• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 459 0

to celebrate commencement. Kids were tossing Frisbees and lounging on the library steps. The beautiful wood-paneled room in which we met was sealed off from the buzz and excitement of the surrounding campus and city. The meeting began, as many others had recently, with a report on the university’s financial condition. While exact figures would not be available until September, it was already clear that the endowment would be down at least 30 percent. Sober administrators summarized what steps had already been taken: a 5 percent cut in the current operating budget, a university-wide hiring freeze, a freeze on all salaries and wages, a 10 percent cut in graduate student admissions and a 10 percent increase in undergraduate student admissions. Not much more could be done, they said, without cutting into bone. Layoffs at this point did not seem likely, but they were already occurring at other universities, and nothing could be ruled out. Faculty and staff, however, would decline through attrition. The vice president then methodically walked faculty members through the details of the budget for the current fiscal year and the tentative projections for the next two budget cycles. Since the university was heavily invested in hedge funds and private-equity funds, he had to admit uncertainty about the projections in the face of continuing budgetary pressures. In the best-case scenario, expendable income from the endowment for the arts and sciences budget would decrease at an annual rate of “only” 8 percent for the next three years. When a faculty member asked how long it would be until budgets returned to precrash levels, the provost answered, “Not for the foreseeable future.”

Our nation’s public universities are facing even more severe financial problems. Declining tax revenues and increasing expenses have led to significant cutbacks in state funding across the country. On the day I am writing these words (October 3, 2009), Bob Herbert published an op-ed article entitled “Cracks in the Future” in The New York Times. Herbert wrote:

While the U.S. has struggled with enormous problems over the past several years, there has been at least one consistent bright spot. Its system of higher education has remained the finest in the world.

Now there are ominous cracks appearing in that cornerstone of American civilization. Exhibit A is the University of California, Berkeley, the finest public university in the world and undoubtedly one of the two or three best universities in the United States, public or private….

It’s dismaying to realize that the grandeur of Berkeley (and the remarkable success of the University of California system, of which Berkeley is the flagship) is being jeopardized by shortsighted politicians and California’s colossally dysfunctional budget processes.

The California system, which has taken decades to develop and has provided important opportunities for countless students and faculty members, is unraveling with astonishing rapidity. In late 2009, Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of UC Berkeley, reported that his university had to cut $150 million in fiscal year 2009–2010 and $814 million from the state’s higher education as a whole. The latest cuts come on top of significant reductions over the past two decades. State support, corrected for inflation and enrollment, is down almost two thirds since 1991–1994. In an article entitled “In California, a Teachable Crisis,” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall of 2009, Christopher Newfield describes a budgetary process that defies reason. After cutting $814 million, the governor’s Department of Finance “threw all of the university’s federal stimulus money into the hole that created—resulting in a net loss of 5 percent. Then it cut an additional $637 million for 2009–10, leaving the university’s state general-fund budget down 25 percent for 2008–10.” Neither short-term nor long-term planning is possible in the midst of such chaos. To make up for these budget cuts, administrators predict that it will be necessary to raise tuition from $8,000 to