No romantic about the idea of a land grant university actually serving the people - writ large, or in toto - of a state, that IS/WAS the charter of the University of California - or at least its once-core College of Agriculture, now Natural Resources.
One thing we argued in the Berkeley-Novartis study was that the System-wide University Administration had fairly clearly bought into the idea of the University as as engine of regional growth... rather than serving the people of the State of California, or the multiple constituencies of Clark Kerr's multiversity, he idea was increasingly to focus on serving regional entrepreneurial capital and inter/national research/tech transfer-funding corporations on the neoliberal assumption that the economic growth then stimulated would trickle down to the people.
The legitimation of this move, laid out in the article Doug clipped and in interviews with administrators 6-7 years ago, was that the state continually reduced appropriations for the University and it therefore had no choice... if it was going to continue what it called its historic mission to serve the people of California. When this argument was presented to committee leaders in Sacramento, apparently, their response was: "Wait a minute, you are telling us - now - that you provide awesome service to the people of California and have a declining need for our funds because you have responded to the reduced flow of money by pursuing public-private collaborations, but that you only did so because we were allocating you less money?!?! Why the hell haven't you been here each funding cycle over the last thirty years.... showing us all the great stuff you do for the State - just like everyone else has - so that we wouldn't reduce your funding? If you'd made good arguments, we'd have cut elsewhere!"
Apparently, the UC system-wide admin had no come back... at least in part because they have increasingly come to System-wide out of industry or out of the business side of the University... but, sadly, the vast majority of the students at (and parents who send their kids to) UC over the same thirty years have been upper middle class strivers more interested in job skills than in Progressive, much less left, social change. The critical students are there, but in quite small numbers, and many many many have bought into cultural and consumerist lefitsms rather than political economic ones.
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [I'm becoming convinced that people who think that neoliberalism died from
> the financial crisis should do a serious rethink.]
>
> <http://beta.dailybruin.com/articles/2009/9/28/uc-debates-going-private/>
>
> UC forms commission to discuss going private
> By Ravi Doshi
> Sept. 28, 2009 at 4:42 a.m.
>
>