For additional background information

BFA faculty caught up with the marchers while they were stopped for lunch in Pinole and marched with them for a couple hours.

The Daily Cal has coverage of the second day of the 99 mile march and the faculty participation in it: “Day 2 of the ’99 Mile March for Education and Social Justice.’”

Approximately two dozen UC Berkeley faculty will join the “99 Mile March for Education and Social Justice” on Friday, March 2^nd.   The march departs Oakland on Thursday, March 1^st, and will arrive inSacramento on Monday March 5th for a rally on behalf of public education at theStateCapitolBuilding.

UC Berkeley faculty will join the march on Friday afternoon to walk the stretch fromRichmondtoVallejo.    “We are marching to draw attention to the plight of public education inCaliforniaand to implore Californians to re-invest in it,” said Berkeley Faculty Association Co-Chair and Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown.  “For all its resources, innovation and wealth,Californiahas sunk to nearly the bottom of the nation in per student spending, and our public higher education system, once the envy of the world, is in real peril.”

On Monday, March 5^th, UC faculty from several northernCalifornia campuses will join students, parents, workers, teachers and administrators from all sectors ofCalifornia public education for a rally at theCapitolBuilding inSacramento.   According to Richard Walker, Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, “we are going to the Capitol because re-funding public education is urgent, not only for reasons of equal opportunity and human development but because universal access to high quality education reduces the need for prisons, policing, welfare, and a range of other expensive social services.”

Brown agreed, “first-rate and widely accessible public education was the engine of this state for half a century….cutting that engine now is pure folly.”

The March 1^st-5^th “Days of Action on Behalf of Public Education” are endorsed by the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), the umbrella body for Faculty Associations on individual UC campuses.

For information about UC faculty participation in the 99 Mile March or the Rally at the Capitol, contact:

Eric Hays (staff): 916-502-6804; info@cucfa.org

Richard Walker (faculty):   510 295-3108; walker@berkeley.edu

Wendy Brown (faculty):   510 703-6513;  wlbrown@berkeley.edu

We call on all students, teachers, workers, and parents from all levels of education —pre-K-12 through higher education in public and private institutions— and all Occupy assemblies, labor unions, and organizations of oppressed communities, to mobilize on March 1st, 2012 across the country to tell those in power: The resources exist for high-quality education for all. If we make the rich and the corporations pay we can reverse the budget cuts, tuition hikes, and attacks on job security, and fully fund public education and social services.

We have the momentum, the numbers, and the determination to win. Education is not for sale. Let’s take back our schools. Let’s make history.

For more information click here to go to Occupy Education California web page or you can find out more on the facebook page here.

The project is inspired by the thirty-year history of All-UC Faculty Conferences that took place between 1944 to 1976 and in which faculty from all campuses and all disciplines came together for two days to discuss a topic of system-wide importance. At the end of these conferences the deliberations were presented to the President of the University. The upcoming Santa Barbara meeting, while not officially convened by the Academic Senate (as were past all-UC faculty conferences), nevertheless draws upon and invokes this UC tradition. It is intended to stimulate faculty re-engagement in envisioning the future of the University.

In addressing questions of long-term institutional significance, the meeting will use an iterative planning process known as a “charrette.” Charrettes were introduced as part of urban design in America starting in the mid-1960s, and they have now become an established practice to enlist community participation in planning, designing, and visioning. While not a panacea, charrettes represent a method of approaching the future– with all of its uncertainties–that is worthy of consideration in higher education.

Catherine Cole explains: “We want to see if the charrette method can help enlist faculty productively and effectively in addressing the complex and difficult problems that public higher education faces today. We also approach the weekend with the assumption that finances are only part of the UC’s present problems. The larger questions we must address are about institutional vision. Our challenges cannot be addressed by fiscal management alone.”

While the fiscal crisis cannot be overlooked, the organizers of the charrette believe that our problems arise from a crisis in vision as much as they do from lack of revenue. The University of California is in reaction mode. While the administration is reacting to the dramatic state de-funding of public education, many faculty and students are preoccupied with reacting to the administration’s reactions. The charrette organizers contend that reactions alone are unlikely to create a future that any of us really want to inhabit. “We are all so myopically preoccupied with the current crises,” Cole observes, “that we can’t seem to see or imagine a larger picture, much less a better one. We are not planning in the UC. We are only coping. And we’re barely doing that.”

The charrette is called “The Uses of the University 2050,” taking its title from Clark Kerr’s famous collection of essays on the University of California. The date of 2050 was chosen to stimulate long-term thinking.

To prepare for the charrette participants have read Kerr’s book and have had preliminary seminars on it. “Kerr’s book is a blue print of the modern research university, and it explains how the UC came to be the institution it is,” observes Ann Bermingham.

How will UC need to change to meet the challenges of 2050? How can it best serve the needs of the citizens of California? How can it remain a public institution? Is the University best served by remaining a single system with a central administration? What is the place of undergraduate education within the research university? These are some of the questions that need to be considered as the institution goes forward. Unlike the recent Commission on the Future convened by the UC Regents, or Kerr’s legendary California Master Plan of Higher Education, the upcoming charrette to be held at UCSB is a participatory, interdisciplinary, ground-up mode of planning, and one that makes use of a broad range of faculty experience and expertise. Faculty from all ten campuses and from Colleges of Letters and Sciences, as well as professional schools will participate. “My hope is that participants in the UCSB charrette will return to their campuses invigorated and inspired to continue the charrette process on their own campuses as together we plan and make the UC’s future,” says Bermingham.

The organizers have been successful in attracting support for the charrette from the UC-California Studies Consortium Systemwide Workshop, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang, UCSB Executive Vice Chancellor Gene Lucas, UCSB College of Letters and Science Executive Dean David Marshall, the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, Berkeley Faculty Association, the UCSB Faculty Association, and the Berkeley Townsend Humanities Center Laboratory “Making UC Futures.” “We are tremendously grateful to the Berkeley Faculty Association for their interest and support,” said Catherine Cole.

]]> http://ucbfa.org/2012/02/uses-of-the-university-2050-an-all-uc-charrette/feed/ 0 http://ucbfa.org/2011/12/bfa-signs-on-to-refund-california-coalition/ http://ucbfa.org/2011/12/bfa-signs-on-to-refund-california-coalition/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:31:04 +0000 DW http://ucbfa.org/?p=854 The BFA board has agreed to sign on to the ReFund California pledge for public education, following a poll of the members that was overwhelmingly in favor. ReFund California is a coalition of public interest groups seeking to get Wall Street banks to pay for reinvesting in housing, public education, and other public services. The pledge on public education can be found here.

For reportage on the meeting and the vote, see:
Daily Cal
Contra Costa Times
The Nation

The Council of UC Faculty Associations, on behalf of all UC faculty, is making a petition supporting OWS available for UC faculty to sign.

We urge you to read the petition and support it by clicking here.

This petition was originally developed by faculty at Columbia and Barnard. For an excellent short article on this growing movement and how it relates to higher education, read Prof. Jonathan Cole’s post about OWS on the Huffington Post, which is linked here.

•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