Guest Editorial: Brown, Napolitano go head to head on UC budget

When Gov. Jerry Brown and UC President Janet Napolitano formed a committee of two to solve the problems of the University of California system, the first thing that occurred to us was: Who’s the referee?

The two have conflicting visions of how to maintain UC’s once solid but now precarious place among the top universities in the country.

Napolitano has set out a plan for tuition hikes that would offer stability.

Brown thinks this would make the system too costly for students and played the gambit of withholding funding from the state budget if the Board of Regents approves Napolitano’s plan.

The governor of California and the former governor of Arizona and Secretary of Homeland Security are both, let’s just say, strong personalities.

Would somebody please sneak a video camera into that meeting room? This could play better than cats on YouTube.

But you know, it’s a great idea. They both want a strong UC system, understand budgets and would really hate for the other to win outright. An agreement that allows each to declare victory will create a third winner: UC.

Last week the University of California Board of Regents agreed to form the Select Advisory Committee on the Cost Structure of the University with just the two high-powered members to sort out system budget issues, tuition hikes, costs and access.

This apparently was Brown’s idea, which must mean he’s prepared to compromise a bit, as he has met Napolitano before.

While the committee will be staffed by the governor’s personnel and the UC president’s team, the two principals will run the show. They expect to update the regents in March.

Napolitano — reluctantly, she says — asked the regents to consider a 28 percent tuition hike over five years to fund the university, which is still considered the best public higher educational system in the land but is in danger of losing that status because of deferred maintenance on its campuses, oversized classes and particularly poaching of key faculty by colleges that can offer stability.

In response, Brown said he would withhold $120 million from the university in the next budget year unless the regents decline the tuition hike, which he considers an unfair burden on families.

Brown is right that some costs and executive salaries are too high — while Napolitano wants to raise the chancellors’ even higher — and that the system needs to better use the Internet. But he’s putting too much faith in Web-based classes as a way to cut the university budget.

The communal classroom experience is key to any great university’s educational potential. While Internet courses will be helpful to teach basic information, employing them broadly will require development of supporting classroom work with personal interaction and stimulating experts to guide it.

That should about set the stage. We can hardly wait for March.

— By The San Jose Mercury News

[Source]: The Reporter