Jeff Bleich, recent trustee of the California State University system and chair of the Board of Trustees for the past two years gives a kiss and tell story in a Nov 4, 2009, LA Times opinion. He rightly deplores the unraveling of public higher education in the state.

I’ll believe the stats he gives regarding the evolution of the state budget. The master plan of the sixties for higher education has been abandoned, he says. I say: it has been destroyed, and willfully. More below on this evil will. In any case, here are the broad numbers he gives on prisons and higher education. In the 1980s, 17% of the budget went to higher education, 3% for prisons. Now, 10% of our budget goes to prisons (24 new prisons built recently, how many for or by private companies?), and 9% for higher education institutions. Note that the share of the budget represented by those two expenditures of public money has remained constant, about 20%.

So Mr. Bleich now shouts from the mountain tops: Hear ye, this must stop, shame, let’s go back to greatness and promise. Ok, but where is the analysis of why this happened? Well, he does go a bit in the political choices made by the people of California and their political leaders, but not very far. He explains that

To win votes, political leaders mandated long prison sentences that forced us to stop building schools and start building prisons. [….] Leaders pandered by promising tax cuts no matter what and did not worry about how to provide basic services without that money. [….] To remain in office, they carved out legislative districts that ensured we would have few competitive races and leaders with no ability or incentive to compromise. Rather than strengthening the parties, it pushed both parties to the fringes and weakened them.

One needs to go further and explain why they “pandered”. The appeals to security are used precisely by the kind of politicians who need to hide their service to greed (e.g. by dismantling public energy companies, farming out of health and education to private companies, opposition of regulatory agencies concerning commerce, banking, insurance, real estate interests). Their appeal to security, public order, and mouthing of “unassailable freedoms”, are simply gross tricks and hypocritical covers. And all too often, too many of the representatives who don’t share these views still go along with the program, namely the dismantling of public services.