UC Could Use Its Fiscal Crisis to Set Right Its ‘Tyrannical Machine’ : Universities: California must retreat from campus expansion plans and turn its focus onto improving undergraduate education.

RIVERSIDE —  Public universities suffer business cycles badly. Only a year ago, the University of California was contemplating three new campuses. Now it cannot pay its bills. The UC administration is threatening to turn away qualified students. The Board of Regents has raised student fees.

Universities go wrong, not from ill intentions, but from confusing ends with means. They become what National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Lynne V. Cheney calls “tyrannical machines.” As a result, they lose perspective. So it seems that UC undergraduates are only there to fuel the machine, to feed the need for faculty positions and graduate research, when undergraduates ought to be the center of the enterprise.

The current cash-flow crisis provides a golden opportunity to put purpose back into the UC system. Cheney’s recent report on educational practices gone wrong provides suggestions to set things right. It could save money, too.

Quality should matter more than numbers, Cheney says. The value of an undergraduate education means more than simply letting bodies in, particularly when it comes to graduating underrepresented minorities. Unless more Latinos and African-Americans complete meaningful degrees, the future that we share in California is in doubt. The bottom line is graduation, not enrollment as a freshman. So many minorities drop out before their senior year. Very few even qualify for college as it is.

When students enter UC classrooms, they should be competing on a level playing field. Minorities who drop out often do so because they have always been playing catch-up. The university could ease the burden on its books and stop the cause of this attrition by deferring admission of those who fail entrance exams in writing and in math. That’s roughly half the freshman class, and includes far more Anglos than minorities in sheer numbers.

UC students who need remedial work in writing or math have no business taking UC classes. Their bodies count for budgetary purposes, but not their minds. And once they are within the UC system, bad grades will count against them and against their future plans. The community college system is perfectly prepared to provide needed remedial education at a fraction of the UC cost. Deferring UC admission would also make an impact on the high schools, where students need to know that achievement matters more than grades.

The Cheney report also emphasizes choice. Students ought to have the freedom to select the school they desire to attend if they’re qualified. Applied from kindergarten through 12th grade, free choice unfortunately disadvantages those children whose parents do not know or care enough about their child’s education to make a good decision.

But young adults make decisions for themselves. Why not give them a choice, by providing qualified high school students sufficient scholarship support to choose between UCLA and Occidental, UC Irvine and Pomona, UC Berkeley and Stanford? These schools all exercise comparable selectivity yet the graduation rate of underrepresented minorities at Occidental is far higher than at UCLA. Each black or Latino student’s college degree is worth far more to our society than the cost of a private education.

California already has a program that could provide this scholarship support, and it would be sensible to make better use of these Cal Grants. The cost of educating undergrads within the UC system requires far more money than student fees will pay or even that the state itself provides. Federal research funds and private endowments contribute toward paying off the overhead, but this money is typically directed toward budgetary demands having precious little to do with undergraduate education: research laboratories, professional schools and institutes for scholar superstars. Instead of spending tax money on more buildings, it would be better to spend it on people by awarding larger Cal Grant scholarships directed toward California’s most expensive independent colleges.

Directing students to community colleges and private institutions will not make the UC system cost effective and qualitatively competitive unless there are also changes from within. Organizational reform is needed, too. Here the problem lies with the academic departments, the units around which each university campus is structured.

Faculty are recruited by departments, do their teaching and their research there. Departments run the show, but they have little reason to be interested in the wider scheme of things, beyond expanding their own domain, adding to their staff, specializing their research. Consequently, UC faculty are apprenticed to their own departments, which in turn reward special research interests and dictate courses taught.

It is no wonder that faculty have little motivation for interdisciplinary studies and general education. The resulting conflict has been ballyhooed as a question of teaching versus research. But that is not the issue. The real problem lies with how departments control scholars. UC faculty must be liberated from the organizational unit that recruited them if the campus is to prosper as a whole. Such a move would improve the quality of education considerably.

If UC faculty members each taught a single course outside their departments in the service of the campus as a whole, departmental thought control could be broken. Truly interdisciplinary courses might exist, courses which were not advancing special research interests.

The intellectual horizons of the faculty might grow, and more courses might be taught of the sort for which liberal arts colleges are so respected. Most importantly, faculty might come to realize they are working for the students that they teach, not the departments that hired them. And there would be economy even in this move: If each person taught one additional, interdisciplinary course, more students could be served, and more money saved.