The Master Plan is in Tatters

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By Peter Schrag
Columnist
California Progress Report

There’ll be more tuition increases and enrollment cuts this week at both the California State University and the University of California, plus the loud student and employee protests that will accompany them.  They come just a few days after a PPIC (Public Policy Institute of California) poll showing that Californians have great regard for those public universities – they give them high approval ratings -- but don’t want to pay another dime to support them.

Most Californians just don’t seem to get the connection between their worries about the future and the severe budget cuts those universities have already suffered. Nor do the protestors understand that their problems originate not with university presidents and trustees, but in Sacramento and, often, with those same voters.

Meanwhile, two of our leading would-be governors, Republicans Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman, are competing over who can whack still more out of the state’s austere budget and the taxes to pay for it.

The leading (and so far the only) Democrat, Jerry Brown, who hasn’t yet officially declared, isn’t giving any specifics. But as governor from 1975 to 1983, Brown showed more disdain for the University of California than his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan did, and treated it more badly in his budgets. University employees shouldn’t complain about low pay; Brown famously declared; they were getting “psychic rewards.”

It’s therefore hardly an understatement to say that California desperately needs leaders who can make clear to voters and taxpayers not only the crucial importance of the state’s educational system to California’s future – all of it, from pre-school to the community colleges to graduate school research -- but the absurdity of an electorate demanding quality services but refusing to pay for them. 

Instead the leading candidates pander to the meanest biases of a society that in the past thirty years has nearly abandoned its communitarian ethic. In its place, voters have learned – mostly from marketers and politicians – to ask, first and foremost, what government can do for them...

The polling business itself has reinforced those attitudes. In continually asking people what they think about almost every conceivable subject, it’s reinforced the idea that today’s poll results represent transcendent social wisdom.

In the process, the polls also reinforce the penchant of politicians to play to those beliefs. Jerry Brown’s own specialty has almost always been anti-politics: the politicians running against the system he helped make.

Most pols rarely challenge the conventional policy wisdom or advocate choices that might better serve the long-term interests of the larger community. We are living in an echo chamber in which polls, politicians and the media bounce the same constricted ideas from one to the other.  

The other day, PPIC President Mark Baldassare, one of our most respected opinion samplers, inadvertently reinforced that process. Commenting on the difference between Californians’ high esteem for the state’s colleges and their unwillingness to raise either fees or taxes, Baldassare said voters are “struggling with a crisis in the economy and a crisis of confidence in their leaders.”

There’s no arguing with that statement, but it doesn’t point to a way out. To say only that merely reinforces the idea that things are immutable.

The leaders of the three segments of California’s higher education system, once a shining example for the world, are trying to remind both Sacramento and, increasingly, the people of California, of the enormous risk of leaving that system to rot.

University of California president Mark Yudof and other UC officials are also hoping to persuade the Obama administration and Congress that if the President is serious about increasing the graduation rate of the nation’s universities, once first among the world’s developed nations, now 14th and likely to fall still further behind, the federal government will have to help.

The feds have long funded university research and grants for low income students but, as Yudof says, Washington always assumed that higher education is essentially a state responsibility.  As state support for higher education shrinks almost everywhere, the feds will have to provide additional resources not just for student aid, but to increase the capacity of universities, public research universities particularly, to produce the highly educated individuals who will generate the new ideas and technologies to keep the nation competitive.

The same goes for California, its economic competitiveness, and its health as a good society. If the United States is falling behind the world, California is falling ever farther behind the nation. California’s model Master Plan for Higher Education, which once guaranteed a place somewhere in a California college or university for every Californian able to benefit from it – and promised to do so at low cost – is, as Yudof said, “in tatters.”

At this moment, when thousands of additional students are knocking at the colleges’ doors, admissions are being curtailed, classes cut, and tuition raised beyond what anyone could have imagined only a few years ago.

Yet this is precisely the moment when additional investments in higher education are likely to yield the greatest long-term benefits. It’s California’s schools and universities that have always brought high tech and other innovative enterprises here and, in many instances, spurred the creation of new ones An economic crisis is not a time to cut spending; it’s a time to increase it. But is there anyone out there willing to say that?

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Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Wednesday for the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics, Immigration will be published early in 2010.