As you arrive on campus, you will probably be taken aback by your ingratiating reception: UCSD students, some of whom are campus leaders and most of whom are political moderates, chanting slogans, wielding signs and, of course, bearing lots of T-shirts in an attempt to dissuade you from enacting further tuition increases. The event, which was preceded by an all-night vigil and rock concert, is the culmination of a systemwide campaign to draw attention to the obvious: The University of California is on a crash course with disaster.
In the past several years, we have sadly witnessed the Master Plan for Higher Education-celebrated worldwide as a paragon for public higher education-battered beyond recognition. UC student fees have increased more than 124 percent since the beginning of the decade (more than 90 percent in real dollars), while California's median household income has actually declined. Although student financial aid has increased during this period, the availability of aid has not kept pace with tuition increases. In addition, the fastest growing form of financial aid is loans, not grants.
While student tuition hikes have garnered the most attention, UC faculty and staff have suffered as well. Despite a series of upper-level administrative salary hikes, reaching the height of absurdity with former President David P. Gardner's $800,000-plus severance package, much of UC's staff and faculty has endured wage and salary freezes. UC faculty members, the core of the university, now earn an estimated ten percent below the national average.
Taken with your aggressive early retirement campaign, such freezes have only served to erode the UC's well-earned reputation as one of the nation's-indeed the world's-premiere institutions of higher learning and research. As the framers of the Master Plan knew in 1960, without competitive salaries, the University of California would falter.
As the university's highest-ranking officials, these issues should weigh heavily upon your shoulders. Which is why we make an appeal to you today to use your considerable influence to roll back the damage done to our university.
By most indicators, California's fiscal earthquake is over and we are heading confidently into economic recovery. However, unlike the past, when support for higher education fluctuated with the "natural" boom and bust cycles, our governor and Legislature clearly have no intention of restoring the university's budget. The Master Plan, once cherished as California's crown jewel, has ironically lost priority to state criminal justice and corrections spending.
Ludicrously billed as "pro-education," Governor Wilson's state budget proposal would increase UC state funding a paltry two percent next year and four percent in each of the following three years. Considering the UC budget was slashed by 24 percent, or $548,051,000 in constant dollars, between 1990 and 1994, Wilson's two percent would do little to regain lost ground.
As the usual "last resort," students are expected to pick up the slack: The governor's UC budget plan would throw another four years of ten-percent tuition increases down the turnpike. By 1998-99, students would be paying a $5,500 cover charge for a UC education. The message of Wilson's budget is clear: The Master Plan for Higher Education is a relic which should be left to die.
Despite mounting dissent at the Capitol-21 Democratic senators, joined by two Independents, recently blasted the Wilson budget's shortchanging of higher education-we have heard nary a peep of opposition, much less an outcry, from you. Incredibly, when Governor Wilson unveiled his budget proposal last January, outgoing UC President Jack Peltason said, "The governor's compact represents a strong commitment to renewing the state's investment in higher education." For Peltason's words to have been any more conciliatory, he would have had to say them on his knees, kissing Governor Wilson's feet. Taken with your own silence, Peltason's words signal, in such a stark and grotesque form, a crisis of leadership at the university.
These are strong words no doubt, but we write them not in malice and not, in our opinion, in a rush to judgment. As you all know well, the University of California is facing a crisis of epic proportions. California's universities are not only battling head-to-head with state corrections for funding, but we are facing an historical boom in the student-age population. Dubbed "Tidal Wave II," an increase of 450,000 students is projected to hit California's shores by 2006.
However, not only have you been unwilling to lead a fight for higher education, but you have yet to establish a clear long-term strategy for dealing with the enormous problems facing the university. Though it may be unrealistic to expect all tenets of the Master Plan to be preserved, allowing the plan to be scrapped, wholesale, without a fight, would be nothing less than a tragedy.
As Californians, we have tended to take our educational resources for granted, assuming that they will always be available for us or our children. But complacency will only assure that tomorrow one of our most prized assets, one of our most noble promises, will wither away and slip from the hands of the future.