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Economy | |||
Teaching Be Hard at Little Red Schoolhouse. | |||
2009-07-19 | |||
California's crisis continues while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders inch slowly toward agreement on the deep cuts necessary to close California's massive $26 billion budget shortfall. Now, even as the state continues to pay its bills with IOUs, the University of California, the nation's leading public university, is being forced to cut its budget by $813 million -- or 20%. It is highly unlikely that these cuts will be reduced by a budget agreement in Sacramento. UC Berkeley will see recruitment of faculty drop from the normal 100 positions a year to 10. At 28,000-student UC San Diego, also ranked with Berkeley and UCLA among the world's top 20 research universities, recruitment has been halted. More than 300 UC scientists have issued a white paper warning Schwarzenegger that the sharp reduction endangers the 10-campus system's position as the premier public university in the United States and could have a negative impact on California's future economic growth. According to UC officials, the cut in state funding brings the "amount of state investment in the University down to $2.4 billion -- exactly where it was in real dollars a decade ago." During the same time period, spending on state prisons has more than doubled to $11 billion. Either prospective students would rather be incarcerated or they've got the wrong client mix? In any case, it is obvious education in California is not working. The UC Board of Regents on Thursday approved an emergency budget plan that would force 80% of the system's 180,000 employees to take unpaid furloughs of 11 to 26 days over the next year. UC President Mark Yudof said the furlough plan was preferable to layoffs in an enormous system that includes five medical centers, three national laboratories, and 225,000 graduate and undergraduate students. UC officials have yet to secure agreement on the furlough plan from the unions that represent 35% of university employees. Surely couldn't be a hold up by the unions. But furloughs will only cover approximately a quarter of the UC deficit. The rest will come from a 10% increase in tuition, debt refinancing and dramatic budget cuts at the individual UC campuses, as testimony to the Board of Regents from the systems chancellors revealed on Wednesday. At UC Berkeley, according to Chancellor Robert Birgenau, campus libraries will be closed on Saturdays and no longer stay open 24 hours during final exams (a long-time campus tradition). He said UC is "the only university among our competitors whose faculty are taking a furlough," adding that faculty salaries already lag some "$25,000 behind our peers." In the past, even with this gap, UC Berkeley has been able to entice top faculty to leave Harvard and Yale for the Bay Area. The UC System as a whole has won 55 Nobel Prizes. Not to mention all the Orders of Lenin. The retrenchment at the individual campuses will mean fewer student jobs, few teaching assistants, a virtual elimination of lecturers who often teach up to 30% of the undergraduate classes in some departments, and the risk that top faculty will flee for more lucrative -- and stable -- ivory towers. Elimination of untenured community activits and guest lecturers? Who's to do the work?
In Sacramento, Schwarzenegger and Republican legislators have blocked all attempts by Democrats to cover any portion of the current $26 billion state shortfall with a tax increase. Tuition has more than doubled at the University of California in the last decade, rising to more than $8,700 for in-state students in fall 2009. Many of the state budget cuts being negotiated behind closed doors in Sacramento will primarily affect the poor and working class -- health coverage for the poor and the CalWORKs welfare-to-work program, for example. But the severe funding reductions to the public schools and to the state university system -- not only the University of California but also hundreds of thousands of students attending the 23-campus Cal State University system and the community college system -- will strike California's large middle class in a fundamental way. $8,700 for "in-state" tuition? Still a huge bargain I'd say.
who may possibly be sick and tired of educating the Chinese." | |||
Posted by:Besoeker |
#3 Why would FreeBSD be affected? |
Posted by: OldSpook 2009-07-19 21:02 |
#2 And yet, this model has been increasingly abandoned at home by a state government responsible for its core funding For so called enlightened people, they still don't get the basics of cause and effect. If there is no money, there can be no services. Services have to be scaled to match resources which are not unlimited. The gravy train has run out of rails. The tax serfs don't exist to serve the state. The state exists to serve the people. |
Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-07-19 10:33 |
#1 If California's budget crisis affects FreeBSD I may well wind up switching to OpenBSD. Not that I mind, but the server people gig me $69.00 everytime I want to do kernel upgrades. |
Posted by: badanov 2009-07-19 09:29 |