>
> On Mon 28 Sep 2009, Doug Henwood 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.
>>
>
> Neoliberalism may or may not have died; it's a very interesting question.
> But this particular privatization project doesn't seem like evidence of its
> continued vigor. It has neither a neoliberal motivation nor a neoliberal
> outcome.... SNIP ...
>
> Basically what is meant by privatization here is raising tuitions to deal
> with the fact that the money to subsidize them isn't coming through, and
> doesn't look like it's going to for the foreseeable future, thanks to the
> weird supermajority tax law voted in by Proposition 13 back in the Reagan
> era. This "starving the budget" strategy is literally the dead hand of that
> era still clutching. 25 years of juggling to avoid its consequences have
> finally run out in the current crisis and finally they are strangling in its
> grip.
>
> So I'm not sure it's any kind of a bellwether. But you're certainly right
> to be looking out for them.
>
> Michael
To this, I'll only say a corollary of what I wrote earlier. It is very clear, having spent hours pouring over documents and interviewing folks in the UC administration, that the UCB and System-Wide administrations - rather than fight to maintain their budgets by making strong and repeated arguments to the legislatures and governors of the last thirty years - embraced the (more fiscally unsound) neoliberal argument that external grantsmanship and public-private collaborations were likely to generate more revenue via indirect/overhead costs, through patents and through licenses than could be squeezed out of the legislature. Put another way, rather than fight for the funding of the public university based on appeals to the University's remarkable contribution to the people of the State of California based on their efforts to realize the public and land-grant missions of the place, the Chancellors of the different campuses and administrators at System-Wide chose a neoliberal model of the university as engine of growth to pursue. U of M and MSU did the same thing, and a number of the second tier public universities in Michigan are moving away from their traditional mission as Research II universities - where teaching students and service to the university and community is as important as research and grantsmanship - and towards being research-driven and public-private collaboration-focused universities... all at the expense of teaching. This, to me, is the neoliberalization of the University system - intially by ommission (not defending the public mission) and now by commission (actively rejecting the public mission). And, yes, I know, the public mission was historically honored as much in the breach as anything else... one of my grad advisors led the lawsuit against UC arguing the the tomato harvestor UCD invented actively damaged California farmers and farm workers...