The legislature passed (more or less) a budget on June 15. As noted on this blog yesterday, we have not heard a peep from the governor whether he will sign it (probably with line-item vetoes) or veto it entirely.
Question: So when is the outer limit for the governor to make his decision?
Answer: June 27.
Meanwhile, if you turn on your television for news of the budget and don’t see anything, there is nothing wrong with your set:
The deepening pandemic depression is going to have a profound impact on the University of California budget. Unprecedented unemployment, lagging state revenue, and massive campus losses associated with remote learning make it clear that we are looking at a replay of the 2008 crisis, at least. To stay up to date on the growing crisis,
A report this week from Reclaim California Higher Education (a coalition of faculty and student groups) makes the case that affordable (even free) higher education is within reach for California. The privatization experiment has failed. The harm to a generation of hard-working, high-aiming young people is proven. It’s time to return to what works: the proven Master Plan for higher education in California. California, with its own resources, can afford to restore top-quality, accessible, affordable college and university opportunity to every qualified student. In fact, Californians can afford nothing less. You can read a summary and download the entire report…
At the Regents meeting of January 22, 2014, Gov. Brown seems to be searching for an online course that requires no human interaction. Such a course, he reasons, could have unlimited enrollment because it is completely self-contained. He gets some pushback from UC Provost Dorr, who thinks courses should have such interaction. You can hear this excerpt at the link below. The entire meeting of the Committee on Educational Policy of the Regents was posted yesterday.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tYFLJvrE3g?feature=player_detailpage]
Our previous post covered the Jan. 22 meeting of the Regents’ Committee on Educational Policy. As noted, there was discussion of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, considered a major accomplishment of Brown’s father when he was governor. Below is a link to Brown’s comments in which he suggested the Plan was now dated. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RmjI4gVync?feature=player_detailpage]
As we have noted in numerous prior posts, the Regents refuse to archive their meetings beyond one year. So we dutifully record the sessions in real time. Below is a link to part of the afternoon session of Jan. 22. This segment is mainly the Committee on Educational Policy. Gov. Brown was in attendance. We will separately (later) provide links just to certain Brown segments. But for now, we provide a continuous recording. There was discussion of designating certain areas of UC-Merced as nature reserves, followed by discussion of a new telescope. The discussion then turned to online ed and…
The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has issued a report on UC and CSU funding. LAO is usually viewed as a neutral agency. But it is a component of the legislature. So it tends to favor approaches that add to legislative control as opposed to, say, gubernatorial control. This report is no exception. LAO seems to want to return to what it terms the “traditional” approach to funding, but with bells and whistles added to monitor legislative goals. The traditional approach seems to be one focused on undergraduate enrollment. But in fact the tradition – such as it is – has…
