COLUMN LEFT / TOM HAYDEN : The Cannibals Gorge on State Universities : Student fee hikes foreclose access to many thousands.

My generation criticized modern universities for being impersonal bureaucracies anchoring the status quo. But at least they were affordable, and their doors were open to aspiring newcomers.

Now that has changed. The doors of higher education in California are closing, and across the country universities are following the same course.

It’s called “downsizing,” an impersonal mechanical term, spawned in the corporate world of layoffs and restructuring. I first noticed the phrase in a 1990 letter from Gov. Pete Wilson opposing a bill that I had carried to reaffirm California’s Master Plan for Higher Education.

The master plan, drafted in the expansive 1960s, directed the growth of low- or no-cost access to higher education for millions of Californians. This was seen as a worthy public investment, and my 1990 legislation proposed to continue the policies into the decade ahead. In addition to the 1.2 million students enrolled in 1990, another 800,000 qualified applicants, many of them ethnic minorities, would be seeking to enroll in the ‘90s. The Legislature envisioned building three new UC campuses with voter-approved bonds.

But the governor had a downsized vision: Higher education would have to cut back, not just in 1990 but for the decade.

In the past two years, student fees have increased 65% at UC and 60% at CSU, and have just been doubled at community colleges. California student debt has increased 50% in two years, to per-capita levels higher than those of the former Soviet Union and Mexico combined.

For the first time, California higher education is no longer a bargain compared to other states. UC Davis will now cost nearly $12,000 a year (including housing).

The effect of fee increases on access is profound. Independent studies estimate that the much smaller fee increases in the 1980s deterred 80,000 people from attending Los Angeles community colleges. In the coming year alone, 200,000 students may be cut out of higher education.

The governor told The Times that a “truck driver with a family of four” (Sacramento Republicans are partial to such marketing metaphors) shouldn’t have to pay taxes to subsidize higher education for wealthier people. It apparently doesn’t occur to the governor, a graduate of Yale, that higher education should be open and affordable to the children of truck drivers--and to truck drivers, too.

Wilson has rejected a sliding-scale fee structure based on income; worse, he has slashed financial aid programs by 15%. There now are nearly five qualified student applicants competing for every Cal Grant; two years ago, the ratio was 3-1.

Wilson had a choice: The $250 million in new student fees could have been generated by closing tax loopholes on entertainment deductions and cutting the subsidy for business lunches by half. But state government favors country club dues over classroom access.

Wilson’s narrow fiscal vision is predictable, but more appalling this year was the capitulation of top Democrats and the higher-education leadership.

Speaker Willie Brown, historically an opponent of student fees, has adopted more of a royalist perspective since becoming a UC regent. He led the defense of the regents’ $2.4-million retirement package for President David Gardner, which would have paid for 1,500 Cal Grants, and he personally blocked floor debate on a resolution that called for rescinding the regents’ action. He also shrugged off the Legislature’s audit that revealed that UC officials were flying around in Lear Jets, writing off the cost of entertaining themselves and spending $95 per square foot for “improvements” in the president’s office.

Higher education’s leadership was shockingly silent as their institutions took the greatest cuts in this year’s budget. By comparison, the aggressive leadership of the K-12 school system fought the governor all summer long. Higher education, once proudly independent, has been neutered at the top because the governor’s political cronies dominate both the regents and the CSU trustees.

And so the students were sold out. It was perhaps no surprise for a generation that is constantly told that it can expect to do less well than its parents. But despite the odds, students marched, wrote letters, lobbied in the Capitol. They had a hopeful spirit.

Now I sit with hundreds of their letters on my desk, each one detailing an education in jeopardy. What shall I tell them? That, working within the system, I managed to limit Wilson’s fee increase at CSU to only three years? I can’t--that was damage-limitation, not progress.

It should be a public disgrace that this is the first student generation to be downsized. What’s most depressing is that our leaders aren’t even troubled. In another culture, they would be the worst kind of cannibals, eating their young.