The revised budget, commonly known as the May revision, reflects new spending proposals from state legislators, changes in the state’s economic outlook and decreases in federal government funding since the governor’s first proposed budget in January.

The UC Board of Regents will discuss the revised budget at its meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday.

If approved by the Legislature, the governor’s budget will increase funding for each of the state’s higher education systems above the prior year’s funding. The university will receive an increase of up to 20 percent in General Fund appropriations — about $511 million — over the next four years.

According to the budget, these changes will represent an increase of about 10 percent in total operating funds, including tuition and fee revenues.

The budget includes about $25.4 billion in total funding for higher education in the coming fiscal year, $400 million less than was proposed in January.

In addition, a previously proposed unit cap has also been removed from the budget following rejection from the state Legislature. Faculty groups and lawmakers criticized the 150 percent unit cap on state-subsidized courses for its “one-size-fits-all” model and argued that the mandate would not be as effective as individual campus caps.

According to the UC Office of the President, the unit cap would have impacted 2,200 UC students in the 2013-14 academic year.

“UC will continue working with the governor and the Legislature to address critical funding needs,” said Patrick Lenz, the university’s vice president for budget and capital resources, in a statement.

According to the governor’s press release, the budget is expected to remain balanced in the coming years. Spending cuts enacted over the past two years and new temporary funds brought in by Proposition 30, which was passed by voters last November, are expected to allow the state budget to reduce the state’s debt to $4.7 billion by 2017 — a reduction of more than 86 percent.

“This budget builds a solid foundation for California’s future by investing in our schools, continuing to pay down our debts and establishing a prudent reserve,” Brown said in a press release. “But California’s fiscal stability will be short-lived unless we continue to exercise the discipline that got us out of the mess we inherited.”

Additional elements of the revised budget include changes to the state’s public school funding system, investment in job-creation programs and an additional $72 million for county probation departments to compensate for their increased responsibilities as legislatures try to reduce the state’s prison population.

Brown will now have to convince the state Legislature that his plans for higher education and the state merit passage. After discussion from state senators and assembly members, the budget will be finalized in June and take effect July 1, the start of the 2013-14 fiscal year.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

The post Brown releases revised state budget maintaining tuition freeze appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The regents will also review a special report by UC President Mark Yudof on the current and future challenges facing the university, a report on the university’s academic performance and a proposed design for a new aquatics center at the UC Berkeley campus.

On Wednesday morning, the board will hear an update on Brown’s revised budget, which reflects new revenue estimates and the effects of new proposals by the state Legislature on the budget.

Later that day, the Committee on Educational Policy will hear a report on “academic performance indicators” at the University of California. The report summarizes two decades of statistics collected from the 10 UC campuses and finds that despite declining state support, the university has continued to excel by a number of performance indicators, including graduation rates and number of students enrolled.

Over the last two decades, four-year graduation rates have increased substantially. The entering class of 2007 had a graduation rate of 60 percent, up from 37 percent for the entering class of 1992, according to the report.

The report also recommends that state legislators give the university and individual campuses greater flexibility, authority and resources. The positive outcomes seen over the last two decades show that the university can function better independent of the state, the report says.

The committee will also discuss a proposal to increase investment in the university’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources for new research that includes work on invasive pests and diseases, childhood obesity and sustainable food projects.

The Committee on Grounds and Buildings will vote on a proposed design for a new aquatics center on the UC Berkeley campus. The $15 million project, which was announced last month, will be funded entirely by Cal Aquatic Legends, an independent nonprofit donor group founded to raise money for the project. The center would only be used for athletic training.

The project requires an amendment to the UC Berkeley 2020 Long Range Development Plan, which the Committee on Grounds and Buildings will be asked to certify and approve.

The Committee on Finance will vote on the 2013-14 financing of Cap-Equip, a universitywide program that aims to restructure capital financing and save money on research, telecommunications and software equipment. The committee will also vote on maintaining the expenditure rate for the university’s endowment pool.

The Committee on Oversight of the Department of Energy Laboratories will hear updates from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on climate research, a new X-ray laser that determines protein structures and a recent grant from the Department of Energy for the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville. In April, the department promised about $25 million annually through 2018 for the development of new biofuels.

On Thursday, after a public comment period, the regents will hold closed meetings with the Committee on Compensation and the Committee on Finance as well as other regents-only meetings.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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1) Just to get this out of the way: The unibrow is gone! Yes, it no longer adorns the spot between his gorgeous eyes. The debate over how exactly it was removed remains unresolved. The top possibilities are duct tape and waxing, since plucking would have taken too long.

2) Despite its untimely death, the unibrow has a Twitter account. Read that sentence again to make sure you understand that. The tone and grammar of the tweets makes it unlikely that Dirks is behind it, but it’s still hilarious. And it’s just getting off the ground! Help out the ‘brow by adding to its two-follower count.

3) He has an acute sense of fashion. The tie he was wearing at his acceptance speech was customized. His wife got it for him in from of his favorite stores on Madison Avenue.

4) He believes in the power of public schools to make a university great, despite the fact that he’s spent extensive time at notable private universities such as Caltech and Columbia.

5) He wrote the books “The Hollow Crown,” ”Castes of Mind,” and “The Scandal of Empire.” (We think these would’ve been better names for the books in the Hunger Games series.) They focus on India and the role that the caste system, colonialism and imperialism had on the formation of the country.

6) His interest in South Asian anthropology was piqued by his Fulbright Scholar trip to India as a young boy, where he learned to speak Tamil, a regional language, and how to play the South Indian drum.

7) His relationship with his wife, Janaki Bakhle, began when Bakhle, an editor at the time, chased Dirks to review a manuscript for a piece in the University of Minnesota Press.

8) His spectacles do only serve as a function for reading, as he tends to peer at you above them ominously when engaging you in conversation. Perhaps the piercing spirit of the ‘brow lives on.

9) He and Jerry Brown have had a bit of an indirect spat, with Brown criticizing the pay raise Dirks is getting over Birgeneau: a margin of $50,000. Brown pointed out that this was not in the spirit of “servant leadership” and voted against it, although it eventually did pass.

10)  Though he now embodies the “stereotypical professor” look with the crazed hair and thick mustache, he did have long hair during his time at Wesleyan as an undergraduate. He also managed to rock a red bandanna.

If this isn’t enough for you, there’s a half-hour-long interview following his appointment as chancellor-designate that you can check out. And if you have any questions for the man, you have a chance to air them! The student forum takes place on May 2 at Anna Head Alumnae Hall.

Image source: Public Affairs, UC Berkeley

Contact Uday Mehta at umehta@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @mehtakid.

The post Ten random facts about Chancellor-designate Nicholas Dirks appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, along with eight other Democratic senators, proposed their new plan, SB 69, citing concerns that the governor’s plan fails to tie funding to districts’ performance and ignores low-income students in nonpoor districts.

“We believe strongly in the principle and foundation underlying the Governor’s proposal,” Steinberg said in a press release. “But the Governor’s way leaves poor kids who are in a non-poor district, invisible.”

The governor’s plan, known as the “Local Control Funding formula,” directs additional funds to students with the greatest need — low-income students, English learners and foster youth. But one portion of the plan, known as the “concentration grant,” allocates additional funds to districts in which 50 percent of the student population qualifies as being educationally disadvantaged.

“(Under Brown’s plan) thousands of kids would remain invisible, because if you’re a poor kid in one of those districts that is not in that 50 percent category, you are not getting the concentration grant,” Steinberg said during an education committee hearing.

Steinberg’s proposal aims to provide greater accountability and change the formula for allocating concentration grants, according to a Steinberg spokesperson Rhys Williams.

According to Williams, SB 69 aims to allocate funds more equally across the state by redistributing concentration grants under different formulas. These would distribute funds based on the total number of students in a school or the proportion of disadvantaged students in a school.

The bill also requires more comprehensive data collection and requires districts to demonstrate improved outcomes for student subgroups, while districts that do not show academic improvement could see restrictions on their funding.

But Jonathan Kaplan, a policy analyst at the California Budget Project — a nonpartisan fiscal and education policy group — said Steinberg’s proposal would “water down” the K-12 funding plan. Kaplan noted that the senator’s concern for “forgotten students” could just as easily apply to his bill.

“What happens to students in high concentration of poverty?” he said. “What happens if you spread their funds throughout the state? I would suggest that would be forgetting students who come from areas of high concentration.”

John Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said concentration grants are needed because low-income students in highly concentrated districts have unique difficulties.

“When you have students in large concentrations, the social fabric that students of privilege provide — an invisible set of resources — are missing,” he said at a press conference with Brown. “You need more resources.”

Berkeley Unified School District school board member Josh Daniels welcomes both plans, saying he supports any additional funding for the district even though he has not yet analyzed SB 69 specifically.

“The current education funding system is highly irrational and underfunded,” Daniels said. “Anything we can do to increase the funding to address the irrationality would be a positive thing for Berkeley and California.”

Both proposals would increase per pupil funding, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Although the analyst’s office has not published a report on SB 69 yet, an LAO report on the governor’s restructuring plan agrees that several changes should be made.

“Our research suggests that the qualifications for receiving the concentration grants should be higher — right now, it’s half the districts in the state,” said Rachel Ehlers, an education analyst at the LAO. “If this is supposed to address districts that are facing disproportionately higher challenges, then they should be limited to districts with truly higher concentration of the poorest students.”

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

The post California State Senate bill recommends new state K-12 funding model appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Nevertheless, California State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, introduced a bill in late February that would require the 50 most impacted lower division courses in the California higher education system to be offered online. The bill follows Gov. Jerry Brown’s public advocacy for online education to the UC Board of Regents and also at San Jose State University in January.

But rest assured: This is no educational apocalypse.

Although Steinberg’s bill was criticized by the UC Academic Senate for its foolish outsourcing of education to for-profit third parties, it’s heartening that at least one California legislator is finally beginning to catch on to the most important question in higher education today. As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote earlier this month, “The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?”

If online education is just as capable of communicating at least technical and procedural information (former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s online STEM courses at Udacity can attest to this) — then what, exactly, is the purpose of a university?

Brooks, a notable champion of online education over the years, answered that question for his readers two weeks ago — online education can teach technical knowledge; while “practical” knowledge, the richer and more elusive lessons we learn in college, should be left for traditional universities. That’s a start, but I suspect the actual answer is more far-reaching — and it might leave UC students uneasy.

Ever since the 1944 GI Bill enabled thousands of young Americans to attend college, higher education has proliferated throughout American society and evolved from privilege to workforce prerequisite. Embracing the shift in their clientele and inspired to create a more educated American workforce, colleges and universities across the country drifted from their roots in classical education in favor of the pragmatic knowledge that was and continues to be in high demand. Largely abandoning their position as lofty country clubs for the upper crust of American society, universities nationwide embraced a new role as the engines of the American economy.

Offering vocation-centered, concrete education to a mass audience is admirable — both dreamers and pragmatists are vital to American society. Universities tried to find a middle ground, attempting to instill a sense of purpose and meaning in the lives of students and provide them with the pragmatic knowledge necessary for success in the American economy. Today, when online universities offer technical training at a fraction of the price of a traditional college, it’s clear the dual-purpose model needs rethinking.

I’ve argued for classical education in the past, but I know “Walden” and “Julius Caesar,” as much as I love them, aren’t for everyone. My father was an adjunct professor at a California community college in the Sacramento area a few years ago. He met a student one day who’d been attending a two-year institution for 10 semesters. That’s three years longer than the expected time to earn an associate degree — and he was still a freshman.

Beyond the technical learning, job training and lower-level workforce experience — the vocational schooling — necessary for 21st-century competitiveness, most Americans don’t need or desire the watered-down classical education most universities force down the throats of disgruntled students. Not everyone is meant to go to college, and not everyone should have to. College is about pushing the limits of our feeble understanding to reach unforeseen conclusions and immersion in a culture of constant intellectual challenge to reach into the depths of the elusive truth. College is a sort of education that can’t be forced.

Online education, on the other hand, has the potential fill the gap in American vocational schooling that traditional universities have failed to address.  Like the “pragmatization” of American universities in the 1950s, the Internet is the next medium that will expand education to a wider audience worldwide. The Internet can be a forum for the democratization of technical education — a place where all Americans, for the first time in history, can learn the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century global economy rather than hanging on in community college for five years or more.

For students like the young man my father taught, for American industrial workers left without jobs after production-line outsourcing, for anyone left behind in the relentless race of the modern economy — online education just might hold the promise of the future.

Contact Connor Grubaugh at cgrubaugh@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @connorgrubaugh.

The post The promise of online education appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Brown decried Dirks’ $50,000 salary increase over that of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau at a time of fiscal austerity for the university.

The public spat — emblematic of the troubled relationship between the state and university — appeared to set an uneasy tone for the start of Dirks’ tenure.

But when Dirks assumes office on June 1, he may find an unlikely ally in Brown at a time in which state funding has fallen to constitute just above 10 percent of UC Berkeley’s budget.

Dirks and Brown have quickly developed a close friendship. Privately, the two call each other, dine with their wives together and have long conversations about the history of the Indian caste system.

“We like talking to each other,” Dirks said of Brown in a recent interview with The Daily Californian.

Both Brown and Dirks have been called “big-idea” leaders. Both have followed in their fathers’ footsteps and entered public service. Both have spent time studying Asian cultures — Brown having studied Zen Buddhism and Dirks being an expert on Indian history and culture.

“Nick is a very interesting man in himself,” said Peter Awn, dean of the School of General Studies at Columbia University. “Like Brown, he really is an idea man. I think that Brown will get a kick out of that.”

Dirks’ arrival coincides with a critical time for the university in its relationship with the state.

“Nick is a very
interesting man in himself.
Like Brown, he really
is an idea man.” – Peter Awn, Dean
of the School of General Studies
at Columbia University

Both the passage of Proposition 30 and the flurry of new legislation related to higher education being introduced in Sacramento hint at the potential for a reset in recent trends.

For Dirks, Brown represents an opportunity to bridge unstable ties between the university and the state. For Brown, Dirks is a leader who shares his steadfast commitment to cost efficiency as a solution for the university’s problems.

(Sharon Liu/Staff) Sources: Columbia Spectator; Berkeley News Center; LA Times

Tight pockets

At January’s UC Board of Regents meeting, Brown — who has become markedly more involved in the state’s higher education system — called for the university to cut back on what he deemed excessive spending.

The governor voiced the need for limitations on executive pay, student unit caps and a move toward expanding the university’s online program in the name of cost-saving.

“Teaching costs have to be brought down,” Brown said at the meeting. “I won’t tell you how to do that, but you need to figure it out.”

According to Gareth Lacy, a spokesperson for the governor, Brown remains “absolutely committed” to holding the line on tuition hikes.

“Students should not be the default financiers of higher education in California,” Lacy said.

Brown’s recommendation follows his deep cuts to social services, including millions of dollars of reductions to programs such as state child care and college scholarships.

Brown could not be directly reached for comment.

Like Brown — who famously chose to sleep on a bare mattress on the floor of his simple apartment during his first term as governor rather than in the governor’s mansion — Dirks has developed a reputation as an administrator dedicated to cost efficiency even in the face of public concern.

At Columbia, where he served as the executive vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Dirks helped push forward an administrative restructuring of the faculty of arts and sciences. In 2011, the consulting group McKinsey & Company, which was hired by Dirks and Columbia President Lee Bollinger, made recommendations about how to implement this structural streamlining.

“His goal administratively was to increase efficiencies, quicken decisions and to try to build more collaborative relationships among the various deans,” Awn said.

But the program drew significant criticism from both students and administrators. In 2011, the former dean of the undergraduate Columbia College, Michele Moody-Adams, resigned abruptly. Both The New York Times and the Columbia Spectator reported that her decision to step down was related to her concerns regarding the administrative overhaul.

“Dirks is thought of as positive in some ways, but he’s also seen by some undergraduates as someone who is centralizing power and taking it away from individual schools, especially the undergraduate school,” said Jared Odessky, an elected student representative on the Columbia University Senate. “The problem is, when allocating financial resources, a lot has gone to the top.”

Dirks’ management of the program was in part facilitated by the administrative flexibility afforded to him by the private nature of Columbia — a comfort he will no longer benefit from at UC Berkeley.

“One thing I’ll say about University of California is there’s a high level of transparency,” Dirks said. “I’ve never had transparency like this in my life.”

“I’ve never had transparency
like this in my life.”
-Chancellor-designate Nicholas Dirks

While administrators at private schools like Columbia have more maneuvering room, by virtue of being at a public school like UC Berkeley, administrators are required to be more cautious, according to Director of the campus Center for Studies in Higher Education C. Judson King.

“I’m fine with the transparency and the open records, but sometimes it makes it more difficult to make decisions,” said UC President Mark Yudof. “Of course it may be easier to make a decision at somewhere like Harvard than Berkeley, but at the end of the day, we have a public university with a public mission.”

Still, Dirks hopes to spark dialogue with the campus’s active community. He said he plans on holding regular fireside chats and meetings with student groups during his visit to the campus in May.

(UC Berkeley NewsCenter/Courtesy) Dirks shakes hands with Chancellor Birgeneau after being confirmed by the UC Board of Regents in late November of 2012.

“I like that professor Dirks is really engaged with students — he’s very open-minded, intelligent and trustworthy,” said Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab, who sat on the chancellor search committee.

Creative solutions

Both Dirks and Brown have a history of looking for outside partners to help finance state and university programs.

Recently, Brown secured a deal with a China-based investor to help pay for a $1.5 billion development deal in Oakland. During a trade mission last week in Beijing, Brown also sought support from China for the state’s recently approved high-speed rail project.

As the senior administrator working on the development of global outreach, Dirks was a fundamental force in seeking international support for Columbia, according to Kathy Okun, vice president for university development at Columbia. Under his leadership, the university established five global offices to represent it.

(Joy Lee/China Post/Courtesy) Dirks speaks to students at Doe Library in November of 2012.

“It is critical to engage Berkeley’s global community — and in order to do just that, I recently  completed a tour of Asia, where I met with the Berkeley Clubs in Mumbai, Delhi, Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Dirks said.

Over the last decade, UC Berkeley has put increased emphasis on garnering private support through different campaigns, initiatives and a shift in alumni relations. Haas School of Business development efforts, such as the thank-you letter event, are among the many programmatic efforts toward closing this gap through a cultural push toward philanthropy, said David Blinder, former associate vice chancellor for university relations.

“Ironically, we need more private money to sustain our public character,” Birgeneau said.

“Ironically, we need more private money
to sustain our public character.”
- Chancellor Robert Birgeneau

In 1987, the state funded 54 percent of the university’s budget. In 2012, the state supplied only 11 percent. Over the last eight years, total yearly private giving has increased by around $80 billion.

Although UC Berkeley still lags behind its private peers, with an endowment about half the size of Columbia’s, the university’s efforts have significantly increased in recent years, said Vice Chancellor of University Relations Scott Biddy.

“We are not simply wringing our hands,” he said. “We are working hard to sustain our excellence … and to ensure that Berkeley competes academically at the very top tier on the global stage — one of the ways we do this is by raising private gifts.”

The new chancellor’s history of engaging with alumni and donor communities comes to the University of California at a time of heightened stakes. His experience as a fundraiser at Columbia may be key in Brown’s advocacy for the university to seek a larger degree of financial independence from the state.

As vice president, dean and primary fundraiser of Columbia’s faculty of the arts and sciences, Dirks raised more than $900 million of the $5 billion Columbia Campaign — the largest campaign in Columbia’s history.

(Chris Taggart/Courtesy) Dirks and his wife, Columbia associate professor of history Janaki Bakhle, pose with Columbia trustee William Campbell.

“In order to have successful philanthropy, you need two things: big ideas and people who make those big ideas happen,” Okun said. Dirks has both, she said.

Like both state and university administrators, Dirks agrees that the university needs to search for new sources of revenue. But he remains reluctant to embrace Brown’s leading proposal that the university take on a more expansive online education program.

In January, Brown proposed a budget that allocated $10 million for the development of online education, calling for the university to take advantage of new forms of technology to improve graduation rates and increase access to the university.

Although Dirks helped create online extension programs at Columbia, he has come down against the use of such programs as a one-stop solution to the university’s financial problems.

“The emphasis of online education should be on enhancing the learning experience, not thinking of it as some great fantasy for revenue production, which is completely untried and untested at this point,” Dirks said.

Looking forward

As both Brown and Dirks move forward, they will have to negotiate what in recent years has been a testy relationship between their two institutions.

“Although the state is only (about) 10 percent of our budget, our relationship with the state is important,” Birgeneau said. “We need to keep it straight.”

Between their shared history of controversial efforts toward fiscal discipline and their search to find more sustainable sources of revenue for the university, the brewing friendship between Dirks and Brown comes at a true inflection point for the university.

“Governor Brown and I are having so much fun talking that we haven’t had the chance to think about the next Prop. 30,” Dirks said. “But we will.”

Contact Alex Berryhill and Shirin Ghaffary at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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The tax increases in Prop. 30 were approved in the spirit of safeguarding public education funding; however, just months after Prop. 30’s passage, we already see its funds being spent elsewhere. Although the UC and CSU systems were able to avoid a midyear tuition increase, painful tuition hikes still loom in the near future.

Pending legislation in the California State Senate and Assembly, Senate Bill 58 and Assembly Bill 67, would freeze tuition at its current rate for all campuses of the UC, CSU and community college systems for the seven-year lifetime of Prop. 30.

Prop. 30’s hefty 3.45 percent increase in sales tax and establishment of the highest top personal income tax rate in the nation will generate roughly $50 billion over the next seven years. Although Prop. 30 revenues are estimated to reach $6 billion this year alone, Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed fiscal year 2014 budget includes just $2.7 billion in additional funding for public education. (Only $125 million of that amount will go to the UC system).

If less than half of Prop. 30 revenue is being spent on public education this year, where is the rest of money going?

Because Prop. 30 did not include a statutory requirement or guarantee that the additional revenues would be committed to public education, it’s difficult to know exactly where Prop. 30 revenue goes. We do know that Brown’s initial budget proposal included a $1.3 billion increase in wage and benefits for California public employees.

Californians voted to keep education affordable for students, not to give public employees a pay raise.

In an op-ed I wrote for The Daily Californian last October, I expressed my concern that exactly this would happen. Based on the vague language of Prop. 30, the fear tactics used to pass it and legislative precedent in Sacramento, several critics had no confidence that Prop. 30 funds would be fully committed to public education.

While I, along with many others, opposed Prop. 30 on the November ballot, we can all agree that now that we have these additional tax revenues, we must do everything we can to hold Sacramento accountable and to commit Prop. 30 money to public education in California.

One ‘Yes on 30’ television ad featured California State Controller John Chiang claiming, “With strict accountability, money must go to the classrooms and can’t be touched by Sacramento politicians.” There currently exists no such accountability.

By knocking on doors, making phone calls and registering tens of thousands of new voters, student leaders fought to secure additional tax revenue for public education from Prop. 30. Is this where students’ efforts are supposed to stop? Get Prop. 30 passed and let Sacramento politicians do the rest? Last November, students demonstrated that their actions can make a difference — but what we decide to do with our voices now can have an even greater impact on the future of public higher education in California.

Fortunately, there exists a proposal in the California State Legislature that would hold politicians in Sacramento accountable and further commit Prop. 30 funds to public education.

The UC, CSU, and community college tuition freeze proposed by Republicans addresses the two critical weaknesses in Prop. 30: 1) Currently, there is no way to ensure these new tax revenues are being spent on public education; and 2) even if the state budget committed 100 percent of Prop. 30 funds to education, issues like excessive executive salary compensation and risky Wall Street investments very well may receive this money rather than students.

AB 67 and SB 58 simply remove tuition hikes as an option to bail out poor budgeting in Sacramento or financial mismanagement by the UC, CSU and community college administrations. With this new law, legislators would have to finally get serious about finding sustainable ways to keep public higher education affordable and accessible to all Californians.

Remember that tuition at the UC and CSU systems has more than tripled over the past 10 years. Where do we expect tuition to be another 10 years from now?
Because students worked so hard to get Prop. 30 passed, it is now our responsibility to hold Sacramento accountable with these new funds, and supporting this seven-year tuition freeze is a first step that would have immediate positive effects on every student in California.

Shawn Lewis is vice chair of the California College Republicans and former president of the Berkeley College Republicans.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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The new program, called the “Promise Platform,” will turn students and young alumni into fundraisers by asking them to use social media to solicit donations from friends and family in exchange for promising to complete a given task. These promises could range from a student not drinking coffee for a week to — as chair Sherry Lansing jokingly suggested — UC President Mark Yudof and Gov. Jerry Brown singing a duet.

The initiative, which relies on the strength of participants’ social networks, follows years of efforts at developing methods of creative fundraising, according to UC Student Regent Jonathan Stein. But the underlying incentives for students and alumni to participate remain uncertain.

“This just sort of points to problems with the university if we have to resort to bartering in this way,” said UC Berkeley junior Mariana Sosa.

The program, set to launch in October, falls under Project You Can, a systemwide initiative launched in 2009 that aims to raise $1 billion for student scholarships by 2014, said Daniel Dooley, UC senior vice president for external relations, at the UC Regents meeting Wednesday.

“A student could promise to dye their hair purple if their network would help to raise $1,000 for student scholarships,” he said. “You create a buzz on social media networks (through) these promises.”

The UC system partnered with the Entertainment Industry Foundation for this effort. Lansing, who also serves as chair of the EIF board, said EIF will help recruit celebrities to encourage the general public to get involved.

“The importance of the Entertainment Industry Foundation is that they will give us a handful of celebrities so we can cut through the clutter and get attention to this,” Lansing said at the meeting.

The EIF will be offering its services pro bono, according to UC spokesperson Dianne Klein. She said the program intends to target donors of all levels within the university as well as interested individuals outside the system.

“It’s a chance for all of us to give a dollar, to give a million dollars,” Lansing said.

In developing the program, the university worked with Stein and representatives from the UC Student Association. The UCSA will encourage students to fundraise once the project launches next fall, according to ASUC External Affairs Vice President Shahryar Abbasi.

“Hopefully, (the university) starts to do these projects more,” Abbasi said. “This is a public institution, and it’s only going to survive if the public helps out.”

The regents will discuss the project again in September to offer a final update before the project is launched.

“I think it’s a very good idea,” said UC Berkeley junior Nelson Rozo. “If there’s a collective enough effort, it could be cool.”

Libby Rainey covers higher education. Contact her at lrainey@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @rainey_l.

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After news emerged last July that the California Department of Parks and Recreation had hidden an approximately $20 million surplus from state officials, apparently in order to protect the funds from prying budget analysts, many were left to wonder just how much money other state agencies were hiding from the budget-slashing glare of the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown.

The answer came in late January, when it was revealed that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection hid more than $3.5 million in secret funds accumulated since 2005 that should have gone to the state general fund. In addition, a state auditor report released last Thursday uncovered news that the the parks scandal took place over the course of not just a few fiscal cycles as suspected, but for as long as 20 years.

After the report’s release, what was once thought to be only an isolated scandal within the parks department suddenly exploded into a corrupt culture that dates back to 1993 on top of a second scandal at Cal Fire. For aghast citizen observers, the events draw into question California’s entire bureaucratic structure.

Since then, there’s been rampant speculation about the issue — how widespread is the problem of budget secrecy in California’s bureaucracy? How should the perpetrators of the parks and Cal Fire deceptions be held accountable? But there’s been little talk about addressing the actual root of the problem. The real question to ask is simply this: Why?

The Department of Finance announced it will conduct an audit of the Cal Fire incident similar to the audit of the parks department it conducted after that scandal was first revealed last July. And legislation was introduced in the State Senate in late January that would submit state employees who knowingly participated in the misrepresentation of financial figures to potential criminal and civil action.

But just reacting to these scandals as isolated incidents isn’t enough. Neither of these courses of action look too likely to put much of a kibosh on future budget frauds, because both audits and criminalization view what happened at Parks and Rec and Cal Fire as a result of corruption, not structural fault. As long as bureaucrats think they can get away with shamelessly audacious shatterings of the public trust, and bureaucratic structure allows it, damage control will do little to solve the problem.

Perhaps California politicians and voters are just unsure how to react. After all, a situation in which the government hides money from itself sounds 1) unlikely, and 2) inconsequential. But the reality is that the scandals in the parks department and Cal Fire show a brazen disrespect for the people of California and their popularly elected officials, as well as a shockingly disjointed view of how democratic governments operate.

Bureaucrats at both departments treated the money allocated to them by the office of the governor as if it was theirs to do with as they pleased — theirs to defend at the bargaining table, hide away from the public view or risk losing to budget-slimming financial analysts — rather than a temporary gift from taxpayers with a specific purpose in mind.

The independent nature of the California bureaucracy — its culture of interagency and interdepartmental competition for funding — threaten the ability of the government to act as a popularly elected body. It’s impossible for the Legislature and governor’s office to direct and control policy if run-away bureaucrats, knowing that accountability from the legislative branch is usually a pipe dream, proceed to set their own agendas.

It’s time to rein in the bureaucracy. Sure, it’s a concept that’s been discussed on the state and national levels for years, mostly by merciless whack-a-mole conservatives like Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Uh, Departments of Commerce, Education and … uh … oops). But equating an agenda of increasing legislative oversight and constitutional control over the bureaucracy with decreasing the size of government puts the idea in a bad light. Reining in bureaucracy doesn’t need to mean less government, although it could — it only needs to mean more accountable government.

It’s time for California to wake up and realize that our bureaucracy is spinning out of control. Failing to act on the crimes committed in the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection sends a signal to bureaucratic administrators that it’s permissible to fudge the books and interpret policy mandates in their own way. It’s time for Brown and the Legislature to work together and create a simpler bureaucratic system that favors transparency over secrecy, cooperation over competition and effective popular governance over mindless and deceptive political jockeying.

As soon as California’s government gets just a little more responsive as a result, we’ll be thanking them for it.

Contact Connor Grubaugh at cgrubaugh@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @connorgrubaugh.

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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.

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