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Some qualifications needed

Byuclafaculty

In an opinion piece today in the Sacramento Bee, columnist Dan Walters slams CSU for its political activities.  An earlier posting on this blog noted that CSU had an official political scorecard that rated members of the state legislature available online indicating how well or poorly they supported CSU goals.  You can find it at:
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/10/lawsuit-filed-against-csu-campus-over.html

UC gets dragged into his column at various points so some comments are in order. Below are some excerpts in italics:
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The California State University system has traditionally been the steady workhorse of California higher education, generating the engineers, teachers, accountants and middle-managers that any society needs. Meanwhile, the more prestigious University of California has been the racehorse, scooping up money from alumni, foundations and corporations, luring Nobel laureates to its faculty, awarding advanced degrees, fostering world-class scientific research and flaunting its constitutional independence from political control. While the state Legislature can mandate policy at CSU, UC answers only to its regents.
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“UC answers only to its regents” is an overstatement at best.  The state budget and the allocation to UC comes from the legislature, not the Regents.  It is true that UC has constitutional autonomy that CSU does not.  Legislative control of funding produces an ability to influence UC.  Note that some elected officials are ex officio members of the Regents.
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However, under its just- retired chancellor, Charles Reed, CSU expanded its horizons markedly, breaking UC’s legal stranglehold on awarding doctorate degrees in some fields, ambitiously courting outside financial support, and even, on some campuses, expanding into big-time sports competition.  Politically, CSU exploited its one advantage over UC – a direct connection to the Legislature as a dependent system with campuses in virtually every corner of the state. And it developed a political swagger that in the past only UC could wield. 

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CSU did indeed push to break the Master Plan’s restrictions on offering doctoral degrees.  Not clear, however, that UC had “political swagger.”  If it did, the breach in the Master Plan likely would not have occurred.  Indeed, until quite recently, UC had been incredibly ineffective in its relationship with the state’s political institutions.  Remember the so-called “compact” with Governor Schwarzenegger that produced nothing?  It is only quite recently that UC has become more effective in dealing with the state.  
Turning to the CSU political scorecard, Walters writes:
Like all such “scorecards” issued by special interests, CSU’s version is highly selective on the issues it grades. Not surprisingly, Democrats score highly while Republicans are given low marks – the ratings are reduced to A-to-F letter grades – because the system’s biggest interest is getting more tax money. It’s an arrogant act that even the University of California, renowned for its haughtiness, would not dare perform, and it’s completely and utterly wrong for a tax-supported state agency to engage in what is nothing more than rank political and partisan propaganda.
Actually, as we noted in the earlier posting on the scorecard, even friendly Democrats were hard pressed to get a grade as high as B+ from CSU.  As for UC “haughtiness,” the thrust of the column is that UC did not do what CSU did and, of course, the “Nobel laureates” and the “fostering (of) world-class scientific research” should entail some bragging rights.  No?

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Byuclafaculty

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