The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), of which the BFA is a member, held a meeting on January 25 to strategize for a meeting with President Michael Drake on February 8. CUCFA came up with six proposals:
- The national conversation on tuition-free and debt-free higher education makes it an opportune time to reclaim the California Master Plan for Higher Education through The $66 Fix.
- UC Cops Off Campus offers more than defunding; it offers an abolitionist vision of safety, security and mutuality without police violence;
- UC-AFT’s 20+ months of negotiation with UCOP calls for our solidarity with the union for job stability and career pathways for all teaching faculty;
- The climate action and justice movement and UCSD Green New Deal call for divestment from fossil fuels, and a turn to fossil-free finance;
- Faculty should be involved in decision-making around private technology platforms for teaching after the pandemic; and
- Colleagues at UCR call for no expansion without “proportionate funding.”
We see merit in many of these points, with some caveats. Importantly, “proportionate funding” (also called “rebenching,” meaning that undergraduate and graduate students count the same for funding allocations to individual campuses from the state) is a complex issue that will need more discussion before all UC campus faculty associations can present a unified front. Most importantly, we would wish for strategic focus as we approach President Drake, given his track record in the University of California system.
Although the promise of the Master Plan remains in the background, there have been a series of bad deals for UC since 1960. Most recently, negotiations over the state budget in 2015 led to a deal struck between President Janet Napolitano and Governor Jerry Brown, in which the UC conceded to no tuition increases for the foreseeable future in exchange for a one-time investment in the UC pension fund, and a change in the pension plan from 2016. We need a new bargain to unfreeze state investment in the UCs, as well as in California’s putatively progressive educational system more generally. Now, with a different governor, Gavin Newsom, and a new UC President with a commitment to racial justice, affordability, access and health, we face an opportunity we cannot afford to lose. We need Drake and Newsom to work together in a new partnership to make good on the promise of the UC. Connecting racial justice to increased state investment in high-quality public education is a perfect entry point for a reparative vision, to realize the university we stand for. This project could anchor a series of initiatives to be worked out carefully, through which we might imagine police-free campuses divested from the fossil fuel industry, serving more in-state students from underrepresented backgrounds, and producing more research committed fundamentally to the public good.
Sharad Chari and Paul Fine for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association.