Thursday, April 06, 2006

UC Administrators trying to get rid of financial controls

The very first thing I learned about the desire of the business and law schools at the University of California to wriggle out from under the dead hands of UC headquarters and the state Legislature is this: None dare call it "privatization." The term "confuses more than illuminates," Christopher Edley, the dean of Berkeley's law school, Boalt Hall, wrote in an op-ed in these pages last year.

The issue, unsurprisingly, is money. Public university administrators all over the country are getting fed up with declining support from their state and local governments, which measured as dollars per enrolled student hit a 25-year-low in 2005, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I don't think any public institution can fund to fullest extent what it takes to be one of greatest business schools in the world," Judy Olian, dean of UCLA's Anderson School of Management, told me this week.

Along with Boalt, Berkeley's Haas School of Business and UCLA's School of Law, Anderson has been waging a very delicate campaign to win more autonomy from the UC Regents in setting its tuition and faculty pay scales. The issue is delicate because the schools' relationship with the UC system is intimately bound with their public mission, which includes educating the most qualified Californians regardless of their financial resources. There's also some concern that, as the law and business schools go, so will the UC system. Eventually that leads to the question: What does it mean to have a state university?

The impulse toward self-sufficiency is a rational response to an off-campus phenomenon - the decline in the state's budgetary support of UC has been picking up steam. Things have reached the point where administrators and faculty have lost all confidence in the state government as a reliable funding partner.

The record suggests that traditional levels of state support of 60%-80% are relics of the distant past, given competing demands on budget dollars and the Legislature's refusal to raise taxes to meet them. At Anderson and Haas, the state's share of the budget is now only 20%. At UCLA law school it has fallen to 38% from 59% in just the last two years.

The law and business schools at UCLA and Berkeley feel the crunch because they compete with wealthy private institutions for the most-qualified students and most-heavily recruited professors. The system's other law and business schools also are strapped, but don't compete in the same market; the system's medical schools have access to other outside resources, including clinical fees and research grants and contracts.

There aren't many ways to take up the slack. One option is to solicit more private donations, a course that all the institutions have embraced - Boalt this year launched a $125-million fund-raising campaign, for example - and raising tuition and fees. Increasing tuition and fees for Anderson's 660 full-time MBA students by say, $7,000 a year, would bring the rate for out-of-state students about even with the average market rate of $40,000. And it would leave a sizable discount for California residents, while yielding $4.6 million for the school - a healthy chunk of its $60-million budget.

But the UC Regents have always been uneasy with the idea that the professional schools should charge market rates and spend the additional income on faculty salaries and student fellowships. The board acknowledged the principle in 1994 when it established a so-called professional degree fee differential as a mechanism for the schools of law, business, medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine to reach parity with their private competitors - with the understanding that California residents would still get a discount.

Still, the regents retained the authority to set the differential every year, and they've never exploited it to the max. Although tuition at all four schools has roughly doubled in the last few years, it still greatly lags the market and the regents haven't set a timeline for catching up.

Things are almost as bad on the spending side: Olian says Anderson must get formal approval from UC headquarters to pay any professor more than $189,000, and other deans complain that bureaucratic obstacles to various forms of noncash compensation abound.

One important question is whether increased autonomy for the law and business schools presages an entirely new relationship between UC and the state government. Supporters of this notion point to the University of Michigan, which responded to draconian state budget cuts in the 1970s and 1980s by remaking itself as a private university in all but name. The university retained a commitment to educating qualified state residents through a substantial in-state discount. But it embarked on a program of aggressive private fund-raising and recruitment of out-of-state students willing to pay full fare. The state now contributes less than 10% of the university's budget.

"That's the broad outline of where UC has to go," argues Daniel J.B. Mitchell, a professor of management at Anderson. He argues that granting autonomy to the law and business schools is only a starting point. "It's more politically acceptable to ask why the California taxpayer should be subsidizing MBA education. But at the end of the day, the system [in Sacramento] is dysfunctional and we should get the university as much disengaged from that as we can."

And what of the system's public mission? The four schools all say that even with more freedom to increase tuition they'll devote large portions of their resources to financial aid and to serving the community. "We are committed to training the leaders of the state in the government and nonprofit sectors," says UCLA Law Dean Michael Schill; the school understands that students leaving law school with crushing tuition debt can't afford to launch careers in public service.

But the administrators argue that they can better serve their public missions if they're free to raise money where they can and deploy it themselves. If they get their way, they'll be embarking on a great experiment. Will the rest of UC follow?

Source







Yale hates the ROTC, loves the Taliban -- someone should be embarrassed

A bad day at Yale University, one of the jewels of the Ivy League. Rahmatullah Hashemi is still ensconced at Yale University, and his words of marvel at how great America really is continue to ring true. I could be in Guantanamo Bay, he said, but instead I'm at Yale.

Hashemi has been afforded special status admission to Yale precisely because he was at one time the spokesman for the Taliban. And Thursday is the day that fact becomes an unavoidably profound embarrassment for Yale University, which has so far avoided much more than a slightly reddened face.

Hashemi's Taliban abused women, violated international law, hosted Usama bin Laden, joined with him in his enmity for America, imposed a reign of 10th century Islamic terror on Afghanistan. But Hashemi gets a choice spot at Yale because he's a rock star of the "let's poke George Bush in the eye" wing of academia.

Thursday the big embarrassment for Yale is that it's decision day: who gets into Yale and who gets left out. Over 19,000 young men and women will be rejected. But the Taliban man is in solid. John Fund has been writing about the Hashemi case in The Wall Street Journal and I recommend you look over John's columns.

Hashemi still has an application pending to join Yale's sophomore class in the fall. So far he's just a special student. Bear in mind, as John Fund reported, some of the 19,000 young people just rejected were turned down for as little as an inebriated prom evening or a shoplifting case in grade school. And yet a guy from the organization which is still killing our soldiers has doors thrown open for him. Yale should declare the experiment in cross-cultural pollination over and let Mr. Taliban go home. He's had a bit of time at Yale, and Yale shouldn't make it worse by letting him continue toward an actual degree.

Source






US civil rights group: Campus anti-Semitism a serious problem

Anti-Semitism on campuses is a "serious problem" that merits a campaign to inform Jewish students of their rights, the US Commission on Civil Rights said. The commission came to its decision Monday after considering testimony last year from the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and other groups. The commission cited anti-Israeli propaganda appearing on campuses that exploits ancient stereotypes. It recommended that the Education Department run a campaign to inform Jewish students of their right to be free of harassment and that it should collect data on anti-Semitic and other hate crimes at universities. The commission also concluded that there is "substantial evidence" that some university departments of Middle East studies "may repress legitimate debate concerning Israel

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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