BY HANK REICHMAN
The indispensable Chris Newfield has a new post up at his blog Remaking the University, “Newsom’s *Big Funding* Budget for UC and CSU is Flat.” In it he picks apart the false promises in California governor Gavin Newsom’s initial budget proposal for higher education, although the focus is mostly on the University of California (UC) and says little about the California State University (CSU) system. As Newfield readily acknowledges, the state’s budget process is only beginning and there are likely many modifications and tweaks to come. Moreover, most readers of this blog probably have minimal interest in the minutiae of California’s higher ed funding system. Hence, I’ll let folks who need more detail go to the piece itself, which, like everything Newfield writes, is well worth reading.
Gov. Gavin NewsomInstead, I want to use this post to highlight Chris’s observations about two points implicit in Gov. Newsom’s approach — and that of many politicians, Democrat and Republican, and not only in California — to higher education policy.
“Newsom has exactly two ideas about higher education,” Newfield writes. “One is that it maximize access on the basis of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The other is that it prepare students for jobs, and by jobs he means jobs in technology.” These are assumptions not at all original with Newsom; indeed, they are widely held. Let’s look at what Newfield has to say about them.
First, with respect to DEI in relation to students, Newfield writes:
Newsom makes state funding contingent on several 2030 goals: UC eliminating racial gaps in grad rates, getting grad rates to 76 percent for four-year students, and getting students to debt-free graduation. These are essential goals and UC must achieve them. But they require fundamental change in the UC business model. That depends on undergrad tuition subsidizing research and other activities–so less money is in instruction and student support, which hurts retention differentially across racial groups. The business model also depends on saving a lot of university money (my estimate is $755 million in 2019-20 using Accountability data) by capping financial aid, therefore forcing undergrads to borrow and work during the academic year (see Stage 2 and Stage 5 respectively).
This is such an important point–the need to fund goals rather than simply assert them–that I’ll expand a bit. You improve graduation rates in part by hiring enough instructors so that every student can get every class they need, when they need it. Because of chronic underfunding, many or most students on all UC campuses wait quarters or years to get admitted into at least a few of their core required courses.
How do you reduce racial gaps in graduation rates? You offer personalized, individual advising to every student who wants or needs it. You don’t tolerate caseloads of 740 students for each advisor, which Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielson, in their important book Broke, report is the case at UC Merced’s school of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts (page 123).
You also reduce racial gaps in graduation rates by taking students of color out of the cafeteria job they use to reduce their borrowing and into class: you cut their work hours ideally to zero while they are enrolled full time. You do not impose a Self-Help Expectation of $8,500 or $9,200 or $10,000 on every student with financial aid, even if they are low income, as every UC campus does. In other words, if you want to reduce racial gaps in graduation, you don’t do this, for years and years: have a net cost of attendance of $10,000 per year (after financial aid) for students whose whole family earns $60,000 or less.
You also don’t allow the poorest students to have the most debt at graduation. You stop doing these things by buying out financing gaps for poor and otherwise disadvantaged students, and then you put money into personalized, intensive advising, well-funded student centers, and other things most UC faculty and staff could name off the tops of their heads. When you start paying to provide these things, you’re then able close your graduation gaps.
These are all things UC campuses want to do. None of them are things that either the governor or the legislature want to pay for. None of them are things whose costs UCOP [U.of California Office of the President-HR] has itemized and justified in public in order to inspire the desire to pay for these essential things.
This is such an important point. College and university administrators — and many faculty members, too — repeatedly pledge to close “racial gaps,” but the solutions offered are far too frequently detached from any meaningful investment in providing the kinds of resources students — and not only minority students — need. Too often these rely on (less costly) measures of “cultural tutelage,” to use Touré Reed’s phrase, which disregard the fact that in the US “race and class are not separate but inextricably linked” (see Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism, p. 166). To be sure, a diversified and more appealing and meaningful curriculum as well as mentoring and similar programs — and, yes, affirmative action — are essential, but failing a general “public good” investment in higher education for everyone, the sorts of diversity goals that the UC and similar institutions have established will remain out of reach.
“The governor mentioned diversifying university faculty,” Newfield continues.
This has been an explicit UC goal since the 1980s. Again there are racio-cultural obstacles. But the material ones are at least as important. A diverse faculty comes from diverse doctoral programs, which means strong retention in those programs, means fully funding grad students from working-class backgrounds who are at greater risk of dropping out for lack of funds or excess debt. UC does not fund its doctoral programs at the needed level.
Thus in 2019-20, grad students went on a multi-campus strike over their rent burden, demanding a cost of living increase outside their union contract so they could cover costs in the private rental market. Nothing was done, and the students who started it (at UC Santa Cruz) were expelled for a while. In the midst of the pandemic in early 2021, UCSD grads had to protest in the face of massive rent hikes in campus housing. In 2022, rent burden is, if anything, even worse. The diversity of the faculty stops there, with unamanageable costs of living. If it is serious about faculty diversity, UC should announce debt-free doctoral programs. But the governor and legislature would have to pay for it.
I would go further. If UC — and, by no means, not only UC — wishes to attract a more diverse faculty it will be necessary to actually hire more faculty. I ruefully recall how in my years as a department chair and faculty senator I would each year read glowing reports about how the percentage of new tenure-track hires from minority groups was rising, only to see that the overall percentage of tenure-track faculty from those very groups was continuing to decline as only a handful of positions opened by the retirement of faculty of all ethnicities were being filled by anyone other than a small army of exploited part-time lecturers. “What are the consequences of diversifying a profession where many are either forced to leave it, or take jobs as contingent labor making poverty-level wages? Is the consequence of such diversification really ‘social justice’? Or is it exploitation of Black labor in a new form?” Louis Porter has asked.
Porter notes how “the net effect of the George Floyd protests in academia was a renewed commitment to diversity and inclusivity, with little discussion of the economic implications of this diversity and inclusivity. . . . It seemed as though academia . . . was toppling symbolic statues in the ivory tower while ignoring the economic exploitation upon which this ivory tower was based.”
Newfield then turns to the question of orienting college toward employment:
Newsom and most policy people continue to work with a version of Human Capital Theory (HCT) descended from the 1950s, in which “learning equals earning.” In reality that is true only for a subset of students (generally already financially advantaged–for the theory’s flaws see our LARB review-essay). Policymakers are trying to fix the theory by saying, “tech learning equals earning,” and UCOP encourages this splitting of STEM from other fields by publishing wages-by-major data.).
Enter Gavin Newsom: propelled by half-baked but established neo-HCT, he is making these five percent state funding increases contingent on “supporting workforce preparedness and high-demand career pipelines,” requiring 25 percent increases in degrees in STEM “and Education or Early Education” disciplines, as well as the same increase in “academic doctoral degrees,” all by 2026-27. The requirement is not exactly water-tight, and it also has a very weak justification in existing jobs projections. The original 2015 report that started this “million missing college degrees” fixation shows most new jobs appearing outside of STEM (Figure 4). Did anyone in the governor’s office read the current occupational breakdowns for the state? It’s the same story here, with tech a minor employer by size (though not by wages, which are high). But the STEM quota sails anyway, towing a legitimate fear about teaching shortages behind.
Even if the job market really did say STEM, it’s an invasive step for a governor to mandate changes in degree outputs in a university. Californians felt sorry for Floridians having to put up with Gov. Rick Scott making nasty cracks about anthropology and saying he didn’t want taxpayers to foot the bill for useless degrees. Newsom is effectively doing the same thing. It raises allocation questions: Will new faculty lines to teach the expanded enrollments all go to STEM plus a few for education? Will provosts need to stop hiring in arts and humanities for a number of years to pool lines in the “high demand careers”? Should California’s future musicians, screenwriters, architects, designers, painters, film editors, historians, novelists, and journalists avoid the experience of being second-class citizens by going to UC?
To be sure, Gavin Newsom is not Rick Scott or Ron DeSantis. But the neoliberal approach to higher education as essentially a personal investment in career training leads precisely in that direction. Newfield, I think, suspects that the governor senses this but is still entrapped in the assumptions of a dead-end ideology:
Whatever his neoliberal policies might be, Newsom’s deeper desire, I felt watching him, is to ease the worst suffering. This is also where he feels useful, even perhaps a bit of a hero. But this desire doesn’t find much to feed on in higher education as officials present it to him.
It’s not just Newsom: the media isn’t interested in higher ed either. The press had crisp questions about Newsom’s contradictions on personal exemptions from Covid vaccines, his concrete plans for supporting reproductive rights, his borrowing of his recall opponents’ plans for the mental health system, and his proposed changes in the Medicaid prescription program. They had nothing about higher ed. This is a real problem for the sector. The governors’ office doesn’t get vigorously questioned about higher ed, so they don’t prep for that, they rightly think the media and its consumers don’t care about the details, so they never think, “we’re going to get pounded on mandating STEM degrees so we’d better think this through.”
I’ve written about Biden-era Democrats assigning college to a dedicated space in the welfare state. The good news is that they want government-run social development—Biden has in fact broken with key tenants of neoliberal Obama-Clintonism. The bad news for higher ed is that the Biden-Newsom mainstream has no intellectual developmental plan that higher ed inherently addresses. Biden-Newsom are a real advance on Brown-Obama, but an advance for children, the food insecure, the mentally ill, the unhoused, the uninsured, and not an advance for college students or the educational system.
For them, the knowledge economy is abstract scenery, a slightly smoggy familiar sky. We may need a million more degrees, but that’s just a logistics problem—there’s no interest in process or content or quality upgrades to say nothing of revolutions in thought or in the public’s collective cultural and political capabilities. For them, UC and CSU are server farms that should run quietly in the background. There’s nothing heroic about them, and they won’t make a hero of any president or governor. They are of modest interest as economic infrastructure. They are certainly not, for this Democratic party, a state engine of destiny.
This could be changed, in a couple of diverging ways. One would be if all three segments bust out of the workforce preparation trap and develop exciting stories of college-fueled individual and social transformation. I know some deans and individual faculty who could do this. I don’t know anyone at the senior manager level who would. Please correct me if I’ve missed some folks.
The second, more plausible path is to comply fully with the mainstream Democrat welfarist passion. Inspiration is also needed here, that makes the state’s politicians heroes of social justice. But that means defining the processes that would allow UC (and CSU) really to meet graduation and the other targets, and then setting their actual price.
Fix the funding, or miss the goals. It shouldn’t be a hard decision.
At least for Californians, I recommend reading the entire lengthy piece. And also, if you haven’t already, Newfield’s book, The Great Mistake, should be required reading.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom has recently been published.
