Here is a link to a talk by Robert Meister (who was interviewed on Doug's show a few months back) offering a pretty good framework to understand the current UC budget crisis. The material is divided into seven sections. Robert Wood
http://www.youtube.com/user/ucilecture
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Thanks for posting this. I would urge the list to click on the link and listen to the talk. If you don't want to go through the whole thing, then click on parts 3 and 4. It outlines the basic issue of how UC went from a public funded good to a neoliberal nightmare. The basic shift was accomplished by shifting from a tax based institution to a student private debit funded institution, via increases in student tuition. Each student when they enroll qualify for a 100k line of credit. This credit line does not have to be paid until you graduate or quit or go on strike. So you are locked into a continuous flow of debit income for at least four years.
UC then sells bonds to Wall Street using its ability to raise tuition higher and faster than the state can raise tax revenue to secure its bonds. The bonds do not fund instruction costs, but non-instruction costs and investments.
Where does most of the money raised on bonds go? It goes to the top research campuses UCB and UCLA. Why? Because these two campuses take in the most money in research grants and business partnerships. Grants and partnerships have administrative overheads (income producing) that ranges from 20 to 40 percent off the top of a grant. I don't know what the UC cut is for business---that is probably negotiated on an individual basis. So grants are direct income. Notice that most construction also funded in bonds does not go mostly to classroom space and pay for instructional costs. Instead most of it develops research labs and other institutional space---that will be more directly producing income.
This neoliberalization of public education is planned down to which majors and departments to develop and fund, and which to shrink and starve. For example, the sciences, particularly bio-science, chemistry, electronic engineering, and computer science are wealthy, while something like art is dead, anthro is practically dead etc. The simple reason is that there are few grants of very low quality available to the latter departments and majors. So these departments cost money, rather than produce money for the corporatized university system.
All of this is an example of a global neoliberal system. The financial problem with poverty and low incomes is that most people can not borrow enough money. So make them sub-prime loans and credit lines. Instead of providing tax based safety nets and public institutions, the neoliberal answer has been to shift from tax funded public goods and services to debt funded goods and services. The burden of paying for public goods and services is shifted from corporate and upper incomes via taxes, to lower income via debt. You pay for public education through private individual borrowing, i.e. debt. You pay for health care through private individual debt. You pay for housing through private individual debt.
That's the basic theory and basic outline of the talk and the basic idea of what the UC system has turned into.
The concepts are difficult to get across to most people. I had to listen to this twice to distill it down and then combine it with some work experience under project grants at UCB. The basic ideas have to be distilled down further so that ordinary people can understand the problem for UC students. The broader public needs to see their own financial woes, their own dark futures, and their own nightmare country are similar to these supposedly elite students. The linkages are there directly in all forms of public education: all the K12 schools are in the same boat. The states, cities and counties are all struggling under similar neoliberal regimes.
CG