BY HANK REICHMAN October 1 was the legislatively mandated opening day for California’s new ridiculously named fully online community college, Calbright. But there were no classes. There were no instructors. There were no students. There were, however, some applicants. According to Taylor Huckaby, Calbright’s communications director, about 655 people had started an application, of which…
BY HANK REICHMAN Faculty members in other states may be excused for expressing some jealousy of California’s economic and political success since Jerry Brown was elected governor nearly eight years ago. While Republican-led states like Kansas, Iowa, or Wisconsin continue to suffer slow growth and calamitous budget shortfalls and cuts, under Brown and a Democratic…
BY HANK REICHMAN In January, the Reclaim California Higher Education Coalition issued a report, The $48 Fix, which demonstrated that California could provide today’s students with the same accessible low-cost university experience that California successfully offered its students from the 1960s through the 1990s through an income surtax of no more than $48/year for the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Most Californians believe the overall affordability of the state’s public colleges and universities is a big problem, while few say the same about the quality of education. These are among the key findings of a survey of public opinion on the state’s public higher education system released December 8 by the Public…
Last week I posted an item on California Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed 2016-17 state budget, which falls short on higher education funding. In that post I relied heavily on the findings of the nonpartisan California Budget and Policy Center‘s “First Look” at the proposed budget. Now the Center has published another comment on the proposal,…
Yesterday I posted a piece on California Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed budget, with specific reference to higher education. Today UCLA History professor Michael Meranze posted his response to the Brown proposal on the Remaking the University blog that he runs with UC Santa Barbara English professor Christopher Newfield. Michael’s take is similar to mine, but…
I have long contended that California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown is the only true fiscal conservative in American politics. In many ways Brown is a liberal, and an often admirable one, but for decades perhaps his most distinctive characteristic has been his hesitancy to spend money. It would not be out of line to call…
A bit more than a year ago a California Superior Court, ruling in Vergara v. California, overturned California statutes guaranteeing due process protections for K-12 teachers with more than two years experience (so-called “teacher tenure”) and layoff by seniority. At the time I posted several items on the case, first here, then here, here, and…
The following is an op-ed piece by Susan Gubernat, Professor of English at California State University, East Bay and a member of the CSU Academic Senate. It was published in the Sacramento Bee on September 7. Tuition dollars have overtaken state funding in supporting public higher education in California, as is true throughout the country.…
