State support for public higher education in California has declined for decades: it constituted approximately one-third of the UC budget in 1990 and is about 10 percent today.  As the UC has been systematically defunded, campus leaders have sought to address growing deficits by methods grown so familiar they pass as common sense.  They are laser-focused on private sources of funding, generated from debt-financed tuition income, philanthropy, and commercial revenues.  In addition, they have aimed to reduce costs by outsourcing many auxiliary and student services, by substituting poorly-paid lecturers for ladder faculty, and by degrading the healthcare and pensions of remaining employees.

The BFA recognizes the severity of challenges to public higher education in California.  However, these policies have eroded the quality of teaching and research, as well as the accessibility of a UC education for every eligible Californian seeking it.  Like the majority of Americans, we believe that re-investing in public goods is the only way to recover a future for the country and the planet.  Rather than competing to become a poorly-endowed private university educating fewer and fewer of California’s high school students, we aim to reanimate the public mission and purpose of UC Berkeley within California’s higher education system.

We urge our leaders and colleagues to build the case for public support of higher education by endorsing the campaign to re-invest in it.  The “Keep California’s Promise” Campaign (or “the $66 fix,” for the $66 it would cost the median California taxpayer annually) would restore state funding of all sectors of California public higher education to their 2000 levels.  This campaign is supported by UC Faculty Associations, unions, and student organizations across the UC, CC and CSU systems.

At a time when Black Lives Matter movements are working to challenge systemic racism, the Berkeley Faculty Association insists that public higher education should not rise in cost and fall in quality at the moment that the historically excluded are at the university gates.  To this end, while working for restoration of public funding of our university system, the BFA seeks to expand upon and revise the original promise of public higher education.  UC, like the nation, was built on compromised foundations, including, quite literally, on the lands of dispossessed native peoples.  At its inception, a UC education was almost exclusively for white men.  The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education sought to broaden this mandate.  However, it took the Black Freedom Movement and allied struggles of the 1970s to force the University to fulfill this promise through race-based affirmative action in hiring and admissions.

A counter-attack began with the 1978 regressive tax regime under Proposition 13, which dealt a blow to California revenues for education in the precise era that a growing proportion of people of color in California were primed to benefit from public higher education.  And then came the attack on affirmative action, in the form of Proposition 209. Steadily decreasing revenues ever since mean that the university’s well-intentioned commitments to inclusion are severely compromised by the affordability and the quality of the education on offer.  Social justice requires a bolder approach: one that sees California public higher education as an instrument of reparations for the historically excluded; one that seeks to renew its promise now, when it is most necessary.

So what is the actual promise of a publicly funded university?  We stand for 

1. A university in which all students have a genuinely equal chance to think, study and succeed.  This requires that all be able to attend school without having to work, without financial anxiety and without incurring debt.
2. A university whose educational mission is publicly funded so that administrators do not need to chase tuition and donors from across the world and so that decisions about programs, departments and curriculum are made on educational and intellectual rather than financial grounds.
3. A university whose language, practices, and policies befit an institution dedicated to higher education, and are not imported from commercial platforms oriented toward other ends.
4. A university that supports all employees with livable–neither exorbitant nor precarious–salaries and benefits.
5. A university that prioritizes (and subsidizes) research oriented toward illuminating or solving public problems, broadly understood.
6. A university that celebrates and protects the great diversity of knowledge — including basic research and rare knowledge whose purpose and value may not be obvious to all — against external pressures and values, especially those of the marketplace.
7. A university that recognizes the climate crisis and other environmental devastations as holding the future hostage, and models the capacity to eliminate reliance on fossil fuels and foster sustainability in every aspect of its existence, from investments to buildings to food provision.
8. A university whose students, faculty, staff and administration actually reflect the diversity of the people of California.  Rather than merely deploying the language of diversity, such a university also works to recognize and repair legacies of dispossession, exclusion and inequality.
9. A university that commits itself to, rather than seeks to break away from, the broader system and democratic promise of public higher education within the University of California, the California State University, and Community Colleges.