Advocacy and the Done Deal
by Kristin Peterson, Anthropology Department, UC Irvine
On Monday, November 2, UCOF stopped off at UCI - a very good post to this blog on the same day summarized this dire event. At one point, the panel moderator asked the audience for ideas on how to lobby the California Legislature - ideas were needed to advocate on behalf of the UC. My colleague next to me was incredulous, "that's not our *job*!" Yeah, but whose job will it be?
This question posed to the audience came after the panel detailed the strategies that each of their own committees were considering in terms of UC fundraising. External private and federal government funding as well as private industry partnerships were elaborated upon as if we were all having a pre-determined agreed upon conversation that imagined an already privatized university. There was no pretense to the absent role of the state in the public university or even the public sector. This was a Done Deal. Until a couple folks from the audience got up and implored the commission to rethink the role of state funding. Chancellor Drake was entirely amenable, I must say. Yet, it is extraordinarily disturbing to be in the midst of a dangerous and changing definition of the "public" where we must beg our own leadership to reconsider telling the state to do its job. It's even worse that the state's job has become debatable.
But truly the stupidest thing of all is that as an audience at these meetings we are expected to offer up suggestions on how to complete our obsolescence for them. At every turn, Chris Edley posed questions to folks - who were narrating the dire conditions of their environment - that essentially asked them to figure out how to downsize themselves even further: What should the size of a graduate program be? Should campuses have differential financial aid? Should Merced get less? Pathetic.
So what gets advocated in the context of the Done Deal? Of course, what should: restructuring the extraordinary inequity of the CA tax structure, Prop 13, minority rule in the Legislature, tax the rich - yes, I said it! - and the obvious list goes on. But more recently since September 2008, the successive CA budget agreements produced extraordinary slashes in the public sector while creating new tax breaks for corporations. The California Budget Project estimates that over $8 billion in revenue was lost in the Sept 2008 and Feb 2009 agreements alone. This race to the bottom for foreign direct investment while slashing the public sector is classic Structural Adjustment, only the incredible thing is that California is gleefully agreeing to this, whereas historically, sane nation-states only complied while kicking and screaming and dying.
So, aside from Mark Yudof and the Regents having their pity party about the lameness of the Legislature, will they ever chain themselves to the gates of the University and demand that corporate tax loopholes be reversed, that California should have a progressive tax system, that Prop 13 should be abolished, claim that this is all robbery and demand that the public deserves to be restored to something resembling an entity that has a social contract with the state? Not in a million years.
Not in a million years because those corporate tax loopholes and the tax system and our lame-o Legislature are all doing the Regents a big favor. Lets' take a look: the industry most commonly represented by the Regents is finance/investment banking /securities; the second most commonly represented industry is large-scale commercial real estate. Others include business and regulatory law, defense, conglomerate corporate media, and corporate/foundation philanthropy. When you read each of the Regent's biographies, only three voting members, if I am generous, out of 19, plus Yudof can claim any experience in education. The ones who have no experience in education do not even mention the word "education" or mention it as an interest or concern in their bios.
So, while these UCOF meetings do the remarkable thing of actually constructing a sane conversation over the disappearance of public education - as if it is perfectly natural and ok by all of us - how will it be possible to advocate for education and the restoration of the public sector in the face of the Done Deal? Perhaps a People's Commission on the UC is in order, one that could refuse the terms of this conversation and one that could both compete and discredit what we all fear to be an already pre-determined outcome of our future.
On Monday, November 2, UCOF stopped off at UCI - a very good post to this blog on the same day summarized this dire event. At one point, the panel moderator asked the audience for ideas on how to lobby the California Legislature - ideas were needed to advocate on behalf of the UC. My colleague next to me was incredulous, "that's not our *job*!" Yeah, but whose job will it be?
This question posed to the audience came after the panel detailed the strategies that each of their own committees were considering in terms of UC fundraising. External private and federal government funding as well as private industry partnerships were elaborated upon as if we were all having a pre-determined agreed upon conversation that imagined an already privatized university. There was no pretense to the absent role of the state in the public university or even the public sector. This was a Done Deal. Until a couple folks from the audience got up and implored the commission to rethink the role of state funding. Chancellor Drake was entirely amenable, I must say. Yet, it is extraordinarily disturbing to be in the midst of a dangerous and changing definition of the "public" where we must beg our own leadership to reconsider telling the state to do its job. It's even worse that the state's job has become debatable.
But truly the stupidest thing of all is that as an audience at these meetings we are expected to offer up suggestions on how to complete our obsolescence for them. At every turn, Chris Edley posed questions to folks - who were narrating the dire conditions of their environment - that essentially asked them to figure out how to downsize themselves even further: What should the size of a graduate program be? Should campuses have differential financial aid? Should Merced get less? Pathetic.
So what gets advocated in the context of the Done Deal? Of course, what should: restructuring the extraordinary inequity of the CA tax structure, Prop 13, minority rule in the Legislature, tax the rich - yes, I said it! - and the obvious list goes on. But more recently since September 2008, the successive CA budget agreements produced extraordinary slashes in the public sector while creating new tax breaks for corporations. The California Budget Project estimates that over $8 billion in revenue was lost in the Sept 2008 and Feb 2009 agreements alone. This race to the bottom for foreign direct investment while slashing the public sector is classic Structural Adjustment, only the incredible thing is that California is gleefully agreeing to this, whereas historically, sane nation-states only complied while kicking and screaming and dying.
So, aside from Mark Yudof and the Regents having their pity party about the lameness of the Legislature, will they ever chain themselves to the gates of the University and demand that corporate tax loopholes be reversed, that California should have a progressive tax system, that Prop 13 should be abolished, claim that this is all robbery and demand that the public deserves to be restored to something resembling an entity that has a social contract with the state? Not in a million years.
Not in a million years because those corporate tax loopholes and the tax system and our lame-o Legislature are all doing the Regents a big favor. Lets' take a look: the industry most commonly represented by the Regents is finance/investment banking /securities; the second most commonly represented industry is large-scale commercial real estate. Others include business and regulatory law, defense, conglomerate corporate media, and corporate/foundation philanthropy. When you read each of the Regent's biographies, only three voting members, if I am generous, out of 19, plus Yudof can claim any experience in education. The ones who have no experience in education do not even mention the word "education" or mention it as an interest or concern in their bios.
So, while these UCOF meetings do the remarkable thing of actually constructing a sane conversation over the disappearance of public education - as if it is perfectly natural and ok by all of us - how will it be possible to advocate for education and the restoration of the public sector in the face of the Done Deal? Perhaps a People's Commission on the UC is in order, one that could refuse the terms of this conversation and one that could both compete and discredit what we all fear to be an already pre-determined outcome of our future.
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