mortiz055

As I mentioned in my post on the Budget , the Regents will be considering a proposal to alter the governing structure of the medical centers.  This proposal is a somewhat improved version of an earlier, and admittedly worse, plan that was presented at the Regents September Meeting.  The effects of these plans will be to give the Executive Vice-President--Health greater authority, to increase the ability of the medical centers to influence the Regents more directly, and to grant greater autonomy to the health care system more generally.  In both its substance and its creation it points to serious problems in UC's internal governance. First as to substance.  The proposal will expand both the size and the authority of the Regent's Committee on Health Services.  It would be continue to have six Regental members but would now include the Executive Vice President--Health, two Chancellors from campuses with medical centers, four outside "experts" effectively chosen b...

This week's Regents meeting's Agenda is chock full of important items.  In particular, UCOP is presenting the 2016-2017 budget proposal along with a three-year "sustainability" plan , a proposal to improve the finances of UCRP through internal borrowing , and a proposal to centralize the management of the Health Care system . Unfortunately, the lessons from this week's Regents' agenda is that despite UCOP's efforts to tout its agreement with Governor Brown, last year's tuition gambit has done little to change the fundamentally underfunded situation of the University.  Nor is there any indication that either the Regents or UCOP are prepared to break from long-standing patterns of strategy in order to begin to ensure a UC focused on its educational mission and on increasing the quality of its offerings. THE PLAN ITSELF UCOP's proposed budget is a work up of the deal that President Napolitano and Governor Brown negotiated by sidelining both the Legi...

We're many years now into the New Normal for public universities.  We've known for a while that this means permanent budgetary austerity.  We get regular quantifications of the continuing funding problem. Another one, from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , calculates that appropriations fell 20 percent per full-time student from 2008-13, and 26 percent for public research universities.    
Michael and I have had to use this space to make a couple of further points.  One is that the New Normal directly damages faculty and student welfare.  You can see more material on this in  a talk that Michael and I gave  at UC Berkeley last fall. It tied budgetary austerity to the the decline in faculty welfare--and to weakening faculty governance, which I'll be discussing here. 
 The other point we've argued  is that senior public university managers and boards have accepted New Normal austerity in practice.  This year, after much stor...