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.

On Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 2:00 to 4:00pm, in Rm 520 of Humanities I, I’ll be giving a talk in the Works in Progress Lecture Series of the Department of History. The topic is: Divine mobility and imperial power.  Was the notion of a mobile, single divinity as presented in Ezekiel 1 (vision of the throne-chariot) and Ezekiel 10-11, as well as in Exodus, a new development in the exilic period? If new, can it be explained satisfactorily as an atypical response to the Babylonian and Persian empires?  Or can it be understood as an episode in a general capacity that cultures have to borrow and translate religious stories and practices from each other?  I will argue for the first, while being mindful of histories of monolatry and monotheism that have been offered in recent years (among which those of J. Assmann, R. Albertz, A. Lemaire, R. Gnuse, Keel and Uehlinger, J. de Moor, W.H.C. Propp, M.S. Smith, M.L. West, J. Soler). It could be a commentary on this 6th c. BCE coin from the Persian period (Gaza):

Has the money raised by UC tuition, which is going up as state support is decreasing, been used for other purposes than instruction and student services? Professor Meister, President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations and Professor of Political and Social Thought at UC Santa Cruz, argues that this is so. Specifically, student tuition and certain fees have been pledged as part of the collateral for projects funded by General Review Bonds. In other words, UC’s capacity to build more facilities is increased by this novel and heretofore unjustified use of student tuition and fees. Protecting bond ratings is becoming more important than education, especially undergraduate education, no matter what the communication specialists say.

Please read the article by Professor Meister, They pledged your tuition, and his response to faculty questions.

There is a public meeting on campus this Thursday, Oct 29, 2009, at 7pm, in Classroom Unit 2, to discuss the current financial situation at UC. Professors Meister, Glantz, Connery, and several others will be leading the discussion.

One of the sentences I just read in Yudof’s interview with student media (see City on the Hill of Oct 22, 2009, p. 5) made me cringe:

We have to get the bigger message out there that [….] we are enormously important to the quality of your life, and we’re enormously important to the success of the university of California. Great research universities are a magnet for talented people. And if they come here and they stay, it benefits our population and it ultimately leads to more jobs and so forth.

True, research universities are a magnet for talented people who come from all over the world and are drawn especially to advanced programs (doctoral programs, post-docs). But two aspects of this question have become problems in my view: the structures built by universities such as the UC system, and which are so attractive, are in no small part funded thanks to the large population of undergraduates that UC has a mission to educate at the highest level but struggles more and more to do so. Second, the graduate schools, especially in technical fields, are populated by foreigners who have been selected by a complex process (social, educational, etc.) and have cost nothing to this state or nation. That is, about half of our graduate students (more in certain fields) come here in their early or mid-twenties after benefiting (very often) from a state-based education, a tax-payer paid education. It’s all benefit for this country and state indeed, as Yudof is claiming. It is also beneficial to the individuals involved, obviously. But what of the countries of origin? Perhaps the movement of transfer of wealth should reverse itself more than it is doing, and if it is not done on grounds of rationality and justice, what will do it?

Quickie on this film which I saw last night. The cruelties that greed may bring, I was aware of, but the detail is always fascinating: insurance policies taken out by companies on employees, unbeknownst to them apparently…. The film doesn’t dare take on Roosevelt or Obama: no remark or reflection on the role of war in the greed machinery. Yet, the social gains the film attributes to Roosevelt and unions (to be fair), aren’t they due also to the fact that so many millions worked for the war effort and it would have been hard not to reciprocate a little in terms of education, basic union rights (oh, not too far, the cold war helped a lot here to pull the rug from anything SOCIALISTIC), social security, etc.? Interesting to see this film as the quality of education is under attack (dropping really), fees are going up, hopes of good jobs a little uncertain these days, research centers working hard on the next capital-intensive engineering techniques.

While life escapes slowly from a body, yet remains entire to the end—to what end?—,I think of poppies and grass. The background screen to my text editor on this machine has the coquelicots field by Monet (Coquelicots près d’Argenteuil, 1873, Musée d’Orsay), and I’m looking at it in a different light.

The color contrast and especially the tragic miracle of the poppies used to fascinate me. I attach to them my own experience of the bountiful, happy, yet worrying harvesting of wheat fields in the summer, but also the story of the blooming of poppies in the disturbed battlefields of the Somme and Flanders in the first world war. Without forgetting the difficulty of finding them in fields nowadays, at least this past June in Brittany, since crops and techniques have changed so radically. Though thanks to a happy initiative by several local councils, field poppies and other traditional spring and summer flowers are now sown on the sides of the roads near the entrance to villages and towns. Now, I realize the woman and the boy on the right of Monet’s painting emanate from the purple sea of bleuets and pale grass, as do the ones on the left out of the dark trees and lighter grass. Colorful dust to colorful dust.

Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday: is it really surprising? It is of the interest of the liberal sides of our capitalist world to encourage things that work, especially in extremely difficult circumstances, as the financial upheavals of last year are only harbingers of much greater dangers, by which dangers I mean the risks attending the re-distribution of labor inputs, profits and zones of influence on a massive scale over the world, with anything but stasis having been achieved. We are entering uncharted territory (uncharted if we don’t read the history of empires), and a nudge towards peace making to the president of the only superpower in the world, a tottering one at that, perhaps is not wasted. To encourage hope cannot hurt, especially in an environment where the negotiation by a number of actors of access to resources may take more than the US’ often hypocritical and muscular appeal to “sharing”.

Saudi Arabia and neighboring oil-rich countries need the military and financial help (heft?) of Washington but perhaps more that of China and even Russia in their confrontation with Iran. Things are changing fast. China has been pouring money into refinery and pipeline operations in Iran (to the tune of at least 50 billion dollars), but will eventually need energy contracts not only with Iran but with everyone in sight, and that means Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the emirates. Washington is keeping an armada in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, as well as boots on the ground in Iraq, Koweit, Afghanistan, etc., that is, around the Persian Gulf and Iran. We are going to keep something like 50,000 troops in Iraq (how many non-Pentagon?), and about as many in Afghanistan. So, East and West of Iran. Aside: interesting that this modern empire of ours, pace the ideologues, still functions like the old empires, that is, with boots on the ground and ships on the seas (and in the air). Costly. How long can we keep it up if our industrial base and even our financial services go global and may end up under others’ control? The natural power over the Persian Gulf, however, with Iraq weakened for a long time, is Iran, which has had the good fortune of seeing its main regional enemy taken out for a long while thanks to Bush II’s war. They could and can sit back and poke the system, if it’s not too grand to say this (“system” for ad-hoc arrangements) via Hezbollah in Lebanon or worrisome nuclear developments. Hence the recent theater.

I can’t help but compare Israel’s present position within the US empire to that of the leaders of Samaria in Ezra-Nehemiah, under the Persian empire at the time (5th c. BC). Then, neighboring sub-provinces of a Persian empire that extended from nearly India to the south of Egypt and to Asia Minor could also be in competition and try to bring down their neighbor by pretending that they were arming (meaning: preparing to rebel). The leaders of Samaria accused their weak Judaean neighbors to the south of putting up defensive walls in Jerusalem: how peaceful was that? Could the Persian king accept this? Of course he could (if you could convince him that it was not military defense).

The key to peace in the area is going to be a sharing by the US and China, mainly, of the military responsibility over the area. Eventually, one could imagine China asking the Saudis and others to drop their opposition to the state of Israel. China’s interest in the question would be less religious and ideological than that of the US. And in turn Washington should pressure Israel to become a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. We would end up anyway with Iran and Israel as nuclear powers in the Middle East. But with a strengthened hand for China, and a politically diminished role (though not militarily yet) for the US vis-à-vis Iran and the Persian Gulf. How to pull out of the region and especially of the Persian Gulf in orderly fashion, this should be the main goal of an intelligent US policy. It will be impossible to win elections with it.

The communication specialists working for UC’s office of the president (communications@ucop.edu) just sent a message asking UC employees urgently to write their California political representatives and to advocate on UC’s behalf. Here is this letter. We should let them know how great UC is for everyone, how threatened its future is, and how badly we want higher education to be the priority of priorities in next year’s budget. Of course, this campaign is to be done on our own time (furloughs may be used…), it is genuinely personal and is in no way connected with anything official. To quote: “UC faculty and staff should communicate with members of the Legislature on their own time, and as individuals conveying their personal views – not as official spokespeople for the University. Employees also should avoid writing on official University letterhead and should keep in mind the University’s policies pertaining to incidental personal use of University electronic communications services and similar guidelines.” I would guess the electrons in the UC Davis link above are in trouble…

Below is what I answered. It is narrow and too civil, I’m afraid. Frankly, I’m most worried about public education in primary and secondary schools, already so battered, and about programs in higher education that are staffed by lecturers and do much of the heavy lifting.

Dear UC Officers,

I understand the urgency of the political appeal below. The extraordinary circumstances we are in, however, lead me to question the tone of the UC campaign. I think that many people in California, given events that are affecting them more dramatically than institutions, have doubts about UC being the source of their well-being; that apocalyptic predictions might be met with shrugs; and that the people’s political representatives are likely to side with the majority of their voters rather than a coalition of educational interests, however worthy the cause.

I wish the leaders of this great institution would start recognizing, and find ways to express genuinely, how much UC *owes* to the people of California over the generations, how much a good public primary and secondary education are even more essential and key to proper university training, before claiming *also* that UC “is a vital engine of opportunity, possibility, and leadership for California”. Of course, education, including higher education, is fundamental to sustained development and a richer life for everyone. But the tone of this campaign strikes me as tone-deaf in not mentioning that UC is what it is in great part because of the generosity and foresight of the people of the state. And perhaps it would not hurt to admit that the resources of the state have sometimes been misused at UC.

Furthermore, shouldn’t one confront more squarely and publicly the feeling that some aspects of the long, single-minded transformation of UC into a preeminent research institution have been at the cost of its other mission, the teaching of undergraduates? This latter mission was described as “paramount” in a letter to Chancellors from Interim Provost and Executive Vice President Pitts regarding furlough days (August 21, 2009). No matter how furlough days will be managed this year, one result is sure: the quality of education will suffer. But the truth is that this negative effect is one of a series of blows to the quality of undergraduate education. Given the increasing cost of this education to families and students, and given the transformations of an economy in which social differences become so apparent, why would the people of California respond positively to an appeal to greatness? Shouldn’t the approach of UC leaders take into consideration the real fears and frustrations of the voters and their leaders?