By Vic Cox

As college students marched in Sacramento’s streets to protest proposed state cuts to higher education budgets, the UC Academic Senate faculty through their Academic Council representatives urged the University’s top leaders to publicly oppose the cuts.

In an April 8 letter to UC President Robert Dynes, Academic Council Chair Michael Brown warned that failure to halt “yet another reduction to the current level of resources” allocated UC students could end up limiting enrollments as well as burdening this fall’s students with fees estimated to be as high as $10,500.

Speaking for the council and its Committee on Planning and Budget, whose report he cited, Brown, a UCSB professor of education, called on Dynes to “disclose the true level of fees required to fund the Regents’ Fall 2007 proposed budget.” In addition, the president and the Regents should publicly commit to “a minimum cost of instruction no lower than the current, already-reduced 2007-08 level,” and to take “the necessary steps” to sustain this cost level for each UC student, adjusted annually for increases.

The urgency of the council’s recommendations is based, in large part, on findings contained in “The Cuts Report,” an analysis of what a 10 percent reduction in UC state funding means to the system by the council’s budget and planning committee, led by Christopher Newfield, UCSB professor of English. The report and Brown’s letter can be found online at <http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/welcome.html> where they are listed as “Cuts Report.”

Among the report’s key findings are that, should the cuts be enacted into law, Gov. Schwartzenegger’s proposal would chop UC’s budget by “the same size as the 2003-04 cut to UC’s General Fund share ($410 million), more than four times large than UC Merced’s total budget…” This is despite the governor’s compliance with the compact with higher education systems.

Should this size of cut come to pass, the report’s authors found that the gap between the Regents’ proposed 2008-09 budget and the governor’s “will require a first-year increase in (student) fees of 45 percent.” Education and registration fees would rise from an average of $6,636 to $9,636; around $10,500 with campus fees, they wrote. And the 2008-09 cut is “unlikely to be a one-time event.”

Besides blocking “every one of the Regents’ and the faculty’s priorities,” the cuts would “accelerate the redefinition of the University of California away from a public university toward a ‘public-private partnership’,” the report concludes. Under this scenario, even obtaining large private sponsorships and donations would not prevent rising future student fees. “The University becomes quasi-private or poor—or perhaps both at once,” it adds.