The recent ouster of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, engineered by the real estate developers, hedge fund managers, and former Goldman Sachs partners who sit on the Board of Visitors (analogous to the notoriously corrupt UC Regents), has gotten a lot of attention and generated significant outcry over the past few days. The story is clear: as reported yesterday in the Washington Post, Sullivan was forced out because she was seen as resistant to austerity measures:

Leaders of the university’s governing board ousted Sullivan last week largely because of her unwillingness to consider dramatic program cuts in the face of dwindling resources and for her perceived reluctance to approach the school with the bottom-line mentality of a corporate chief executive. . . . Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

This detailed analysis of the situation, by Doctor Cleveland, outlines three specific areas that the Board of Visitors was pushing: 1) online education; 2) high-profile faculty recruitment; and 3) "Program Prioritization," in other words shifting funds from certain unfavored programs to other favored programs that the Board has deemed more valuable -- despite the fact that these programs are actually less profitable. "Program prioritization allows the central administration to take money from profitable units and redirect it to unprofitable units that the administration favors."

All of this, of course, resonates strongly with the policies that the UC administration and the UC Regents have sought to implement since the 1990s and at an accelerated pace over the last decade. Programs like "Operational Excellence" serve as a framework through which the administration can cut salaries and fire workers in the name of "streamlining" and "efficiency," while giving themselves raises and hiring ever more "deans, deanlets, and deanlings" who fill the bloated bureaucratic ranks to the point that senior managers now officially outnumber faculty at the UC. Academic programs have been cut and consolidated, class sizes have increased, out-of-state students are being accepted at higher rates, and everybody's tuition is skyrocketing.

But there's an important point from the experience of anti-privatization struggle at the UC that has so far been missing from the discussion. One of the earliest articles published on the topic, by UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, accurately likened the Board of Visitors to "robber barons" who have "tr[ied] to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris." (These words would do equally well slapped across the foreheads of Dick Blum et al.) But Vaidhyanathan frames his argument as a defense of President Sullivan:

Sullivan is an esteemed sociologist who specialized in class dynamics and the role of debt in society. The author or co-author of six books, she spent most of her career rising through the ranks at the University of Texas, where she served as dean of the graduate school while I was working toward my Ph.D. in the late 1990s. She was known around Texas as a straightforward, competent, and gregarious leader. She carried that reputation from Texas to the University of Michigan, the premier public research university in the world, where she served as the chief academic officer, or provost, for four years.

When the University of Virginia sought a president to lift it from the ranks of an outstanding undergraduate school to a research powerhouse, while retaining its commitment to students and the enlightenment Jeffersonian traditions on which it was founded, the board selected Sullivan in 2010. She became the first woman to serve as president of UVA, a place she could not have attended as an undergraduate in the 1960s because it was all-male at the time.

Sullivan, in other words, is the administrator's administrator. Since the 1990s, she has occupied increasingly senior administrative positions at UT Austin and University of Michigan before being hired by UVA. Vaidhyanathan lists these positions as a way of praising Sullivan's qualifications, but the dark underside of his story is that these flagship universities are precisely the ones that have implemented some of the most wide-ranging privatization policies over the last two decades -- precisely when Sullivan was entering into the administrative ranks. It's no coincidence that Mark Yudof was dean from 1984-1994, then executive vice president and provost from 1994-1997 at UT Austin, before becoming chancellor of the University of Minnesota then president of the UC. And the University of Michigan has become a model for the privatization of public research universities across the country.

Sullivan's own policies may not have been too far out of line with the austerity agenda of our own UC administration. Vaidhyanathan writes, once again intending it as a compliment, that once established at UVA "she had her team and set about reforming and streamlining the budget system, a process that promised to save money and clarify how money flows from one part of the university to another. This was her top priority. It was also the Board of Visitor’s top priority." She may have had different ideas about how to go about making these cuts, but at the end of the day her agenda also turned on its own set of cutbacks.

Furthermore, over the last two years, that is, in each year of her term, President Sullivan has overseen substantial tuition increases: 9.9 percent for in-state students (6 percent for out-of-state) in 2011, and another 8 percent for in-state (6.9 percent for out-of-state) in 2012. In a familiar twist, part of the money raised from the tuition hikes went directly to fund the operation of new buildings. In total, that made eight consecutive years of tuition increases of "somewhere below 10 percent."

No doubt real tensions existed between Sullivan and the Board of Visitors. And it seems clear that, beyond "philosophical differences," these tensions had to do with divergent views regarding what was seen as the appropriate pace of and sites for cuts. But for those of us on the ground at the UC, the public response -- calls to "reopen discussion" about Sullivan's resignation, even votes of no confidence in the Board of Visitors' decision -- seems somewhat misdirected. The removal of the president was sketchy as hell and the Board of Visitors is clearly corrupt, but the answer to the university in crisis is not more or even "better" administrators. "Better" administrators just mean that the implementation of privatization is smoother, if slower. But at the UC we have learned that it is a mistake to think of administrators as individuals: "This struggle against the administration is not about attacking individuals -- or not primarily. It is about the administrative logic of privatization, and the manner in which that logic is enforced." Sometimes this logic is enforced by riot cops, other times by billionaires on the Boards of Visitors. Sullivan's ouster must be read as a necessary result of this administrative logic, the same pressures that push administrators across the country to adopt, implement, and enforce similar policies. Once begun, privatization demands continual blood. But if Sullivan were to return to office, she would face the same economic pressures and would be forced, sooner or later, to accede to them.

The argument is structural; that the administrator plays, and must play, a particular role in the management of the late capitalist university. It's not by chance that across the US all universities (certainly all public universities) are moving in the same directions: massive tuition hikes and corporate fund-raising campaigns, new construction projects to bring in grants and rich students, worker layoffs while adding to the bloated ranks of the administration. If the capitalist is capital personified, the late capitalist administrator is the personification of austerity.

The only way to stop the privatization of the public university is to take it back from the administrative class whose existence depends on its continuation.

NO REGENTS / NO VISITORS / NO CAPITAL / NO BOSSES

The UC Regents are having another meeting on May 16, and tuition hikes are once again on the table. According to the budget report [pdf] to the Committee on Finance, the Regents will discuss the possibility of raising tuition and fees by 6 percent for the fall 2012 semester as well as an additional, mid-year tuition hike "in the range of double digits" for spring 2013 if Governor Brown's tax proposal doesn't pass in November. Chris Newfield's analysis of the budget scenarios is a must read here.

But there's something on the Committee on Finance's agenda that appears at first glance to be strangely out of place. Nestled between discussions of expenditure rates for the general endowment pool and plans for the formation of a captive insurance agency, we find Discussion Item F7, titled "Update regarding Report to the President on Response to Protest on University of California Campuses."

This is a reference, of course, to the Robinson-Edley Report [pdf], which was released in draft form last week to great media fanfare. The text of the discussion item [pdf] for the Regents' meeting is more or less the Executive Summary of the report. Writing at the request of UC President Mark Yudof in the wake of the November 9 police riot at UC Berkeley, General Counsel Charles Robinson and Dean Christopher Edley were charged with generating a set of best policing practices for UC campuses to use in dealing with future protests. The infamous pepper-spraying incident at UC Davis the following week only intensified the report's urgency. Over the course of 50 recommendations (although the version for the Regents' meeting appears to contain only 48 -- it's not clear which two recommendations have been removed), it suggests that the issue at hand is essentially one of free speech. As the Executive Summary states,

This Report is premised on the belief that free expression, robust discourse, and vigorous debate over ideas and principles are essential to the mission of our University. The goal of this Report is to identify practices that will facilitate such expression — while also protecting the health and safety of our students, faculty, staff, police, and the general public. (1)

Joshua Clover has recently shown how the frame of rights and free speech represents a fundamental misrecognition about what is happening on UC campuses and around the world. According to this understanding, the sequence of events goes something like this: students protest, then police respond. Perhaps the police respond a little too hard, arresting a few too many protesters, using a little too much pepper spray. So the administration steps in and formulates a new set of policing practices to ensure that in the future this kind of excessive force isn't deployed. Here, the issue at hand is one of demarcating the limits of protest as speech, of regulating the proper relations between protesters and police.

In fact, as Clover points out, the sequence of events is very different. It begins not with students arbitrarily protesting, but with the administration developing and implementing austerity policies across the UC system -- raising tuition, cutting classes, firing workers, increasing out-of-state admissions, and so on, austerity's myriad manifestations within the particular context of the post-crisis university. These struggles are not rhetorical but material; they are about how the university is run, about what, under the technocratic directives of the UC administration, the university is coming to be. By displacing these struggles onto the terrain of speech, we unwittingly let the administration off the hook: "One suspects there will be some payouts to injured students, and that a cop or two will be pastured. And the matter will be tentatively resolved, despite the economic content remaining entirely unaddressed; thus, the administration wins by 'losing.'"

This is precisely what the Robinson-Edley report does. Without going into too much detail, it's worth looking at an example. One thing that jumps out in the report is the extent to which the authors see the problem as rooted at least in part in students' ignorance: "We also were struck by a more fundamental information gap," write the authors. "[M]ost members of our community know very little about our campus police departments" (23). Apparently, this is not for lack of opportunity. "At UC Santa Cruz, for example, the police department offers a quarter-long course titled 'Citizen Police Academy,' for up to twenty-five students, faculty, and staff. Class members gain a deep familiarity with the campus police department. In addition, on some of our campuses, the police make presentations at new student orientations. But these existing opportunities for students and other members of the University community to educate themselves about their campus police departments apparently have not satisfied the community’s desire for information" (24). Predictably, the report goes on to recommend more such classes, more opportunities for students to "become acquainted with the campus police agency" as well as "with the applicable rules for campus protest -- including rights and responsibilities, triggers for an administration or police response, the response option framework, and alternate modes for engaging with authorities" (26).

The objective is to transform struggles over privatization into a sort of choreographed dance between students and police, to minimize or obscure the work of the administration, and to avoid at all cost any disturbance of the material operations of the university. Despite the much-hyped statement in the Executive Summary that administrators and police will have to stop thinking primarily in terms of "the maintenance of order and adherence to rules and regulations," this order is ultimately upheld as fundamental. In response to concerns that arose from the UC Davis pepper-spraying incident, the report recommends not that pepper-spray should be eliminated but that "event response team’s guidelines, should specify that administrators will not authorize any physical police response against protesters non-aggressively linking arms unless the protesters were significantly interfering with the academic mission of the campus" (37). In the end, order must be maintained, the restructuring of the university must continue unabated.

* * *

Why, then, are protest and policing a concern of the UC Regents' Committee on Finance? No doubt some of the recommendations in the Robinson-Edley report will require some appropriation of funds to implement -- mainly the hiring and training of police officers (Recommendation Group 4) and the surveillance and monitoring of protest actions (Recommendation Group 7). But these will be minor expenses and anyway have little to do with UC finances at large. This apparently unlikely arrangement must be read as an acknowledgment, on the part of the UC's top managers, of what campus protests are really about. They know that the only thing standing in the way of their austerity policies, of their ever accelerating and increasingly desperate attempts to tie the university to the financial markets, student tuition, and debt, are the students and workers -- and occasionally faculty -- standing in their way, literally using their bodies to keep the machine from operating.

It could not be otherwise. At the UC today, protest and policing are inextricably a question of finance.

More tuition hikes are on the horizon:

University of California students could face significantly higher tuition if the state doesn't increase funding and voters don't approve the governor's tax initiative.

University officials are considering a plan to raise tuition by 6 percent this fall if the state doesn't increase funding by $125 million for 2012-13.

Administrators say the 10-campus system would need to consider a mid-year tuition increase in the "range of double digits" or make drastic campus cuts if voters don't pass Gov. Jerry Brown's tax plan in November.

The tuition plans were outlined in an agenda for a UC Board of Regents meeting that was posted online Monday.

Board members are scheduled to discuss various tuition scenarios when they meet in Sacramento on May 16. No action is expected until July.

[Update Wednesday 6/9 4:43pm]: Chris Newfield analyzes some of the possible tuition scenarios here:

The document identifies a current year shortfall of $847M, and a $1 billion shortfall next year -- even assuming the Governor's small January revenue increases and further efficiency savings. Existing budget parameters build in further cuts in what we cannot cut without irreparable harm. Cutting the uncuttable is what we do at UC -- now on an annual basis. This document shows that we will be doing it again next year, even though we can't.

The Governor's May Revise may buy out the tuition increase that you haven't heard about, defined here as 6% for next year.

In Scenario A, in which good revenue numbers come in, the state provides an additional $125.4 M to avoid this increase. As the UCLA FA blog has pointed out, receipts are actually behind projections. This increases the likelihood of Scenario B, which is the 6% increase. Looming in the background is the unidentified Scenario C, in which revenues are behind, the November tax increases fail, UC is subject to a further $200 M cut, and that tuition increase is doubled to at least the low double digits. 12% would bring the base tuition to about $13,700 next year, plus the "Student Services Fee" of $972, and campus fees -- check out the many fees! -- that would bring tuition to about $17,000 for in state students.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the UC Berkeley administration's disastrous plans for financing the renovation of the football stadium. In short, the brilliant idea was to raise $270 million from the sale of seats, presumably to its hyper-rich, 1-percent alumni. As one might expect, things didn't quite work out as our highly-paid financial managers imagined: only $31 million (about 11 percent of the total) was raised over a period of three years, leaving us about $240 million in the hole.

Wonder who's going to get stuck footing the bill...

Although its $321 million price tag would make it one of the most expensive renovations in college sports history, the university said the project would be funded privately, largely through long-term seat sales and naming rights.

But three years into the fund-raising effort, a projected $270 million from the sale of seats has failed to materialize. At the end of December, the school had collected only $31 million in the first three years of the sale. Now it has become clear that the university will have to borrow the vast majority of the money.

In recent interviews, university officials acknowledge that if revenue projections fall short and won't cover the bond payments, the shortfall "would have to come from campus."

The idea that money for the football stadium could come from campus funds, which include student fees, is an admission likely to stir outrage at a school that's already facing possible double-digit tuition increases. "It is disconcerting that the university may be gambling with student fees and other academic funds to cover a massive financial commitment for a football stadium," said Cal computer-science professor Brian Barsky.

(...)

The nearly half-billion-dollar Cal athletic project encompasses a $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium that opens Sept. 1 and $153 million for a new multisport training facility. That's far more than Stanford University spent building a new stadium in 2006.

In public pitches for the project starting in 2006, university officials talked about raising hundreds of millions through an "Endowment Seating Program" that was to endow all 29 of Cal's varsity sports and more yet by selling naming rights to various components of the stadium. The official name will remain Memorial in honor of war veterans. But the economic downturn hindered sales and by November 2010, [Sandy] Barbour [Cal's athletic director] had posted online a letter to fans saying she was "heartbroken that the program's intentions will, in all likelihood, not be fully realized."

The total bonded debt for the project, including the training center, will be $447 million. That's apparently an unprecedented amount of borrowing for a college-sports project, far above the $220 million that Minnesota borrowed to build a new stadium in 2009, the $200 million that Washington has borrowed for its stadium renovation and the $148 million that Michigan took out to add luxury seats that opened in 2010.

The following statement was given by Professor Joshua Clover during the rally at UC Berkeley campus on March 1. From there, approximately 200-250 people marched down Telegraph to Oscar Grant Plaza in downtown Oakland where they converged with students from Laney College for another rally. Later in the day, a small group broke off to begin a 99-mile march to Sacramento.



I was asked to speak about banks and education and I will get to it swiftly without any fancy language. We are here in part to begin a march. It is a march on the seat of government, against intolerable austerity programs that are being imposed by force. This has become a familiar, almost a common event of late. The most dramatic such recent episodes that we have seen have been in Greece, in Athens, a place from whence we draw our farthest histories of education. But we must also draw our nearest histories of the political. Our history of the present also comes from Athens.

In Greece right now, intolerable austerity is being imposed by the economic state and its armed wing, immiserating the people so as to pay an unpayable debt to a global array of financial institutions. There is, in short, a collusion between the state and the banks. The people are being increasingly indebted to the banks even as they cannot afford food and shelter, and this is being done through the militarized mediation of the state.

This is precisely what is happening here as well. Rather than the sublimely dispiriting rain of facts and figures, I want to sketch the process, the mechanism, in five easy steps.

1. The banks have a bunch of money sitting around with no profitable route for investment, because the real economy is in its death throes.
2. The public university wants to raise its price of admission much faster than any increase in people’s ability to pay. Over the last four decades tuition has increased 650 percentage points more than inflation — this is the so-called “rip-off index” — and it’s only accelerating.
3. Economic collapse means that young people are effectively compelled into higher education to compete on the job market — even though they don’t have enough money to keep up with the rip-off index.
4. Did I mention those banks really need new suckers for their loans, especially once the mortgage market blows up?
5. The university and bank thus enter into an alliance through which the bank makes staggering profits from the university’s huge fee hikes.

So I will make the most obvious point: banks don’t make it easier for people to go to school, they make it harder, by enabling massive fee increases. Banks make school more expensive.

But that’s only part of it, of course — the front end, you might say. They get you coming and going. Not only do banks drive up costs, they now on the back end own a trillion dollars worth of the future lives of students. That’s what debt is — they own your hours, period. And that decides your life for you. They know what you’ll do next summer. And the one after that. And the twenty years after that.

If the university’s purpose is to help people move from necessity to freedom — be it political, intellectual, or economic freedom — their collusion with the banks actually and obviously makes you less free. So: the university and you: more expensive, and less free. This is the outcome of the university’s lying down with capital. It preserves itself by selling your and your families’ lives to the bank — by enabling financial profits. As in Greece, so in California: this is the state now.

But here’s the thing I want to say before I go. This problem I have just described is not a false problem. It is not some free decision made by misguided people who can be convinced to see the light and change direction. It is a consequence of objective conditions of the economy and the political situation. Whether we accept that the money finally isn’t out there and isn’t coming back — or whether we accept that one cannot ascend to the seat of government without being irrevocably beholden and committed to this program of exploitation and profit — either way, I do not believe that the situation I have just described can be in any way changed via demands for redistributing the present budget, by demanding a kinder and gentler capitalism.

And this carries me back, as we so often find ourselves carried back, to Greece, to Athens. I say to you today, those of you burning with anger and love and desperation who will commence the long march to the seat of government and those who will stay here, burning just the same, I say to you, MAKE IT GREEK. MAKE IT GREEK. In Greece they have understood, just a few moments faster than we have, that the money isn’t coming back. That the banks and the state are not going to release the people from beneath the boot-heel of austerity. That debt to the banks will be carved from the hides of students, of those who labor, and of those who cannot find jobs. That there is no rescue within this system, within the shock doctrine of austerity capitalism.

So when they march on the seat of government, they do not do so to issue entreaties for a better deal. They do not march to petition for redress of grievances. They do not march to seek out an idealistic equality that simply is not and cannot be a feature of this disaster that is capitalism. They march to burn it down. They march to burn it down. Along the way they pause at banks — in memory of the fact that every revolution has featured, among its earliest acts, the destruction of debt records, because debt is the financial form of unfreedom. And they burn down the banks.

And I say they are not mistaken. I say that their analysis of the real situation is lucid. Inarguable. Perhaps even obvious. Let us enter this history, let us illuminate it, let us make it present. I say: we are all Athenians: MAKE IT GREEK, BURN IT DOWN.

The Daily Cal reports:

The California State Treasurer’s Office sold $860 million worth of University of California 100-year bonds, which will be used to fund capital projects at the university, to 70 large investors Tuesday.

The money raised from the sale of the bonds — which mature over the course of a century and pay about 4.9 percent semiannual interest rates in May and November — will be used for long-term UC capital projects approved by the UC Board of Regents, according to UC spokesperson Dianne Klein. The bonds will also fund individual capital projects at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UCLA, including a portion of the repair of Memorial Stadium, according to Klein.

(...)

UC bond sales are part of standard operating procedure and take place a handful of times each year, but this sale was unprecedented because of its 100-year maturation period combined with the large value of the sale, according to Tom Dresslar, director of communications at the treasury.

The 100-year bonds were designed to appeal to institutional investors, including insurance companies, hedge funds, banks and pension funds, whose interests span multiple generations, according to Klein.

The university is the real world. One positive effect of these bond sales is that they reveal -- if there were still any doubt -- the many and intimate ways in which the UC is tied to the world of Wall Street finance. These ties are the result of a series of conscious decisions made by UC administrators and the Regents to transform the university into a profit-oriented, revenue-generating institution. State funding has decreased, but the shift toward this privatized model, in which the university increasingly generates unrestricted revenues through student tuition hikes (themselves backed by student loans) on one hand and the exploitation of workers on the other, is not, or not only the result -- it is also a cause.

The Daily Cal article unexpectedly pulls a Meister and does a good job of outlining the economics of UC bonds by going back to a 2009 sale of $1.05 billion in construction bonds:

In August 2009, the UC announced that proceeds from approximately $1.05 billion in federal stimulus “Build America Bonds” sold to the public would help fund about 70 capital projects on all ten UC campuses.

In a press release following the 2009 bond sale, Moody’s, a ratings agency, explained the appeal of UC bonds in a shaky economy, since the university has the ability to raise its revenue by increasing student tuition despite state budget cuts.

“In-state tuition has increased dramatically,” the press release stated. “And the out-of-state market remains a comparatively untapped resource that could provide additional growth in tuition revenue should State funding be cut further.”

But they don't look as carefully at the bond report for the current sale, rated AA+ by Fitch. The first thing that becomes apparent is just how happy the bond raters are with the UC's financial managers:

WEAKENED STATE FUNDING: Recent reductions in state appropriations, and the potential for additional cuts through the intermediate term, are mitigated by UC's limited reliance on state operating support. Timely measures consistently taken by UC's 26-member regents and highly experienced management team during times of state fiscal stress provides further rating stability.

As Bob Samuels has been arguing for years, the UC gets its "marching orders" from the bond raters. Fitch is down with the UC's "highly experienced management team" because they've done exactly what Fitch wanted them to do. As students and workers at the UC, however, we aren't so happy with their tenure because we viscerally understand that we're the ones getting screwed. The university is being run for them, not for us.

The other thing that's useful about these bond reports is their honesty. They tell us what the UC administration is really thinking about doing, without funneling it first through an (admittedly flawed) public relations machine. Again, Fitch is happy with the UC's plans for dealing with the likelihood of future budget cuts from the state. In fact, Fitch thinks these budget cuts are a good thing because they increase the university's "operating autonomy." What this means essentially is less restrictions on what the UC can do with its revenue -- while state funds are restricted, meant to cover the university's instructional costs, private funds are not, and can be used for anything from capital projects to paying debt service on previous construction bonds. Fitch tells it like it is:

Appropriations declined a total of $750 million to about $2.27 billion for fiscal 2012, including a mid-year $100 million cut resulting from the state's ongoing revenue shortfall. UC took numerous steps over the past few years to offset the loss in state funds, including significant student fee increases, staff reductions and other cost savings initiatives. On a combined basis, these measures have enabled UC to close about 26% of the total fiscal 2012 budget gap (approximately $1.1 billion).

While the governor's fiscal 2013 budget proposal, currently under review by the state legislature, recommends no further cuts to UC, Fitch believes that state funding for higher education will face continued pressure going forward. The budget proposal is dependent upon various revenue generating ballot measures subject to voter approval. Should these measures fail to gain approval in November, the proposal calls for a $200 million appropriation cut to UC effective Jan. 1, 2013.

The university's management team continues to explore various options to offset reduced state aid, including working with the state on a potential multi-year funding agreement which would provide UC longer term stability in state support in exchange for increased operating autonomy. Options being considered under this agreement include specified general fund increases through fiscal 2016; an increase in the state's share of employee retirement plan contributions, both subject to voter approval of the above-mentioned ballot measures; and more regular, less dramatic increases in tuition.

UC continues to benefit from one of the most diverse revenue streams in higher education, and Fitch notes positively its low and declining reliance on state aid as a revenue source (12.1% in fiscal 2011). The university's other significant funding sources include revenue derived from the operation of its five medical centers (27.1%), grants and contracts generated by its substantial sponsored research activities (24.5%), and student-generated revenues, including tuition, fees, and auxiliary receipts (16.6%).

Straight from Wall Street to the UC: another round of construction bonds, another set of marching orders.

(link)

In solidarity with the #OccupyColleges walkouts taking place today across the country.

from fb:

noon - 3pm

The time has come to voice our rage at the ongoing attack on public education in California and across the globe. This past July the UC regents raised tuition by almost 10%, bringing the total tuition increase for the fall to 17.6%.

President Yudof and the regents will be meeting November 15th to discuss still more austerity measures for years to come. We need to let them know that there will be consequences for the actions they choose to take.

It's time for students at UC Davis and across the state to stand united against such belligerent acts and to send a clear message to the administration that we will not sit idly by as they devastate the future of our communities.

SPREAD THE WORD!

A version of this article was recently published in the UCSC Disorientation Guide. We repost it here because we found it to be a very useful resource: a history of the UC from the perspective of austerity that collects and synthesizes a lot of otherwise dispersed data. Give it a read, and check out the rest of the disorientation guide as well.

As you go from class to overcrowded class this fall, you’ll want to forget that tuition last year was around $1,800 less than you’re paying now. Continuing a 30-year trend, the UC Board of Regents gathered in cigar and gin-soaked boardrooms over the summer to raise our tuition by 17.6% and lay down plans for further increases in January, or maybe just raise tuition 81% over the next 4 years. (Hey, overcrowding at least improves your chances of getting lucky; tuition hikes on the other hand, just increase the probability of working a shitty job in college and plenty of debt after). The UC Office of the President (UCOP) never tires of reminding us that tuition increases are the recession’s fault or scolding us that Californians are just unwilling to spend on education in hard times; this is a strange excuse though, since state funding has been decreasing while tuition has been skyrocketing since the early 1990s. Even while UCOP continues to whine about how poor it is and how unfortunate it is that they need to raise tuition, it’s offering the state of California a billion dollar loan from UC financial reserves. As it happens, in 9 of the past 10 years tuition was raised – well before the 2008 recession began; UCOP’s insistence on the necessity of this recent series of tuition increases has so many logical fallacies that if it were an assignment, it’d get an F (assuming, of course, that the overburdened TA grading it even had time to pay attention to it). Tuition hikes and budget cuts – at all levels of California higher education – are part of the decades-long process whereby the richest assholes in California (and the greater US) intend to make private what few institutions remain in public hands.

The other day, we wrote a brief post on the renovation of Lower Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, reading it (following Bob Meister's now classic exposé) as yet another capital project funded by UC construction bonds that are, for their part, backed by student tuition. Mostly we were interested in the way UC administrators imagined their accountability to the students who increasingly "foot the bill" for pretty much everything the university does, and we didn't get into the technical details of the project because, well, we aren't so great with that kind of stuff.

Fortunately, it turns out we didn't need to. After a brief back-and-forth in the comments of that post, Zach Williams has written an incredibly useful and detailed investigation into the funding mechanisms for this particular project. Think Charlie Schwartz with a killer instinct. Williams's analysis is not only useful for understanding this particular case, but more generally it serves as a framework or methodology for understanding UC capital projects, for seeing through the obscure complexity of these financial deals. This complexity offers the UC administration another rhetorical weapon to be deployed in its war on students and workers. We're going to post the conclusion here, but we highly recommend reading the full post:

The Lower Sproul renovation is funded, almost entirely, by payments from the students, despite University protestations to the contrary. . . .

13 million is from campus funds -- some of which is sourced from student fees, though not student tuition.

200 million is externally financed. This 200 million in financing is backed by two sources:

1. 112 million in special student fees, proposed and approved by the students themselves.
2. A General Revenue Bond

So, half of that external financing (which is, if you recall, nothing other than a general revenue bond, though it may be a federally subsidized one) will be financed by . . . another general revenue bond. The rest will be footed by a sort of ‘complicit in one’s own domination’ decision by the ASU to help turn a basic safety retrofit into a project to increase space for students, student organizations, and student run revenue streams.

And that general revenue bond will be financed by student fees. Quite clearly, none of the 35% of funding from grants is going to this capital project. Rather, it will be financed entirely from auxiliary and student fees. And the bulk of auxiliary fees are . . . oh, right, student fees.

So, let’s list no bullshit sources of revenue for this project.

1. Student fees (campus funds)
2. Student fees (special student fee)
3. Student fees (registration fees)
4. Student fees (auxiliary fees from housing, dining, parking, and so on)

SAN FRANCISCO -- University of California Regents voted Thursday to raise tuition by 9.6 percent -- on top of an 8 percent increase already approved for this fall -- over the objections of students who said they'll drown in debt.

At the same meeting, the regents also gave large pay raises to three executives, including two who are paid from state funds.

This fall, undergraduate tuition will rise to $12,192, more than 18 percent higher than last year's $10,302 -- a level that prompted violent student protests. With a mandatory campus fee of $1,026, a year at UC now costs $13,218 before room and board.

That's more than twice what it cost in 2005.

If austerity is class war, as our compañeros at Bay of Rage like to say, then these repeated tuition hikes should be considered a weapon in the administrative arsenal. Notably, the regents themselves relied heavily on war rhetoric today in discussing student tuition. Sherry Lansing, the regents' recently inaugurated chairperson who stumbled through the motions of her new role today, called for students to join with "staff and chancellors and all of us" to "continue this battle." For his part, Richard Blum, husband of U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, huge investor in for-profit education, and perhaps the single most corrupt of all the regents, outlined what he saw as the first step of this battle as follows: "we should determine who our friends are and who are our enemies."

We too see what's happening at the universities -- and in every other sector of this country -- as a form of war. But we draw different lines around our friends and our enemies. For regents like Blum and Lansing, the enemies are students, workers, and faculty. Each of these groups constitutes a target to be attacked via specialized instruments of war: tuition hikes for students, layoffs and wage cuts for workers and (to a lesser extent) faculty. That is why we are the crisis and the job of the university's corporate management is precisely that -- to manage the crisis, to manage us.

(image from the daily cal, quotes via dettman)

We talk a lot here about construction and debt, about the UC administration's addiction to using student tuition -- and the promise of future tuition increases -- as collateral to finance the sale of construction bonds. That's classic Meister. But it's important to remember that the UC's corporate management uses tuition in other ways as well. Remember, for example, how a couple days ago the state government asked the UC to loan it $1.7 billion, while the UC regents are once again raising student tuition at the exact same time? (The regents just officially approved the 9.6 percent additional tuition increase, on top of the 8 percent that had already been approved. So tuition will officially increase by 17.6 percent this fall.) Bob Samuels explains:

As we get ready for another large tuition increase, and we read about the elimination of several UC degree programs, the bond rating agency, Fitch, has re-affirmed the university’s strong fiscal standing. While the bond raters have been wrong in the past, we can still read the latest analysis of UC’s fiscal health as indicating the real priorities of the administration.

Since the UC has decided to help reduce its pension liability by selling about $1 billion of commercial paper (debt), it has asked to have its financial status rated. As I have argued in the past, due to the UCs high level of debt, it is dependent on getting a high rating from the bond raters so that it can receive a low interest rate, and one result of this dependency on debt is that the bond raters can tell the university how they think the system should structure its finances. Moreover, even though the bond raters pretend to be neutral and free of any ideology, they covertly push the same agenda that we find in the World Bank and the International Monetary fund. This agenda pushes for the privatization of public entities, a taking on of huge debts, and the deregulation of markets. The plan for the UC set out by Fitch is thus in many ways the global plan being pushed by conservatives and bond raters.

In reading the summary of Fitch’s report, we learn that the university has received a high rating because of, “UC's substantial level of balance sheet resources and liquidity; diverse revenue base, which enables the system to weather temporary weakness in any one funding source; and manageable debt burden, despite the expansive, capital intensive nature of its operations.” In other words, UC has many different revenue streams, and although it has a high level of debt, over $14 billion, it has the resources to take care of its financial obligations.

According to Fitch, one of the main signs of UC’s fiscal health is its ability to constantly raise tuition: “Recent reductions in state appropriations, and the potential for additional cuts through the intermediate term, are partially mitigated by the university's still considerable, though now more limited, ability to raise tuition and fees, and its overall limited reliance on state operating support.” In other words, the UC should not worry too much about losing state funds because it has shown a willingness to raise tuition. In fact, this same logic of privatization is driving the state’s reduction of funding for the UC; since the Democrats believe they cannot raise taxes, they cut the UC, which they know will turn around and raise tuition.

Not only does the state feel comfortable reducing the university’s funding, but they are planning to borrow another $1 billion from the UC system, and the reason why the administration will accept this deal is that the university will turn a profit by lending money to the state. This deal make sense on paper because due to UC’s high bond rating and the state’s low rating, the state has to pay a higher interest rate to borrow money, and if the UC lends money, the state can improve its bond rating, and the UC can profit from the difference between its low interest rate and the state’s high interest rate.

What is left out of this equation is that students are paying 6.8% to take out their loans, and these loans not only allow the UC to raise tuition, but the money generated from tuition can be leant to the state at something like 5%, which is better than the 2-3% the UC gets from putting tuition dollars into its Short Term Investment Pool. If we connect the dots, we see that students are lending money to the state, so that the university can bring in more money, but the end result is that the students will have to pay for this interest deal.

The UC administration and the regents, as dettman put it yesterday, "are simply another mechanism by which the state plunders the middle class to feed the rich."

As we reported here, last fall the UC regents voted once again to raise tuition by 8 percent (on top of the 32 percent increase the previous year) during a meeting at the isolated and heavily fortified facilities at UCSF Mission Bay. Around 400 students and workers showed up to protest the decision. During the protest, the police used pepper spray and batons to attack the protesters, and at one point an officer named Jared Kemper drew his pistol on a group of unarmed students. A number of students were arrested that day, and two of them -- Peter Howell and Eric Wilson -- are preparing for their upcoming trials.

Peter Howell is being charged with:

1) Penal Code section 148(b): removal of baton from Officer Kemper
2) Penal Code section 243(b): battery on a police officer (Kemper)
3) Penal Code section 148(a)(1): resisting, obstructing or delaying an officer (Officer Suttles)
4) Penal Code section 406: Rout: attempted riot

Eric Wilson is charged with:

1) PC section 243(c)(2): battery with injury on an officer (Officer Bolano)
2) PC section 148(a)(1): resisting, obstructing or delaying an officer (Officer Bolano and Sgt. Acuna)
3) PC section 148(a)(1): resisting, obstructing or delaying an officer (Officer Suttles)
4) PC section 406: Rout: attempted riot.

The matter is set for Jury Trial readiness on July 22nd, and as soon as a courtroom is available it will be sent out to trial, most likely during the week of July 25th-29th. The trial should last approximately 1 week and will take place at the Hall of Justice in San Francisco, located at 850 Bryant Street.

The defense is still looking for witnesses who would be willing to testify on behalf of either Howell or Wilson. If you were at the protest and saw either the incident with Officer Kemper or the incident in the stairwell, please leave a comment on this post at occupyca or send us an email at reclaimuc [at] gmail.com. We'll forward your contact info to the lawyers, but apart from that everything will remain entirely confidential. Also, if you know of other people who were at the protest on November 17, 2010, please let them know about the trial, forward them the link, and get the word out. We'll keep posting updates here as new information comes in.

At times, the UC faculty has been something of a fickle ally in our fight against austerity and privatization. The massive walkout on September 24, 2009 was successful precisely because the faculty had invested large amounts of time and energy in organizing over the summer, but as the protests began to escalate in the fall they became hesitant and many withdrew. Many students outside of Wheeler Hall on November 20, 2009 were shocked to see the faculty they saw as the most radical and sympathetic yelling at them to sit down and back off, that the squads of heavily-armed riot cops were there to protect them. After the incident at the Chancellor's house, perhaps, the split became insurmountable. A sign of this rupture is the infamous email where Professor Wendy Brown calls the Live Week protesters "hooligans" and "10 year olds," and the protest itself "pure stupidity" and "bullshit." By the spring, most of the faculty (with a few singular exceptions, of course) saw themselves as fully external to the anti-austerity struggle at the university.

Seen in this light, it's not particularly surprising that the UC Academic Council, the administrative arm of the Academic Senate, has come out in favor of tuition increases [PDF]. While "register[ing] dismay at State's continuing disinvestment in higher education," the resolution concludes:

The Academic Council advises President Yudof to request that the Regents increase mandatory systemwide charges effective in Fall term 2011 in an amount sufficient to offset the $150 million reduction in State funding contained in the State 2010-2011 budget.

If solidarity is about drawing lines that separate friends from enemies, then this statement is incredibly revealing about not only where we should situate the faculty but also how the faculty see themselves. As laripley says, "so much for solidarity."

[Update Saturday 12:44pm]: Via dettman, the Academic Council is also apparently in favor of expanding contingent labor:

As reported in the SF Chronicle, the Academic Council recommended last week that the University expand the use of contingent faculty "where appropriate" across the system, in the words of system-wide senate chair Dan Simmons. We have not seen any official announcement, or document such as meeting minutes to confirm this. But this would appear a major shift in the official position of the faculty: since when does the Senate recommend the expansion of non-senate faculty? It's enough that the administration has become addicted to the use of exploited, under-paid, and over-worked lecturers. It's a completely different position for the system-wide senate to come to the same conclusion. The senate should be in the business of expanding (at least some of) the benefits of the tenure system to contingent faculty -- not sell our collective soul to satisfy the administration's appetite for a flexible workforce.

Summer means no students -- for the UC administration, that means the absence of one of the largest obstacles to their privatizing designs. There's a similar logic in the UC regents' decision to hold their meetings at UCSF Mission Bay. It is a highly strategic space: not only is it extremely out of the way and difficult to get to from Berkeley, but it's also located in what is essentially a post-industrial wasteland, with little else around to provide cover. After thousands protested the meeting at UCLA in November 2009 to approve the original 32 percent tuition hike, it seems the regents decided to retire to less accessible locations.

Summer vacation is the temporal version of UCSF Mission Bay. It's not surprising that it was in July 2009 that the regents voted to give UC president Mark Yudof "emergency powers" due to the "state of financial emergency," which gave the administration unilateral authority to impose austerity measures. Especially as "shared governance" becomes less and less of a reality, we should expect more and more executive decisions to be made and policies to be approved at this time of the year.

The title of this article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel is right on: "During Serenity of Summer, UCSC Implements 'Painful' Cuts."

SANTA CRUZ -- UC Santa Cruz's wooded campus is relatively serene in the early days of the more quiet summer session.

Beneath the tranquility though, the campus is set to execute another round of cuts including laying off roughly 50 non-academic employees in what has become an annual occurrence since 2008.

The layoffs go into effect on Friday, July 1, the start of the new fiscal year. In addition to layoffs, workers are seeing their hours (and pay) cut back. As expected, these cuts will primarily affect non-academic workers. (While there are no layoffs on the academic side of things, 40 more faculty positions that are currently empty, and 120 teaching assistantships for graduate students, will be permanently eliminated.) While UC spokespeople talk about how much much their work is valued, they acknowledge that the student-as-consumer is the primary target.

"After years of reductions in state support, we've gotten to the point where every corner of the campus has been impacted by these cuts," UCSC spokesman Jim Burns said. "It's also true that units farther from the classroom have been particularly hard hit -- not because the campus doesn't value those areas and the people working in them. But because we have tried to the extent possible to reduce cuts to the academic areas in an effort to protect student access to the courses they need."

Much like the tuition increases, however, these poverty wages are not a function of the so-called financial crisis. Rather, it's a function of a class war that's been occurring for decades:

During her two decades at UCSC, [custodian Rosario] Cortez has held several second jobs, including other custodial positions and a job at a bread factory. Currently she works five days a week at UCSC, eight hours a day, where she earns about $2,200 a month after taxes, then makes and sells tamales on the weekends for extra income.

Cortez's sentiments were echoed by Ernesto Encinas, a cook at UCSC who cares for his 86-year-old mother and 14-year-old son.

"Everyone I know has a second job," Encinas said. "There is no rest with the wages we make here. You can't make ends meet with just the one job with the way cost of living keeps rising. Any little change in our income can be devastating."

With these cuts comes not a decrease in the amount of work expected but precisely the opposite: speedup. Custodians, for example, are required to clean more areas during a single shift. Administrators get around this in a curious way -- by telling workers, apparently, to "clean less," that is, to do a worse job at cleaning more areas. It's a recipe for disaster -- especially in the context of ongoing layoffs, this amounts to an incredibly difficult balancing act for the workers. On this note, check out what an asshole Jim Dunne, the director of UCSC's physical plants department, is:

"I have heard [the complaints]," Dunne said. "We often only have a few months to implement changes and rework how we do things. We are making a lot of effort to communicate to custodians what that redesign is, but adjustment takes time. It is a difficult situation for both sides. Custodians take a lot of pride in their work. When you tell them to clean something less, that's hard for them."

Yeah, that's the only thing that's hard for them.

If they ever doubted it before, UC administrators now understand that the best time to implement austerity are the summer months. Summer evacuates much of the potential resistance -- with students and faculty mostly away, the only thing standing in the way are the workers, precisely those hardest hit by the cutbacks. It also functions usefully as a time barrier -- one of the administration's most effective tactics is simply to wait protesters out. (Look at what's happened with the last two hunger strikes at UC Berkeley.) Finally, summer marks the point at which many veteran student protesters graduate and move on. For anti-austerity protesters, it will become increasingly important to incorporate the summer into strategic thinking. This does not necessarily imply a need for stable organizing structures, which contribute their own problems, but it does indicate the need to directly address and even intervene in some way during these months. After all, the success of the walkout on September 24, 2009 depended on the work that was done by students, faculty, and workers before the school year had even begun. This does not necessarily have to take place on campus. It could also mean looking to other organizing bodies outside the spaces of the university that are attempting to build capacity for resistance against austerity.

If fall is the moment of attack, and after the fall the moment of reflection, then before the fall is clearly the moment of preparation. But maybe it's time to rethink this calendar?

The other day we posted on the legislative operations that have produced a series of austerity budgets for the state of California. Of course, the services that are on the chopping block are both significant and diverse -- the cuts will affect far more than public education. But for obvious reasons public higher education is usually our point of departure. Anyway, in that post we looked at the responses of the UC administration to the Democrats' proposed budget plan, which would have included another $300 million in cuts to the UC and CSU systems (if it hadn't been vetoed by Governor Brown). First came the statement of UC spokesperson Steve Montiel, which noted that "Any further cuts would threaten our ability to provide access, affordability and academic excellence." Then we turned to a statement signed by UC president Mark Yudof and UC regent chair Russell Gould, which asserts that "An additional $150 million in cuts will impair our ability to provide access at an affordable price while preserving academic excellence."

Access, affordability, and excellence. These qualities -- which, it's worth mentioning, are defined only in broad, meaningless strokes -- are what Yudof has called the UC's three "compass points." Here's how Yudof referred to them at the UC regents' meeting in January 2011 (this quote is under pretty heavy rotation these days):

Yudof said the university has long operated on three "compass points" -- access, affordability and excellence.

"We are moving dangerously close to having to say: pick two of the three. That’s my view, and the excellence is nonnegotiable," he said. "We are going to have to look at access and affordability."

Yesterday, the day after the statements from Montiel, Yudof, and Gould were printed, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau published his own statement, which was emailed to the entire UC Berkeley campus and is posted here. He writes:

As you know, Berkeley already faces extraordinary challenges for the coming year. Our share of the $500 million cut from the Governor’s proposed budget is about $70 million. On top of the proposed cuts, the campus has additional mandatory increased costs such as utilities and health care benefits for which we must find $40 million. Thus, in effect, we are already facing $110 million in cuts for 2011-12 and we cannot sustain any further cuts without placing an intolerable burden on our students and staff. Specifically, the legislature’s budget would have added as much as $25 million to this shortfall, an amount which we simply cannot bear. Not only would this be very painful for our campus, it would ultimately be damaging to the economy and future prospects of California.

As usual, the official response takes a specific form: it once again turns on the logic of the words further/additional. This formulation erases everything that has already happened, removes it entirely from the political horizon. As we wrote here last month,

In addition to erasing the violence of austerity . . ., this strategy charts a path of rhetorical retreat. Obviously this isn't a rousing defense of public education. But it leads to another danger: every time the budget is cut, it's a "disaster"... until the cuts go through. At that point it becomes the new normal. In effect, it represents an attempt to limit political struggle to a relatively minor question about what's currently on the table -- everything else simply disappears.

That's bad enough. But, to return to Yudof's "compass points," something unexpected goes wrong in the next paragraph of Birgeneau's statement:

I know that the Cal community cares deeply about public higher education and understands the importance to the state and to the nation of the education, research and public service that we provide. I want to assure you that we will not compromise on our principles of Access and Excellence. I urge you to join me in telling your local legislators, leaders in the Assembly and Senate, and Governor Brown himself that they must arrive at a budget agreement that does not require further cuts to the University of California.

Either Birgeneau didn't get the message (shhhhhh!) or the decision that Yudof was alluding to back in January has already been made. Not that we were under any illusions about the UC administration's commitment to "affordability." Tuition has skyrocketed, up 40 percent in the last two years and 300 percent in the last ten.

When even the rhetorical flourishes have disappeared, nothing will hold back the coming wave of tuition increases -- or stop the plodding advance toward privatization.

We generally rely on other folks to analyze the budget at the state level, especially as it relates to public education but more generally in the current context of austerity. Instead we usually prefer to focus our attention on the UC administration and the UC regents. But so far we haven't found anything that lays out the process and timeline for the austerity measures that are going to be imposed on the UC in the near future. That's what we want to do here.

First of all, there are a couple of upcoming dates that are important. Today, June 15, marks the deadline by which the state legislature has to pass a budget. If they don't pass one by midnight, their salaries will be permanently docked, as stipulated by a new ballot measure that was approved here last November. Without getting into the boring and mostly irrelevant details of the party politics involved in these decisions, the bottom line is that the Democrats have finally produced a budget proposal, one that they can pass without any Republican votes. Included in the proposal are another series of cuts -- surprise surprise! -- including a additional $300 million of cuts to the UC and CSU systems ($150 million to each), on top of the $500 million already cut, as well as the deferment of $540 million already owed to the UC and $750 million from canceling "old school debts" (money owed to public schools?). As thosewhouseit noted this morning, these cuts will devastate K-12 and higher education in California -- both of which, as we well know, have already been decimated by massive cuts.

So, as expected, this is a shitty deal. It's austerity, plain and simple. It's not necessarily going to pass, since Governor Brown could theoretically veto it [Update Thursday 11:13 am: Brown has officially vetoed the budget plan], but what's important is the generalized agreement by pretty much all of the political elites involved in the decision-making process, regardless of their party of affiliation. In broad strokes, they are all in agreement as to what the problems are and as a consequence the solutions as well. Take a look, for example, at Brown's recent video statement on the budget.



What Brown presents in the video -- and remember, of course, the Brown is a Democrat -- is a series of austerity measures. He calls explicitly for "deep and permanent cuts to ongoing state programs" and what he labels "reforms," which refers above all to the reformulation of public sector pensions and, as he puts it, "a cap on ongoing state spending." Furthermore, the taxes that Brown is calling for are temporary.

Which brings us to the next set of important dates. July 1 is the beginning of the new fiscal year, which means (for our purposes here) that the state sales tax will decline by 1 percent and the vehicle registration tax by 1/2 percent. Governor Brown's tax proposal, then, has two parts: first, it postpones the expiration date of these taxes until mid-September; at which point, second, a special election will take place in which California voters will vote on whether or not to extend these same taxes for another five years. At worst, then, the vote will fail, and the taxes will not be extended -- this seems like the most likely outcome at this point. But what's most depressing about the whole thing is the fact that the taxes are at best temporary. In other words, the entire premise of Brown's proposal is that services provided by the state must be eliminated -- the only question is how fast the transition will be. It's not that we didn't know this already, of course. From the beginning, Brown's politics have been characterized by a commitment to austerity.

In some sense, the special election in September will have large consequences for California public education. If it fails, UC spokespeople have stated, tuition will be jacked up by another 32 percent at the beginning of the winter 2012 semester. (And remember, that's on top of the 8 percent hike that's already been programmed for fall 2011.) This would bring in-state tuition in the UC system to $15,000 a year. But at the same time, the UC administration has already made the choices that have condemned the entire UC system to privatization. The regents are incapable of making a case for public education not because they're bad speakers or because they've misunderstood the subtle details of the university system but because they don't give a shit about public education. As in the case of the $500 million already cut from the UC in the first round of budgeting, every defeat becomes the point of departure for the next one. More than just a losing strategy, we could easily read this as purposeful -- it allows the administration to continually deflect blame while moving the university toward a privatized model.

Right on cue, the UC once again trots out the same old arguments. Here's what UC spokesperson Steve Montiel told the Sacramento Bee about the Democrats' new budget, which includes the $150 million cuts mentioned above:

"We are assessing the latest proposal from the state Senate, and it's too soon to say with certainty what the impact would be. But there's no question that additional cuts would not be good news for UC and the Californians it serves. The university already has taken steps to absorb a $500 million cut, and we have been preparing contingencies in the event of an all-cuts budget. Any further cuts would threaten our ability to provide access, affordability and academic excellence."

And now, UC president Mark Yudof and UC regent chairman Russell Gould have released the following statement:

UC, like the California State University, already has taken steps to absorb a $500 million cut with substantial impacts to programs on the campuses. An additional $150 million in cuts will impair our ability to provide access at an affordable price while preserving academic excellence and allowing students to complete their degrees in a timely way. If this budget plan stands, the likely result will be a double-digit tuition increase on top of the 8 percent hike already approved for next year.

It's the usual trope -- both formulations turn on words like further and additional. What's especially revealing here is the way that Montiel, Yudof, and Gould frame the consequences of these further/additional cuts. Because the talking point of the managerial trinity of "access, affordability, and academic excellence" on the proverbial chopping block has been active since early January at the very latest, when Yudof laid out the changing relationship toward what he called the UC's three "compass points":

Yudof said the university has long operated on three "compass points" -- access, affordability and excellence.

"We are moving dangerously close to having to say: pick two of the three. That’s my view, and the excellence is nonnegotiable," he said. "We are going to have to look at access and affordability."

To return to the statement by Yudof and Gould for a second, take a look at the sentences that come right after the above quote:

And to require UC to carry a $500 million "loan" balance into fiscal year 2012-13 because the state can't provide UC with the fully budgeted allocation will only force the university to incur extra costs that are passed on to students and their parents. In addition, this budget plan poses a threat to UC and higher education in future years as it fails to achieve a sustainable, balanced budget. Without a stable, predictable funding base, our long-term quality is seriously threatened.

It's worth noting that the regents haven't had any problem with passing on "extra costs" to students and parents in the past. That's why tuition has increased 40 percent in the past two years, and 300 percent over the past decade. But what's especially interesting here is the tension between the seemingly out of place call for a balanced budget and a "stable, predictable funding base." After all, the requirement of a balanced budget is precisely the reason that these new cuts have been proposed -- according to the new ballot proposal, the Democrats in the legislature must pass a balanced budget or face a pay cut. So what they've done is cut us instead.

In the end, the "stable, predictable funding base" called for by our corporate overseers gives us the key to unraveling their odd statement. They know, as we do, that the state will never provide the kind of financial stability or predictability they seek. Yudof has long called the state an "unreliable partner" and he has been given no reason to think differently. What this statement does is begin to lay the groundwork for a full shift toward the corporate university -- the "stable, predictable funding base" that the state cannot supply will be sought elsewhere. And we all know where that elsewhere is.