$800k a year and he's "speaking to the dead"

Our good friend “Mad as Hell,” who teaches at a university deep in that sprawling, crispy world known, absurdly, as the “Inland Empire,” alerted us to an article about the UC in yesterday’s Guardian: University of California's students and faculty demand answers. We think you'll find it interesting.

The author, Judith Butler, is the “Maxine Elliot professor in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California Berkeley.”

Some excerpts:

...The University of California finds itself with a shortfall of $1.15 bn for the next two years…. Everyone knows that the state government is dysfunctional, that public funding decreased by 40% between 1990 and 2005 and that this year alone brought another 20% reduction, accelerating the abandonment of the premiere public university by a California legislature fully paralysed by minority rule … and Proposition 13….
…
Mid-summer, when no one was around, UC president Mark Yudof invoked "emergency powers" to implement furloughs on staff and faculty, and sent word to campuses that drastic cuts had to be made in operating expenses. Claiming that the UC system has no funds from which to draw in such dire moments, Yudof devised a plan, which includes a graduated salary reduction programme for all staff and faculty who make more than $40,000 a year.

…[I]t became clear that certain cuts actually devastated some programmes, while others absorbed the setback with ready reserves. The administration did not wait to reach a settlement with the unions. The faculty briefly canvassed were certainly not party to the decision.

As a result, the bad news that deans handed down at the beginning of the semester eliminated 2,000 positions, gutted programmes…. In addition, the administration demanded of students tuition and fee increases of nearly 40%, imperilling the very notion of an affordable public university and forcing many students to leave the university or scramble for full-time jobs.
...
Those of us who were trying to develop a balanced critique … were incredulous when Yudof gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he bragged about his own $800,000 salary, shamelessly displayed his anti-intellectualism, described his entry into the field of education as "an accident" and complained that he tries to speak to faculty and staff about the budget, but it is "speaking to the dead".
…
Faculty, staff and students are collectively outraged that the university has failed to make public and transparent what the cuts have been and will be, and by what criteria and set of priorities such cuts are made. Rage also centres on the devastation of "shared governance" – the policy that faculty must be part of any decision-making that affects the academic programmes and direction of the university. … 

No answers are forthcoming to a set of burning questions: Why in this age of slash and burn has the UC administration bloated by 283%, as their own public financial reports make plain? And why does the university spend $10m a year on inter-collegiate athletics and over $123m on a new athletic centre?

During a time of corrosive neo-liberalism and rising doubts about education and the arts as public goods worthy of state support, the administration ducks and hides – when it is not boasting about its own stupidity, failing to take up the task of making its decision-making process transparent, refusing to honour the mandate to bring in the faculty to share in establishing priorities and weakening the safeguards against a rampant privatisation of this public good that will undercut the university's core commitment to offer an education both excellent and affordable.
…
My wager is that the walls of the university will shake again – and again – until the message is received: This fiscal crisis is also a crisis in governance. The administration needs to make their books transparent, re-engage shared governance and set their priorities right so that the US can continue to claim a public institution of higher learning where a student does not require loads of money to receive a superlative education.

This is the promise that we see dying at this moment, and the very thought sends us into the streets en masse.