University of California President Mark Yudof sat down with the Daily Bruin and student journalists from other UC campus newspapers on Saturday at UC Irvine to discuss the changes in the UC system as a result of statewide budget cuts.
With a folder of brutally honest charts showing fee increases and state funding decreases in hand, Yudof did not beat around the bush.
“I view this as a lose-lose for students. That is my honest view. We either raise fees so that you can have reasonable-sized classes, get access to the courses you need … or you’re going to see this institution deteriorate,” he said.
Yudof also gathered with student government representatives including Cinthia Flores, the president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, and Miguel Lopez, the Graduate Students Association’s vice president of external affairs. Flores said Yudof will meet with representatives from student governments again before the UC Board of Regents convenes in November.
Daily Bruin Editor in Chief Alene Tchekmedyian and Managing Editor Maggie Shine attended the briefing along with student journalists from other UCs. Below are snippets of the Q&A Yudof held with the UC student journalists after his briefing.
You talked a lot about the Blue and Gold program that will help students with a annual income of below $60,000. What about the families with an annual income above $180,000 who have maybe two or three kids that they are trying to send through a UC?
You know, my way of thinking is that we only have so much money, we have to take care of the poorest kids first. … It’s very hard for me to justify putting much money above $180,000 when I can’t cover all of the people under $100,000. … Our problem really is the cost of living is higher in California, many of our campuses ““ you know, Westwood and so forth ““ are fairly pricey places to be. … The other thing some universities do, just to lay out the alternatives, in Michigan and Virginia, they take huge numbers of non-resident students and they charge them full fee, like $30,000 a year. … We’re quintessentially a California institution, so we’re, like, 94-95 percent resident students and I’m unwilling, really, to bump up the non-resident (students) because I think our first duty is to Californians, the people who pay the taxes. I wish they’d pay a little bit more in taxes and support us, but we’ve been unwilling to do that.
What has the UC done to lobby or to convince Sacramento to bring attention to the value of the UC to the state of California?
We’ve done a lot. In the last six weeks, we have gotten 20,000 letters into the legislature; we have organized the alumni, the staff, the faculty. … I’ve visited Sacramento more than 20 times, I met a number of times with the governor. … Here’s my take on it. Right now, they are flat out of money but we have continued to press it. … We have 130,000 names in an advocates list, and we’re trying to expand it to a million names. I think we have to come down hard on Sacramento to get our way, but we have been doing a lot, but they are flat-out out of money and they don’t have the votes to raise taxes. I hope that when we have this reset ““ which I hope is no more than two years ““ we have to be really prepared for a very aggressive campaign to get more money out of the state of California. … My estimate is that we need, in the short run, an additional billion dollars and in the long run ““ say four, five years ““ $2 billion a year to keep the University of California where it should be. And without pressure on fees.
What do you think will happen to the non-flagship UC campuses when the tuition goes up? Do you think they will be continuing to attract students?
That’s an interesting question, and I won’t define who’s a flagship and who’s not ““ that would get me into trouble. I’ll just take the AAU campuses ““ the American Association of Universities ““ the top 62 research universities, and six of them are in California at UC. And by the way, no other state has more than two. We have six. And the ones that are not members yet are Santa Cruz, Riverside and Merced. … I think they’ll fare fine. Riverside has the most diverse student body in our system, along with Merced, I guess. And it has a very large share of low-income students. So I think a much larger proportion of the student body at Riverside will be eligible for the Blue and Gold Program, and also at Merced, than say, UCLA … or Berkeley. So they may have some problems … by virtue of the constituency they serve, they have a lot of students that are eligible for the Blue and Gold, Pell Grants and Cal Grants, so our hope is that they won’t be adversely affected, but we’re going to watch them very carefully.
Would you expect to keep all the campuses in the long run?
I envision keeping all the campuses. I thought it was outrageous when some faculty members advocated the shutdown of Merced. We don’t save that much money. It serves a major constituency in that it’s a very diverse campus. We have $1 billion worth of buildings there, it’s a baby campus. We can’t balance our budget on the backs of Merced or Riverside or Santa Cruz. It just doesn’t save enough money, and it does a disservice to the tens of thousands of students who attend those institutions. We’re not doing that. We’re not going to shut them down.
You defended high executive salaries by arguing that we must offer competitive pay to retain talented executives. What exactly would happen if we settled for less competitive candidates, and is retaining more competitive executives worth pushing students out of the university?
There’s an unloaded question. The first big lie is that the executives have been giving raises. Everyone in the Office of the President is getting paid 10 percent less. Second, if you didn’t have me, and I just went off and practiced law in Philadelphia, we don’t save enough money to balance this budget. It’s very little money compared to the total number. Third, most of the people paid over $200,000 are physicians. They’re not even paid out of state dollars. They treat patients in clinics, they staff our hospitals. … Fourth, we’re not competitive. Our chancellors, with this latest pay cut, are 40 percent below market. It’s already 40 percent below market. Fifth, someone needs to run these operations. I’m sorry, but hospitals need medical directors, campuses need chancellors, and it makes a difference whether we are already paying 40 percent below market, you want to pick the best people you can. … If California were actually troubled that we had extravagant executive salaries ““ we don’t ““ the Office of the President has cut $60 million recently, I mean I just think that this is fantasy land. The fantasy is that you have overpaid executives and if you stopped it, you wouldn’t have to raise fees or you wouldn’t have to have furloughs. The fantasy is that we have reserves, which we don’t have, and you don’t have to do these things because you can just dig into this pot of gold.
Regarding the recent New York Times Magazine interview in which your salary was compared to the President of the United States, who makes $400,000: I understand that your comments were facetious, but I was wondering if you had any comments about it.
Well, I had a zany interviewer and I gave her zany answers. The truth is, if you threw in the White House, a 747 and a lifetime pension of $400,000, I’d certainly take the job, although it, in my opinion, is not a job I’d want to hold, it’s a pretty tough job that President Obama has. But I don’t know what to say. Do you know how much your dermatologist is paid, or how much your surgeon is paid, or how much your internist is paid? They’re all paid more than the president of the United States. It’s a very different sort of job, apparently. … Write to the Board of Regents, because they set my salary, they won’t let me set my own. I’d prefer to set my own but it doesn’t work that way.
What did you mean when you said that being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery?
It was a joke.
Can you explain it?
Well I sometimes feel like I’m always telling people what to do but people aren’t listening. The powers of a president are often very indirect. You know, you can’t do anything without the support of the chancellors, the faculty and the students, and you’re always trying to persuade people, so it was a joke, that you know I have this exalted position, but when it actually gets down to power, you know all I can really do is talk, and not everyone’s listening to what I have to say.
Where do you see the UC in five and 15 years?
I’m really optimistic, I think we’ll have this (financial reset) I’ve talked about and I think we’ll be back on the path. I’m hoping to be able to come up with a plan to hold down fee increases in the out years so we’ll become more and more accessible. I want to maintain the number of low-income students, roughly one-third, which I think makes us the school of opportunity, which I think is very important. I’m hoping we’ll be more diverse.
We have some outstanding campuses in terms of diversity, like Riverside, Merced and a few others, but we’re not where I’d like to be. I’d like to be bigger. The state’s growing. I see us as still the pre-eminent public research university on the planet. I see us with a larger student body because access is so important but continuing emphasis on low-income students, and then our research we perform so brilliantly historically to continue down the path that we’re on. I don’t really anticipate additional campuses. I can’t be sure, but my guess is that we’re probably about billed out with the 10 campuses that we have.
What do you think about faculty members who insist on taking furloughs on educational days?
I have a couple of feelings. First of all, just like I said I appreciate and understand the anger about fee increases … I’m a faculty member myself, I’m a law professor, I even wrote a book on the First Amendment, so I’m not the one to criticize the faculty’s First Amendment rights. I understand their frustration and I understand they wanted to make a point about their unhappiness with the state, their unhappiness with me, their unhappiness with the situation, so I respect that and understand it.
I felt that for me to say you could take a furlough day when you’re teaching was not fair to the students … and how do you ask people to pay more money for their education and then reduce the number of teaching days? … I’m not upset about the faculty demonstration because I feel it’s healthy in a democracy for them to make their views known. I really felt (that) for the administration to endorse it was a mistake, I guess that’s what I really wanted to say. I didn’t endorse it, but I’m not angry at the faculty that did and I surely understand the pent-up feelings about the dire situation they find themselves in.
I think the faculty also has to be realistic you know we’re in the tough times that we’re in. It is my great wish that I could protect the students and faculty and staff from all the difficulties of the national and state economy, but it’s just not within my power to do that.
Can UC endowments be used to alleviate the budget crisis?
Endowments have restricted purposes. … Endowments are like bank accounts with restrictive purposes, so it can only be spent on the purpose that’s specified by the donor. So first, the donors have specified that you cannot spend the money that goes into the bank. So you get the million dollars, but you can’t spend the million dollars, you can only spend the income ““ say, $50,000 a year. Second, the $50,000 income can only be spent on what the donor specifies, … So it can’t be done ““ not without violating the terms that we reached with the donor and not without the attorney general forcing us to abide by our agreements. … And by the way, we have endowments for scholarships, we have endowments for all sorts of things, so it’s not clear that, even if we could sweep it, it wouldn’t be totally beneficial because … we can only spend it like it was specified. … Endowments are primarily gift money.