•Public education for all is one of the great contributions of America to modern life, and was fought for by brilliant educators from John Dewey to Clark Kerr. It has always had doubters and enemies; it is at risk and will not survive unless we defend it once again.

•All of us must be able to defend public education to our colleagues, our students and the public. To do so, we must be able to articulate its basic purposes and priorities, as well as criticize the misunderstandings and mistakes of our administration, the Regents, and the dominant ideology.

•Public education is an investment in the young by the general public and older generations. It rests on the belief that our collective future, the future of this State and country, depends on their talents and wisdom. That is why it should be virtually free. It is not a personal investment by those with ample means, like private universities.

•Educating the young to the highest level has three essential purposes: improving their contribution to economic prosperity, making them into the most capable citizens and leaders, and fulfilling their potential for personal growth and satisfaction

•The 3-tier college system of California is a brilliant solution to reconciling two fundamental goals of higher education: open opportunity and the promotion of excellence among our students.

•In the University of California, research and teaching must always go together. Research informs the best teaching and teaching introduces students to the best minds. Yet this partnership is being eroded by those who think that research is the sole purpose of elite universities and that teaching is a lower activity that should be relegated to lecturers and graduate students.

•Research is a basic function of the university. Research advances the frontiers of human knowledge and has unexpected benefits for society and economy. Sometimes these benefits emerge years or decades later, which is why is it important to support basic research and not only marketable applications. Research is done by faculty across all the disciplines and its value is not to be measured simply by potential economic payoff.

•The natural sciences have much larger financial needs for running laboratories, and require greater outside finance resources (from government, foundations and industry), as well as greater needs for support from the university. This puts special demands on science faculty and the university. But it does not obviate the need for teaching nor does it put research funding above things such as good classrooms and libraries.

•Funding for public education is being eroded all across the country and around the world, as part of the larger shift to neoliberalism, i.e., away from government and toward private enterprise in all social provision. This is not a California problem alone nor a short-term dip due to the Great Recession.

•The university leadership is obsessed with money, putting aside all considerations of UC’s larger values. All they think of is raising tuition, attracting private donations, and garnering more research grants, along with cost-cutting. In so doing, they endanger the future of the public university and make UC more and more like a private institution.

•UC and Berkeley are not “brands” like Coca-Cola to be marketed for revenues. We do not put billboards on campus and we should not be in the business of selling on-line courses and external degrees. We can make use of the internet and other technologies to reach a broader audience, but with great care not to degrade our educational mission.

•The current crisis is being used by the university leadership to make hasty decisions without adequate faculty control and to make end-runs around the university community. Faculty governance was central to making this the greatest public university in the world, and it has been badly eroded. Faculty cannot remain quiet, but need to speak out through the Senates and Faculty Associations on all 10 campuses.

•Extreme salary inequality has demoralized many younger faculty and many of those most dedicated to the university. Their ire is directed at both overpaid administrators and extreme ‘star salaries’ for some faculty. This university became great by hiring well, promoting well and nurturing the best minds. Yet today it is under-paying its younger faculty while spending large amounts playing the free-agent game at the top.

•University leaders, and all of us, need to speak to the people of California. All indications are that they support the higher education system and are willing to pay for it. But the political system is incapable of overcoming ideological opposition to taxes and rational budgeting and our leaders are unwilling and unable to provide political leadership in what is a profoundly political debate over the future of the state.

•Quite modest taxes would restore full funding to the university and state colleges. We calculate that a mere $40 per year by the median tax-payer would return the system to sufficient revenues without the fee increases of the last 10 years. Why can’t this be done? (for further information go to http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/)

•We believe that faculty, students, staff, parents and alumni could be mobilized to put unprecedented pressure on the legislature to re-fund public education in the State of California, if the President and Chancellors across the system would mobilize the greater UC community and provide the leadership we all sorely need.

The Berkeley Faculty Association
Wendy Brown and Chris Rosen, Co-Chairs
Richard Walker, Vice-Chair
September 21, 2011

Proposed Senate resolution on online evaluation 4-14

The Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA) is deeply concerned about the state of the University of California Retirement Plan (UCRP). The UCRP’s Defined Benefit Plan is billions of dollars in arrears because contributions were suspended twenty years ago.

The failure to fund UCRP has several causes, the most fundamental of which is the permanent fiscal crisis of the state of California and the political failure to support our system of public higher education – including the pension fund. The University made things worse by halting contributions to the fund over the same 20-year period. The effects of these failures have been multiplied because other funding sources, such as federal agencies and private foundations, followed suit and suspended their contributions. Thus, the university’s liability for its pension obligations, which it can neither morally nor legally walk away from, has snowballed out of control to become a threat to UC’s future.

UC and its employees must resume contributions to avert disaster. The President’s Task Force on Post Employment Benefits put forward three proposals for how to deal with the pension fund shortfall: Options A, B and C. President Yudof selected the best of these, Option C. Nonetheless, BFA still has severe reservations about the President’s plan. We therefore urge the Regents to adopt an alternative plan, Process D, outlined below.

We object to the President’s plan on three primary grounds. The first is that it fails to close UCRP’s remaining unfunded liability. The university needs to raise $4.5 billion to bridge the gap between the funds raised by increased contributions and the sum needed to fully fund UCRP prior to 2018. The plan fails because it addresses “Normal Cost”, i.e., the amount set aside now to enable the fund to pay benefits in the future, but does not solve the problem of “Abnormal Cost”, i.e., the deficit in the pension fund because of past failures to contribute. UC must ramp up its contribution more quickly to the proposed 20%, and more. The President’s proposal to borrow from UC’s Short-Term Investment Pool (STIP) and/or restructure debt using STIP appears inadequate to the job.

A shortfall of this sort paves the way for a continuing cycle of more contribution increases, more benefit cuts, lagging salaries, more student fee increases, more layoffs – and eventually the collapse of UCRP. It is simply not an option to let the funding gap carry over to an unnamed future in the hopes that something will be done to save us.

BFA’s second objection to the President’s Plan is that it shifts too much of the burden of restitution for UCRP onto faculty and staff. The plan requires the majority of UC employees to make higher contributions in return for greatly reduced benefits. The aim is to increase contributions to UCRP from the current 3.5% to 10% of salaries. On top of this, UC intends to raise the employee contribution for health insurance from 11% to 30% of the premium (and no one knows how high insurance premiums will go). The result is that the ratio between UC’s employer contribution and employees contribution is shrinking, from as much as 4 to 1 in the past to less than 2 to 1.

These increased contributions represent a substantial cut in take-home pay for most employees and a big hit to ordinary faculty – who will take it much harder than top executives and superstar professors earning $200,000 to $800,000 a year. This inequality will become more egregious with the two-tier plan. Be forewarned that the effect on faculty recruitment and retention will be severe, which will hurt the university. UC’s excellent health and retirement benefits have, in the past, been a bulwark of the public university against the higher salaries and other assets of the private universities.

The third reason BFA objects to the President’s Plan is because of its regressive impact. The flat-rate increase in contributions discriminates against low and mid-wage UCRP members. Moreover, it harms future employees (from 2013) by putting them in a “new tier” which requires lower contributions but offers reduced benefits. Current plan members may exercise a one-time choice to remain in the main tier or opt into the new tier; higher contributions in the main tier would pressure them to do the latter – a short-sighted decision that could harm their retirement incomes. The new tier plan saves even more money – and further reduce pensions – by pushing back by 10 years the age factors on which benefits are based. It creates a gross new inequality among UC employees.

Such two-tier systems have been foisted on many workers over the last thirty years, and the result is too many Americans with insufficient pensions to enjoy a normal retirement after a lifetime of work. It will not go down well with UC employees and certainly not with the majority of faculty who are not in business or medical schools, not making big consulting fees, nor among the superstars earning $200-$600,000. [Options A and B are even more regressive because they propose to save money by "integrating" UCRP benefits with Social Security, by subtracting each retiree's Social Security income from her UCRP pension and linking the age factor to salary scale. We reject this outright].

BFA urges the Regents to adopt an alternative strategy for restoring UCRP to financial health: Process D. Process D is not a financial blueprint but a means of developing one – because the crisis facing the university is not just financial but one of institutional viability. If the Regents and UCOP impose a bad solution on their employees, they are likely to run into a wall of dissent, internal division, and delay due to litigation; alienation of an ever more financially burdened public and student; and a crippling flight of faculty from a declining institution to private and public universities offering better deals.

What is needed at this point is an entirely new approach to developing a solution to the pension crisis: a professionally-facilitated process that brings together all the parties who have an urgent stake in resolution of the problem, including administration, faculty, staff and students. The aim must be to educate all parties about the depth of the crisis and the sacrifice that is demanded, and to create trust that the eventual Pension Plan worked out will be in the best interests of all in terms of fairness and future security.

We therefore call on the Regents to reject Options A, B, and C, and to initiate Process D to develop an effective and equitable plan for a financially sustainable UCRP. Our full reasoning is provided in a longer report, available on our website, ucbfa.org.

October 14, 2010

As most faculty know, UC’s pension plan, the University of California Retirement Plan (UCRP), faces a dire problem of a growing unfunded liability, as funds have not been contributed to it for nearly twenty years now, leaving investment income as its only source of growth. As most faculty also know all too well, at their meeting in September 2010 the Regents adopted a schedule for the resumption of contributions by plan members not represented by unions (including faculty) and by UC itself. However, these contributions address only one small piece of the problem — costs that the plan is incurring right now — but not costs associated with the plan’s problematic recent history and other current pressures against traditional pension plans. At their meeting in December 2010, the Regents will be considering changes to UCRP to address these larger issues.

The Board of the BFA strongly objects to many of the changes that are being discussed, and urgently wants BFA members and other faculty to be informed about the issue. Our objections, and also our own suggestions for dealing with the problem, are outlined in a report available by clicking on the following link: BFA Response to PEB Task Force Recommendations, 10-14-2010

Its key points are as follows.

The President’s Task Force on Post Employment Benefits (PEB Task Force), appointed in March 2009 to review all such benefits and develop a plan to restore UCRP to financial health, has put forward two preferred plans, “Option A” and “Option B.” Seven Task Force members issued a dissenting statement arguing for “Option C,” a plan considered by the Task Force but not ultimately put forward. The Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate reviewed all three plans at a special meeting October 6, and expressed opposition to A, conditional tolerance of B and a preference for C.

The Board of the BFA, however, finds neither A, B nor C acceptable. A and B are severely regressive, discriminating against plan members in lower and middle income ranges by reducing benefits according to income received from Social Security. C does not do this, and so is preferable to them. However, A, B and C all discriminate against future employees by putting them in a “new tier” of the plan which would require lower contributions but also offer reduced benefits; current plan members could exercise a one time “choice” to remain in the “main tier” or opt into the new tier, and increases in contributions in the main tier would pressure them to do the latter. The new tiers in A, B and C also save money by pushing back by ten years the age factors on which benefits are based. The new tiers in A and B (but not C) also save money (a great deal of money) by “integrating” UCRP benefits with Social Security benefits – i.e. by subtracting each retired member’s social security income from their UCRP pension check – and by linking the age factor to salary scale.

Astonishingly, these degradations of UCRP would not even solve the problem of its unfunded liability. All of them conflate two fundamentally different costs. One is the Normal Cost of the plan (the present value of service credit accrued by members in any given year; i.e., the amount needed to be set aside now to enable the plan to pay the benefits associated with that service in the future), a cost which is routinely and reasonably funded by contributions from both employees and employers. The other is what we call the “Abnormal Cost” threatening our plan, the special financial burden it now bears because of the ongoing failure to adequately fund it. That failure has multiple, complex causes, including, most fundamentally, the political failure of the state of California to support its own system of public higher education. The effects of this on UCRP have been especially dramatic, not only because pension plans by their nature depend on long time spans between when contributions are made and benefits paid, but also because, when the state has not contributed to the plan, neither have the many other funding sources which pay the salaries of many UC employees, even as those employees have accrued benefits under the plan. It is in this way that UC’s liability for its pension obligations, which it can neither morally nor legally walk away from, have snowballed out of control and become a threat to UC as a whole. Recent attempts to find money to pay down the liability by raising in-state student fees and by increasing enrollment of out-of-state students paying even higher fees only replace one threat to UC with another, and put the burden of solving the problem on those who had no role in creating it.

We believe that the complexity of the problem for UCRP of the Abnormal Cost, and the fact that that cost is not simply a financial problem, require an entirely new approach, taking full account of the interaction of UCRP with broader issues of compensation. Further negotiation will be necessary in any case, because for the many plan members represented by unions, plan changes, including any resumption of contributions by employees, are subject to collective bargaining as well as litigation. In recent years, progress has been made on complex environmental problems through a new kind of professionally mediated process which brings together all the parties who, whatever their historical grievances, have an urgent stake in resolution of the problem. We believe that solving UCRP’s problem requires such a mediated process, as outlined in our report. We call that process, and the fundamental principles of fairness we insist that it respect, “Process D.”

We call on President Yudof and the Regents to reject Options A, B, and C, and instead initiate Process D to develop an effective and equitable plan for a financially sustainable UCRP.

Note: A letter (which you can read by clicking here:BFA Letter to Yudof Re: Pension Crisis, along with this report, was sent to the UC Office of the President on 10/14/2010.

Time: Wed, October 6, 11:45-12:45
Location: Center for South Asia Studies Conference Room, 20 Stephens Hall (note that the entrance to this space is just off the plaza between Moses and Stephens Halls as you walk towards Barrows Hall)

Speakers: Associate Vice Provost Angy Stacy; Vice Provost Shelly Zedeck; Alice Jordan of the Student Parent Center; and members of the audience.

Concerned BFA members are welcome to attend

You can download by clicking here: Rethink UCB

Flyer text:

Rethink UC

Paying more for less? While student fees skyrocket, programs and courses are
slashed. Welcome to UC, your education begins here.

Paying more
Student fees have increased 300% since 2001. Just last year the UC Regents approved a 32% fee increase, and they are already considering another double-digit increase this year.

Getting less
Class sizes are increasing. Courses and services are being cut. Students may not be able to graduate on time. We are losing diversity.

Subprime lending alive at UC
Students are taking out record levels of debt in order to pay their fees. Many spend decades struggling to pay it off.

Call to Action on October 7th
Rally 12pm at Sproul!

The historic actions, protests and strikes of last fall and spring showed our state and the nation that students, teachers, staff, and our communities are determined to fight against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and the shrinking access to public education and services. However, our fight is far from over. On October 7th, supporters of public education plan to unite and demand accessible, affordable and quality education for all. www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com

Alternative Commission on the Future:
Proposals by UC’s Commission on the Future would limit access by reducing enrollments, shift costs to students through fee increases, and erode quality by reducing teaching staff and rushing degrees via online courses. The Alternative Commission on the Future has better solutions – check them out at: www.ucaft.org/content/alternative-commission-proposals-future-uc

Hold UC Executives Accountable:
After years of scandals, the state is finally forcing UC’s books open through a major public audit to uncover the extent of waste, fraud, and abuse within the UC. It’s time to hold UC executives accountable. Stay tuned for reports from the state audit and spread the word! Get more info at www.ucwatch.org

Register & Vote on Nov 2 to Protect UC! www.sos.ca.gov

YES on Prop 25
Majority Vote to support a simple majority to pass the budget. This will help the legislature protect education www.endbudgetgridlock.com

Tax Big Oil
Legislators are proposing a tax on California oil production that would raise about $2 billion for state colleges, community colleges and universities annually. California is the only major oil-producing state that lacks a natural-gas and oil severance tax. www.facebook.com/FairTuition

Five minutes before midnight on June 30, movers hauled the last boxes from a spectacular rented home in the Oakland Hills. The tenant’s lease was about to expire, and in his haste to get out, he left behind thousands of dollars of damage to the hardwood floors and Venetian plastered walls.

The tenant was Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California. His midnight move was the latest chapter in a two-year housing drama that has cost the university more than $600,000 and has drawn senior U.C. officials into an increasingly time-consuming and acrimonious ordeal over the president’s private residence.

The effort to resolve Mr. Yudof’s housing problems has taken place while the U.C., the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system, struggles with one of the worst financial crises in its history, including layoffs, student protests and tuition increases.

After six years as chancellor at the University of Texas, Mr. Yudof arrived here in 2008, vowing to bring fiscal responsibility to the 10-campus U.C. system. He chose not to live at university-owned Blake House, the traditional presidential mansion, which the university estimates requires $10 million of renovations and repairs.

Instead, Mr. Yudof, 65, moved with his wife into a 10,000-square-foot, four-story house with 16 rooms, 8 bathrooms and panoramic views. He said he needed the house, which rented for $13,365 a month by the end of the lease and was paid for by U.C., to fulfill his obligation to host functions for staff members, donors and visiting dignitaries.

Mr. Yudof held 23 such functions over a two-year period, according to the university. He also ordered a list of improvements and repairs — including air conditioning and 12 phones — that drove up costs and, according to staff members, tied up university officials in meetings and lengthy negotiations on issues ranging from water bills to gopher eradication.

After the Yudofs vacated the property at the end of June, Brennan Mulligan, the landlord, informed university officials that he intended to keep the U.C.’s $32,100 security deposit. Mr. Mulligan requested an additional $45,000 to cover the repairs for hundreds of holes left from hanging art, a scratched marble bathtub, a broken $2,000 Sivoia window shade and other claims.

“At some point, I got a call from the general counsel, and I’m like, ‘Why am I talking to the general counsel?’ ” said Mr. Mulligan, 40, a boyish Hong Kong-based business consultant and a U.C. Berkeley graduate who bought the Oakland house in 2003 after selling his bike-messenger bag company, Timbuk2.

“To me it’s like, ‘Is this how they spend their time?’ ” Mr. Mulligan said.

Among Mr. Mulligan’s list of complaints was the university’s failure to respond to a May 2010 notification from the East Bay Municipal Utility District that the district suspected a water leak on the property. By the time the leak was discovered, shortly after Mr. Yudof moved, the house’s bimonthly water bill had spiked to nearly $5,000 and 1.2 million gallons of water had trickled into the Oakland Hills, according to copies of the bills.

“It took the plumber 10 minutes to find the leak, literally 10 minutes,” Mr. Mulligan said at an evening interview at the house, the lights of San Francisco visible beyond the glass façade of the living room. “There was a broken pipe and a pool of water and I was just like, ‘Wow, this looks like that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s just coming out.’ ”

Mr. Yudof said he was unaware of the leak.

On Aug. 5, Mr. Yudof’s aides presented Mr. Mulligan with a settlement agreement that would allow him to keep the security deposit and receive an additional $19,759.05. The university presented the written agreement to Mr. Mulligan on the same day The Bay Citizen filed a public-records request for information about the university’s expenditures on the house.

On Aug. 8, Mr. Yudof killed the deal.

He said he had been aware of the university’s discussions with Mr. Mulligan but balked at the settlement when he learned about the “outrageous and ridiculous” terms. He said his decision was unrelated to the public-records request.

“I thought it was totally inappropriate what they were doing,” Mr. Yudof said of his staff. “I don’t have to sign a settlement proposal drafted by the staff on this or any other matter. And I didn’t.”

In an interview last week, Mr. Yudof attributed the housing problems and higher-than-expected costs to Mr. Mulligan, whom he described as “the landlord from hell.”

He said Mr. Mulligan was often unresponsive to maintenance requests, and in one instance missed a payment to a vendor, forcing the university to pick up the tab for a significant repair.

According to university records, U.C. spent $19,423 to repair a two-person elevator that sometimes stalled between floors. E-mails released by U.C. under The Bay Citizen’s records request show that Mr. Yudof’s wife, Judith — who has knee problems that make it difficult to climb stairs — gently implored Mr. Mulligan to pay a delinquent bill from the elevator’s installer, which refused to service the elevator until the bill was paid.

The university ultimately used another company to repair the elevator; on one occasion U.C. paid $3,180.24 in overtime ($530.04 per hour) to complete the work, according to a copy of the bill.

Mr. Mulligan said he unknowingly missed the payment to the elevator company but then immediately sent a check by express mail. He said he did not see a bill from the university until he entered into negotiations for damages two years later and U.C. officials sought reimbursement.

The university paid $70,806.73 to move Mr. Yudof to Oakland from Texas and $39,107.30 to move him again when Mr. Mulligan refused to extend the lease. The frantic move from the Oakland location lasted from 7:30 a.m. to 1:45 a.m. the next day, according to billing records. During the three-week search for a new house, the Yudofs took up residence in a discounted suite at the Claremont Hotel & Spa in the Berkeley Hills, at a cost of $8,394.16 to the U.C.

“I don’t think it was a good experience,” Mr. Yudof said, referring to living in the Oakland house. “Under the circumstances, it was the best I could do.” The home was comparable to that of other university presidents, he added.

The U.C. spent $127,443 on security at the house, following threats against Mr. Yudof and several visits to the house by protesters.

Despite the near settlement, university officials said they intended to go to mediation with Mr. Mulligan and were prepared to litigate to recover the security deposit and other damages.

The money spent on the house came from a private endowment. It was a relatively small sum for a $20 billion, 180,000-employee public university that supports 10 campuses, five medical centers and a national laboratory. But the lavish spending and the numerous hours spent by university officials managing Mr. Yudof’s personal affairs have chafed some members of his team.

“He essentially turned the Office of the President into his personal staff,” a university official said.

Much of the activity took place out of public view. The Office of the President filed at least six reports of “interim actions” related to the house that took place between public meetings of the Board of Regents.

Mr. Yudof and his wife have settled into a new home in Lafayette. The rent is $11,500 a month. The house “potentially will save the university as much as 25 percent of what was required to maintain the previous residence,” according to a report filed to the board.

The new house is 4,837 square feet, less than half the size of the Mulligan residence.

Tucked in the new lease is a provision designed to help protect the landlord against damages incurred. “Landlord must approve any items affixed to the walls,” it reads.

sfainaru@baycitizen.org

Also available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/education/22bcyudof.html?src=mv

Much of the news surrounding the University of California system has involved whether the network of universities will be able to survive its current budgetary crisis without shrinking in size or quality. In that context, it is no surprise that Christopher Edley Jr.’s plan to use online education to expand the university’s footprint “from Kentucky to Kuala Lumpur” has turned some heads — and churned some stomachs.

Edley, dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, has been using his position as co-chair of the education and curriculum working group for the UC Commission on the Future to advocate for an ambitious expansion of the system’s online arm that could eventually include fully-online bachelor’s degree programs designed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.

California is not the only state eyeing online education as a way to increase access and cut costs. But while many states are looking to use the popular medium to reach adult learners or save money at non-elite institutions, the University of California is a top-shelf research university that boasts one of the country’s most competitive undergraduate programs. If the system does end up offering an online bachelor’s degree, it would be a big step for online education.

Edley’s idea is still in its early stages and has not been adopted into any strategic plan. The University of California Board of Regents has offered only informal, preliminary support, and the systemwide Faculty Senate has approved only a pilot program for 25 to 40 low-level, high-volume courses — not a full-blown online degree program. Still, the rhetoric and sprawling, transformative vision Edley has been pushing have been received favorably by some while eliciting alarmed responses from others.

Members of a union representing graduate student-instructors at UC, finding Edley’s plan for “squadrons” of teaching assistants serving on “the frontline of online contact” more than a little dystopic, showed up to a regents’ meeting in May wearing patches that read “Dean Edley = Class(room) Enemy.” Edley’s goals for online education at UC were primarily profit-driven, they argued in a statement, and would “undoubtedly end in the complete implosion of public higher education in the embattled state of California.” Some professors and media outlets have expressed similar concerns.

Edley says that the implosion of the system is precisely what the online program would help prevent. The law dean-turned-futurist argues that even if a combination of spending cuts and state aid keeps the system afloat through its current crisis, the system is not equipped to enroll the 45,000 additional students it would need to close its $5 billion budget deficit.

“We face an enrollment gap, rejecting more and more eligible Californians,” Edley wrote recently in an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle. “And a UC education likely will be decreasingly affordable, especially for the middle class… Our purpose is to advance knowledge while democratizing excellence. To do that, we must innovate.”

Edley says it is important that a pilot program affirm the quality of online courses before further stages of his vision are put into action, but he also seems to believe a future in which UC offers online bachelor’s degrees is inevitable, and that the university should take steps toward doing so with all practical speed. “Eventually, there will be online credit-bearing courses and B.A. degrees in the so-called quality sector,” his working group wrote in its proposal for the pilot. “…UC should be first, as soon as possible, and our ambitions should err on the side of boldness.”

The Pivotal Pilot

The pilot, which could begin as soon as this fall, would have a team of professors and course designers move 25 to 40 entry-level courses from the classroom to the Web in an effort to assess the “effectiveness, cost, and sustainability of online education.” Most of the UC courses that qualify as likely candidates are oriented to mathematics and the natural sciences — calculus, chemistry, physics, economics, etc. — but the system’s highest-volume courses also include freshman composition, sociology, and world history.

Functionally, the pilot courses would be similar to the 78 credit-bearing courses currently offered across the UC system; only students currently enrolled in the university would take the courses, and there would be no fully-online degree track. The difference is that the pilot would focus on using the latest online teaching tools — particularly synchronous features such as live chats and videoconferencing — to replicate the quality of the in-person survey courses they would replace. As the pilot goes forward, a research team will be tasked with exploring a number of questions, including learning outcomes, cost, faculty workload, the ability to prevent cheating, and the relative effectiveness of different methods within the realm of online teaching.

While Edley’s working group recommended in June that the university wrap up the pilot and interpret the data it produces “no later than fall 2011,” an official response issued by the Berkeley division of the Academic Senate on July 20 described this timetable as “impossibly optimistic,” noting the need for multiple trials and deliberate analysis. Edley admits now that the pilot could take considerably longer (“I personally am prone to err on the side of impatience,” he says), and that he is leery of outpacing support from the faculty.

“Timing will be inevitably determined by a mixture of substance and politics,” he says. “That’s the way the world works.”

Still, Edley says he hopes the pilot progresses as quickly as possible, and he recommended as much in a presentation last month with the Board of Regents, which has taken a particular interest in the law dean’s plan for global expansion and nine-figure profits. The university could not immediately provide the details of its financial modeling, but other documents suggest that the money would come from tuition, fees, and perhaps licenses for “premium access” to course content. Daniel Greenstein, the vice provost for academic planning at UC, tells Inside Higher Ed that the revenue projections are “untested assumptions” based on “what we see out there in the world.” Testing profitability, Greenstein says, would be one goal of the pilot program.

Pockets of Dissent

On the whole, professors have supported preliminary steps toward expanding UC’s online offerings. In May, the Faculty Senate unanimously endorsed the pilot program. Several campus-level faculty senates have even offered up their own courses as guinea pigs. “Advancing technology,” wrote a task force dispatched by the Academic Senate last year to study the issue, “may offer a significant opportunity that UC has yet to exploit, although it is well-positioned to do so.”

But some UC professors, like the graduate students’ union, remain skeptical. The Berkeley Faculty Association — a group of about 300 professors — put out a report in May that did not condemn the pilot but voiced concerns about where Edley wants it to lead.

The association was particularly unnerved by the idea of graduate student-instructors being the “frontline of contact” with online students, as Edley put it. For some, that sort of talk evokes a model many for-profit institutions have used to keep payroll expenses low and administrative control high: have full-time faculty put together the syllabus, then hire less-expensive adjuncts to deliver it. Faculty resistance to this sort of University of Phoenix-inspired arrangement was a major factor in last year’s implosion of the University of Illinois Global Campus, a similarly ambitious online effort. (Other large online programs based at large state universities have been more successful: UMassOnline enrolls nearly 50,000 students and earned the University of Massachusetts $56.2 million last year, and Penn State University’s World Campus has garnered similar returns.)

Wendy Brown, a political science professor at Berkeley who co-authored the Faculty Association report, told Inside Higher Ed that she has no qualms with a pilot going forward. What she worries about is the way Edley has been framing it as a first step toward something larger and perhaps more controversial. Inferring from Edley’s idea of graduate student-instructors forming the “frontlines of contact” with online students, Brown says she worries the law dean’s proposed cyber-campus would contribute to the displacement of full-time faculty members with adjuncts — a perennial concern among traditional faculty everywhere, given the decline of tenure and the popularity of the Phoenix model. “This is absolutely part of a larger set of proposals referred to by the Commission on the Future that describe the necessity of shrinking the letter-rank faculty and increasing part-time faculty,” says Brown.

Edley says this is not his agenda at all. He says he imagines online courses as being structured just like the existing face-to-face versions they would replace: A professor develops the syllabus and delivers the lessons, and graduate assistants lead discussion groups and grade assignments, under the professor’s supervision. Edley says that rather than enabling layoffs, the cyber-campus would prevent them, and might even allow the university to grow its full-time faculty in a way that it could never hope to under current conditions. “Our financial estimates make very clear that this might allow us to expand the number of ‘ladder’ faculty, rather than substituting adjuncts,” he says.

Other critics fear for the university’s brand. “UC faculty members are skeptical now, but in the future, employers and graduate schools will be,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle in a July 18 editorial. The Berkeley Faculty Association report alluded to similar concerns about the capability of graduates who earned their degrees apart from “the academic-intellectual benefits of university culture.” Both seemed to imply that a University of California degree encompasses something beyond just a sequence of classroom sessions; it also means that the degree-holder has, in a less tangible way, benefited intellectually and socially from spending years immersed in campus life.

“Tons of research” supports the thesis that the online platform itself does not diminish in-class learning in many disciplines, says John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium and editor of the Journal of Asynchronous Learning. But what about the intellectual and social growth that purportedly occurs outside the classroom at traditional colleges? How important is it, from the standpoint of a graduate’s capability, and a university’s reputation, that students take part in the extracurricular parts of campus culture that online education has so far been at a loss to replicate?

Edley says that question interests him, and that he wants to explore it in the pilot “if we can.” But he points out that any progress toward an answer would be limited, since most students in the pilot will be currently enrolled students from the campus. Really, one would need a sample of students taking all their courses remotely. A draft prospectus for the pilot program mentions that some “fully distant” students could be studied through summer sessions and “cross-campus and dual enrollments”; but in order to get the strongest sample one would need an online bachelor’s program already in place. And even then, it might be years before researchers could have any idea of the post-graduate success of fully online students relative to their on-campus peers.

Really, the law dean says, people need to let go of the idea that the two types of experience can be compared in a tidy, definitive way. “Quality,” says Edley, might mean something completely different in the online world. “What will be key,” he says, “is making sure we don’t define quality as replicating or simulating everything that goes on on campus, but instead ask what is fundamental to quality, and then examine the trade-offs.” This, of course, is also an ambitious research question — one that could also be hard to resolve within a pilot.

Selling The Big Picture

Edley has hardly been deterred by his critics. His working group brought an expanded set of recommendations to a June meeting of the Commission on the Future, advising that the commission tell President Mark G. Yudof to, among other things, prepare a systemwide business plan leveraging online courses to “generate a large new revenue stream” that would prop up the system’s brick-and-mortar operation. Long-term net revenue from these courses “would be comfortably into 9 figures,” the group predicted.

The manifesto-like document also notes that while an aggressive approach to building the proposed cyber-campus might come with “internal political and bureaucratic risks,” it would be the best way to “mobilize support from potential donors, the legislature, and the general public.” Edley told Inside Higher Ed that he imagines the university might like to get its feet wet by first running a fully-online associate degree program before taking the plunge on the bachelor’s, but he reiterated the sense of urgency he has been trying to promote about beating peer institutions to the punch.

The Commission on the Future discussed the online manifesto at a meeting last month. “The consensus was that yeah, this is something to be moved forward — to be kept on the table when other things were taken off the table,” says Steve Montiel, a spokesman for the president’s office.

Edley’s plan won him a coveted audience with the Board of Regents this month. The law school dean took a more restrained tack in his presentation, emphasizing that fully online undergraduate degrees were “not on the table right now,” according to a copy of his PowerPoint presentation; in a slide listing things the Commission on the Future is “likely” to propose, he left off fully-online degree programs, predicting only that the commission would call for an “expeditious execution of the Online Pilot Project.” He also reiterated that faculty support would be essential to the fate of the cyber-campus, and that “large-scale deployment” would work only “if quality is achievable.”

The meeting was purely informational, and it would likely be a while before the Regents voted on any formal action related to Edley’s broader vision. But apart from one or two skeptics, the governing body took favorably to the idea of UC offering an online undergraduate degree program down the line if the pilot pans out, says Montiel. The Commission on the Future, meanwhile, would likely revisit Edley’s plans either next month or in the fall, he says. The commission will likely make its formal recommendations by the end of the year.

So all eyes are on the pilot program, on whose success any subsequent transformation of the system’s undergraduate curriculums would appear to turn. Beyond that, the question is to what extent the UC faculty — which so far has been guaranteed final say over any online course — would continue to support the administration if it moves forward on some of the more controversial aspects of Edley’s vision.

At a meeting of the systemwide Faculty Senate last week, representatives expressed general wariness of “the proposal to accelerate and broaden an online instruction program and to initiate planning for a coordinated approach” to a larger push for online education.

The general mood was clear, says Fiona Doyle, chair of the Berkeley division of the senate: Go ahead with the pilot — but as far as fully online bachelor’s degrees stamped with the seal of the University of California, those kids in Kentucky and Kuala Lumpur should not hold their breath just yet.

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— Steve Kolowich

The article can be found by clicking here

You can download the letter by clicking here: BFA Opposes Cuts to Early Childhood Education

The letter reads, in part: “The Berkeley Faculty Association strongly opposes the elimination of this program. Responsibility for children can be a huge barrier to UC access. Indeed, it can be as much an obstacle to low income parenting students, especially female students, as low income itself. We therefore urge the administration to restore to the budget of the campus childcare programs the subsidy for the infants and toddlers of low-income students. With tuition skyrocketing and the state slashing programs for low income Californians, this is not the time for us to abandon our low income, parenting students. Rather, this is precisely when we must rise to the challenge of meeting their needs.”

click here to be redirected to the report at the AAUP website