubt in my mind that community colleges are one of the most laudable aspects of the American educational system, if not the most laudable. The second chance (and third chance, etc) that they offer to students who may not have been ready for college at 18, or people for whom life’s hard realities intervened, or who don’t have the cash to go to a state college, or who are just interested in a skill or a given subject serves to make the American educational system far more democratic in terms of openness and serving the whole population than the far more tracked systems of Asia or Europe (even as our structural flaws and barriers to true equality of access to education place our systems at a distinctly inferior position when looked at from the vantage point of the systemic or societal level). Community colleges are, in a broader educational context that leaves a lot to be ashamed of, a justifiable point of pride. And they only serve that critical educational function when the cost of attending is nominal if not entirely free. So at a gut level, while I’m unsure if prop. 92 is the best means to get to that end, generally I’m quite sympathetic to what they’re trying to do with it.

But it is a mistake to get sucked into fighting over scraps of the pie, when we should be asking why the pie is insufficient for public education at all levels in this state. The CCs work synergistically with the UCs, CSU and the primary educational system. If they’re all hurting for funding, let’s look at where waste can be rededicated toward more productive ends (namely, by moving funds from the embarassingly overpaid administrative area to the long-neglected salaries of staff and faculty or physical plant area). It would probably cut costs significantly were we to have decent public health insurance, to contain that exponentially rising cost of forking over a grotesque profit margin to the insatiable insurance and pharmaceutical corporations. But after you cut the obvious waste, we really need to get serious and start acting like adults about raising taxes to pay for this public good. Jacking up fees is a terrible (and illegal, if you look at the 1960 California Master Plan For Higher Education‘s requirement that fees never go to pay for educational costs, long since breached in bipartisan practice from Gov. Reagan on down to another B movie actor-turned-Governor) way to make up the shortfall, because it strikes at the very heart of an open public educational system by rationing the common good of education by ability to pay (or at least by willingness to accrue sizeable student debt).

Tuition in Calfornia has risen at a rate far exceeding inflation or state costs since 2003, while state spending on higher education has been falling as a % of the state budget for decades now. This is not by accident, this is the result of a deliberate plan to gradually privatise the whole educational system by Governor Schwarzeneggar’s finance director, Donna Arduin. From an LA times article two months ago:

To reorganize the state’s finances, Schwarzenegger recruited Donna Arduin, an advocate of privatizing government services who had been Florida budget director under Gov. Jeb Bush. As California finance director, she soon became known as Schwarzenegger’s “bad cop.”

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.

These “crises” are not accidental or temporary, they’re structural, and are instrumentally used to set different parts of the educational community against each other to distract from the privatization and slow destruction of what was once a world class public institution with free tuition and low fees, open to anyone with the grades. With every tuition and fee hike, and every shift to corporate or private donations (with strings attached, it should go without saying), the very idea of the public is watered down and eroded, and we all get suckered into just accepting it as a natural state or random “crisis” instead of as a system under deliberate atack on ideological grounds.

The solution here is not to fight over the scraps from the table, but rather to demand that funding matches the needs of a world class, accessible educational system. you cannot have quality on the cheap, and there is a vast public interest in having the social mobility and economic dynamism that comes from such an educational system, from the CCs on up.

When you look at what benefit has accrued and continues to accrue to the state of California from the existence of our public higher educational system, it is well worth the money. As these fees continue to be raised, that once great engine of social mobility will slow down and eventually grind to a stop, and those social benefits will not accrue in the same way. Cutting a segment of the population out makes it harder to justify paying for the system collectively. Turning away California’s poor, California’s working class and increasingly its middle class as well as starves our economy and our culture from the dynamism and works that those students might have created with the stimulus of a world class education.

If one believes in an educational meritocracy, education ought to be completely free, to let the cream rise to the top. What privatizers like Schwarzeneggar and Arduin mistakenly assume is that those with the money are the cream by virtue of their having all that money in the first place. The history of America and the history of California suggest otherwise.

I’m going to have to read up on prop 92 to decide whether it’s worth pursuing, but in the big picture, it’s a symptom of a greater problem that we’re not addressing as a state.

(This grew out of a comment on the Davis Vanguard thread, that got so long I figured it needed its own diary. Originally at surf putah)

( – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

Pay for disgraced overpaid executives goes up:

University of California President Robert Dynes, who was pressured earlier this year to step down by next June, is expected to get an over-scale faculty salary of $245,000 for research and teaching at UC San Diego.

[…]

Dynes had been at the center of controversy after The Chronicle disclosed that millions of dollars in extra compensation and questionable perks had been handed to some top executives without telling the public or regents. The Chronicle’s findings, reported in 2005 and 2006, were followed by three state and university audits that showed how UC administrators sometimes flouted, circumvented and violated university policies governing pay and perks.

Speaking to reporters outside the meeting, Dynes said he would be taking a yearlong administrative leave at his presidential salary of $405,000 after he steps down.

“It is a sabbatical that I have earned. I have been at UC for 17 years, toward 18 years, and I have never taken a sabbatical,” Dynes said. “I look forward to it to re-energize myself.”

In leaving the presidency, Dynes will have his moving costs to San Diego reimbursed and he is authorized to get a subsidized, low-interest housing loan from UC.

[…]

In related action, the committee gave thumbs up to a pair of 17 percent raises for Hume and Vice President Anne Broome. The full board is expected to approve them Thursday.Hume needs the $62,500 raise to bring his salary closer to his peers, Regent Judith Hopkinson said. Hume’s salary, which will be $425,000 a year, is more than Dynes’ $405,000 salary. Regents Chair Richard Blum [that’s Mr. Dianne Feinstein, for those keeping score in ruling class bingo.] said that when a new president is hired, the salary for the top position would be increased.

At the same time  the already-high tuition for debt-burdened students goes up:

The California State University Board of Trustees is expected to approve a $4.8 billion budget request today that could increase student fees 10 percent next year, and the University of California’s governing board is expected to follow suit with a possible increase of 7 percent.

[…]

Fees have nearly doubled at both universities since 2002. Most recently, the 23 campuses of the California State University system raised fees by 10 percent to about $3,521 annually this year, and the 10-campus University of California system increased the cost for undergraduates by 9.7 percent to about $7,494. The figures do not include expenses such as room, meals and books.

[…]

Gregory Cendana of the UC Student Association said that he is not seeing an increase in quality or services with his rising fees. He said he has to work 35 hours a week in two jobs and will graduate with $21,000 in debt.

“I’m tired of paying higher fees when I still have to sit on the floor of my classes,” he said.

So let me get this straight. A decent wage and benefits for food service workers? Sorry, don’t have the money, unless we take it out of stuident fees. Cost of living increases for professors, staff or academic student employees? Sorry, can’t afford it, times are tough, tighten your belts. Keeping fee increases within inflation levels (let’s not even begin to talk about the UC mandate to provide free public tuition, long since abrogated in deed if paid lip service)? Sorry, wouldn’t be fiscally prudent, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps between classes, kids.

But huge bonuses and six figure salaries for disgraced administrators? Sure, the UC system needs “good people,” and their peers are making so much more than them, think of the embarassment of having smaller salaries than the other plutocrats.

They aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. The UC and CSU systems are being privatized before our eyes.

originally at surf putah

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?!

Well, we haven’t quite reached that milestone yet, but it is only a matter of time.  A very short time. 

As the costs for fixing the state’s troubled corrections system rocket higher, California is headed for a dubious milestone — for the first time the state will spend more on incarcerating inmates than on educating students in its public universities. Based on current spending trends, California’s prison budget will overtake spending on the state’s universities in five years. No other big state in the country spends close to as much on its prisons compared with universities.
***
“California is just off the charts compared with other states in corrections spending,” said Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, a leading research organization. (SF Chron 5/22/07)

During the Arnold Administration, prison spending has leaped from just under $6B to an expected $10B in the 2007-2008 Budget. That kind of growth would make even a CEO of an Indian software firm jealous.

There are many, many reasons that our prison expenses are so out of line, even when compared to other states.  But one reason surely must be ToughOnCrime^TM:

“I’ll tell you what, it’s clearly not a statement of our priorities,” said Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles. “Our policies are hurting the economy of California. This is a disservice to our economy.”

Núñez blamed the prison spending on a get-tough-on-crime mentality among politicians that equates more prison spending with safer streets, when that is hardly the case.

First, congratulations to the Speaker for saying this.  This should be shouted from rooftops: ToughOnCrime^TM is ruining our prison system, and apparently our budget as well. ToughOnCrime^TM fails us when we try to rehabilitate prisoners, ToughOnCrime^TM fails us on race issues, ToughOnCrime^TM fails us on efficient use of resources.  Todd Spitzer, the outspoken OC Assemblyman, can crow all he wants about how Tough he is, but where has the success been for ToughOnCrime^TM?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports a tentative agreement has been reached between the CSU faculty union and the administration. From early reports this seems a significant victory for the teachers:

A labor showdown between the California State University system and its faculty union was averted Tuesday with a tentative accord on a new contract that provides a guaranteed pay hike of 20.7 percent over four years for professors, lecturers, coaches and librarians.

“We expect our members to ratify this. We think it’s a good deal,” [union president John] Travis said. “We pretty much got everything that we asked for.”

What I like even more about this is that part-time and adjunct faculty are included in the wage increase, although the article says the rate of increase for those instructors – currently more than half of the overall CSU faculty – is undetermined.

This is fantastic news for the CSU workers.

As the California Aggie reported today, State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) has just introduced a bill, SB 190, that would mandate that the CSU board of trustees and UC board of regents hold public, transparent deliberations on executive compensation. Given the repeated ethical violations and soaring payraises and benefits that the regents and trustees have voted for themselves over the past several years (and that to have the gall to make everyone else fill out ethics questionaires?), given the stagnant wages paid to professors, TAs, clerical and service workers by the same regents and trustees, and given the ever-skyrocketing tuition hikes at both the CSU and UC systems (not to mention the community coleges), I think this is a reform long overdue.

Public universities shoud not just be plum patronage positions for an unaccountable ruling class of free-floating executives, who vote each other raises with public monies. They are intended for the public good, to produce research for the people of the state of California, and to educate the youth of California. The state government and the university regents and trustees have reneged on this intent, and can no longer be trusted to conduct public affairs in private, free of all oversight and beyond reproach.

Thank you Senator Yee. It is time to remind the regents and trustees exactly who they work for, and for whose benefit the public university system is intended to work for.

originally at surf putah

Faculty for Cal State schools throughout California will begin voting today to determine whether to walk off the job over grievances regarding pay, class size, and health care.  If approved by a simple majority, faculty would begin a series of rolling two-day walkouts statewide.  The voting process will last into next week with the results announced soon afterwards.

The California Faculty Association website offers all sorts of resources to further understand the history of this issue.  Included is a full rundown of the 20 months of bargaining between the CFA and the State, including lots of neat graphs, tables and statistics (which I know we all love).  Of particular interest to me was the graph showing that it’s actually more lucrative to teach at community college than in the CSU system.

This comes at a time of exciting union activity throughout the California college and university system.  John Edwards appeared in Berkeley on Sunday and waxed poetic about the UC Berkeley janitors, saying, “This march for economic and social justice for the men and women who work at this university is a part of a bigger march in America for fairness and equality.”

Covered at Surf Putah and cross posted here at Calitics last week, the Associated Students of UC Davis have voted to support the unionizing efforts of Sodexho employees on campus.

With the Employee Free Choice Act passing the House last week, big things are happening.  Via the link we learn that “one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign … [and] 60 million U.S. workers say they would join a union if they could.”  The link also comes complete with YouTube action from California’s own George Miller.

Change is coming in a big way to the California education system.  Underpaid workers at the highest levels is just one aspect that’s coming to a head right now.  At the local and state level, the fight over how the educational system is going to operate is being waged.  The battle today is how we’ll treat the people who deliver knowledge.