The following statement was presented to the UC Regents by graduate students at the May 19th UC Regents meeting at UCSF. Nine graduate students from UC Berkeley attended the meeting dressed as “GSI Joes” in army attire adorned with military patches that read “Dean Edley = Class(room) Enemy.” The action was a response to Dean Christopher Edley’s recent proposal for transforming UC Berkeley into a “Cyber Campus” where “squadrons of GSIs” will serve on the “frontline of online contact” with undergraduates. Dean Edley's Cyber Campus proposal is here, and coverage of the action is here.
We are here today as members of UAW 2865, the union for Academic Student Employees at the UC. The University of California perceives its graduate students as a cheap labor force that will follow orders without question. Recently, in a proposal for transforming UC Berkeley into a “Cyber Campus,” Christopher Edley, the Dean of Boalt Law School and Chair of the Gould Commission’s Education and Curriculum Working Group, called for “squadrons of GSI’s” to serve on the “frontlines” of a new UC Berkeley. This myopic vision of higher education conceives of the UC as more of a brand than the public institution called for in the 1960 Master Plan. We find Dean Edley’s “Cyber Campus” to be just the beginning of a frightening trajectory that will undoubtedly end in the complete implosion of public higher education in the embattled state of California. Dean Edley’s proposal and many of the recommendations currently under consideration by the University Commission on the Future are just select examples of how the UC is sacrificing undergraduate education in order to maximize profits.
As graduate students who are on the front lines of educating undergraduates, we see everyday what is happening to the quality of instruction at the UC. We are horrified by the UC Regents’ vision of the future, one that is based on business models that do not consider quality of education or student and worker experience. This is a future in which we refuse to live, work, and teach. If the future of the UC is one where graduate students are continued to be treated as a casual labor pool we guarantee it will be one that is missing the top notch graduate students on which administrators have come to rely.
One of the unfulfilled promises of the UC system is that it should be at the forefront of progressive change that California desperately needs. Instead, it is at the forefront of privatization, a high fee-high loan model that will drive low income students into debt or shut them out completely. Instead of negotiating fairly with the labor unions, the UC has repeatedly thwarted good faith bargaining. Instead of striving to be competitive in attracting graduate students to the UC, our universities expect us to work for less and receive lesser benefits because we chose to study at a public institution. Meanwhile just the opposite argument is used to attract people to high level management positions: we have to pay them exorbitant salaries and perks or they will go elsewhere. Instead of insuring childcare for the lowest income students at UC Berkeley, our registration fees subsidize football tickets for students. A crisis of priorities, indeed.
The Regents increased our fees without increasing the quality of our experience here at UC; in fact, Dean Edley's plan will destroy the quality of undergraduate education in the process of redefining what teaching means for graduate students. We did not come to graduate school to be in squadrons, nor did we come here to be virtual instructors on the frontline of dismantling quality public education in California.
But the military rhetoric Dean Edley uses is perhaps apt in this case. A moment of crisis is a time when profound change can happen, a new path taken; there are parallels here and lessons that we should have learned but have not. In the moment of crisis generated by 9-11, the president of the United States was able to sell the country on an illegal, unilateral and murderous war, a war that our country is still waging after nearly a decade. And to what end? To generate profits for a select few while hundreds of thousands suffer and die. The budget crisis has been used in the same way here at UC. You, the UC Regents, have accelerated your plans to dramatically restructure the UC in a way that represents the outright rejection of the logic of public education. Your vision of the UC could not be clearer: it is a corporation that sells education, one that lives and dies by its ability to reduce costs of production. You are well on your way to destroying the UC's public function as a collective investment in the future of all Californians, replacing it instead with the market function of providing a luxury good to those who can afford it. This will be your legacy. We did not come to the UC to fight, but we will fight you every step of the way, and that legacy will be ours.
Showing posts with label privatization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privatization. Show all posts
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
More March 4 Protest Coverage
Angry US students protest cuts to higher education--Associated Press
Coverage of education protests in US--Al Jazeera
Rowdy protests target funding cuts at US campuses--Associated Press
Day Of Action: TOP MOMENTS--Huffington Post
Campus Activism across CA (March 4)--Daily Cal
Editorial Daily Cal: Seeing Beyond UC
Daily Cal Slide shows
Berkeley/Oakland
Sacramento
San Francisco
Coverage of education protests in US--Al Jazeera
Rowdy protests target funding cuts at US campuses--Associated Press
Day Of Action: TOP MOMENTS--Huffington Post
Campus Activism across CA (March 4)--Daily Cal
Editorial Daily Cal: Seeing Beyond UC
Daily Cal Slide shows
Berkeley/Oakland
Sacramento
San Francisco
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Future of the University
A UCSB Symposium
Jennifer Washburn (author of University Inc.), "University Inc.: Why Public Knowledge and Public Education Are At Risk"
David Marshall (Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, UCSB), "The Plight of the Public Research University"
Followed by Roundtable Discussion
Thursday, November 5 / 3:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Newfield comment: Washburn's book is the best existing overview of the impact of industry sponsorships on university activities. She is candid about the risks, and her concerns must be grasped in order to advance current analyses about the impacts of privatization. Everyone at UCSB should go to this event.
Jennifer Washburn (author of University Inc.), "University Inc.: Why Public Knowledge and Public Education Are At Risk"
David Marshall (Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, UCSB), "The Plight of the Public Research University"
Followed by Roundtable Discussion
Thursday, November 5 / 3:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Newfield comment: Washburn's book is the best existing overview of the impact of industry sponsorships on university activities. She is candid about the risks, and her concerns must be grasped in order to advance current analyses about the impacts of privatization. Everyone at UCSB should go to this event.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
The UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP)
For Immediate Release
Students, Faculty, and Staff pledge 110% confidence in President Yudof, the UC Regents, and the efficient privatization of the world's greatest public university.
-------------------
UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) Resolution- Passed 9/6/09
-We the faculty, students, and staff of the University of California recognize that the University of California has fallen behind the times by pursuing a goal of excellence in public education.
-We pledge our 110% confidence in President Yudof, the UC Regents, and their ambitious plans to privatize and streamline the nation's best public university.
-We announce our unflagging belief that in times of crisis such as the University of California now faces, democracy, shared governance, and public debate are only obstacles in the way of efficient privatization and must not be tolerated.
-We aver that demands for greater transparency of the University of California budget can only lead to further outrage and lend support to criticisms of President Yudof and the Regents, and so must be avoided at all cost in order to save costs.
-We demand the end to all organizing, troublemaking, and general hullabaloo by UC faculty, staff, and students.
-We call for a UC-wide “buy-in” on Thursday, September 24, 2009 in support of the efficient privatization of the University of California.
-We admire the bravery of administrators who accept raises in their salaries while slashing the wages of everyone else (or at least those they don’t lay off), hiking up student fees, cutting academic services, and furloughing staff. The courage of these administrators truly gives the students of the University of California something to look up to.
-We maintain our belief that to make an omelette, you sometimes have to break a couple eggs. And if those eggs include things such as the quality of UC courses, the diversity of the student body, the living standards of our staff, and the University of California’s reputation around the world for excellence in public education, then so be it.
-Signed by the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP)
UCMeP@gmail.com
www.privatizeUCnow.tumblr.com
Facebook: UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP)
Twitter: UCMeP
Students, Faculty, and Staff pledge 110% confidence in President Yudof, the UC Regents, and the efficient privatization of the world's greatest public university.
-------------------
UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) Resolution- Passed 9/6/09
-We the faculty, students, and staff of the University of California recognize that the University of California has fallen behind the times by pursuing a goal of excellence in public education.
-We pledge our 110% confidence in President Yudof, the UC Regents, and their ambitious plans to privatize and streamline the nation's best public university.
-We announce our unflagging belief that in times of crisis such as the University of California now faces, democracy, shared governance, and public debate are only obstacles in the way of efficient privatization and must not be tolerated.
-We aver that demands for greater transparency of the University of California budget can only lead to further outrage and lend support to criticisms of President Yudof and the Regents, and so must be avoided at all cost in order to save costs.
-We demand the end to all organizing, troublemaking, and general hullabaloo by UC faculty, staff, and students.
-We call for a UC-wide “buy-in” on Thursday, September 24, 2009 in support of the efficient privatization of the University of California.
-We admire the bravery of administrators who accept raises in their salaries while slashing the wages of everyone else (or at least those they don’t lay off), hiking up student fees, cutting academic services, and furloughing staff. The courage of these administrators truly gives the students of the University of California something to look up to.
-We maintain our belief that to make an omelette, you sometimes have to break a couple eggs. And if those eggs include things such as the quality of UC courses, the diversity of the student body, the living standards of our staff, and the University of California’s reputation around the world for excellence in public education, then so be it.
-Signed by the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP)
UCMeP@gmail.com
www.privatizeUCnow.tumblr.com
Facebook: UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP)
Twitter: UCMeP
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Chris Edley Interview New York Times (Jan 2007)
At Berkeley Law, a Challenge to Overcome All Barriers
January 17, 2007
At Berkeley Law, a Challenge to Overcome All Barriers
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
BERKELEY, Calif.
Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the flagship law school of the University of California, learned early about racial discrimination. After all, his father, one of the few African-American graduates in Harvard Law School’s class of 1953, could not get a job in a Philadelphia law firm.
“They’d hired William T. Coleman from Harvard a couple of years earlier,” Mr. Edley recalled, referring to the former transportation secretary, and ardent defender of civil rights. “And they were waiting to see how that experiment worked out before hiring another one.”
Mr. Edley’s father went on to become a prosecutor in Philadelphia, then the first black program officer at the Ford Foundation and president of the United Negro College Fund. He was never, Mr. Edley said, bitter about the obstacles in his way. But civil rights and related subjects were the topics of discussion around the dinner table. From age 5, the son wanted to be a lawyer.
Now Mr. Edley, in his third year at Boalt Hall, as the law school here is known, finds himself defending affirmative action policies intended to overcome barriers like those his father confronted.
The job is a challenge; under California law, the law school cannot use race as a factor in admissions. But tackling that challenge was an important reason he took it.
“This was ground zero for the opportunity struggle that defines the civil rights agenda,” Mr. Edley, 55, said in a recent interview in the book-lined anteroom to his office in Berkeley. “The challenges in education, health care, immigration, the criminal justice system, here in California, capture what the battle for racial and ethnic justice is today.”
Mr. Edley said he believed that most people are not against using race as a factor in providing job, education or other opportunities.
“People oppose quotas, in the sense of rigid, numerical straitjackets, and they oppose giving unqualified people preferential treatment,” he said. “But they also support pragmatic efforts to open up doors.”
As dean, Mr. Edley is pursuing an ambitious agenda that would put Boalt in the middle of debates over discrimination as well as over health care costs, technology and other difficult problems. The centerpiece of his plan is to build several new “institutes,” each devoted to studying issues like civil rights, technology, business law and health care.
Deans of rival institutions are closely watching how Mr. Edley, the first African-American dean at Boalt and one of a few in the country, carries out his plans.
“People are full of the most glowing things to say about him, that he is a visionary, that he’s brought this new intellectual vibrancy to the school,” said Elena Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law School, where for more than 20 years Mr. Edley taught civil rights and subjects ranging from environmental to tax law.
Mr. Edley, whose career also includes extensive Washington experience in the Carter and Clinton administrations, is intense yet relaxed and informal, a thoughtful man with round eyeglasses who appears youthful despite a graying beard. He prefers jeans to suits and ties.
And he is often soft-spoken as he outlines his plans, which include raising Boalt’s already high profile by hiring dozens of professors and seeking to raise more than $100 million to improve facilities, offer more financial aid and build the institutes.
Mr. Edley said that the institutes are modeled on the Project on Civil Rights, which he helped found at Harvard. The project, which is dedicated to studying racial and ethnic justice, law and policy, and run by Gary Orfield, is moving to the University of California, Los Angeles, this year — another sign, Mr. Edley said, that the center of debate on the issues it studies has shifted to California.
Mr. Edley said he hoped that research by one of the new institutes, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, will provide ammunition to supporters of using race in admissions. If the law were to change, Boalt might have more minority students and that would be good for the institution, he said.
“I’m always sensitive to the fact that affirmative action has very little direct bearing on the challenges facing the masses of poor minority families,” Mr. Edley said. “But I’ve also seen the ways in which inclusion can transform an institution, not only in its character but in its effectiveness.”
As an example, Mr. Edley described a debate in the 1980s among members of the board of managers of Swarthmore College, his alma mater. Mr. Edley and another black member of the board argued that Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania, should divest its investments in South Africa, and they believed that the tide was against them.
“It just looked clear, we were not going to get the consensus needed,” Mr. Edley said. He and his colleague discussed when to resign from the board, but posed a final question to the other members.
“Whose institution is this?” Mr. Edley recalled asking. “And is our presence here merely as invited guests in someone else’s house, or are we owners of this place and its aspirations, every bit as much as the rest of you?” Swarthmore’s board ultimately decided to divest, he said.
In coming to Boalt, Mr. Edley worried about whether he would feel part of the institution. He met with minority law students and tried to gauge their views of the campus, and was gratified to observe that they felt a sense of ownership in the law school. That feeling eluded him, he said, in his own education.
“It’s the difference between being an employee or customer and being a stockholder,” Mr. Edley said.
Mr. Edley was born while his father was in his third year of law school. He graduated from Swarthmore in 1973, then followed his father to Harvard Law. He also has a master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
In Washington, he worked in various White House posts and for the Department of Health and Human Services. In 1995, he directed the White House review of affirmative action for President Bill Clinton.
At a meeting at the White House in February 1997, Mr. Edley met Maria Echaveste, then on the
president’s senior staff. They married in 1999, and Ms. Echaveste, a co-founder of the Nueva Vista Group, a lobbying firm, travels back and forth to Berkeley from her office in Washington. They are raising two children; Mr. Edley also has a 23-year-old son from a previous marriage.
Mr. Edley said he had little interest in returning to Washington. “I have no Potomac fever left,” he said.
Like any top academic official, Mr. Edley spends much of his time these days on fund-raising. That, too, is a challenge, he said, because many of the law school’s alumni do not realize how expensive tuition has become — more than $25,000 a year for California residents — and they do not understand the need for donations.
“The alumni mistakenly believe that the state remains committed to providing a quality legal education for next to nothing,” Mr. Edley said. “But those days are over.”
January 17, 2007
At Berkeley Law, a Challenge to Overcome All Barriers
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
BERKELEY, Calif.
Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the flagship law school of the University of California, learned early about racial discrimination. After all, his father, one of the few African-American graduates in Harvard Law School’s class of 1953, could not get a job in a Philadelphia law firm.
“They’d hired William T. Coleman from Harvard a couple of years earlier,” Mr. Edley recalled, referring to the former transportation secretary, and ardent defender of civil rights. “And they were waiting to see how that experiment worked out before hiring another one.”
Mr. Edley’s father went on to become a prosecutor in Philadelphia, then the first black program officer at the Ford Foundation and president of the United Negro College Fund. He was never, Mr. Edley said, bitter about the obstacles in his way. But civil rights and related subjects were the topics of discussion around the dinner table. From age 5, the son wanted to be a lawyer.
Now Mr. Edley, in his third year at Boalt Hall, as the law school here is known, finds himself defending affirmative action policies intended to overcome barriers like those his father confronted.
The job is a challenge; under California law, the law school cannot use race as a factor in admissions. But tackling that challenge was an important reason he took it.
“This was ground zero for the opportunity struggle that defines the civil rights agenda,” Mr. Edley, 55, said in a recent interview in the book-lined anteroom to his office in Berkeley. “The challenges in education, health care, immigration, the criminal justice system, here in California, capture what the battle for racial and ethnic justice is today.”
Mr. Edley said he believed that most people are not against using race as a factor in providing job, education or other opportunities.
“People oppose quotas, in the sense of rigid, numerical straitjackets, and they oppose giving unqualified people preferential treatment,” he said. “But they also support pragmatic efforts to open up doors.”
As dean, Mr. Edley is pursuing an ambitious agenda that would put Boalt in the middle of debates over discrimination as well as over health care costs, technology and other difficult problems. The centerpiece of his plan is to build several new “institutes,” each devoted to studying issues like civil rights, technology, business law and health care.
Deans of rival institutions are closely watching how Mr. Edley, the first African-American dean at Boalt and one of a few in the country, carries out his plans.
“People are full of the most glowing things to say about him, that he is a visionary, that he’s brought this new intellectual vibrancy to the school,” said Elena Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law School, where for more than 20 years Mr. Edley taught civil rights and subjects ranging from environmental to tax law.
Mr. Edley, whose career also includes extensive Washington experience in the Carter and Clinton administrations, is intense yet relaxed and informal, a thoughtful man with round eyeglasses who appears youthful despite a graying beard. He prefers jeans to suits and ties.
And he is often soft-spoken as he outlines his plans, which include raising Boalt’s already high profile by hiring dozens of professors and seeking to raise more than $100 million to improve facilities, offer more financial aid and build the institutes.
Mr. Edley said that the institutes are modeled on the Project on Civil Rights, which he helped found at Harvard. The project, which is dedicated to studying racial and ethnic justice, law and policy, and run by Gary Orfield, is moving to the University of California, Los Angeles, this year — another sign, Mr. Edley said, that the center of debate on the issues it studies has shifted to California.
Mr. Edley said he hoped that research by one of the new institutes, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, will provide ammunition to supporters of using race in admissions. If the law were to change, Boalt might have more minority students and that would be good for the institution, he said.
“I’m always sensitive to the fact that affirmative action has very little direct bearing on the challenges facing the masses of poor minority families,” Mr. Edley said. “But I’ve also seen the ways in which inclusion can transform an institution, not only in its character but in its effectiveness.”
As an example, Mr. Edley described a debate in the 1980s among members of the board of managers of Swarthmore College, his alma mater. Mr. Edley and another black member of the board argued that Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania, should divest its investments in South Africa, and they believed that the tide was against them.
“It just looked clear, we were not going to get the consensus needed,” Mr. Edley said. He and his colleague discussed when to resign from the board, but posed a final question to the other members.
“Whose institution is this?” Mr. Edley recalled asking. “And is our presence here merely as invited guests in someone else’s house, or are we owners of this place and its aspirations, every bit as much as the rest of you?” Swarthmore’s board ultimately decided to divest, he said.
In coming to Boalt, Mr. Edley worried about whether he would feel part of the institution. He met with minority law students and tried to gauge their views of the campus, and was gratified to observe that they felt a sense of ownership in the law school. That feeling eluded him, he said, in his own education.
“It’s the difference between being an employee or customer and being a stockholder,” Mr. Edley said.
Mr. Edley was born while his father was in his third year of law school. He graduated from Swarthmore in 1973, then followed his father to Harvard Law. He also has a master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
In Washington, he worked in various White House posts and for the Department of Health and Human Services. In 1995, he directed the White House review of affirmative action for President Bill Clinton.
At a meeting at the White House in February 1997, Mr. Edley met Maria Echaveste, then on the
president’s senior staff. They married in 1999, and Ms. Echaveste, a co-founder of the Nueva Vista Group, a lobbying firm, travels back and forth to Berkeley from her office in Washington. They are raising two children; Mr. Edley also has a 23-year-old son from a previous marriage.
Mr. Edley said he had little interest in returning to Washington. “I have no Potomac fever left,” he said.
Like any top academic official, Mr. Edley spends much of his time these days on fund-raising. That, too, is a challenge, he said, because many of the law school’s alumni do not realize how expensive tuition has become — more than $25,000 a year for California residents — and they do not understand the need for donations.
“The alumni mistakenly believe that the state remains committed to providing a quality legal education for next to nothing,” Mr. Edley said. “But those days are over.”
Chris Edley Op-Ed on UC Future (January 2005)
A Needy Boalt Hall Looks to Private Money
By Christopher Edley Jr.
Christopher Edley Jr. is dean of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
January 17, 2005
Should we "privatize" parts of the University of California, as some have suggested? The mere mention of the idea is enough to start a war. In fact, I've learned never to use the term to describe the goals for my law school, Berkeley's Boalt Hall, because, frankly, it confuses more than illuminates.
But we do need to think about substantive structural changes in the way we do business. To understand how I view the future here at Boalt Hall, it is important to distinguish between our mission, our governance and our financing.
I am not interested in privatizing Boalt Hall's mission. The university's overall mission is to provide public access to world-class excellence at a bargain price. Unlike the UC undergraduate programs, we've never offered "mass" education — we're too small for that — but affordability has always been a top goal.
Yet the state is increasingly unwilling or unable to pay for excellence, so escalating tuition, partially offsetting neglectful appropriations, threatens to make the bargain a cherished memory.
Tuition for California residents at Boalt Hall, where I became dean last July, is about $22,000. That is roughly two-thirds of what Stanford and Harvard law schools charge, and double what Boalt charged just four years ago. Ten years ago, Boalt cost only a third of the top privates, and I regularly see alumni who, a generation ago, got three years of a world-class legal education for a total of $750.
So if we aren't mass, and the bargain is at risk, what is "public" about our mission? First, a great public law school must be inclusive to produce leaders for all communities and sectors. Higher tuitions forced by state cuts must be countered with strong financial aid policies and loan forgiveness for public interest graduates.
Second, we have an obligation to harness our excellence in teaching and research so that we can help tackle the toughest, most critical problems facing California, the nation and the world. The best lawyers are problem-solvers, and the best public law schools should be leveraging their intellectual capital to make a difference not just in the private sphere but in the public arena as well. Contributions that trickle by chance from a private university can, if we keep our eyes on the prize, flood forth from a great public one.
That's our public mission, and I don't intend to jeopardize it.
Nor do I want to privatize the way Boalt Hall is governed. I don't support ending the control of the regents and the Legislature over this or any other UC school. As much as I dislike the red tape and overregulation of a large public university, I welcome accountability.
But ultimately, what if Sacramento really won't fully fund our inviolate mission? Resources are vital; we can't do the job without them. The conclusion I've reached, at least for Boalt, is that we need a "burden-sharing" strategy, in which we persuade alumni and other private donors that our mission warrants their support — their investment — in creating leaders and solving problems that matter.
Sure, private fundraising has been on the rise at Boalt and throughout UC for some years. The dominant alumni mind-set, however, is that surely the state is paying to sustain the access and excellence that make us great, when that is no longer the case. Boalt is probably typical of UC in that a decent proportion of alumni do contribute, but in amounts that are dwarfed by private competitors. Yale Law School, with an alumni body comparable to Boalt's, has eight times as many professional fundraisers, and also eight times the endowment income per student.
We will change this. We will make the case not just to the state but to outside donors as well that having a world-class law school in a world-class research university is smart, and that it is worth supporting.
List your favorite examples of mind-bogglingly difficult challenges — racial justice at home; economic growth abroad; balancing security and liberty; exploiting breakthroughs in science and technology; making our diversity a source of strength, not hate. Meaningful progress on any of these will require the skills and imagination of terrific lawyers to craft the laws and the contracts, to design the institutions and policies, to structure our businesses and protect our rights. Great public law schools can make a difference.
Ultimately, the key to getting the private resources we need, ironically, is in vigorous pursuit of our public mission.
A starvation diet for higher education is like burning seed corn. For a state that has been all about the future, the explanation for such profound error can only be a mysterious civic disease of a terrible sort. I'm patient with prayer-based remedies but, meanwhile, the excellence of Boalt and other institutions requires private resources. Is that privatization? The word's misleading, but the need is clear.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
By Christopher Edley Jr.
Christopher Edley Jr. is dean of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
January 17, 2005
Should we "privatize" parts of the University of California, as some have suggested? The mere mention of the idea is enough to start a war. In fact, I've learned never to use the term to describe the goals for my law school, Berkeley's Boalt Hall, because, frankly, it confuses more than illuminates.
But we do need to think about substantive structural changes in the way we do business. To understand how I view the future here at Boalt Hall, it is important to distinguish between our mission, our governance and our financing.
I am not interested in privatizing Boalt Hall's mission. The university's overall mission is to provide public access to world-class excellence at a bargain price. Unlike the UC undergraduate programs, we've never offered "mass" education — we're too small for that — but affordability has always been a top goal.
Yet the state is increasingly unwilling or unable to pay for excellence, so escalating tuition, partially offsetting neglectful appropriations, threatens to make the bargain a cherished memory.
Tuition for California residents at Boalt Hall, where I became dean last July, is about $22,000. That is roughly two-thirds of what Stanford and Harvard law schools charge, and double what Boalt charged just four years ago. Ten years ago, Boalt cost only a third of the top privates, and I regularly see alumni who, a generation ago, got three years of a world-class legal education for a total of $750.
So if we aren't mass, and the bargain is at risk, what is "public" about our mission? First, a great public law school must be inclusive to produce leaders for all communities and sectors. Higher tuitions forced by state cuts must be countered with strong financial aid policies and loan forgiveness for public interest graduates.
Second, we have an obligation to harness our excellence in teaching and research so that we can help tackle the toughest, most critical problems facing California, the nation and the world. The best lawyers are problem-solvers, and the best public law schools should be leveraging their intellectual capital to make a difference not just in the private sphere but in the public arena as well. Contributions that trickle by chance from a private university can, if we keep our eyes on the prize, flood forth from a great public one.
That's our public mission, and I don't intend to jeopardize it.
Nor do I want to privatize the way Boalt Hall is governed. I don't support ending the control of the regents and the Legislature over this or any other UC school. As much as I dislike the red tape and overregulation of a large public university, I welcome accountability.
But ultimately, what if Sacramento really won't fully fund our inviolate mission? Resources are vital; we can't do the job without them. The conclusion I've reached, at least for Boalt, is that we need a "burden-sharing" strategy, in which we persuade alumni and other private donors that our mission warrants their support — their investment — in creating leaders and solving problems that matter.
Sure, private fundraising has been on the rise at Boalt and throughout UC for some years. The dominant alumni mind-set, however, is that surely the state is paying to sustain the access and excellence that make us great, when that is no longer the case. Boalt is probably typical of UC in that a decent proportion of alumni do contribute, but in amounts that are dwarfed by private competitors. Yale Law School, with an alumni body comparable to Boalt's, has eight times as many professional fundraisers, and also eight times the endowment income per student.
We will change this. We will make the case not just to the state but to outside donors as well that having a world-class law school in a world-class research university is smart, and that it is worth supporting.
List your favorite examples of mind-bogglingly difficult challenges — racial justice at home; economic growth abroad; balancing security and liberty; exploiting breakthroughs in science and technology; making our diversity a source of strength, not hate. Meaningful progress on any of these will require the skills and imagination of terrific lawyers to craft the laws and the contracts, to design the institutions and policies, to structure our businesses and protect our rights. Great public law schools can make a difference.
Ultimately, the key to getting the private resources we need, ironically, is in vigorous pursuit of our public mission.
A starvation diet for higher education is like burning seed corn. For a state that has been all about the future, the explanation for such profound error can only be a mysterious civic disease of a terrible sort. I'm patient with prayer-based remedies but, meanwhile, the excellence of Boalt and other institutions requires private resources. Is that privatization? The word's misleading, but the need is clear.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
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