California's Crisis In Higher Education

It's Nobel time, and for the umpteenth year brilliant men and women who teach and do research at American universities are running away with the prizes. This is because even with all of this country's problems it still has the best university system anywhere. But for how much longer?

That question resonates most powerfully at the University of California, the preeminent public university system in the world and not coincidentally home to dozens of Nobel laureates over the years, including Elizabeth Blackburn of UC San Francisco, who shared this year's prize in medicine.

UC Berkeley is the crown jewel of the California state system, and more of its undergraduates go on to receive PhD's than any other university in the U.S., supplying a steady stream of first-rate scientists and academics for industry, education and government.

It is important to note that a third of those undergrads are the first in their families to attend a four-year college and a third come from impoverished or lower middle class backgrounds who would not have had the opportunity to succeed at such a high level without Berkeley's largesse and the federal Pell Grant program.

While universities throughout the U.S., including my employer, are feeling the impact of the recession, the UC system is in the midst of a meltdown because of severe cutbacks in the state education budget voted on by legislators who are so dysfunctional that they actually make Congress look good.

The state has been cutting back on funding for its universities since 1995, but at a fairly manageable rate. But the latest cutbacks total $813 billion, including a colossal $150 billion in cuts at the Berkeley campus.

The inevitable result is that Berkeley has been forced to lay off staff, reduce faculty and cut pay, and with no end in sight to the state financial crisis the ability to keep attracting the best scholars will inevitably be impacted.

As it is, some 2,000 positions have been eliminated and several programs shut down, including those that train high school teachers in science education and specialize in East Asian languages and advanced Arabic. We're not talking about Keats scholars or performance artists having to do without, but rather fields that are vitally important in the new millennium, including those in which the U.S. continues to fall behind the rest of the world.

UC system President Mark Yudof and his top administrators have come under withering attack because of their seeming inability to deal with the cutbacks, and thousands of students and faculty turned out for demonstrations late last month to vent their displeasure. So the crisis is not merely in education, but also in governance.

* * * * *

A footnote regarding the aforementioned Dr. Blackburn:

In 2001, she was appointed a member of George Bush's Council of Bioethics, a panel charged with advising the president on ethical issues related to advances in biomedics and technology. But Blackburn, who vigorously supported embryonic stem cell research, was anathema to the virulently anti-science right wing of the Republican party and she was dismissed in 2004.

Blackburn did not go quietly, remarking that "When prominent scientists must fear that descriptions of their research will be misrepresented and misused by their government to advance political ends, something is deeply wrong."