There’s no shortage these days of informed opinion about how California is on the brink of economic disaster, no longer represents a place of creative innovation and may even become America’s first failed state.
And those are the more optimistic ones.
Kidding aside, these are dark days for the Golden State and they stand to be tough for a long while longer. But while midway through a critical election year and the middle of a severe recession seems like no time to review and evaluate the future direction of major public policy, that’s precisely what California needs to do.
In every way, a shortfall of vision created many of our problems in the first place. Our budget deficits, pension crisis, record unemployment and unprecedented housing foreclosures are effects – not causes – of bad policy choices California has made over the past several years.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the public institutions that traditionally represent the best of California and the role they will play in what we hope are better times ahead. One that has made quite a bit of news lately (for all the wrong reasons) is the University of California and this is troubling, to say the least.
Ask any prominent official in the state and every one of them will say that the UC is one of America’s best systems of higher education. But that exalted reputation for excellence can also bring about an arrogant approach to detail and a sluggish resistance to change.
The first paragraph from last weekend’s L.A. Times report says it all:
Unbelievable.
Controversies like this will only increase the pressure on UC to address its adoption of a big-government mentality, growing because it can and fueled by what it must have thought was an inexhaustible supply of taxpayer dollars. Only now are many discovering what conservatives have been saying for years – that public dollars come from hardworking people and must be treated with care and respect.
In 2008, FlashReport friend Bill Whalen wrote an excellent piece about how many within the UC system are pushing for a move away from the use of standardized tests like the SAT and towards a more “holistic” admissions process. Like most people, I remember the SAT caused great anxiety and I do not now (or then) consider taking the test an enjoyable experience. But that’s the point; schools need more rigorous testing, not less, and they need to maintain the kinds of objective standards enforced by Prop. 209 not create another preferences system that will divide us by race and color.
What was the UC response? The Board of Regents last year voted to eliminate the SAT Subject Test as an admissions criterion. Not content with removing this component of high academic standards, the university’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) recommended in December 2009 that the UC “signal to students” to not take the SAT. The folks who sit on the BOARS panel are fully aware of the outrage they would ignite if they just did away with standards altogether as a means of circumventing Proposition 209 so they’ve taken to chipping away at them, eliminating a little bit here and a little bit there.
The man who needs to step forward is Mark Yudof – current President of the entire UC system. His last job was chancellor of the University of Texas system, so he obviously has the right kind of experience, but does he have the right sense of seriousness about UC’s situation and California’s as well? While the UC president may not have the power to unilaterally derail plans to wreck the school’s heritage of high standards, he sure has the power to influence the decision makers in whose hands rests the power to preserve or destroy those standards.
For a final word, here’s is how the UC system describes itself on its own website:
The University of California is part of your life, every day. From health care to our children’s schools to our communities to the environment.
They mean this as a good thing. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Saving UC standards would be a good start.
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