Ideas for organizing that final project ...

I'm not sure what we all think about our end-of-the-term project, but I thought I would add a few things here to maybe get the conversation started. First of all, I'm skimming Chris Newfield's book, trying to get ideas for how to tell this story. The central questions seems to be these: How have the university as an institution and the educators, support staff, and students who populate it become (as they are today) viable targets for defunding, for budget-saving cuts? At what historical moment and under what conditions could the university not protect itself from such fiscal attacks? And how has it become more and more difficult to articulate the general social functions of higher-education outside of a market framework?

I've broken things down into a few components (maybe we could think about some of these as necessary conditions for the above questions) ... I apologize for the incomplete sentences/bullet points. I'm just trying to get my thoughts organized.

• The (original?) vision of the public research university: Universal access + high-quality teaching and research

(Newfield says that behind this was a goal of a "multiracial, worker-inclusive" middle-class that could challenge elites' control of society.)
What is the conception of "public" in this vision?

• Race and racial integration at UC

The racial integration of the university happens over the same time period as the beginning of its defunding. Coincidence?
Diversity/multiculturalism vs. a multiracial student body (Newfield argues these are different things and in fact a "diversity" agenda has effectively blocked the development of a multiracial populace connected by their common education

• Culture wars attack higher education: the "war on equality"

"[T]he culture wars were economic wars. They sought to reduce the economic claims of their target group--the growing college-educated majority--by discrediting the cultural framework that had been empowering that group. [...] The culture wars discredited the cultural conditions of the political and economic ascent of these college-educated, middle-class workers" (Newfield 6).

• A changing economy = a changing university

The university goes corporate (late 1970s/1980s onward?): the growing privatization/marketization of domains usually kept separate from a marketized institutional structure; or maybe this is best understood of purging or purifying the educational domain of its nonmarket components, and elevating the market to the general framework governing goals, administration, and individual behavior instead of market-like activity subsumed to different, overarching goals ...
(Newfield: changing meanings of "economic development" from "human development"--economy serves "human flourishing" to "human capital"--human skills and capacities and technologies serve "economic flourishing"; the university becomes a "privatizable knowledge factory" [9])
Turning the university into a corporation, many things (not all things--important to recognize the heterogeneity of the university and the people in/attached to it) on campus become driven by expectations for return on initial investment:

1. The rise of private research funding
2. Since when do professors rely on industry funding? A question: Is such reliance a response to a lack of internal/govt support for general kinds of research? Or is it part of what led to the movement towards marketization in the university? (Probably both ...)
3. Marketing the university: capturing market share by advertising on campus
4. Financialization of university endowments
5. University accounting procedures builds market principles into the justification for funding

"[S]ince the New University would be judged by its economic contribution, and since private enterprise drove the creation of economic value, there was no reason not to privatizethe university's core functions--that is, make them more responsive to market forces and business methods" (10).
It is important to question both of these initial assumptions: 1) that a university should be judged by "economic contribution" and 2) that only markets create (economic) value.

• On publics

What is the "public" the university is now, under this new socioeconomic framework, supposed to serve? How is this different from the public envisioned by the "public university" of the early 20th century?

• A history of budget crisis/crises

Maybe someone could take on the details of the budgets, so we can begin to understand the multiple state fiscal crises over the past 15-20 years and the state's response (each time taking a chunk out of higher education)

• The current budget crisis

An in-depth look at what has happened/is happening right now

• The alternative to budget cuts: TAXES

I'm writing a second post on this, based mainly on the work of Isaac Martin, so more to come. But the basic question is: How have taxes become a non-alternative--that is, how has it become such an impossibility to raise taxes to protect social institutions like higher education?

• The new University of California, our proposals

I have two, open to revision or addition:
1) Funding of the university should be made subordinate to educational needs and priorities, not vice versa (budgets should not dictate the limits of education); and
2) The university should enact in its operation the social and philosophical principles it teaches.