In February 2012, the campus stood on the verge of capturing a $60 million grant from the Simons Foundation to launch a theory of computing institute. Its competition, several elite East Coast private universities, equated the problems facing the campus with a death spiral. Why, they wanted to know, would the foundation consider giving such a large sum of money to a campus that in a decade would be a shadow of itself?

Having been posed the question, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau gulped as he sat across a table from the foundation’s decision-makers. Completely unprepared for such an assessment, he paused for a full 30 seconds before unleashing a 30-minute lecture on the ongoing vitality of UC Berkeley.

“I told them everything,” he said in an interview last week. “I told them about our public character, I told them about our comprehensive excellence, I told them about our financial aid strategy.”

UC Berkeley’s proposal, which drew from a variety of fields, including molecular and computational biology, and incorporated the star power of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, won the grant, beating out top-flight private universities like Harvard and MIT.

This triumph is emblematic of the excellence UC Berkeley has achieved under the leadership of Birgeneau, who is stepping down this summer. Worldwide rankings place it among the top universities on the globe, it has maintained its status as the premier public institution in the United States and its faculty members and students continue to win the most prestigious awards academia offers.

But the success has come at a cost, to both UC Berkeley itself and the University of California as a whole. For many, the path charted by Birgeneau through the state’s disinvestment has threatened the fabric of the UC system and alienated members of the campus community. To some, it has gone so far as to jeopardize the very idea of the public university.

Because of its stature, UC Berkeley has a unique ability among the UC schools to generate revenue through fundraising, private partnerships and nonresident tuition dollars. In a two-day strategic planning meeting shortly after he took office in 2004, Birgeneau decided to capitalize on this advantage in order to maintain what he calls the campus’s “comprehensive excellence.”

But this strategy — a mixture of increased lobbying for federal research grants, a drastically expanded private fundraising enterprise and a sharp increase in out-of-state students that yielded unprecedented nonstate revenue for the campus — favored UC Berkeley ahead of the rest of the system. By leveraging UC Berkeley’s brand, Birgeneau set the campus apart from the other nine UC campuses.

“(Fundraising) is campus-driven: You’re always counting on the allegiances and often the heartstrings of the donors,” said David Blinder, who spearheaded fundraising efforts as the campus’s associate vice chancellor of university relations and vice president of the UC Berkeley Foundation. “Their affiliations are to the campus rather than to the broad, amorphous thing that is the University of California.”

In the last fiscal year alone, the campus has raised $408 million through programs like the Campaign for Berkeley.

UC Berkeley’s prestige gives it a leg up on the fundraising competition, and Birgeneau has not shied from exploiting this advantage — a policy with which Birgeneau, who says he values the Master Plan’s multitiered structure, sees no problem.

“Ultimately, the responsibility of the UC Berkeley chancellor is to ensure that Berkeley continues to set the standard for public education nationally and internationally,” Birgeneau said. “My first responsibility is to ensure that … California has at least one public institution that is as good as the very best private institutions and sets the standard for the world.”

Birgeneau further articulated his vision of UC Berkeley’s primacy in a 2012 white paper he co-authored that called for many decision-making functions to be devolved from the central Office of the President to individual campuses. Although he said the proposal was not intended to give UC Berkeley or any other campus special status, it strained the unity of the 10-campus UC system. Among many controversial points, the paper’s proposal to create decision-making boards specific to each campus opened the door to differential tuition between campuses — a proposal that was shelved by the university’s 2010 Commission on the Future due to concerns it would irreparably destroy the system’s nine undergraduate campuses’ equal-footing relationship.

In addition to being a coalition of campuses, the UC system is also a coalition of undergraduate and graduate institutions. At UC Berkeley, the relationship between undergraduate and graduate programs has struggled — and in some cases, this relationship has been severed almost completely.

In the face of state disinvestment, graduate programs have ratcheted up tuition rates and subtly pivoted away from the campus. Combined living and tuition expenses at the UC Berkeley School of Law now top $72,000 for California residents, placing it in the neighborhood of its private peers. Meanwhile, graduate programs in the sciences have increasingly looked to sponsored projects as a way to obtain research money.

“All of the attention in access has tended be on undergraduate education,” said Judson King, director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley.

In pursuit of financial security, the campus’s graduate programs have emulated the operations of their counterparts at schools like the University of Virginia. Virginia’s Darden School of Business, for example, has relied largely on tuition and fees to finance itself self-sufficiently for more than a decade.

“What a lot of places are doing is selectively quasi-privatizing certain schools, like law and graduate business schools,” said University of Virginia professor David Breneman, an expert in the economics and financing of higher education. “But they don’t like to talk — UVA doesn’t like to talk about anything but it being a public university — but we’re moving away from the meaning that it’s largely publicly financed.”

Instead, the reliance on student fees and donations has meant that graduate programs have come to look more like privately financed arms of a public university.

In order to demonstrate to donors that he was serious about maintaining UC Berkeley’s comprehensive excellence, Birgeneau fully committed the campus to his alternative funding push.

“First and foremost, it was important for our constituents to have the confidence that nobody was going to be retreating from Berkeley’s standards,” said Blinder, who left the campus for a similar position at The Scripps Research Institute this year.

But the focus on money created an atmosphere in which Birgeneau spent so much time away from UC Berkeley pursuing additional revenue that students and faculty members alike came to see him as aloof from the needs of the campus community. The tension came to a head during Birgeneau’s controversial handling of the November 2011 Occupy protests — an episode he said he regrets — when many in the faculty called for a no-confidence vote in his leadership.

Other policies also created conflict on campus. Operational Excellence, a cost-saving initiative that Blinder credited with demonstrating the campus’s commitment to financial efficiency to donors, often became a target for its layoffs that campus workers perceived disproportionately affected nonsenior management roles.

Increased admission rates of nonresident students became an equally frequent focus of campus dialogue. During protests, activists decried the immediate effects of the out-of-state influx while analysts considered the policy myopic. A recent paper co-authored by professors Bradley Curs of the University of Missouri and Ozan Jaquette of the University of Arizona found that increased enrollment of nonresidents at public research universities, including UC Berkeley, has limited socioeconomic and ethnic diversity.

“It undermines the university’s long-term case that it is a public university and needs public support,” said Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, who called the pursuit of nonresident students “expedient revenue-hunting.” “These things represent short-term solutions to long-term systemic problems that need to be worked through.”

All these policies and decisions, and the reactions to them, are manifestations of the fundamental tension that underlies Birgeneau’s term as chancellor. His nine years in California Hall have been at some level a prolonged dialogue on what it means to be a public university.

On the one hand, the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education founded the UC system on the public ideal, according to which the population of the state invested in the education of its younger generations. This is the ideal that many faculty members and students aspire to and the principle that has guided the movement against state disinvestment of the past four years.

But as the state disinvested from the UC system regardless and UC Berkeley began raising money from other sources, Birgeneau has sought to maintain what he calls the “public character” of the university.

“Saying it’s a public university means it is available and accessible to all residents of the state depending only on their having the academic qualifications for admission,” King said. “The idea of public education is that it is available without regard to personal or family (financial) resources.”

By this metric, Birgeneau claims to have preserved public character. Although middle-income enrollment has decreased 9 percentage points from 2000 to 2010, 38 percent of UC Berkeley’s student body receives Pell Grants, and in December 2011, the campus implemented the Middle Class Access Plan, which caps parent contribution toward undergraduate education for students with family incomes of between $80,000 to $140,000.

Birgeneau’s appointment in January as the leader of the Lincoln Project — a three-year initiative organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences aimed at defining the future of public higher education — affords him a platform from which he can continue exploring higher education reform, this time on a national level. Though his methods have at times been controversial, his peers in public higher education refer to the successes of the campus during his tenure as the “Berkeley Miracle.”

Endorsing his work at UC Berkeley, the academy wrote in a press release announcing the move that Birgeneau “has launched initiatives at UC Berkeley that are the models for public colleges and universities elsewhere.”

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo and Curan Mehra at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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Brown’s comment reflects a seriously misguided understanding of California’s higher education system. Most significantly, his remark is couched in a false dichotomy: that research and teaching are somehow mutually exclusive. Under Brown’s view, it would seem, time professors spend conducting research is time they could instead be spending in the classroom.

But as many professors can attest, that is not the case. At this university, research and instruction go hand in hand. The work a professor does outside of his or her lectures in many instances directly contributes to the courses he or she teaches. Professors do not isolate themselves when they conduct research — students are often involved in the process.

The university’s stress on research traces back to a legislative commitment from the state. The California Master Plan for Higher Education — which created the framework of the UC, CSU and community college systems students experience today — clearly established the UC system as the research branch of state higher education. Brown’s views, no doubt stemming from an admirable desire to create a more efficient university, would in practice represent an unforgivable departure from that promise.

Also disturbing is Brown’s value judgment about the worth of certain kinds of research. In singling out “academic novelty” as an inferior or less worthwhile endeavor, Brown unfairly pitted different academic fields against each other.

By creating a distinction between “novelty” and “research into reality,” Brown undermines the potential for groundbreaking research in lesser-known fields. Following Brown’s advice would only constrain innovative research projects that could have a profound influence on UC students and the state as a whole. And if academic novelty isn’t valued at a university, where else will it be pursued in earnest?

Beyond the need for ingenuity in academics, it is important to remember that research is part of what gives the university such a strong appeal. Many UC campuses, especially UC Berkeley, derive much of their prestige from the notable research conducted by their faculty members. This is a huge draw for students, but more importantly, it attracts stellar professors. A strong, dynamic faculty gives campuses like UC Berkeley the elite academic reputation they deserve. And those professors didn’t come here solely to teach — the importance of research at this university is an alluring characteristic.

In the context of the UC system, it should be impossible to prioritize instruction over research, because the two are not opposed to each other. They are equally important. That dynamic is embedded in the character of this university, and it must not change. Research is part of our very essence.

The post Brown is wrong on research appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Members of the board’s Committee on Educational Policy weighed the different benefits an expanded program of online courses could provide the university. As a cost-cutting measure, an online curriculum could dramatically reduce the cost of teaching per student, making a UC education much more affordable.

“The costs of an undergraduate education would be reduced for students and their families, and the greater throughput would allow UC to educate more undergraduates over a given time period,” an executive summary from the UC Office of the President reads. “It is also possible that online courses can decrease, or slow increases in, the university’s instructional costs, while sustaining UC’s high curricular standards.”

An expanded online catalog can also fill and improve upon the niche currently occupied by community colleges under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, said UC President Mark Yudof at the meeting.

“It should be possible for students to take one or two years’ worth of high-quality general education courses and then transfer to a UC campus,” Yudof said.

But according to UC Provost Aimee Dorr, current online offerings are mostly incompatible with the different requirements of the individual UC campuses. The transfer process is difficult under the current model, where each campus produces and gives credit for its own selection of online courses.

The board discussed UC Online, a systemwide program launched in January last year that offers online courses for credit accepted at all UC campuses. In the last year, about 1,700 UC students were enrolled in its 13 courses, which each cost about the same as a UC summer course.

The program, however, may not be operating as planned. Last year, only one non-UC student enrolled in a UC Online course, a problem that must be solved if the program will work as a gateway to other campuses.

The meeting comes less than a week after Gov. Jerry Brown announced his proposed 2013-14 budget, which allocates $10 million to the university for developing online and technology-based courses. Brown’s budget recommended the UC system be more responsible with its spending and continue to eliminate inefficiencies.

The expansion of online classes in the university might be a move in the wrong direction, said Student Regent Jonathan Stein, noting that the UC leadership has not paid adequate attention to student input.

“We’ve talked extensively about how students learn today and that students are more native to the Internet,” said Stein. “No one has asked students if they’re interested in this.”

Contact Jacob Brown at jbrown@dailycal.org.

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Last year’s college seniors graduated on average nationwide with $25,250 of student debt. However, compared to the nation, UC Berkeley students on average find themselves carrying a lighter debt load.

While the percentage of undergraduates nationwide taking student loans has jumped to nearly 56 percent for four-year public schools from 19 percent in the 1989-90 school year, at Berkeley only 40 percent of undergraduates take loans to finance their education.

Widely accepted benchmarks place acceptable student debt levels at anywhere below 9 percent of initial postgraduate income. At the University of California, only four percent of students had debt exceeding that level.

In 2010, UC Berkeley students graduated with average debt of $16,056, less than their peers at the campus’s four public comparator schools, the University of Virginia, The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and SUNY-Buffalo — the four public schools against which UC Berkeley benchmarks itself.

But student debt levels at UC Berkeley still exceed those at each of its private competitors — Harvard, MIT, Yale and Stanford — leaving UC Berkeley students feeling less financially sound than their privately educated counterparts.

In March, the Bay Area News Group reported it would be cheaper for a student from a middle-class background to attend Harvard than to attend Cal State or UC Berkeley, signaling the need for UC Berkeley to offer more financial aid in order to remain an attractive destination for top students.

In an effort to be more like its private peers, this January UC Berkeley laid out the Middle Class Access Plan, which emulates financial aid programs at schools like Harvard and Yale.

The plan caps parent contributions at 15 percent of total income for families making between $80,000 and $140,000.

Amid legislative gridlock at both the state and federal levels, the MCAP shifts the burden of accessibility to the campus’s own financial aid program instead of the state or the university at large.

Matthew Reed, program director at the Institute for College Access and Success, said the plan, which would exchange student loans for grant money, is a step in the right direction.

While the new plan comes in the spirit of the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education’s original promise of universal accessibility, it violates the plan’s core promise of a tuition-free education. In the plan, the authors took a firm stance against raising tuition for California residents.

“(Raising tuition) negates the whole concept of widespread educational opportunity made possible by the state university idea,” the report quoted University of Minnesota President James L. Morrill as stating. “It conceives college training as a personal investment for profit instead of a social investment. No realistic and unrealizable counter-proposal for some vast new resource for scholarship aid and loans can compensate for a betrayal of the ‘American Dream.’”

Though the MCAP appears to be the “counter-proposal” Morrill denounced, it may be the campus’s only means of maintaining accessibility as it seeks to reconcile its idealistic goal of universal accessibility in the face of fiscal difficulties exacerbated by waning state funding levels.

MCAP shifts the burden of funding accessibility away from increasingly unreliable state and federal partners and onto other developing funding sources.

Campus officials have estimated MCAP will require somewhere from $10 million to $12 million in funding for the next academic year, which will be drawn from “expanded financial aid resources, philanthropy and revenue from the increased number of UC Berkeley students paying non-resident tuition,” according to a campus press release.

Zach Williams, a UCLA political science doctoral student and recording secretary of the Los Angeles unit of UAW 2865 — the university’s graduate student union — took issue with the use out of state tuition to maintain access for Californians, saying it created a “questionable” reliance on out-of-state students.

However, this dependency on fees to keep costs in check is anything but new.

In 1970, just 10 years after publication, authors of a review of the Master Plan had anticipated an increasing gap between the cost-per-student and projected revenue.

In response, they reneged on the promise of tuition-free education. The authors of the review recommended, “Resident students with the ability to pay should share in the direct costs of their instruction at both the University of California and the California State University and Colleges.”

Though they added the caveat that tuition levels should never exceed levels at comparable public institutions in other states, the condition seems to have gone unnoticed.

The annual cost of attending including the cost of living at UC Berkeley has climbed to $28,162 for a student living off-campus, surpassing levels at all four of the university’s public comparator institutions.

Since the authors’ recommendations 40 years ago, the university, when faced with the question of how to reconcile fiscal difficulties, has had a propensity to look to tuition increases.

But by relying on out-of-state students, the plan produces unintended side effects.

While she took no issue with the use of philanthropy, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business associate professor and Berkeley Faculty Association co-chair Christine Rosen said the reliance on out-of-state students limits the number of seats available to California residents, defeating the entire purpose of increasing accessibility.

“There’s a way in which we might be borrowing from Peter to pay Paul,” Rosen said.

Unlike UC Berkeley, other schools have not relied on tuition to fund some of their significant financial aid programs. The University of Michigan, for example, funds its M-PACT financial aid program entirely with philanthropy.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said in an April interview with The Daily Californian, “out-of-state and international students’ revenue from them is an important component of our ability to offer financial aid to middle-class Californians, which is a tremendous boost to the public character to the university.”

Still, UC Berkeley’s weaker endowment efforts — compared to schools like the University of Michigan or its private peers like Harvard and Yale — and continued dismal levels of state funding may force its hand toward even more out-of-state student fees.

The next few years will be a critical time for UC Berkeley and its goal of accessibility as the campus sees whether it can substantially increase its endowment. And, as the economy slowly picks up steam, the campus will soon learn whether the state plans to resume its investment in California’s higher education institutions or if it plans to continue steadily reducing funding.

In 2001, UC President Clark Kerr predicted the Master Plan would have its big test in the next 12 to 15 years.

He wrote, in the spirit of the labor economist that he was, “The test is whether enough student places, at reasonable tuition levels, can be created to continue universal access and full service to the labor market.”

The Middle Class Access Plan appears to be UC Berkeley’s strongest effort in achieving that goal. The test will be whether the campus can do so without abandoning its promise to the residents of California.

Curan Mehra is the lead higher education reporter.

The post Debt levels differ for colleges appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Indeed, “privatization” has been one of the movement’s favorite buzzwords, used to conjure up images of a conspiracy by the corporatist regents to rob every student of their last penny. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of the slogan’s popularity is the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization. As a satirical subdivision of the demonstrators, UCMeP’s website sarcastically calls for “the swift and efficient privatization of the University of California.”

It seems as if every apparition of this buzzword carries the same underlying assumption­ that privatization is evil. But this fundamentally stands in conflict with how we live our everyday lives. After all, most of the goods and services we buy and use are private, as markets provide for food, clothing, shelter and technology in an incredibly efficient manner. So, what makes education so exceptional?

Every intelligent Cal student should examine the presumptions being barked from that ever-so-annoying megaphone on Sproul Plaza before jumping on the protest bandwagon. Namely, why would the privatization of our University of California, Berkeley necessarily be a bad thing?

Having read my question, dear reader, you may think that I’ve radically gone off my rocker. Perhaps I have. This article ends my two-semester tenure as the Daily Cal’s political columnist, after all. So, I figured I could either finish with another sappy, self-congratulatory column about free speech or go out with a bang. Fortunately, for your entertainment I’ve chosen the latter. As music legend Neil Young once crooned, “It’s better to burn out than fade away.”

Let’s burn this bitch.

The root of stigma surrounding privatization is the assumption that tuition at an autonomous UC would be astronomically higher without public funding. After all, 28 percent of UC Berkeley’s budget comes from California state support. Without this source, opponents would argue, our campus’s operating costs would be shifted onto students in the form of higher tuition.

However, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. There are many private universities in America today that are both cheaper to attend than UC Berkeley and just as academically excellent. A recent article by the Bay Area News Group, for example, found that “a family of four — married parents, a high-school senior and a 14-year-old child — making $130,000 a year” would spend $17,000 to send their child to Harvard, compared to $19,500 at UC Berkeley.  The same goes for Princeton, Williams College and Yale.

Granted, many of these elite universities enjoy enormous endowments that make our $3.15 billion pale in comparison. But, at the same time, UC Berkeley as a larger school doubtlessly has a larger alumni network to tap into. Ironically, one of the greatest discouragements for alumni donating to our school today is precisely its public funding. After all, a Cal alumnus residing in-state may figure that he or she is already “donating” through taxes, so why ring up the bill even higher?

Fortunately, our campus has repeatedly proven that it can count on private donors to make up for lost state funding. Not only has UC Berkeley stepped up its donation solicitations over the past few years, raking in $283.35 million in 2011, but major campus programs have also been made and saved by private funds. The newly opened Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences was constructed primarily by private funds, with only $53 million of the project’s $257 million total coming from the state.

Furthermore, Cal’s baseball, rugby, women’s gymnastics and women’s lacrosse teams were saved from elimination last year precisely by such philanthropy. So why exactly couldn’t a private UC Berkeley, as one of the world’s most respected institutions of higher education, find more sources to make up for state slashes without shifting the costs to students?

All right, it’s about time I take off my trollface. I ultimately don’t think that a private UC Berkeley would or should be a reality anytime soon, mostly because abandoning the university’s public mission for “Undergraduate programs (to be) available to all eligible California high-school graduates and community college transfer students” would be a breach of contract with taxpayers. However, as our campus continues to face cuts from a bankrupt state, we should embrace philanthropy for reinvigorating UC Berkeley in its time of trouble instead of shunning it with delusions of privatization.

One instance of shunning in my mind is the stigma surrounding out-of-state students. As fellow Daily Cal writer and Vermont resident Jordon Bach-Lombardo explained in a January article, many “voices preach that out-of-state students steal places in university classrooms from deserving Californian students.” Unfortunately, this xenophobia is only bound to increase with the UC Office of the President having announcing last week that out-of-state admissions increased by five percent for the incoming freshman class.

Such interstate hate is both discourteous and hypocritical. It is discourteous in the sense that out-of-state students pay more than double than in-state students do to attend our university, thus subsidizing the education of us Californians. It is hypocritical in the sense that many of the same people who would defend illegal immigrants’ rights to participate in our state’s social programs are suddenly decrying the same situation when a different class of foreigners wants to attend public schools reserved for “real Californians.”

Rather, we should welcome students, immigrants and investors willing to bring their labor, talents and wallets to the Golden State. Because if our university can survive its current budget-cutting catastrophe, it will more likely be through the private investment and innovation that make markets thrive than the public petitioning of a bankrupt state that could care less.

The post Who said privatization was bad? appeared first on The Daily Californian.

2010 was a watershed year in the history of the university. “Tuition” was added as a term in official policy.

Crossing this “tuition line” redefines students’ relationship to the regents and the state.

This wasn’t something students asked for. It is the product of growing privatization of higher education.

Something that students, faculty and staff have mobilized and protested against for years and must continue doing.

But we now have the power to do something about that privatization.

No longer are we the “raw materials” being modeled by the “employees” at the whim of “managers.” Today, we are the major stakeholders in the UC enterprise. Today we are those whom the university administration should be chiefly beholden to. The moment is ripe for students to demand a renewed relationship as partners in the operation of the university and call for its priorities to be re-examined in accordance with greater student voice.

Through years of state divestment in public higher education, the university is now more accurately defined as a “public-private partnership.” More of the cost of getting an education is paid by students with the assumption that our edu­cations are private goods that benefit us more than bolstering democracy, the economy and society as a whole. However, this is still a public institution, and we are the public — therefore the comparison to private school student-administrator relations is incomplete.

The university was a pioneer in granting shared governance to its faculty in the early part of the 20th century under the presidency of Benjamin Ide Wheeler. This move proved to be a distinctive element that allowed the university to flourish and become the great institution it is today. The system of shared governance gives UC faculty, operating through the Academic Senate, a voice in the operation of the university in areas of admissions, curriculum and advising on budgeting, to name a few. With this role, the faculty assume more responsibility over the maintenance of the quality of instruction and research at university.

In the beginning of the 21st century, the university should pioneer a more democratic model that includes students as stakeholders in university operations — and thus in their educations and futures. This will take the form of policy reforms in the UC governance structure at all levels, campus- and systemwide, to include more student voice in decision-making.

An example of such a partnership on our campus is Lower Sproul redevelopment, where the ASUC and campus are partners in the $220 million project.

“Shared governance” is t h e structure of the program committee and working group. The ASUC makes decisions to ensure that students get the best possible deal out of the project. This model ought to bea dopted for all types of decision-making, at all levels.

We should urgently step into this role to influence the regents to be bolder in advocating to refund California to the taxpayers and state Legislature. Students should seek to influence the selection of upper-level administrators, notably the chancellor’s replacement, and necessary services like health centers, academic support units and libraries. We should monitor teaching quality of undergraduates. Further, students should be able to sit on all campus committees that deal in capital construction projects, given that at UC Berkeley, the students are the greatest single donors to capital construction in its history.

This shift is already happening. For example, the University of California Student Association and the student regents are organizing a campaign to push for four more student regents — one graduate and one professional student seat, plus their designates. We pay more and should expect more out of our educations. We should partner with UC alumni to step into the role of responsibility in governing the university to change the current priorities of UCOP. We must demand seats at the table — not just token representation like the one voting student regent but meaningful voting authority that includes our shared priorities and vision of the university as a public good. The university is nurturing the leaders of tomorrow, and we all want to ensure that access and affordability are priorities for the benefit of all people in our society. Students can now more directly shape the priorities and policies of our excellent UC system with the tools of shared governance and give new meaning to the axiom “Our university!”

Elliot Goldstein is an ASUC senator with the Cooperative Movement party.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this op-ed stated that Mario Savio’s speech occurred on Dec. 3, 1964. In fact, he gave the speech on Dec. 2, 1964.

The post Encouraging shared governance for students appeared first on The Daily Californian.

We often talk about taxes as a burden, asking who must bear the burden of paying the highest taxes. A few weeks back, I was sitting in on a forum about higher education put on by the office of the EAVP in the ASUC. State Senator Loni Hancock was speaking and made a point that was always in my mind, but I had never put into words. She said, “Taxes should never be considered a burden.”

She was right, the term “burden” implies a negative, which taxes are not. Taxes provide for the collective, that which the individual cannot afford alone, and that which the private sector will not willingly provide. Taxes provide for the most basic of goods, like police, roads and the fire department. In the 1960s, the establishment of the Master Plan for Higher Education put California at the forefront in the determination that education is a collective good. In the 1960s, politicians understood that the average person, not to mention folks of lower socioeconomic standing, could not afford to pay for an education alone. So we invested — we put money into education because it was the right thing to do.

In 1978, Californians passed Proposition 13, which drastically reduced revenues coming into the state. Proposition 13 not only froze property tax rates at their 1975 assessed values, but also established the ever-hated “two-thirds” requirement in the state legislature, requiring that any new proposed tax must pass with a two-thirds vote of each house of the state legislature.

After that, we went from having one of the top public K-12 school systems in the nation to having one of the worst, and now the consequence of this shortage of funds is becoming apparent in our higher educaiton system as well. What took over one hundred years to create — the University of California — is being dismantled in a mere decade. It has become painfully obvious that our state legislators and our new governor are doing very little to stop the hemorrhaging of money from public higher education. The need for a conversation about the reform of Proposition 13 has never been more apparent.

We are part of an education system that no longer reflects the ideals upon which it was founded: access, affordability and quality. What have we done to reverse this? What have we done to return to the ideals of the Master Plan for Higher Education, and to start a conversation about reforming Proposition 13? We have protested, lobbied, occupied and walked out; We have yelled until we cannot yell any more, and what has that gotten us? What good does it do to yell when nobody is listening, when our struggle exists solely as a two minute sound clip on the nightly news?

We are socially conscious students, too aware of the crime perpetuated against our collective social service, but our struggle is not one that can exist in a vacuum. The fight for affordable higher education is not one that is isolated to UC Berkeley or the UC system. We will continue to be ignored until we realize that our struggle is shared with every single other student in this state, both residents and out-of state students. In a time of such inaction on the part of our elected officials, it is necessary for students across the state to come together and demand structural reform to save our right to public education.

Andrew Albright is an ASUC senator with the CalSERVE party.

The post A continued struggle for public education appeared first on The Daily Californian.

However, these quaint peccadilloes pale in comparison to the fullblown insanity of California’s voters.

I’m no psychiatrist, so I’ll stop short of diagnosing this strange psychosis witnessed both on the Berkeley campus and statewide. But even a quack shrink might equate the counterintuitive demands of California’s voters to a strange case of electoral and economic schizophrenia.

That’s a pretty tough accusation to level, so let me make my case: After I moved here from the East Coast and grew more accustomed to West Coast life, I started to observe more profound peculiarities than those oddities listed above. In particular, I noticed that California voters seemed to demand stellar public services from their government but didn’t want to pay for them.

I first encountered this phenomenon at Berkeley after learning that very few alumni give back to the campus each year. In 2010, only 12 percent of alums donated, and 40 percent gave over the course of their lifetime — measly sums compared to the 20 percent who gave last year and the 60 percent who gave in their lifetimes to the second-best public university in the country, the University of Virginia.

To understand these figures, one has to first comprehend the mindset of entitlement among Berkeley students and Californians.

On a campus where hardly any alums gave back this year, many current students are out in full force to protest fee hikes each semester.

I’m not condoning fee hikes. But Berkeley out-of-state tuition still falls short of the cost of an equivalent education in a private institution, and the in-state price tag is another $10,000 less. In a school where, despite rising costs, students still receive a premium education for far less than they would elsewhere, is it really so unreasonable to ask graduates — and taxpayers — to give back? Apparently, according to California voters, it is.

“There is a sense that we strongly value education and higher education, but voters still seem unwilling to vote in support of increased revenues,” said Michele Siqueiros, executive director for the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit organization that works to promote access and success for students in higher education. “In essence, they believe that a mixture of better use of resources or taxing the rich (or anyone else but me) — can work.” This idea of a free education being the right of all Californians can be traced back to the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, the document that envi­sioned the state’s three-tiered system of universities and colleges.

It is the “mythology” of the master plan that “burned into the minds of a whole generation … of people who went to school in California” that they were entitled to a free ride, according to Judy Heiman, principal analyst at the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

However, although the Master Plan was meant to last only until 1975, “nobody has stopped to take a look at it since then,” Heiman said.

This practice of transforming antiquated legislation into lasting promises and of representatives passing long-term measures to appease voters in the short-term reappears again and again in California’s state politics. The mentality of wanting the service without paying the price is enabled in part by the strength of the ballot box initiative in the state; according to Heiman, it’s “pretty easy” to propose a referendum.

This means that instead of a state budget being considered primarily by the Legislature, some programs are proposed and passed through referendum and then “get locked into state law, or the constitution, where the Legislature can’t even change them,” Heiman said.

Of course, no conversation about California’s funding practices would be complete without mentioning Proposition 13, the infamous 1978 constitutional amendment that keeps property taxes in California absurdly low and requires a supermajority of two-thirds of the Legislature to raise taxes.

Shortsighted ballot initiatives like Prop 13 pass in “boom years” when money is “pouring in,” according to Heiman. Such referendums fail to account for future turbulence and instead increase spending and reduce taxes. If these actions are not taken in a responsible manner, they lead to a severe structural deficit for the state.

And altering such popular initiatives is the “third rail” of politics, as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the LA Times.

Californian voters — and Berkeley students — need to wake up from this spell of lunacy and recognize that turning a blind eye to the impracticalities of half-baked referendums and refusing to pay for the services they demand is not a sustainable way to run a state, or a university.

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