Remaking the University

Chris here, introducing a post by Ivan Evans, professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi's opinion piece, "The Neoliberal Assault on Academia," produced a long discussion on several lists because of its claim that faculty have played a central role in shifting their universities towards revenue metrics and managerial assessments of intellectual value.  His example is the arrival of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, which has molted into the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  

Though pushed by the Thatcher government, the RAE was accepted and applied by the UK professoriat. Its successor, the five-yearly REF," Prof. Barkawi writes, "completely dominates UK academic life. It determines hiring patterns, career progression, and status and duties within departments. It organises the research projects of individual scholars so as to meet arbitrary deadlines. It has created space for a whole class of paid consultants who rank scholarship and assist in putting together REF returns. UK academics regularly talk about each other's work in terms of whether this or that book or article is 'three star' or 'four star'."

Prof. Barkawi argues that UK universities are now run by managers who see their jobs not as furnishing resources needed for academic work, but as the continuous monitoring and non-expert assessment of research and teaching that winds up justifying resource restriction and permanent reorganization.  Shifting audit to management, he argues, undermines "the entire point of university research," which "is conversation and contestation over what is true and right. In the natural sciences, as in the social sciences and humanities, one person's truth is another person's tosh, and valid knowledge emerges from the clash of many different perspectives." This complex, internally regulated, expertize-driven debate is being in large part replaced by audit mechanisms. "Meanwhile," Prof. Barkawi concludes, "all those adjunct faculty are far more subject to managerial control and regulation than are tenured professors. Aside from their low cost, that is one of the principal reasons why they are so attractive to university managers."

Prof. Evans extends this remark about adjucts below.

I strongly agree with Tarkawi's conclusion that faculty are far more complicit in the sacking of public higher education than we are prepared to acknowledge. One of the best indexes of this is the arrogance that ladder-rank faculty display towards adjunct/part-time faculty/"lecturers" in our own departments. As with the caste system, there are so many categories for them, all of which serve the purpose of the Brahmins in the Academic Senate.  

We--and here am I tempted to specifically include you [on the list] alongside myself in this condemnation, but won't  because there's always a small chance that some of you/us are exempt from these generalizations--in fact appear to take some pride in treating adjuncts as an inferior caste. It is the norm for adjuncts to be excluded from faculty meetings and to be deprived of any say in the management of departments. Instead of resisting the "adjunctification" of the professoriat by incorporating these colleagues--because they are colleagues--into the university and our respective departments, we tolerate them as useful proof of our Brahmin status. They are our untouchables. 

And we treat them accordingly. 

I have recently asked my colleagues at UCSD questions such as: How many adjunct/contingent/non-tenure track faculty are there in your department? Can you name them? Have you met any adjuncts for coffee or lunch on campus? Are they invited to the homes of ladder rank faculty? Do they have office space? Do they have any voting rights in your department? Should they? Do you know how they are evaluated? Should they be rewarded for publishing? Should ladder-rank faculty with poor teaching evaluations be assigned to courses ahead of adjunct colleague with excellent teaching evaluations? Should campus charters be changed to extend representation to adjuncts in the Senate?

The results of the informal survey have been so depressing that I would like to survey faculty at UCSD to draw attention to the cooperation that ladder-rank faculty give to the corporatizaton of their home institutions. We should be forging firm bonds with the fastest-growing category in our midst instead of setting ourselves apart from and above them. We are all aware that our fate is tied to the fate of adjuncts and that our separate futures would be far more pleasant if we stand firm with them now. But I think we know that we will not. Better to burnish our progressive self-image by baying at the moon (on this and other list servs) even as we help campus administrators slip the dagger between our collective ribs.
Truth is that ladder-rank faculty are growing old and we are not prepared to pick this important fight with our administrations or UCOP. We are edging towards retirement, counting our beans in our pension funds, and just holding on until we escape amidst encircling doom. Safe in retirement, many of us will tut-tut and speak of the halcyon days when ladder rank faculty were little gods with real rights. 

I am much more apprised of the unflattering assessment that adjuncts/non-tenure track/contingent faculty have of ladder-rank faculty because several of them sit on the Steering Committee of the CA-AAUP. I have become acutely aware of, and grown very ashamed of, the way ladder-ranks treat the nameless Other. As Stuart Hall summarized an analogous arrogance back in the '80s, it's "The West versus the rest". 

Consider this: One adjunct on the Steering Committee teaches 6-9 courses per quarter at a bewildering array of campuses in the Bay Area. I do not have a good enough grasp of the geography of that region to understand exactly why: 

• she hits the road at 5:30 am to make her first class;  
• teachers non-stop from 8am - 5 pm (including travel time as she whizzes at breakneck speed from one campus to another) 
• takes her first and only break from 5-7pm 
• teaches again from 7-9pm 
• holds her office hour from 9-10pm (yes, that's PM) 
• checks in at a $49 /night motel on Highway 101 (in a town called Gilroy); and
• repeats this schedule three times per week.

On a "good day", she remains in the Berkeley area where she resides and teaches at 2-3 colleges. No contract, no benefits, no representation in the Senate. At the beginning of the Winter quarter, she was informed that one course had just been re-assigned to another adjunct "who needs the course more." Just like that, income that she is so vitally dependent on, and in fact cannot survive without, was taken away--by email, without prior notification and for a reason that is as inscrutable as it is uncontestable. 

Re-read this list again to grasp the full dimensions of what I can only call its horror. It is unspeakably appalling. And I am ashamed that our preponderant collective interest in matters such as SB 520, MOOCs, etc. is: "what's in it for the ladder ranks?" "How dare they strip away our rights", etc

This is the price others pay to keep us ladder ranks in clover. The results of my still informal survey at UCSD leave no doubt that  ladder ranks would club adjuncts into oblivion rather than be amalgamated with them. The arrogance, and fear of being lumped together with the Untouchable Other remains and perhaps increases even as the once-venerable ladder rank category shrinks with each passing year.

In fact, it is best to not mention a category of fellow workers and colleagues--humans and good people all--who now account for 76% of the academic workforce.

Absent a UC faculty union with real teeth, I cannot see faculty mounting anything close to meaningful opposition to the gutting of UC. What would make a difference is an alliance of faculty, regardless of rank, at all three levels of the Master Plan. (Yes, there are other two other levels). But that will not happen, mostly because UC faculty are aghast at the idea of rubbing shoulders with the Untouchables both amongst them and those who labor in recondite places without darkening the views from Sather Gate or scenic La Jolla.

I now feel that we shall deserve what we get.

There are two ways to read the important document, “Academic Performance Indicators at the University of California.”  I’ll call them Jekyll and Hyde. JekyllThis report is a breakthrough for the administrative recognition of faculty labor.  Among other things, it notes that:·      Contrary to nationwide claims that faculty have shifted out of teaching, UC faculty teach 13% more student credit hours (SCH) today than twenty years ago, with most of that increase coming since 2005-06.·      Budget cuts mean that student-faculty ratio increased 17.5% in the past twenty years, and is slated to increase another 7.7%, for a 25% increase overall.·      These increases occur on a base of a typical faculty workweek of 61.3 hours (6). 42% of that is spent on instruction (not 54.3% as stated in the report; h/t Charles Schwartz). If we assumed that salaries cover a forty-hour week, one third of faculty workload is performed as unpaid overtime. If faculty worked a forty-hour week, the university would lose a third of its faculty output.The study on which UCOP bases the 61.3-hour workweek is almost thirty years old. It was conducted during what turned out to be the waning years of full-scale Master Plan funding.  Given subsequent increases in the student-faculty ratio and in SCHs taught per instructor, very crude arithmetic would get total faculty hours to something closer to 65 today, assuming (dubiously) that not too much of the additional student workload was passed on to TAs or computers.  That fits with my experience and the anecdotal evidence. A normal faculty workweek is, for example, 5 ten-hour days per week (say 8am to 6 pm) plus another 6 hours on Saturday (perhaps 8 to 2, or all afternoon), plus another 10 hours per week via 2 hours Monday through Thursday evenings (e.g. of email), and at least a couple of hours on Sunday to get ready for the week. That’s a routine week.  Grant deadlines, midterms and finals grading, membership on a search committee or grad admissions, problems with a course—these kinds of things can spike hours well beyond the 60+ norm.  Also, this is a typical professor, not a blue-chip PI of the type discussed in my post about the UCLA neuro-imaging lab, who must organize many simultaneous projects and a large staff, or a professor who throughout the academic year travels one to three times a month to lecture, as has been happening to me.If you think about changes in research since the mid-1980s, current overall hours may be higher than 61. For example, grant acceptance rates have fallen below below 20% in many STEM fields and below 10% in others.  A PI needs to submit between 5 and 10 applications per grant received. There is more unfunded administrative reporting and compliance.  If we continued like this we could get the weekly average for a grant-active STEM professor, or a self-funded researcher in the humanities doing all research as an overload on while teaching 300-500 students a year, into 70 hours a week fairly quickly.  The report also makes a good effort to tie UC research to instructional quality.Ladder faculty research also provides an important foundation for the entire undergraduate curriculum. UC undergraduates learn not only the basics of a field but also the big questions, the latest findings, and the methods by which scholarship is carried out. Not as well known is the fact that an increasing number of undergraduates participate directly in research.  As of 2010-11, according to the 2012 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), 56 percent of seniors had done some kind of research or creative project with faculty and 54 percent had taken at least one student research course. These experiences help develop the critical thinking, communication, and problem solving skills, as well as domain-specific knowledge, that employers are looking for and that are useful across many different careers, many different life circumstances, and in all areas of citizenship.  (7)This is a good starter description of the baseline “creativity learning” that public universities need to offer their students in the 21st century.  Routine white-collar work is increasingly hard to find, and undergrad teaching needs an upgrade, not an austerity-driven, ongoing demotion. “Research learning” is a key to the upgrade.Finally, UC faculty’s “degree productivity” is double that of private institutions in the Association of American of Universities (AAU), a high-end research group (Display 7). If you reduce education to crude accountability metrics, you get the same story that you do if you evaluate research content: UC faculty members are extremely productive. They are, if anything, over-productive.  And excessively self-exploiting.HydeBut there is a second way to read this report:  as a justification for turning UC into an undergraduate school, and a mid-level one at that.  The first problem is UCOP’s time-honored claim that state funding cuts haven’t hurt quality.  The opening paragraph is a nice tribute to the extra efforts undertaken by UC faculty, staff, and students. But since all this has “enabled UC campuses to maintain excellence in the educational enterprise while reducing costs,” who’s to say the cuts were a problem?  And why not cut public funds even more? Won’t it just force faculty and students to become even more efficient?To head off this interpretation, this Academic Performance report would need to offer some evaluation of UC educational quality, beyond output metrics like percentages who obtain degrees after X years of enrollment.  The higher ed world has made this shift from looking just at outputs to trying to assess learning. One milestone in this shift was the 2011 book, Academically Adrift, which used results from a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to estimate that after four years of college, over one third of college students show no gains in writing, complex reading, or critical thinking.  The culprit was a lack of rigor in many college programs, combined with a lack of student seriousness about their studies. (An often-omitted detail is that majors in the liberal arts and sciences did much better than this.) UCOP doesn’t try to show that UC degrees are at least as rigorous as before, but shows that they are even more numerous.  The report doesn’t even raise this issue of quality and rigor.  Anyone familiar with current issues of student learning will be disappointed by this quantitative approach—as will anyone who struggles in underfunded UC classrooms to offer rigor on a mass scale.In addition, the section on graduation education is underdeveloped. The takeaway is that UC is average in doctoral productivity.  There is no argument here for the longstanding ambition of the younger campuses to increase their proportion of PhD students.  They are slated in the report to remain near the bottom of the AAU in this measure. UCOP should have mentioned that shrinking doctoral programs will hurt the research ecology and undergraduates at the same time, since grad students do much front-line teaching.  There’s no case made here for starting with average productivity and then investing in order to do new and special things with public university doctoral programs.Having not asked the question of whether state cuts have undermined educational rigor at either the B.A. or Ph.D. level, the report ends with a series of efficiency strategies that could make B.A. degrees cheaper--and less rigorous.  The efficiencies are familiar: simplify (and reduce) B.A. requirements, use more online courses, and improve transferability (pp 21-22).   But the report has already shown that UC B.A.s are cheap enough, and in reality are probably now too cheap.   There are no big new savings to be had here, because UC has been squeezing undergraduates for over 20 years.Finally, here’s the report’s vision of the future: Projections of student enrollments and total faculty numbers, as described earlier, indicate that faculty will be asked to increase their instructional workload over the next few years.  They will expect to do so. Based on current projections, SCH per ladder faculty member should grow by approximately ten percent over the next five years. Though not calibrated in courses per year, additional hours would represent a further increase in teaching effort.Having shown that UC faculty teach more than ever—on a 60+ hour week--the report says they will be asked to teach even more.  It suggests for some unknown reason that faculty expect this, when in fact every faculty member I know opposes it. The text then goes on to suggest that “UC must maintain an environment in which it can recruit and retain such pre-eminent faculty,” for the bizarre reason that such faculty “will work far beyond a 40-hour work week and devote about half their UC work time, and about two-thirds of a 40-hour work week, to instructional activities and carry them out very well.”  So the stated point of a having the best faculty is that they are best at overworking themselves!  UCOP seems to accept permanent operational austerity, which implies that faculty wll spend more of their time on teaching but not be able to add much quality to the teaching they do.  What Jekyll gives here, Hyde takes away.   The presentation of the report, and any follow-ups, should make the following points: ·      Budget cuts have hurt UC instructional quality (in spite of everyone’s heroic efforts) ·      Instructional quality depends on adequate per-student outlays, which, given the cap on tuition, means significant public funding restoration·      The faculty’s professional responsibility is to increase rigor, not to water it down·      Quality and rigor, not quantity and output, is the real service to the public mission today--in research and instruction alike.That said, it's great to see the general campuses at the center of the Regents' agenda.

There’s been much local coverage of two principal investigators switching from UCLA to USC, and taking with them an estimated 85 people from UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI).  The Los Angeles Times has run two stories about it, one of which received over 120 reader comments, and the story was Larry Mantle’s lead on his Airtalk show at KPCC, where he had one of the two departing faculty members as his guest. 

But beyond a big win for the Trojans over the Bruins, why should the public care?

The basics are that USC courted and successfully lured LONI’s director, Arthur Toga, and one of its nine listed faculty, Paul Thompson, along with what Larry Gordon and Eryn Brown report in the Los Angeles Times as most of the lab’s academic staff. As is usually the case in this kind of move:

• The academic domain is in one or more superhot areas of research, in this case, the intersection of neuroscience and big data.
• The principals are said to be among the best in the world, and their presence expected to be “transformative,” in the term of the USC president.
• The scientists need a new building.
• No one on either side will explain the business deal or talk financial specifics.
• Everyone praises competition as normal and good for science.  Prof. Thompson told Larry Mantle that UCLA would recruit great new people to replace those who depart. 
• The quoted public university official states that the loss is not related to cuts to public funding.
• Everyone else thinks the departure is related to cuts in public funding.

The Times reporters directly contradicted the UCLA official by citing Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, who told them, "This is a major problem for public higher education.” Similarly, one of the Times readers wrote,
everytime a public institution competes with private, the public one will always lose. They public will always equate anything public with greedy government workers and will resent money going to support what they consider unproductive and unaccountable bureaucrats. The public does not distinguish between productive government ventures and those that are a drain on taxpayers.  (“awunganyi” May 10)In a follow-up story, the chair of the UC Academic Senate, Robert Powell, said that the exit has “reinforced my fears that Sacramento is not paying enough attention to the research mission of UC.”

True, Sacramento doesn’t pay enough attention to UC research. But no one has spelled out the loss to the public in this move of an excellent neuro-imaging lab.  What is the loss here exactly?

There’s a hit to the UCLA brand.  Brand matters to fundraising, to personnel recruitment, and to grant writing.  It is widely assumed that the best people with the most job offers will chose to go to the richest and scientifically hottest place. UCLA has some repair work to do.

There’s a hit to the status of UC and of public universities in general. This is a loss to the image of public universities as being as good as the best.  More people than ever assume that even UC is reverting to the mean in which public means mediocre and private means the best. 

But both of these losses are fairly easy to dismiss.  Universities are now ranked like sports teams, and UCLA will focus on winning the next game.  UCLA apparently didn’t even take the field for this last one—Profs. Toga and Thompson didn’t ask the UCLA department chair to make a counteroffer.   Prof. Thompson was eloquent on Airtalk about the benefits to the discipline overall to have a concentrated facility with a great infrastructure, and promised ongoing synergy with colleagues doing related work at UCLA. Any damage to research seems temporary at worst.  USC may have made a strategic long-term decision to be great in this area and to do what it takes, thus doing more for neuro-imagery than UCLA wants to do. And UCLA had already done quite a bit.  I don’t know LONI’s equipment and infrastructure issues at UCLA, but the only publicized financial information was of the leaders’ salaries: over $1 million / year for Prof Toga, over $420,000 for Prof. Thompson. A good number of highly qualified people will line up for jobs like these.

Here we get to a deeper loss: public understanding of the costs of science. The public salary numbers are the only thing Californians know about the money behind this deal.  When a UCSD lab moved to Rice University two years ago, one of the departing scientists helpfully explained that UC was facing a “support gap” in future years that would reduce the science they could do there.  But usually, and in this case, all the relevant facts about science funding are kept behind a veil of silence. 

(In 2007, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust told a BusinessWeek reporter that public universities would have a hard time keeping up in research financing. She was publicly rebuked by the Big 10 presidents. Since then, virtually no family financial business has been mentioned outside the family.)

Part I of the missing storyline is this.  Public research universities can no longer fully support all the science grants their excellent faculty can get. I get stories about absurd shortages of photocopier cartridges and arguments about phone charges from labs at every campus in the system.  They seem to me to be frequent and annoying enough to threaten productivity and morale.

Public universities can’t fully support their grants because extramural funding doesn’t cover the full cost of research.  Labs burn money like a jet burns fuel, which is what they are supposed to do.  LONI spent $12 million a year, as a case in point.  This is peanuts for JP Morgan or the military, but a lot for a university.   As I’ve noted in various posts, universities have to add in on average 25 cents of their “internal funds” for every dollar in extramural grants.  Public universities just don’t have the internal funds to do this like they used to.   The economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman calculated that public university expenditures have fallen from 70 cents on the dollar spent by their private peers 30 years ago to about 50 cents today (p 237-38).

In addition, these labs need advanced facilities and in some cases equipment that they can’t charge to grants. USC will build LONI a new building, one that will support other research as well.  In the case two years ago of a UCSD lab that moved to Rice University, Rice was providing space in a building that had cost it (and Texas taxpayers) north of $140 million.  USC is likely to be doing something similar.

On Airtalk, Prof. Thompson said that they must get one-third of their funding from non-governmental sources.  This puts additional strain on a public university fundraising operation that is also trying to find money for graduate fellowships to replace cut state funds. USC undoubtedly told Toga-Thompson that in contrast to UCLA, USC would put LONI at the head of the fundraising line. They may have named likely seven- and eight-figure donors were the lab to move. But labs like LONI depend on what falls from those trees. USC also charges three times the tuition that UCLA does, which is another source of funds. LONI is a big stick with which to beat the fundraising tree. Large public universities can’t fund the same level of background infrastructure or full-court fundraising for each and every one of its special projects.

The next part involves this comment about how USC is entrepreneurial and UCLA is bureaucratic. When Larry Mantle asked about this (about 16:00), Prof Thompson replied that in fact, “he didn’t see any bureaucracy: at UCLA, which is a wonderful place and gave him his career. What USC did have was a team with the “vision and experience” to manage the logistics for a complex move of 100 people.  Here’s my translation:

• USC has a central administration on campus. UCLA has UCOP in Oakland.
• USC had a bigger bureaucracy to throw at one lab, not a smaller one.
• USC was planning a move that was going to happen. UCLA was managing a large research ecosystem. (LONI wouldn’t make UCLA Medicine’s list of 10 biggest problems to solve today until it was approached with an offer, which it wasn’t.)

My four conclusions are these:

1. UCLA’s core problem is a funding shortage, not surplus bureaucracy. (UCLA is the wealthiest UC campus, so things only get worse from there). 

2. Public universities need to tell the truth about research funding.  This will include the facts that science loses money, that some portion of undergraduate tuition funds offset research costs, and that most funding doesn’t “produce” anything in the near-term, except findings more research along with a great deal of useful failure.

3. Public universities need to explain why research like LONI’s should be to some large extent at public universities.  Why does it matter to the science, to the public impact, to the education of the next generation of scientists? Perhaps there is more openness and accountability at publics, and therefore more innovation. Perhaps scientists at public universities have a better feel for public needs and do more useful research.  Perhaps public universities uniquely have the necessary scale to train the thousands and millions of researchers in all fields to solve our ever-mounting problems.  We now need a new theory of public universities, before things get even worse.




4. Universities both private and public need to open up  discussion of spending priorities to their academic communities.  Given rising costs and shrinking revenues, choices have to be made. They  need to involve the faculty, from all disciplines, and students of all levels.  This is as true of USC as of UCLA, which has a poor record of consultation and can only buy a limited number of LONI-type labs with (in part) student tuition and non-STEM cross-subsidies.  Privates can now raise tuition only so much. Academic choices need to come from a bottom-up debate of a kind that higher ed has never had.

If we can’t do (1), show public efficiency (poorer but smarter, more research with less money, more degrees for each faculty member [page 16]), the public has no reason to support rebuilt public funding.

If we can’t do (2), tell the truth about funding, the public will keep thinking that science supports itself and doesn't need state money. Funding will stay flat or fall, and the public university research ecology will get gradually weaker. 

If we can’t do (3), say why public is often better than private, the public will be happy to see high-end science like neuro-imaging as done by the 1% for the 1%, and expect the 0.01% to pay for it with charitable donations.



If we can't do (4), achieve common understanding of resource choices, most public university students and faculty won't miss the LONIs as much as they should.

The ordeal of UC Davis's "Banker's Dozen" came to a practical end on Monday when they settled with the Yolo County District Attorney on reduced charges stemming from their protest of the connection between US Bank and UC Davis.  As you recall, 11 students and 1 professor had been charged with a range of misdemeanors that could have resulted in up to 11 years imprisonment.  The protesters had been engaged in civil disobedience on the sidewalks around the US Bank to draw attention to the connection between the bank and the University and to oppose increasing privatization of services.  In the settlement, all but one of the charges have been dropped (the last remains but will be dropped contingent on the protesters performing 80 hours of community service). The protesters have agreed to one "infraction." So, in effect a year's unnecessary prosecution will get the Dozen to do what they wanted to do in the first place: serve their community.

A statement from the Banker's Dozen can be found at Reclaim UC.

Cloudminder has a larger collection of links available here.

Corrected 5/9/13 to clarify charge issues.

May 7, 2013
An Open Letter to California State Legislators
Dear CA State Legislators,
As a parent and a UC professor, I feel compelled to urge you to reject the SB 520 bill being presented to you by Darrell Steinberg. Please fund the Community Colleges and the California State Universities and the University of California properly: that way you can help guarantee access to quality education. By mandating the use of on-line general education courses for public higher education, you put the entire system of public higher education at risk.
In education, there are no quick fixes: solutions such as SB 520 can cause long-lasting damage. Universities have been already been seriously weakened by years of budget cuts and administrative bloat. Real change, however, can only happen come through the implementation of ground-up reforms.
Our students need more interaction with real-life professors: they don’t need more screen time.  The Internet is an amazing resource for research and learning, but more screen time for young people is not a substitute for rich pedagogical experiences. Students need more contact with professors and their peers in an information saturated media ecology. They need quality experiences with on-line education as supplements not substitutes for real life classroom experience.
Although SB 520 has been amended to protect public funds from private exploitation, the provisions are weak at best. Case in point: California spends millions of dollars a year buying STAR tests from the ETS. A rampant assessment emphasis in public education has provided a windfall for secretive, privately run organizations like ETS. ,Next, week, my son - like millions of Californian schoolchildren - will be taking standardized tests that may or may not provide accurate assessments of his academic achievements and aptitudes.  Star testing was implemented as part of an accountability regime in K-12 education. It has produced mixed results in terms of actually improving the California public school system. Class sizes in public schools meanwhile have ballooned.
Technological solutions to social problems are dangerous panacea disguising the real cause of the problems we face – shrinking budgets for the University’s core mission of undergraduate education. Cynical administrative moves to disguise economic chicanery are not the solution.
As Diane Ravitch has written, “American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them.”  (222) 
SB 520 deplores the fact that so many of our students cannot get into courses to complete their degrees in a timely fashion. However, this is a problem that the three segments of public higher education in California do not have to the same extent. The UC faces that problem much less than the community colleges. Inversely, SB520 drives those in the UC, CSU, and the CCs who already developed their own hybrid technology-enhanced education into shot-gun marriages with for-profit providers, thus funneling public funds into private enterprise hands.. The present crisis is not some kind of natural disaster, like an earthquake. The crisis of access is entirely man-made!
Every undergraduate program on my campus has been cut to the bone: our core missions are compromised every day by budget cuts. Cal State, Community College and UC students represent a broad cross section of the population of  California. Our students don’t deserve access to on-line education approved or not by CA faculty. They don’t deserve a virtual University -- they deserve a real one. They need more access to professors, to content and to pedagogical situations that challenge and move them.
Please listen to the students. Time and again students across the state have insisted publicly that they neither need nor want more online education. Nor do they want state funds to go to for-profit and pseudo-not-for-profit vendors. Our students want a good education. Please leave it to those most engaged in public higher education to determine how technology-enhanced delivery can work to improve the classroom experience.
Please vote against SB 520. Please restore the UC, Cal State and Community College budgets so that we can continue to provide access to all of California’s college students.
Yours truly,
Catherine LiuProfessor, Film and Media StudiesDirector, UC Irvine Humanities CollectiveUC Irvine

Drawing: University of the Philippines, Visayas Cebú College, completion scheduled 2014.

Over the course of a week I'll discuss new perspectives on MOOCs  (massive, open, online courses)  from a conference, a survey, a student column, and a faculty letter.

By way of background, I note that we are entering a 4th phase in the sped-up lifecyle of the online debate.  In a year, MOOCs have gone from being (1), a niche service for underserved markets, to (2), a short-term fix for course supply problems in funding-starved public colleges, to (3), a replacement for current shortfalls and future growth in public university systems that makes restored funding unnecessary.

In the process, MOOCs have entangled themselves in the politics of higher education and the political economy of post-crisis capitalism.  They must now be held accountable both for the impact of their claims on public university budgets and for the social consequences of their educational outcomes.  

My sense is that the emerging 4th phase is going to undermine (3), for the good of students, faculty, and MOOCs that colleges can both maintain and use.  I'll come back to these issues in upcoming posts.

The Lawrence, Kansas Conference

I was thinking about MOOCs again last week at the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutions, hosted this year by the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas (#CHCI13).  (Sincere thanks to center director Victor Bailey, who proved that public universities are still capable of great productions.) They, the MOOCs, popped into my head at a panel ("Global Humanities and the State") comparing university trends in the European Union, South Africa, and Asia. 

South Africa is an important special case that I will omit here.  The European Union is also important for the wrong reasons: it is going nowhere fast in higher ed.  As one panelist explained, EU research policy "all begins in the 1950s, and you know what that was: S&T, S&T, and more S&T [science and technology], and then something good must come of it." 

The EU's overall research budgets are small, the increments uninspiring, the grand challenges overly general and banal, and the bias against social and cultural knowledge a sad tribute to the blindness of technocrats who continue to repress the actual history of Europe, in which progress has depended entirely on the active uptake of true social and cultural knowledge.  The humanities fields were entirely absent from the first six "framework programs," have been lumped together with social sciences in a small corner of the 7th framework, and are in a similar place in FP 8, "Horizon 2020," where society's role is largely equated with green energy. I simplify somewhat, but less than you might assume.

Humanists receive less money than scientists per grant, of course, but even so undergo a less than 10% success rate in the current Framework Program competition, or half the rate of the scientists.  Having to compete twice as hard leads in effect to humanists having to self-fund most of their research.  This is research that tries, among other things, to preserve and explain the human experience of the ages, knit Europe together across national and linguistic lines, resolve tensions over race and immigration, and curate tomorrow's masterworks of insight into the human condition--all on a shoestring, usually one dug out of the scholar's own sock drawer.

But the analysts of Europe didn't find any EU MOOCs claiming to solve funding issues. Neither did the survey of Asian universities, provided by Alan Kam Leung Chan, the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technology University in Singapore. Prof. Chan treated us to news of a higher ed building boom like only retirement-age Americans can remember here.

China is the most famous case, having in ten years more than tripled the number of college graduates from 9 million to 30 million.  Since 1991, Singapore has added four universities to its previous two, and by 2020 will have a higher bachelors degree proportion than the US.  Indonesia has 30 public universities, and 2000 new private universities. The Philippines has 500 public universities and 1500 new privates. Vietnam has gone from 150 universities in 2000 to over 400 today, with 20 percent of those being private.

The scale refutes the number one economic premise of American MOOC development, which is that even rich countries can't afford great public universities anymore, so medium- and low-income countries shouldn't try.  In the North American mythology, less "developed" countries must teach their teeming masses on line, with low-cost American MOOC services endorsed by MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Penn.  And yet Asian countries are ignoring this Western wisdom. They have rejected its "build nothing" implications.

Obviously there are questions about quality in the midst of all this growth. But such questions are being asked by Asian policymakers, who appear not to be diverted by technology sales teams from their higher educational goals. 

Prof. Chan noted that Asian countries are engaged in debates over exactly the issues that for most U.S. policymakers have been pre-decided—whether and how bibliometrics and rankings should be used, how to deepen exposure to the humanities rather than marginalizing them, how exactly to teach Asian cultures in a global context, how to design differentiated educational pathways across every subject area, and how to teach not only for content mastery but for creative capability as a college outcome for every student.  Prof. Chan advocated a relentless focus on maintaining the highest quality standards in all programs. Without that, he noted, Asian countries' students won't be prepared for the world environment in which they will have to operate.  

Sitting in the audience, I was dismayed to realize yet again that In the U.S. we are having the opposite conversation, which is how to get public university services back to their inadequate level of the mid-2000s, while spending less money than we did then.

Afterwards I blurted out my question: "Why this higher ed torpor in Europe and North America, compared to the dynamism of Asia?" 

This got a few of us to laugh.  But none of us had a decent answer.

Last week offered more examples of Sacramento Politicians following the latest fashionable thinking on Higher Education.

For those of you who missed it, Senator Steinberg has offered yet another version of his SB520.  It tends to soften the language of command and the nature of the targets.  But its essential nature--to provide legitimacy for for-profit online providers while ignoring questions of curricular improvements--remain in place.  You can find the bill here.

Also last week the Governor's office released a framework for Higher Education funding that I suppose will be elaborated in his May Revise on the State Budget.  As you can see it pats the Governor on the back for promising to increase Higher Education funding back to where it was 6 years ago while imposing a tuition freeze and a series of quantitative metrics on the three higher ed segments.  It confuses price with cost and doesn't seem to realize that instructional costs have been reduced and the driver for tuition increases has been the reduction in state funding.  We have posted the framework here.

We will try to be back with fuller analysis when we can.  Bob Samuels does have analysis here while Dan Mitchell has some thoughts on the May Revise here.

By Celeste Langan
On Sunday, April 7, 2013, the Daily Californian ran a storywith the headline, “Campus announces plans to construct new aquatics center.”  It’s unclear from the story just when this announcement might be said to have taken place, since a public hearing on the proposal was held in Berkeley on April 3.  Presumably at least those who organized the meeting knew of the proposal in advance.  Still, it’s fair to say that the proposal came as a complete surprise to most of the Daily Cal’s readership—that is to say, faculty, staff, and students.  An announcement has yet to appear in the Berkeleyan or on the UC Berkeley website.
We’re told by Intercollegiate Athletics that the proposed Aquatics Center, to be built on what’s currently a parking lot adjacent to the Tang Student Health Center, is an “extremely generous” proposal on the part of private donors (referred to as “Cal Aquatic Legends”), who have engaged to raise all necessary money.  We’re told that Berkeley’s pool facilities pale in comparison with Stanford’s, and that the pool facilities we have are too crowded.  Forced to share Spieker Pool with other students, faculty, and community members, the swimmers and divers who compete for Berkeley on an intercollegiate level can only practice at certain times, which limits their opportunity to elect certain major fields of study. 
Why should we look this gift horse in the mouth?
With the new Aquatics Center, intercollegiate athletes would no longer have to share.  We’re told that the proposed new facility would be for the exclusive use of intercollegiate athletes and certain illustrious alumni.  Thus the proposal is parallel in concept to the recently completed High Performance Athletic Center near Memorial Stadium and Memorial Grove.  When that project was first proposed, the Cal community was also promised that it would be funded entirely through private donations; in 2006, we were told that $90 million was “in the bank.”  We know now that only $29 million was raised through private donations.  Instead, the University is in debt for that facility alone (not counting Memorial Stadium) to the tune of $124 million.
It’s probably true that better facilities and resources aid performance.  But shouldn’t we be applying that principle first to the 99% of Berkeley students who are not intercollegiate athletes, and to the object of academic performance?  Instead, a valuable public resource (the land granted to the university to educate California’s citizens) would be diverted to serve the interests of only a few.  Even if the construction costs of the proposed Aquatics Center are entirely covered by private donations, the plans for the building effectively monopolize that space, excluding 99% of the Berkeley community from its usufruct.
Wherever we turn today, we read that the “bricks and mortar” university is no longer viable; that it’s too costly and denies access to high-quality education.  At Berkeley we’re all too familiar with the crumbling of bricks and mortar; after nearly every winter rainstorm one can find pieces of mortar or peeling paint, along with puddles, in some of the campus’ most historic buildings, including the hallways and locker rooms of Hearst Gymnasium, the poor but beautiful elder sister of the Spieker complex.  Faculty try to teach and conduct research in deteriorating classrooms and laboratories. Donors, we are told, have no interest in funding the repair of existing facilities, in upgrading and greening the heating and plumbing systems.  And the state’s declining support for the UC system makes even everyday maintenance a financial challenge.  To respond to these challenges, the administration tries to find ways to cut costs—diminished library hours, fewer books bought, class enrollments capped to accommodate available classroom space and diminished numbers of ladder-rank faculty.
In this context, it’s not just the prospect of turning a parking lot into an athletic facility that galls.  It’s the fact that the new facility will be for the exclusive use of a small number of intercollegiate athletes, some of whom already receive support in the form of athletic scholarships.  The rest of the student body, as well as the faculty and the community, will still have access to existing facilities.  But what’s to guarantee that “access” will actually be any more extensive?  Where is the plan to provide more hours for recreational swimming, to pay for the requisite lifeguards and staff? Will the “Aquatic Legends” continue to foot the bill for the new Center’s operating costs, or will the University now have to divert some of the funds dedicated to Spieker and Hearst (to say nothing of classroom maintenance) to pay for heat, light, and staff at the Aquatics Center? 
It’s true that the Aquatics Center is planned for a space that’s currently a parking lot—hardly an inspired use of precious space (unless one considers the disinvestment in public transportation, which makes it difficult for many students, faculty, and staff who live far from BART to get to campus except by car).  But it’s not as if the University has worked with Alameda County to improve bus service, or on its own to develop a shuttle service, despite the fact that available parking for faculty, staff, and students has been seriously diminished by recent UCB building projects.  Moreover, the Environmental Impact Report filed for the Aquatics Center acknowledges that the project “conflicts with the existing applicable land use plan” as laid out in both the 2020 Long Range Development Plan and the South Side Plan.
Consider what’s happening here.  It’s a perfect case of what’s called “the privatization of public resources.”  Often “privatization” is represented as a benefit, the assumption being that “private enterprise” operates more efficiently than public entities, which serve a larger constituency, and often conform to a greater number of regulations.  (Kind of like the difference between a car and a bus.) But we need to remember to ask who benefits from these supposed efficiencies.  In the case of the Aquatics Center, UC Berkeley would be ceding land use—granted by the state for the benefit of all Californians—to a tiny fraction of athletes.  Given past history, it is likely that students and taxpayers would end up financing a good portion of the costs. 
And what of the net psychiccosts?  Although universities are imperfect institutions, traversed by all the economic, social, and cultural inequalities of their historical moment, they also have their utopian aspect:  the “oneness” implicit in the name; the sense that the accumulated resources of a university, intellectual and physical, are shared my all members of its community.  That’s why a university’s libraries, grounds, and buildings—its “bricks and mortar”—are still important, because they provide a space for the exchange of knowledge as a commongood, and remind us that education is, at its best, a res publica, a public thing. 
We should therefore ask the Administration to halt planning/construction on the Aquatics Center until they demonstrate to the public and formally to the Senate that it is a) actually, truly fully paid for by donors, and b) that it is a good use of collective public University resources at the present time, given that it will be used by a small fraction of the UCB community for a nonacademic mission.

Senator Darrell Steinberg, after push back from higher education figures, has offered up an amended version of his Senate Bill 520.  Although it shifts authority for approving online courses from the California Open Access Resources Council (COERC)  to the administrations of the public higher education segments (in consultation with their Senates), it sharpens Steinberg's effort to compel the three segments to subsidize the growth of private online course providers.  Instead of addressing the long-standing underfunding of the three segments, Steinberg is seeking to compel California Higher Education to depend upon alliances with venture capital.

One fundamental change in the amended bill is its elimination of any role for COERC in the new online course system.  As I indicated in a previous post Steinberg had originally tied his push for online courses to his previous push for a system for producing digital textbooks.  This part of SB520 garnered the most vociferous push back because it removed authority over curricula from the Academic Senates at the three segments and struck most obviously at faculty authority.  In response to that push-back, SB520 now commands that the new California Student Access Platform "shall be developed and administered by the President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments."  He has also added a clause that each online course must have "associated with it a faculty sponsor who is a member of the faculty of the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges" if it wants approval.  There remain ambiguities here, most especially concerning the respective authority granted to the administrations and senates of the Community Colleges, CSU, and UC.  But Steinberg has made that a problem for the segments rather than seeming to attack faculty authority directly.

Secondly, Steinberg has restricted access to the Online Platform, perhaps in response to the manifold questions that surround MOOCs and their educational value.  In the revised version, Steinberg now declares that the Platform will only serve students matriculated either at one of the three segments or at a California High School.   As before, the Platform is designed to focus on lower-division courses that have histories of over-enrollment.

But in modifying these sections of the Bill, Steinberg has only intensified its major implications.  Whatever Steinberg's motivations, the amended version of the Bill makes clear that the heart of the legislation is mandating that California Public Higher Education shift course creation to private providers and guarantee private online providers a market in credentials and an educational legitimacy that they have been unable to generate on their own. 

SB520 states as a principle that:

California could significantly benefit from a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework that increases partnerships between faculty and online course technology providers aimed at allowing students in strategically selected lower division areas to take online courses for credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems. 
 Indeed, the Platform itself:

shall solicit, develop, and promote appropriate partnerships between online course providers and faculty members of the University of California, California State University, and the California Community Colleges for the development and deployment of high-quality online options for strategically selected lower division courses.
And lest we miss the point, SB520 also commands that:

(2) (A) For each of the 50 courses identified under paragraph (1), solicit and promote appropriate partnerships between online course technology providers and faculty of the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges which, by the fall term of the 2014–15 academic year, shall result in the availability of multiple high-quality online course options in which students may enroll in that term.
(B) An online course developed pursuant to this paragraph shall be deemed to meet the lower division transfer and degree requirements for the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges.Apparently, Senator Steinberg has sought to appease faculty opposition by shifting authority over the courses to the 3 segments and by insisting that each course be linked to a faculty "sponsor."  But these changes do nothing to the central effect of the Bill: to secure a subsidized market for for-profit online companies.

If this conclusion seems harsh, it is only necessary to look at Marty Block's alternative bill SB547.  I discussed Block's bill and its problems earlier, but one clear difference is that Block does not require public institutions of higher education to partner with for-profit online companies.  Steinberg's SB520 on the other hand, commands that partnering as its very essence.

It is not clear why Steinberg thinks that this is a good solution. Obviously, it allows the Legislature to avoid confronting their own role in underfunding higher education.  Perhaps his thinking has been shaped by the lobbying of people such as Sebastian Thrun (whose Udacity seems to be basing its future on precisely this sort of captured public market) or Steinberg's former colleague Dean Flores of 20 Million Minds.  Flores, who has been pushing online providers across the nation recently told Inside Higher Education that “I think every professor in the nation starts with, ‘I think online education is going to ruin higher education,’ " he said. "What I think every professor is saying is, ‘Online learning is going to significantly disrupt the way I’ve been doing things."

Higher Ed administrators and Senate leaders may think that the proposed changes are enough to make the bill palatable.  But this would be a mistake.  In its stripped down version, SB520 continues to forward an agenda of insufficient public funding and a desire to force public institutions to serve private interests.

The latest version of SB520 needs to be opposed.  But even more than that, Higher Education needs to do a far better job of explaining what actually goes on in campuses and systems and how universities and colleges in California actually work.  Or Steinberg's trojan horse will not be the last.

By Anonymous

Yesterday was the first day of the IU-system wide strike. "IU on Strike" reports that 15 picket teams were sent across the Bloomington campus to spread the strike – to dorms, workplaces, the major academic buildings, cafeterias, and bus stops. Teach-ins and alternate classes, organized by undergrads, grad students and faculty and open to all, were held in the heart of campus. More than 300 people left the starting point of the strike demo, snaking across campus, and were joined by more than 100 along the way. Many support staff (whose contracts include a no-strike clause) stood in the doorways of buildings to watch.

Later in the day, a group of 150 protested the Board of Trustees meeting which was held behind closed doors. Small numbers of people were allowed into the meetings, in groups of five. The vast majority of the protesters remained outside, chanting, sharing stories of debt, and making noise. The Board of Trustees meeting is traditionally open to the public.

"IU on Strike" assesses that hundreds of people participated in the movement for the first time. Many academic buildings were half-abandoned. Solidarity actions were also reported at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Michigan, while statements were received from many more schools across the country.

The strikers declared the first day of the strike a success, in making it clear to the Trustees that the political costs for cutting public education have gone up, and laying the groundwork for the larger movement and disruption necessary to turn the university around. Strikers demands focus on reducing tuition and fees, stopping privatization, improving wages for workers, and issues of diversity.

Chris here.  Meanwhile in Portugal, the Constitutional Tribunal's ruling that the 2013 state budget contained 1.3 billion Euros of unconstitutional cuts to public employees, unemployed people, and pensioners.  In response, the Minister of Finance has frozen "non-basic" spending, which includes education. The photo was taken at a protest in March 2012. The sign reads, "If education were a bank, it would be rescued."

In response, the Rector of the Universidade de Lisboa, António Sampaio da Nóvoa, issued a statement condemning the "intolerable measures" and promising resistance. H/t to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who also provides the translation below.


"Closing the country does not resolve the country's problems"

1. In an order from the Minister of Finance, dated 8 April 2013, the Government decided to close the country and impede the functioning of public institutions: ministries, local administrative units, universities, etc. The order is a form of reaction against the Constitutional Tribunal's decision, as is explained early in the first sentence. The Government adopts the policy of "the worse, the better". In a restrictive and difficult situation, whoever has been trying to secure normal institutional functions feels tricked by this blind measure that is against the country's interests.

2. We all know that we are in the midst of an extremely grave crisis. But it is precisely such situations that require clarity in policies and direction - economizing as much as possible, but searching, to the extent possible, for ways that institutions continue to function without major disruptions. The Minister of Finance's order produces the opposite effect, hurling disruption and chaos with no practical result.

3. It is an unwise and unacceptable gesture, that doesn't resolve any problem and that seriously endangers the future of Portugal and its institutions. The Government uses the worst authority to suspend the State of Rights and install a State of exception. Taken literally, the Minister of Finance blocks the simplest expenses, no matter their purpose. Just three examples among thousands. We are forbidden to obtain ordinary things for our laboratories, food for our cafeterias, or paper for our students' diplomas. Is this the way Portugal's problems are solved?

4. In the case of the university, there are also important engagements involved -- particularly international and research projects that will be blocked, without any savings for the State, but with enormous damage on the institutional, scientific, and financial level.

At the University of Lisbon we will know how to rise to this occasion and resist intolerable measures that have neither compass nor destination, and are absurd. There is no worse policy than the policy of the worst.

Lisbon, 9 April, 2013
António Sampaio da Nóvoa
Rector, University of Lisbon

By Anonymous

Students at Indiana University are striking on April 11-12th. The strike coincides with the meeting of the university’s Board of Trustees. Six of the nine members of the Board are appointed by the state’s governor.

Strikers’ concerns focus on tuition and fees; the privatization and outsourcing of services; and a wage policy that has severely affected the lowest paid members of the university. Twenty years ago, IU-Bloomington received about 50% of its funding from the state. Between 2008 and 2013, state spending per university student fell more than 17%, and total state funding for IU’s budget has hit a new low of 18%
.
The most recent data suggests that the average IU student graduates with a debt of $28,434.

Strike demands also call on the university to honor its promise to double the enrollment of African-American students, as well as to support the abolition of HB1402 (which prevents undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition) and SB590 (an immigration law enforcement bill styled after Arizona’s SB1070.)

The strike has been organized by open assemblies. The emphasis is on laying the groundwork for a longer struggle to defend the public university.

Support staff currently work under a “no-strike clause.” Faculty were initially told they may be in violation of university policy in discussing the strike over email, but this suggestion was retracted after protests about academic freedom.  The administration insists that “faculty and staff have a duty to provide the classes and services” for which students attend.

UPDATE: The Nation has a petition in support of the Strikers.  You can find it here.

Morten WatkinsOn March 29th, students at University of Sussex who had been protesting the privatization of the University were evicted from Bramber Hall after eight weeks of occupation.  Students arrested at these protests will be going on trial later in April.  Protests will continue however.  You can find out more information at Sussex Against Privatization.  The Independent has more coverage of where things are heading.

On this side of the Atlantic, students at Indiana University are planning a strike for this week (to coincide the meeting of their University Regents).  Students there are protesting the ongoing and deeply entrenched austerity which has not only driven up student tuition but also imposed inadequate wages and benefits on staff.  You can find out more information at IU on Strike.  Some Coverage can be found as well at The Nation.

These are both ongoing actions and we will try to keep you abreast of new information.  We would welcome people from either Indiana or Sussex who want to use the comments to provide updates.  Feel free to sign in as anonymous if you feel the need to.

On Wednesday, April 10 the Senate Committee on Education will hold hearings on both Darell Steinberg's SB520 and Marty Block's SB547.  These two bills are the most prominent of the flurry of activity in the Legislature concerning Higher Education, “bottleneck” courses, and online activities.  As with other bills out there neither SB520 nor SB547 grapples with the systemic issues confronting California Higher Education (especially for the severely under-resourced CSU and CCC) but instead attempt to ride the MOOC wave to address the issue of access to courses.

Steinberg's SB520 has garnered the most attention and is the most complicated.  SB520 builds upon Steinberg’s previous legislation (SB1052 and 1053) passed in 2011-12.  These laws established a framework for the production of online textbooks for lower division courses across the three systems.  SB 1052 and 1053, created a California Digital Open Source Library and a California Open Education Resources Council.  Under SB1052, the COERC (I suppose pronounced "coerce") is required to, among other things, ensure the:

• "[d]evelopment of a list of 50 strategically selected lower division courses in the public postsecondary segments for which high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials shall be developed or acquired pursuant to this section." 
• "creation and administration of a standardized, rigorous review and approval process for open source textbooks and related materials developed or acquired pursuant to this section."
• and "establish a competitive request for proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties may apply for funds to produce the 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials in 2013."

The Council would be made up of 9 faculty representatives from the 3 systems (each system sending 3). 
There are legitimate concerns raised about expecting 9 faculty to be able to manage this function.  Still, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they could, in fact, identify the most important bottleneck lower-division courses and determine those courses where the basic textbooks seem to be the same.  Given that the proposed textbooks would be modular in form, faculty in courses would retain control over the materials used in their classes.  Moreover, Steinberg appears here to be trying to use public pressure to encourage private textbook providers to lower price.  Whether the state should be providing funds for private publishers to produce these books is something that could be debated.  Still it seems that Steinberg fashioned a focused tool that may help students with an obvious problem: the costs of their lower-division textbooks.
SB520, on the other hand, relies on digital providers to manage a series of disparate issues.  First, it proposes to extend and modify the California Virtual Campus (originally established in 1999).  The CVC was designed both as a repository for existing online courses (it serves as a sort of portal for students) and also as a mechanism to bring together "stakeholders" in higher education together "to facilitate ongoing collaboration and joint efforts relating to the use of technology resources and high-speed Internet connectivity to support teaching, learning, workforce development, and research."  Steinberg proposes to extend the term of its legal basis from 2014 to 2017

But he also proposes to do much more.

The heart of SB520 is the linkage of the California Virtual Campus  to a new California Online Student Access Platform overseen by the California Open Education Resources Council.  Under Steinberg's proposed legislation the Open Education Resources Council would identify the 50 lower-division courses (across the three segments) that are "consistently impacted" and oversee a process by which online courses would be reviewed and approved and then placed in the California Online Student Access Platform.  At that point the legislation declares:

Students taking an online course available in the California Student Access Course Pool and achieving a passing score on the course examination shall be awarded full academic credit for the comparable course at the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges.
SB520 also declares as a legislative finding that "California could significantly benefit from a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework allowing students in online courses in strategically selected lower division majors and general education fields to be awarded credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems" and commands the COERC to offer "an efficient statewide mechanism for online course providers to offer transferable courses for credit."  

The creation of a "statutorily enacted" online platform through which private providers can secure a public market for their courses does at least two things.  First it removes control over the curriculum from the Senates of the three public sectors; second it effectively leverages public resources to secure the investments of private venture capital.   As Chris and Bob Meister have recently pointed out, SB520 not only falsely implies that MOOCs can compensate for the decline in public funding for Higher Education but follows a classic pattern of venture capital reshaping public institutions by using them to secure protected entry into a particular market.  

Indeed, SB520 is a venture capitalist's dream: it opens up a potentially never ending public market for their wares and provides needed legitimacy for their products.  Online providers will be able to concentrate on producing individual courses that will meet whatever standards that COERC may approve.  They will not have to undertake either the process of ongoing evaluation (that will be provided by COERC) or manage the insertion of their courses into larger programs and general education systems (that cost will be borne by public higher education).  Moreover, by insisting that these courses be MOOCs ("open to any interested person.") SB520 encourages the development of a secondary market for the MOOC providers while effectively eliminating courses geared to specific campus populations.  In effect, SB520 provides public funding to minimize costs for private providers; it is another transfer of funds from the state to corporations.

Most of the attention on SB520 has been on the threat to the authority of the Senates (Steinberg seems to have thought that having Senate appointees to the California Open Education Resources Council would prevent that issue from arising).  And that threat has led to a good deal of push-back ranging from the faculty petition organized by the Berkeley Faculty Association to the critical letter offered by the system-wide Academic Council.   One danger of this emphasis on the authority of the Senates rather than on the legislative interference in the form of teaching is the potential for complacence in response to Marty Block's SB547.

SB547, to be sure, avoids some of the problems of SB520 because it is much simpler:  it commands the Academic Senates of the three segments to identify "high demand transferable lower division courses under the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum" and to develop online versions of those courses to be offered in 2014.   It suggests that funding will be provided in the annual budget (although there is no command about how much that funding will be or what costs will be included).

But as with SB520, Block's proposal insists on the rapid deployment of a teaching medium that, initial studies suggest is profoundly unsuitable for students without previous academic success (see studies on Virginia and Washington.  MOOC proponents will, of course, insist that the medium is experimental and that the technology will enable them to improve their ability to teach all students.  That may well be true.  But the future possibility does not justify the present commitment of resources and legitimation of a particular vision of education.  That it is also a remarkable political intrusion into the nature of teaching (with potentially the same effects on the classroom as the introduction of the testing regime has had in K-12) cannot be ignored.  Although I do not doubt the good intentions of either Steinberg or Block, their proposals subordinate the integrity of the curriculum in the interests of the venture capitalists behind Udacity, Coursera, and other digital start-ups. 

Locking in online courses as the only possible solution to the problem not only avoids confronting the larger crises brought about by state disinvestment in higher education but also institutionalizes a particular form of online classes. 

It is encouraging that both Senator Steinberg and Senator Block are attempting to address the real financial pressures facing students and their families.  It is also important that they recognize the importance of improving transfer rates and helping the CCC resume its important role in fostering social mobility in California.  But their approach through the mandated production of online courses misses the boat.  Steinberg's bill will undermine public education by entrenching private capital; Block's overestimates the educational effectiveness of online for its target population and therefore helps foreclose more imaginative uses of the digital and the allocation of necessary resources to the CCC and the CSU.  It also allows the Legislature to avoid confronting the question of why bottlenecks have grown.  It would be good if Steinberg and Block turned their attention to that issue.  They might find that it led them back to the crucial problem that the State has created: the continual under-investment in California Higher Education.

UPDATE: The hearing on SB520 and SB547 has been postponed till April 24.  I'll keep you posted if anything else changes.  (h/t Eric Hays)

By Robert Meister, UCSC

After a decade of skyrocketing tuition, Sacramento politicians have seized on a new gimmick to avoid paying for the kind of low-cost, high quality college education California used to guarantee all its students.

SB520, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Steinberg, proposes to "solve” the problem of over-enrolled gateway courses at California’s public universities and community colleges by requiring them to grant “full academic credit” for “comparable” courses completed on new  for-profit online platforms (such as Coursera and Udacity) and existing for-profit schools (such as Kaplan and Straighterline).

This solution appears to be a zero-cost proposition for California’s taxpayers and students because many of the new online courses are presently free, except for the cost of providing certificates of completion.

The problem with this too-good-to-be true solution is that it is too good to be true.

As soon as SB520 becomes law, sellers of certificates of completion for online courses would find themselves in the new—legislatively-created—business of selling guaranteed transfer credits redeemable at any public university or college that admits the student to a degree program.

SB520 places no limits on what these for-profit providers could charge for these certificates despite the fact that the universities or colleges would have to honor them.  At the same time, as budget cuts make access to gateway courses scarcer (particularly at the community colleges), SB520 would create windfall profits for the private sector that will not be burdened with the infrastructure or quality controls that have made public university and community college degrees valuable.

The long term result will be higher costs for students and a continuing decline in the quality of their publicly-funded education, all in the name of removing bottlenecks in lower division required courses that cuts in state funds have created.

SB520 would establish for the first time anywhere a system of legislatively-mandated transfer credits between a public higher education system and the for-profit sector of education providers. This hasty and ill-conceived bill is a legislative giveaway to a growing private industry with no commensurate public benefit or regulation.

Our public leaders should instead concentrate on restoring the promise of the low cost and high quality public higher education that built California.

(From The New Yorker April 1, 2013)

Chris here--followed by Jenna Joo below.

The current flurry of online legislation in Sacramento includes the following: (h/t Berkeley Faculty Association):

Assembly Bill 386 (Marc Levine, D-San Rafael) – Allows any student within the CSU System to take an online course on any other campus, with some restrictions.
Assembly Bill 387 (Levine) – Mandates 10% of courses at the three higher education segments be placed online.
Assembly Bill 1306 (Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita) – Would establishes a New University of California as the fourth higher education segment. The New University will provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit, baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.
Senate Bill 520 (Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento ) – Directs the three higher education segments to identify the 50 most “bottlenecked” courses, creates a statewide pool of these classes, after a standardized review and approval process allows private vendors to offer these classes for credit.   
Senate Bill 547 (Marty Block, D-San Diego) - requires the 3 segments "to jointly develop and identify online courses that would be made available to students of each of the 3 segments for enrollment by the fall of 2014. The bill would require the online courses to be in areas defined as high demand transferable lower division courses under the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum and to be deemed to meet the lower division transfer and degree requirements for the 3 segments."

ABs 386 and 387 force conversion to online. SB 1306 is the absurdity degree zero of online panacea hallucination: it creates a "New University of California" that must offer credentials but that may not offer instruction.  Unless this is the Senate's answer to Animal House, I don't get the joke.

SB 520 removes the creation and approval of some college and university courses from the segments' various faculty.  SB 547 requires an as yet undetermined number of courses to be offered online, but it appears as though the creation and the approval of these courses would remain with the faculty.  Unlike SB 520, SB 547 does not concoct an artificial market for MOOCs, but given UC online's small number of offerings, MOOCs would lead the charge of the content providers.

SB 547 would also affect the community colleges and Cal State campuses more than UC, which has fewer completely unavailable courses.  It  probably won't inspire the unified opposition that SB 520 has in the past two weeks, which promoted a strong UC Academic Senate leadership letter that attracted press coverage for its accusation of legislative complicity in forced privatization; the Berkeley Faculty Association's petition, which has so far attracted nearly 1500 signatures; talking points from UCSB's Faculty Association, among others.

UC Berkeley's conference, Learning Mode: Critical Issues in Online Education, took place as the state was processing the news (particularly Tamar Lewin's New York Times article) that the legislature might thrust MOOCs upon public colleges to cure the terrible enrollment bottlenecks that the legislature had itself created with its habitual budget cuts.  I gave one of the papers for our Online Study Group, whose research has relied in large part on the tireless efforts of UCSB's Jenna Joo, a PhD student in Education.

Jenna attended the conference with me, and her report is as follows:

The conference held a total of six panel discussions where speakers from a variety of backgrounds.  Scholars, educational media developers, students, and commercial employers came together to discuss the pros and cons of online education and to raise important questions and concerns.

The conference moved between excitement (about the potential of digital technology for higher education) and caution (about the implementation and potential impact of online education I for students, teachers, and communities). The issue of online education is a hot one, but it is also complex, given the intersection of various factors of political economy that underlies its growth and development.
Personally, I moved between feelings of anxiety, hope, resentment, and optimism. By the end of the conference, I was overwhelmed—partly by the large amount of information thrown at me to digest, but mostly by the burdens placed on education in the 21st century. 

The first half of the discussion focused primarily on the vast possibilities technology may have for improving student learning and increasing research opportunities. Improving student learning broadly involves changing teachers’ roles; reformers demand that they stay away from a “sage on the stage” model and instead become collaborators who will promote active interactions. As Sooinn Lee, CEO of LocoMotive Labs, pointed out, learning can be fun and not so painful and there are many tools available to make it more enjoyable for students.  Professor Ryokai of UCB’s School of Information argued that technology, specifically mobile devices, could help enable out-of-class learning. The Chief Scientist at edX, Piotr Mitros, pointed to possibilities of a distributed classroom model in which large numbers of teachers and students collaborate and network to promote community-based educational attainment. Finally, John Rinderle, the Associate Director of Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, emphasized the opportunities for “engineering learning,” with broader goals and contextualized student and classroom data including not only the outcome data but also the learning data across the spectrum (i.e., student progress and engagement). He also believed that such data should be open for communities to use and assess together.

I have to admit that open data is one of the most exciting promises of online education to me as a graduate student in Education, where obtaining a large amount of student data on my own is literally impossible. It sounds like technology can achieve things that we couldn't achieve before. We are imagining education both inside and outside of classrooms that is fun, interactive, collaborative, large-scale, and open for access and advancement.The second half of the discussion focused on the contradictions of online education.  To take only one obvious example, Coursera, which was launched in April 2012, has attracted over 2.9 million students from 196 countries with a broad range of backgrounds.  However, the retention rates are low and the very nature of online education calls for the need for strict authentification of the student's identity if courses are to be taken for credit. Coursera's representative assured the audience that they are working with their analytics team to further understand low retention rates and how student diversity affects them.  But they have not made any of that data available. 

Professor Pieter Abbeel taught an online version of UCB’s CS 1881.1x course to a large number students (Spring 2013 version here), but only about 5% of them actually completed the course. Professor Abbeel praised the potentially democratic nature of online courses that avoid improving completion by deselecting most  students in advance, via rejection letters in the admissions process. But he also pointed out that designing and performing an online course takes enormous time and effort. He pointed out the need for “flexibility” to keep developing the courses and enhancing student learning.

What I found to be innovative about CS 188.1x was the feedback-based teaching/learning system in which students were given the chance to revise and resubmit their homework after receiving feedback on it. The feedback-based approach could allow students to reflect on their mistakes and better understand their strengths and weaknesses on the subject matter. However, it should be noted that such an approach could require a lot of time and manpower, contradicting
the idea of online education being faster and cheaper. 

One thing is clear— we still need more research and practice in order to assess feasibility of our goals for online education. So far, the MOOC providers seem busy with their own analytics teams in an attempt to understand outcomes on their own. For the moment, open access to educational data is a long way off. An alternative vision appeared in a talk by Professor Jacqueline Shea Murphy, a Professor of Dance at UC Riverside and one of the first UC Online course developers.  She suggested the need for effective systems of training that communities of practice.  Online courses need to maintain the instructional and research ecosystem for future generations of teachers and scholars.

Finally the conference addressed the question: what exactly we would like to achieve with online education? Proponents highlight  “easy access,” but “easy access” is itself not meaningful without “great outcomes.” Education attainment in the US has always been stratified by race and class, so that individuals from families of underrepresented background tend to be lower attaining students.  Christopher Newfield presented our group's research, starting with the inequalities of investment that have historically underwritten inequality in educational attainment. Our team proposed as a normative goal for online education that it reduce the inequality of educational outcomes across differences of race and income.   We argued that order to achieve this goal, we need to help lower performing students become high performing-- to make everyday people special, rather than providing access as such.   

MOOC's social contexts were raised by the other speakers on this panel - Victoria Robbins on existing and future uses of digital modes for examining social injustice, Jen Schradie on the persisting digital divide, Christian Simm on the Americanism of MOOCs, Enrique Tames on the uncertain impacts of smartphones in Mexican classrooms.  Such discussions might serve to alter the “online is better” mindset and reconfigure the definition of high quality education by reflecting on the findings of open educational research. For example, the meta-analysis released by the Department of Education in 2010, did not find online education to be superior so much as it identified value in active and interactive learning modes, including greater possibililties for self-pacing and self-reflection. These are teaching and learning strategies that will require careful design and implementation, whether online or off.

As part of their passage of legislation to keep the Government running, the Senate voted unanimously to support an amendment offered by Tom Coburn to limit NSF funding for Political Science grants to projects that develop "national security or the economic interests of the United States."   Coburn's hostility to Political Science research can be found here.  The text of the amendment itself is provided here.

Although everyone recognizes that topics go in and out of favor for funding by granting agencies, Coburn's amendment and its voice vote approval is a terrible development.  It is another example of politicians effectively limiting the freedom of inquiry under the guise of fiscal restraint.  In this case, it is particularly striking because if you read Coburn's statement above you will see that he objects in quite fundamental fashion to research that helps clarify how American politics actually operates.  I wonder why.

This period in the MOOC lifecycle is reminding me of a couple of years I spent in the late 1990s as a consultant to a water-treatment start-up company.

The company was pitching a promising but unproven technology to some of the worst non-point-source polluters in California.  These operators couldn't control stockyard waste runoff, chemical drainage from olive packing, and many other kinds of dispersed pollutants that didn't come out of a pipe and that thus were impossible to filter.  Our company was pitching something new to a conservative tightfisted industry--agriculture--and it had limited money and not very good connections in that industry.  So how could they find customers while they were improving the actual technology?

The answer had several parts.

(1) Carefully select technical results for the sales pitch to potential customers.  The chemists looked for results from streams that were "most like" the one they were being asked to treat, but this also meant exaggerating positive results with the best of intentions, based on the commercial chemist or engineer's "we'll fix that tomorrow" optimism that really does solve a lot of hard problems sooner rather than later.

 (2) Claim a finished product for a work in progress.  The phrase was "this machine can be dropped off the truck" and was "plug and play."  That this was not true was an open secret. The customers knew that the machines had to be monitored and tweaked with enormous human input during every day of operation.  But "plug and play" was a validating fiction that reassured all parties that everything was moving in the right direction.

(3) Use (1) and (2) to obtain a steady series of trial installations of the new technology at problem sites.  To do this, the company bid below cost to get in the door, both to get upfront market share and to accumulate technical experience that could improve the product.  The company lost money doing this, but gained visibility, reputation, and know-how that brought its exaggerated claims onto a glide-path toward reality.

(1) plus (2) plus (3) equaled ongoing financial losses.  This was a start-up company with a high burn rate of mostly angel funding.  In the two years during which I was associated with this particular firm, they never achieved accurate estimates of "normal" long-term operating costs.  This wasn't because they were dishonest, but because there were no "normal" operations in this entry / development / sales / start-up mode.

The most important part of the process was (4), moving regulation towards the existing technology.

The company hired Washington and Sacramento lawyers with personal ties to legislators, including a couple of pro-green Senators, and to officials in organizations like the EPA.  At the time, non-point-source pollution was a growing regulatory concern--a major hurricane had just spread hog farm waste over much of eastern North Carolina--so many politicians and senior agency managers were interested in this company's work.  On one trip, the company also met with representatives of large engineering firms. Their project VP laid out the market penetration process: we get you further installations, we collect results together, we validate your results, we explain the results to officials, and we help insert the results into the details of a policy's enactment.  Getting into a market meant creating a market of which you the company were already the center.

Until I attended several meetings like this, I had assumed a difference process, which might be called "how a finding becomes a rule."   I thought regulators tracked findings of scientists that were studying an important pollution problem, and then wrote pollution standards that used formal study findings to define correct health and environmental goals.  Science and regulatory standards would come first, and then the public and private sectors would partner to meet regulatory standards.

I learned in 1999 that the reality was the reverse. Technology of commercial interest to a firm was presented to regulators via brokerage through lawyer-lobbyists.  The technology would help define the scientific parameters of the pollution problem.  Since all of the firm's capital had been raised by promising angels and other investors a major share of a "trillion dollar market" in global water treatment, the company presented only those technological solutions which offered the company potential market share, meaning technology over which they had a monopoly via a combination of patents and trade secrets, mostly the latter.

The private firm's business plan was blended with appraisals from third parties and regulatory intentions from public agencies. The agencies, ideally, would recognize the company's results as valid and then write the standards to fit the company's technology.  The explicit and sanctioned goal is sometimes called "regulatory capture" -- regulations would conform to the strengths of a potentially important technology, which was also the technology controlled by the company in question.

Today, MOOC leaders clearly understand the process of adapting state regulation and social needs to the technology they happen to control. They are proceeding systematically through the steps above:

(1) Sales momentum has to stay ahead of the accumulation of negative product results.  Sometimes results are misstated.  Coursera's page about its "pedagogical foundations" links to the famous Department of Education meta-analysis of about 45 studies of online education's effectiveness. Coursera says, "This analysis demonstrates very convincingly that online learning methods are, on average, at least as effective as face-to-face learning."

In reality, the study comes to different conclusions. It finds that "the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium" (52). It suggests that the benefits of "blended" online / face to face techniques may flow not from the technology but from the fact that they "involve more learning time, additional instructional resources, and course elements that encourage interactions among learners."  The most cited online study to date raises the intriguing possibility that the benefits of the only good kind of online--relatively expensive "blended" modes--don't actually come from "online" (p. xiv), but from instructors and students having more time and money.  

Sometimes results are simply ignored.  For example, a new, high-quality study of 500,000 online courses in the state of Washington (Xu and Jaggars 2013) found,
Overall, the online format had a significantly negative relationship with both course persistence and course grade, indicating that the typical student had difficulty adapting to online courses. While this negative sign remained consistent across all subgroups, the size of the negative coefficient varied significantly across subgroups.  Specifically, we found that males, Black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grade.. . . These patterns also suggest that performance gaps between key demographic groups already observed in face-to-face classrooms (e.g., gaps between male and female students, and gaps between White and ethnic minority students) are exacerbated in online courses. This is troubling from an equity perspective. (23) Online may not only not improve educational outcomes.  It may worsen them. It may take a higher ed system that has for years been worsening race and class inequalities and make them more terrible still.  But in a start-up sales regime, momentum depends on minimizing or ignoring findings that contradict the company line.

(2) The distinctive feature of MOOC marketing in 2013 is the shift from being an exciting experiment to being offered as a working solution to budgetary and access crises.  Hence the legislation proposed last week by the California State Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg simply presumes that online courses  could put "quality first" and offer expanded access with no real loss of educational value.  MOOC leaders will themselves note various weaknesses and unrested assumptions in their approach, as several did at UC Berkeley's Learning Mode conference this weekend (#learningmode).  The flaws in MOOC quality are open secrets, but they are subsumed by plug-and-play claims embedded in the rhetoric of Big Data and related tropes of inevitable technological progress.  This powerful combination swamps both the history and the current reality of on-line limitations, some of which harken back to the correspondence schools of the late 19th century, which 130 years ago also promised increased individual attention and the bypassing of the "sage on the stage."

The Steinberg legislation marks the synthesis of MOOC steps (3) and (4), in which large scale trials are being insured through a state-created artifical product market revolving around Udacity and Coursera in particular.  The business problem is this: Large-scale trials must be had at any cost, or the product momentum will die, investors will have doubts, money will dry up, market penetration will fail.  MOOCs have shown that lots of people will sign up for a free online course--and that a tiny proportion actually persist.  If students are required to pay tuition, as with UC online, they currently don't sign up in the first place.

Thus 2013 may not be Year of the MOOC II, in that it may reveal that MOOCs may have no large natural market of tuition-paying students.  To head off this possibility, the firms have shifted focus to regulatory capture.  This is what happened when Udacity was hired by San Jose State University to run 3 remedial courses.  The formal signing ceremony put founder Sebastian Thrun on the same level as the governor of the state and the chancellor of the Cal State University system.

The bigger payout of this regulatory lobbying strategy appeared last week, when California's public college and university community learned in The New York Times that state legislation "would force colleges to honor online classes" ("force" has been altered to "seeks" in the current online title, h/t Wendy).  The article appeared a few hours after I happened to hear a report about Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun leaving the capitol offices of State Senate Pro Tem President Darrell Steinberg, the author of the legislation.  There are other signs of the kind of regulatory capture I witnessed in my corner of 1990s start-up culture.  Ry Rivard reports on the secrecy that surrounded the writing of SB 520's amendments, which do force all three higher education segments to accept online courses approved for credit by a separate state-established panel.  The fact sheet calls for "a thoughtful and strategic harnessing of Silicon Valley's innovations in online education"--signalling the skewed history typical of lobby capture.

MOOC momentum is being driven not by educational need or proven technological achievement but by a business lobby with connections and resources as good as Wall Street's, and with a better social cause.  The movement's systematic exaggerations, the lack of concern for impacts on public university ecosystem, the staged benevolence towards a hostile customer--all are hallmarks not of technical or pegagodical progress but of a carefully designed business strategy.  We won't be able to assess the technology correctly unless we see this.

The Chair and Vice-Chair of the System-wide Academic Senate have responded to SB520.  You can find their letter here.

The Berkeley Division has also sent out a letter (co-signed by their EVC).  You can find it here. 

For those of you who may have been wondering how this bill may fit in with UCOP's continuing desire to promote UCOE you may want to read the fascinating Senate Report on the Continuing failures and false promises of UCOE.  It came out in December.  I am sorry I missed it.  But you can find the link here.

STEINBERG'S PROPOSAL:

You can find the text of the proposed legislation here.   Senator Steinberg's office has offered a "fact sheet" to persuade everyone it is a good idea.   Steinberg's proposal is actually an amendment to his earlier proposed legislation to create a California Virtual Campus.

OTHER RESPONSES

Bob Samuels has dissected the strategy towards outsourcing embedded in SB520.

Both Angus Johnston and Jon Wiener have noticed how it is predicated on the continuing privatization and defunding of public education.

Kevin Carey offers some fawning praise of the idea.

NEWSPAPER COVERAGE

The NYT story that first highlighted the bill.

The LAT "reporting" can be found here.

Some context from the SacBee.

And some more context from Insider Higher Ed

The Chronicle of Higher Education has coverage here.

March 13, 2013
AS Chair Christina MaslachAS Vice Chair Elizabeth DeakinAcademic Senate320 Stephens Hall, #5842Berkeley, CA 94720
Dear Chair Maslach and Vice Chair Deakin:
The Berkeley Faculty Association is gravely concerned about the proposed California legislation to mandate acceptance of online courses for UC, CSU and CC credit.  In view of President Yudof's general endorsement of this proposal, cited in yesterday's New York Times article on the proposed legislation, we are especially concerned about whether the UC Academic Senate leadership was consulted about this proposal, and if so, whether they gave it their approval. Would you find out and let us know? There are many complex issues here, of course, but of immediate concern is where the Senate leadership is on this extremely important development. As I am sure you are aware, the proposal has profound implications for shared governance, educational quality, faculty control of curriculum, standards for degrees, and much more.
We look forward to your speedy response. 
Many thanks.
Sincerely yours,

Louise Fortmann and Christine RosenChair and Vice Chair of the Berkeley Faculty AssociationFor the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association