A e-mail I sent to UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau on the subject of his recent co-authored paper, "Modernizing Governance at the University of California"
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Dear Chancellor Birgeneau,
Congratulations. On your impending retirement as Chancellor of
the University of California, Berkeley at the end of the year. On the publication of the paper “Modernizing
Governance at the University of California: A Proposal that the Regents Create
and Delegate Some Responsibilities to Campus Boards”. And on the total transformation of Berkeley
during your tenure as Chancellor.
When I arrived at the University of
California, Irvine, in 2004 as a freshman, tuition and fees were roughly half of
what undergraduates are charged today.
The price tag of a UC education had already ticked upwards by the time I
came to Berkeley’s history department as a graduate student in 2008, but since
then has leapt up higher and faster than before. California’s gaping democratic deficit which,
in turn, has generated a severe financial deficit, has led the state to
disinvest from all three tiers of higher education. Today, Berkeley is taking in more
international students and more out of state students than before, while
receiving less funding from the state of California than ever before. The Legislative Analyst’s Office tells us
that this is a raw deal for Californians, something that is hardly news to students,
faculty and staff on UC’s campuses.
These trends, and the reaction to them,
are worrisome, because the University of California is an institution towards
which I’ve come to feel much gratitude and loyalty. For I tend to identify myself as a University
of California student first, and a Berkeley student second. But I am not more proud of one than the other
because for me, they are one and the same.
My Berkeley experience has been a continuation of my Irvine experience,
and while most students in the system—probably the world’s finest and most
ambitious system of public higher education—have only experienced one campus, I
believe that all students benefit from being a part of that system, that
community, both in concrete institutional and idealistic philosophical terms.
And because UC has been my home for
eight years, it pains me to see the extent to which your leadership has failed
not only Berkeley, the campus in your charge, but the system as a whole. Efforts by yourself, by UC President Mark Yudof,
and the UC Board of Regents to check disinvestment by the state, to rally the
campus community to the defence of UC, and to take the case for UC to
Californians have been notable chiefly for their amateurism and total lack of
success. But you have failed Berkeley
and UC not just through a lack of success.
The paper “Modernizing UC” will
undoubtedly serve as your valedictory gift to the campus, and perhaps your
greatest legacy. I have no doubt that if
its conclusions are accepted, it will also be looked back upon as a marker in
the decline and ultimately the end of UC as a system. It is not the first occasion on which you
have advocated steps which would lead to the break-up of the University of
California. And the recommendations,
that the education of Californians be treated according to whims of the market
and that the premise of universality underpinning the system be broken down by
allowing campuses to charge fees at their discretion, will undoubtedly appeal
to many in an era in which collective ambition seems to be giving way to morally
wayward profiteering. These
recommendations are also clearly not in the interests of a majority of campuses
and are transparently aimed at detaching those campuses which can trade on
their reputations from what administrators see as the encumbrances of membership
in a public institution with a public responsibility to California’s
citizens.
Under your watch, a half-hearted defence
of Berkeley’s status as a responsibility of the state of California in keeping
with its membership in the University of California has been accompanied by an
unseemly rush to degrade the public character of the University. This degradation is being achieved with
remarkable rapidity as the burden of funding has shifted from resting fairly
and squarely on the shoulders of society at large to sitting far more heavily
and uneasily on the backs of students and their families in the form of
unconscionably high fees.
Some place blame for the spectacular fee
increases at the feet of campus and system administrators. They are wrong. No amount of administrative bloat, real or
imagined, could make up for the state’s brutal disinvestment. Administrators, yourself included, may have
shown remarkably little foresight in failing to anticipate state disinvestment,
but the ultimate cause for the increasing cost to students and families lies
unequivocally in the structure of state politics. But just as those who wish to blame the
administration fail to see the big picture, you and your colleagues failed to
act to counter disinvestment and, more seriously, failed to understand
Berkeley’s role as a part of the University of California and, therefore, as an
institution that has an obligation to work for the public good of California
and its citizens.
In the course of this failure, you neglected
to reach out a hand to frustrated students, staff and faculty, and under your
direction, the campus police force responded to protestors’ justified if
sometimes misdirected anger with a mailed fist.
Not once, but repeatedly. And you
didn’t simply stand by and watch, but time after time, went through
painful-looking contortions to justify the horrifyingly violent and utterly unjustifiable
treatment of the students who are ultimately placed in your charge—by their
parents, by their community, by their state, and ultimately, by those students’
own desire to be part of a larger, nobler endeavour, one which the behaviour of
you and your colleagues has sullied very badly.
I will always treasure your messages to the campus during these moments
of violence as sterling examples of moral and intellectual dishonesty.
So, while we can’t hold you directly
responsible for UC’s moral and financial crisis, we can and do hold you
responsible for the exacerbation of those crises, for the division of the
campus community against itself, and for shamelessly advocating the break-up of
the place we call home. The
anti-communitarian spirit in which you have launched these latter efforts sends
a clear signal to the Berkeley community that you have given up on the state of
California. Given up without a
fight. Moreover, it sends a dispiriting message
to our community members at other campuses that you have betrayed UC. And in so doing, you are betraying Berkeley’s
core values.
Undoubtedly, you would have preferred to
be Chancellor in happier times, when Californians held UC in high regard and
regarded it as “worth it”, and when national economic crises, nationwide
political trends, and California’s peculiar political winds were not buffeting
Berkeley and the UC system. But as it
is, you failed to rise satisfactorily to the challenges facing Berkeley, and
failed to chart a path that would secure both the financial future and ethical
ends of Berkeley and of the University of California system, of which our
campus should remain part.
An Antipodean savant once complained
about the introduction by the small-minded of “market economics” into places where it didn’t belong, and resented the dismal view that “a beautiful day has not
value if they can’t sell it”. The ideal
of public higher education in California, inextricably linked in the eyes of
many, many people in the state, the nation, and around the world to UC
Berkeley, is not unlike Fred Dagg’s “beautiful day”. There is something morally troublesome and
intellectually sordid about trying to hitch it to the market, something which degrades its efforts and dispirits its
community. I wish your successor,
whomever he or she may be, better luck in fighting for Berkeley’s future, and
hope that a commitment to maintaining its membership in UC and its public
character—something sadly lacking during your own tenure—proves to be a litmus
test during the selection process.
Sincerely,
Jeff Schauer
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