mortiz055

The UC Regents have finally released Justice Moreno's Report into the allegations that UCOP interfered with last year's audit.  As Chris and I noted last spring (see here , here , here , and here ) the damage caused by UCOP's handling of the audit has been considerable.  With the release of the audit, newspapers up and down the state have intensified their criticisms of UCOP and President Napolitano.  Although the Regents and others  are trying to minimize the implications of the audit, the damage is real because the Moreno Report is so damning. The State Auditor, Elaine Howle, had explicitly requested that the campuses send their survey responses directly to her office.  The surveys covered campus views of UCOP itself, and were thus not to be routed through UCOP.  As the report makes clear, President Napolitano approved a plan that required campuses to submit their evaluations of her office to her office before they were transmitted to the auditor. ...

This blog turned ten on Sunday, prompting me to wonder whether blog years are longer than kid years, or the other way around. Kid years are longer when you're waiting for your birthday. Blog years are longer when you're watching a university board meeting and you could have sworn the president said exactly that same thing about the budget 7 years ago, except it was a different president.  In any case, UC Berkeley looked like this when we started -- me in 2007 , as a kind of alternate track while I was finishing a book called Unmaking the Public University, and Michael in 2009 , when California higher ed got massively cut, employees were furloughed, students were protesting massive tuition hikes, and the road ahead seemed both steep and open.  Of course time in higher education policy moves in a circle, rather than straight ahead, and those of us who assumed that our professional status obligated us to continuous institutional self-governance wondered whether we were actually c...

How are we doing with the private-goods model? Advocates have defended it by saying that "multiple revenue streams"--tuition, philanthropy, non-resident enrollment growth, housing, for-profit masters programs--protect the university's public benefits. I got an up-close look during my second visit this year to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Preparing a lecture on the theme of "U-M: 2117," I went through the university's most recent public data, realizing I was doing this for the first time since our UC Academic Senate group wrote  the "Futures Report"  ten years ago, using Michigan as a worst-case state cuts scenario. The good news is of course that U-M is one of the world's great universities, having pioneered inclusive quality and public funding in the 19th century, and gone on from there. It has wonderful people and programs, as I experienced once again first hand. It's also a best-case example of privatization. It has an endowm...