We Must Reinvent the ’60 Master Plan

Forty years ago, the state of higher education in California was much like it is today. The University of California was suffering through the consequences of a bruising loyalty-oath controversy and continuing sniping from legislative committees intent on ferreting out alleged communists in the system. The state colleges were growing restive under the yoke of the state Board of Education and the superintendent of instruction. Energized by regional ambition and the population explosion rocking California, the state colleges wanted their independence from the K-12 system, which meant their own board of governors. Community colleges, meanwhile, were mushrooming. In contrast to UC and the state colleges, they faced the most complex challenge of all: a mixed menu of academic and vocational programs oriented toward the broadest possible audience.

In 1960, after much struggle and debate, the Legislature passed, and Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr. signed, a Master Plan for Higher Education. It was a win-win situation for all. UC maintained its autonomy and its exclusive rights to the doctorate and professional schools. Granted their own board of trustees, the state colleges achieved their independence from the Board of Education, together with the right to grant the master’s degree. The community colleges also got their own board and chancellor, and their dual identity, as a feeder to UC and state colleges and as a direct provider to society of a trained work force, was reconfirmed.

It is now time to revisit and renegotiate the Master Plan. Each sector of our higher-education establishment is showing signs of strain that must be redressed.

California State University has outgrown its hyper-modernist uni-city as one vast system in multiple locations, governed by one chancellor sitting in Long Beach. Forty years ago, UC feared that the state colleges represented a threat to its exclusive right to research, the doctorate and professional education. Hence, UC insisted on a cap to state-college ambitions: no doctorates, except in cooperation with UC (only one such joint Ph.D. was ever granted); no professional schools, and a heavy teaching load (three courses a semester) for a faculty not expected to publish or perish. Yet, many of the state colleges accepting such a cap--San Diego, Long Beach, Fresno, San Jose, San Francisco and Chico come to mind--were, all things considered, more serviceable, more energetic, more developed and engaged institutions than such UC campuses as Riverside and Santa Barbara.

Today, it no longer makes sense to impose institutional caps on the Cal State campuses. Nor should such engaged institutions, so much a part of local identity and self-esteem, be administered by a mega-bureaucracy in Long Beach.

First, there is the question of size. Any one of these campuses, pushing as they do 30,000-plus enrollments, would, in smaller states, be the equivalent of Big Ten universities, if only in scale.

Second is the question of regional importance: Many Cal State campuses are primary agents in regional economic restructuring and renewal. Cal State Long Beach President Robert Maxson, for example, has integrated his institution into the question of whither Long Beach in the post-Cold War era. Fresno State is second only to UC Davis as a driving force in agriculture.

It is thus time to deconstruct the Cal State behemoth into a federation of individually chartered universities, with no caps on their programs, provided that proper academic standards be met. The greatness of UC should not rest, in any way, on its ability to tell other institutions what they cannot become. Government should be by locally elected boards. The community colleges of California already possess such local autonomy, which is why they have been so successful in the political/budgetary arena.

For its part, the University of California is sorely in need of a return to the people. Such a return does not imply an acquiescence to untoward political influence or the dilution of the university by pseudo-populist cant, but, rather, a return forward to that sense of identification with the university that ordinary Californians used to have, which enabled the rise of UC to greatness under the presidency of Robert Gordon Sproul.

Sproul instinctively understood the “Old Blue” identity hidden in the hearts of most Californians, especially those in the Legislature. Unspoiled by academic elitism, yet understanding the values and prerogatives of the academy, Sproul possessed the ability to convince ordinary Californians and their legislators that they also were part of the grand adventure of UC. Not everyone might be able to get into UC. Yet, everyone could participate in the benefits that its research and teaching brought to society.

The rising professionalism of academic life; the identification of faculty with their professional associations rather than their campuses; the withdrawal of faculty from adult-extension programs; the increasing gap between the politics of faculty and the politics of ordinary Californians; faculty withdrawal from teaching as a major responsibility; an increasing emphasis on esoteric research; a patronizing attitude in testimony before elected officials; the attachment of faculty to the marginal and the embattled as the prime emblem of the people--all this has greatly stressed the relationship between people and university.

In the renegotiation of the Master Plan that must now happen, the private sector must also be given an equal place at the table. Just as the 1960 plan recognized the importance of the state and community colleges, so, too, must its replacement recognize the fact that fully one-third of all Californians experience higher education in private circumstances. The private colleges and universities of California, in other words, are performing a public service. Without them, higher education in California would collapse. Not only must a new master plan grant full partnership to the state universities; UC and the state universities must grant full partnership to the private sector, which, paradoxically, is part of the public establishment of higher education in California.

Recognizing this, Gov. Pete Wilson has raised annual Cal Grants from $5,000 to $7,500, which represents approximately half the cost of a year’s education. In doing so, the governor has underscored the fact that there is no way the public sector can keep apace with the demand for higher education in California. The only plausible financial strategy in such a situation is subsidizing individual students who qualify. Twenty years ago, Norway, facing a population boom of 18-year-olds, made a similar decision. Rather than build a new university to serve the boomers, Norway granted each qualified student the equivalent of $15,000 a year to pursue studies at a college and university of their choice.

Now is the time, then, for the elected and appointed officials of California to start the process of updating the Master Plan for the next century. In 1960, the academic and political leaders of California envisioned California as an education utopia, in which every student, whether in pursuit of a Ph.D. in classics or a firefighter’s certificate, could be given the tools with which to pursue a life. Much of the strain experienced by leaders in higher education these days (take, for example, the surprising resignation of UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien) comes not only from political stress, expressed most vividly in the debate on affirmative action, but from the lack of clear guidelines in the higher-education establishment.

These days, all California is reinventing and renewing itself. Higher education should be no exception.