AN INTERVIEW PETER SHRAG

Peter Schrag was Editor of the Sacramento Bee's editorial pages for 19 years, retiring early this year. He is now a Bee Contributing Editor and is at work on a book about California's political culture over the last 30 years. This interview was conducted by Patrick M. Callan, Executive Director of the California Higher Education Policy Center.

Patrick M. Callan: What is the theme of your forthcoming book on California?

Peter Schrag: I'm writing about what's happened in California in the last generation or so, using 1962, which was the year that California became the biggest state in the union, as a baseline. There was a lot of hoopla and a lot of excitement about it, a lot of enthusiasm about California.

Then, of course, the other seminal date was '78 when Proposition 13 was passed. And I'm looking at the intersection of demographic changes, political changes, the initiatives that have been passed, and the levels of public service and the public service ethos. We had a communitarian ethos in the '50s and '60s in this state; now we have a fee ethic. And the attitude that developed was that the most immediate beneficiaries ought to be paying a larger share of the cost of the service. Higher education is obviously a major case in point.

PC: Wasn't the ideal of the 1960s and of the California Master Plan the expansion of educational opportunity, with the financial strategy at that time of putting colleges everywhere in the state and making them as cheap as possible?

PS: That's exactly right. One of the things I ran across was this wonderful conversation that Pat Brown had with Fred Dutton, who had been his campaign manager. This was 1959 or 1960, fairly early in the Brown administration. Brown was talking about big water project budgets, and Dutton said, "Can we really do this and do everything else, do all the schools and the higher education and so on?" And Brown said, "We have the money, we can do it, we can do everything." And I think that was part of the attitude of the state: "We can do everything, and if it's important to do we'll find the money."

Obviously that's gone now. It's gone throughout the system. It's certainly gone in higher education. And as you know, the criticism in the last few years has been that the essential point of the Master Plan is gone, that it's no longer a demand-driven, but to some extent a supply-driven system. And that's regrettable, obviously.

On the other hand, the Master Plan is still an ideal, and I think maybe there is always going to be some tension in a state like this between the ideal of an open system and bowing to larger economic realities, particularly the need to extract some money from those who are able to pay in order to support those who are not.

PC: Do you see the need for or desirability of changes in higher education in addition to the way we pay for it?

PS: Well, there are certainly other issues. Some of them have been raised by the Policy Center. Do we keep replicating full service graduate programs as the system grows? Do we redefine the system in some way so that it's more tailored to the new technologies, so that you don't create a new institution every time you have another 20,000 students to accommodate? Should community colleges take on a larger share of the first two years than they have? Do we think about reorganizing so that maybe UC or CSU campuses have clusters of community colleges around them, so that they have some interconnection?

There are other ways of experimenting so that we're not so locked into that same three-tier model that we had in 1960. And I think those and other ideas are going to be considered. And there's still an awful lot of research and studies and discussion that have to take place about how you can run the system, perhaps even increase and improve the quality of service to students and service to the state in terms of research, without the high overhead costs that we started out with in the '60s. At some point, everybody's going to be looking more carefully, particularly with the availability of new technologies, new ways of doing things.

At the same time, as long as things are really flush, I don't know that those questions get asked.

PC: Is the scale of the higher education enterprise, with our huge public statewide megasystems, part of the problem?

PS: If somebody said to me, "Okay, you're going to be the chancellor of CSU," I'd say, "Where are the levers; how do you make this thing turn? How do you slow it down, speed it up?" And it seems to me that's a huge, enormous, unpredictable kind of undertaking. And it does argue for decentralization and for breaking it down into smaller units.

There's no public higher education system as large as the California one. Maybe if you broke it down into smaller units, the individual units would be more subject to individual or to small groups of leaders who could inspire them, move them. I mean, university presidents are a very different animal now from what they were thirty years ago, both in this state and elsewhere. So it's interesting because even when Clark Kerr was writing and giving the Godkin lectures in '62 and '63, he already seemed to be awed and overwhelmed by what he was creating, and had numbers in there about how many white mice we raised and how many extension courses and how many countries we had programs in. They were smaller than the numbers today, but absolutely he was saying, "Look at the size of this enterprise!"

PC: How important is the state political and public policy leadership in raising issues and stimulating change?

PS: Pat Brown certainly was the last governor who wasn't either chronically angry at higher education or indifferent to it. Reagan was in a public fight with UC for much of his time, though he didn't really damage it very much, it seemed to me. Jerry Brown did do some damage. And by and large Deukmejian and Pete Wilson have been sort of indifferent. They didn't see themselves as leaders or the builders of higher education, or education at all.

It may be one of the peculiarities of the system we have here that it's so diffuse that nobody says, "Well, there's something wrong with the University of California or the community colleges, let's do something about the governor." Pat Brown was identified with higher education, and it's obviously one of the reasons he wasn't re-elected in 1966. No governor since has really been identified with higher education except Reagan in a sort of negative way, and maybe Jerry Brown in a negative way.

Many of the political leaders and external groups who do care, care about certain little fragments of colleges and universities. Are the affirmative action programs adequate? Are we getting enough minorities? Are we training enough engineers or doing enough for the farmers? But not in the sense of asking whether we have a University that's of high quality or what can be done to reinforce the distinction or its service.

PC: What do you see as the key issues with respect to the quality of higher education?

PS: My biggest worry about quality, which is the sort of macro quality issue, is not so much that the University of California will not be ranked at the top by the National Academy of Sciences or others. One of the ongoing quarrels that I now have, I suppose, with the University and also to some extent CSU, but more the University of California because it's a flagship institution, is that higher education seems to be so singularly oriented toward the economic side of the equation. And I think on that side it will do fine. Higher education will probably prepare its graduates well for jobs. I assume that will be a self-reinforcing system.

But what about the role of universities as the carriers of the culture, as the preservers of the culture, as institutions that raise moral issues, raise issues about protection of the fostering of humanities?

Higher education sells itself and speaks to the community largely on the basis of that one side, which is, "We provide technological innovation, we generate jobs and prepare people for them, we generate new industries, we generate new developments." Should they also be talking more about, "We raise ultimate questions, we are one of the preservers of the culture, of literature, of arts"? It's one of the things that the University ought to stand for more visibly and more vigorously. Should universities speak more for the civic side of society and not just the economic side?

PC: Is that something you see as having changed?

PS: I think so. Clark Kerr talked a great deal about the multiversity and its increasing economic role, but he and some other higher education leaders of that era also talked about the larger social context. I think that was one of the things that helped maintain public admiration for higher education. I think colleges and universities are perceived more now as (a) good places to have a good life for four years, and (b) as training and research institutions, but particularly as tickets to a degree and a job.

And the more higher education is defined almost exclusively in the utilitarian way, and the more we make strictly utilitarian bargains with students--that's the other side of the rising fees--it becomes more and more just an economic transaction. You borrow a certain amount of money in order to pay your tuition, maybe you owe the bank something or Uncle Sam or whoever you borrowed from, but you don't owe the institution or society anything, and I think that's unfortunate, too. I think that has something to do with civic sensibilities as well.

PC: You're talking about the role of higher education and its leaders in building civic culture and values.

PS: I think it is important. I really think it ought to begin. I'd like to see university presidents talk a little bit more like they did 40 years ago, about the larger society and about the obligation of their institutions to the larger society. Not just in economic terms.

It must be done carefully; you don't want to become a public scold. But, yes, talk about issues or values in relation to your institution, in relation to the state. I mean, this is a state that spends less per capita on art and the humanities than almost any state in the country--almost nothing for public radio or public television. Those are the kinds of things that universities ought to be talking about.

If we're going to have a high-value-added kind of society, we have to have all of those amenities that people who do that work will be attracted by. And that means, as Steve Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy said recently, "You damn well better have opera. You damn well better have music and theater and museums."

That's something that university people ought to be talking about more. I mean, how dare they fold the San Diego Symphony. How dare they fold the Sacramento Symphony, where the difference is a matter of nickels and dimes. Why is it that the state doesn't have any funding for public radio and public television and public art at a much higher level? One of the comparisons Levy made was with South Carolina--a state that spends more on public art per capita than we do.

So it would seem to me, it would be important to hear a little bit more from the educational community about these things--not just about their own thing, but about their concern for a larger civic culture. And why not have them engage themselves with lower education, with K-12, with crack babies, with the condition of life in cities? Those are all things, it seems to me, that it would be nice if you occasionally had university leaders talking about. And you don't hear them.

PC: You seem to be saying that colleges and universities and their leaders have adopted what you called the "fee ethos," hunkering down to protect self-interest but not looking much beyond their institutions, and that we should expect more.

PS: What I'm proposing may be risky. It may be that somebody would say, "Why don't those college and university types shut up and stick to their own business?" But institutions of higher education were supposed to be beacons of quality in the larger sense, not just quality of what goes on in the classroom and the laboratory, but what goes on in the larger society, the quality of life of the people of the state. And not just writing prescriptions for what the curriculum should be in the schools, but constantly calling attention to those things, and saying, "How dare you have a school system where the roofs leak and where you can't put a computer in the classroom because it's going to get wet, and where the ceiling tiles are falling down?" I mean, this is crazy.