Universities: Austerity in California

In California, too, there is trouble between educators and the governor—this time at college level. Governor Ronald Reagan is once again coming under academic fire for his cost-cutting budgetary policies. Last year, regents and administrators of the University of California reluctantly went along with a Reagan-proposed $13 million cut in requested operating funds as an emergency measure. In January, the Governor proposed a $280 million budget for the university next year, or $31 million less than the request submitted by University President Charles J. Hitch. The regents—including several who sided with Reagan last year—are fighting hard to get the cuts restored.

This month, the board voted 16 to 4 to reject the Reagan budget, which even conservative Regent Edwin W. Pauley described as “unlivable.” In a detailed, 15-page analysis, Hitch argued that the budget provides no money at all for new programs or improvements, will curtail much-needed growth at new campuses in Santa Cruz, San Diego and Irvine. Officials at Berkeley insist that 1,600 students will have to spend at least an additional quarter on campus because required classes are overcrowded. The cuts will even reduce planned additions to university police.

Symptoms of Deterioration. The grumbling is even greater at California’s 18 state colleges, which serve 190,000 students, compared with 95,000 at the university. Reagan asked for a $24 million slash in the colleges’ proposed $249 million budget. Faced with an $18.5 million request for funds to lower professors’ class loads and introduce various innovations, the Governor reduced the sum to a mere $459,000. Even State College Chancellor Glenn Dumke, a friend and politicalally of Reagan’s, sees “symptoms of deterioration” in a rising faculty turnover (now at 10% a year) and a drop in the percentage of Ph.D.s on the colleges’ staffs.

Whether the schools will be able to get more money is doubtful. Reagan points out that he cannot raise more funds without raising taxes—and he is wholly against that. Instead, he wants the university and the colleges to in crease student fees. Mindful of the long record of disorders at Berkeley, not to mention recent demonstrations at San Francisco State and San Jose State colleges, the legislature seems to be in a mood to let the schools stay lean until they stiffen campus discipline.

Meanwhile California’s academic administrators complain that faculty morale is at an alltime low, worry about the steady exodus of star professors, and insist that what was once the nation’s finest system of public higher education is in danger of heading to ward mediocrity. Last week John Summerskill, 42, resigned after two years as president of San Francisco State, home of one of the nation’s first student-initiated “free colleges” and a campus noted for its unorthodox ways. Lamenting the “financial starvation” that faces his college, Summerskill complained that “the political leadership is tuned to the people’s fears of increased taxation, of violence in the streets, of dissent on the campus. No state leader encourages the people to have pride in their great university, to build and strengthen the fine state colleges.”