Who Runs the University of California?

[Nikki Stone1]

Amazing article:

http://www.counterpunch.org/parrish03012010.html

Some snippets:

....The State of California's political elites and business leaders routinely use the language of crisis now whenever discussing the UC. In the past few decades, state funding of the university has suffered steady erosion. The UC now receives more funding than ever from private corporations and the federal government (the latter being in most instances pretty much the same as the former). Its various revenue streams range from student fees to several billion dollars in medical hospital revenue to private grants and donations, to its own hedge fund-like investments portfolio, to atomic bomb dollars from the Department of Energy.

Thus, despite the state budget cuts, the UC's overall revenue reached an all-time high of $19.42 billion in the 2009-10 academic year, and the Regents' claim that the UC faces an “imminent and substantial” funding deficit is inaccurate, to say the least. According to both the university's own financial documents and Moody's bond rating agency, the university had access to over $8.3 billion in unrestricted investment funds it was holding in reserve at the time.

The university has undergone a neo-liberal-style “structural adjustment” at the behest of the UC Regents, and this transformation has been accelerated during Yudof's tenure as president. Under the leadership of California's economic elite, the UC has become the leading prototype for a "disaster capitalist university."....'''


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(Di Fi's hubby in this one)

....An even more damning revelation was made public this past October when UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister published his scathing analysis of the UC administration's use of student tuition dollars as collateral for construction bond debts. In addition to his PhD in economics, Meister serves as Chairman of the Council of University Faculties – essentially, a faculty union with representatives on all 10 of the university's campuses. He knows what he's talking about. According to the Regents' own data and policy documents, the primary use of student fee revenue since 2004 has been as collateral for bonds to fund campus construction projects. In this "modified credit swap," students are forced to take out "subprime" student loans, often charging six percent interest, so the university can borrow money at a reduced rate to construct new facilities like – to take one example -- the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, which UC Regent Richard C. Blum's own construction company, URS Corporation, was contracted by the university to build....

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...To understand fully why the University of California's internal finances are being subjected to “economic shock therapy,” much like a Third World debtor nation under the thumb of the IMF, it's necessary to know a bit about the history and function of the university's power structure. Although it is nominally a public institution, the UC is not owned and governed by the State of California. Rather, it is the UC Regents who call all the shots. The Board of Regents is a corporate entity formed in 1879 for the explicit purpose of thwarting a populist social movement of small farmers who demanded that the the university become more responsive to their needs....