The Daily Bruin Editorial Board sat down with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block last week and was given the chance to ask him key questions regarding higher education, budget cuts and university prestige. The following selected questions from the interview give some insight into the mind of the chancellor.
Daily Bruin: What exactly does public education mean to you as chancellor?
Gene Block: “Public” means two things. It means access. So if you can’t provide access to a broad kind of students from different economic backgrounds, then you’re not really acting as a public institution. So I’d say on the input side ““ access.
On the output side, I think it means educating students that have a commitment to their communities, a commitment to public service. Why go to a public university and get the same education that you can get at a private? Let’s differentiate ourselves. And part of the way we differentiate ourselves is by our public mission.
DB: That said, are we looking at possibly privatizing to any degree?
GB: When you say “privatize,” that’s a complicated word. It’s loaded with emotion. If the state doesn’t come back to the table and support us at a level that can allow us to remain an excellent institution, what are the choices? …
One thing you can do is have a much larger endowment. We have a relatively small endowment for the institution our size. Ours is about less than $2 billion right now. I think the University of Virginia is $5 billion and half the size. So the per-student endowment for University of Virginia, which is private, is significantly higher, and therefore there is more money available within the institution to help support students. …
With the right resources, we could potentially bring in more money from our intellectual property as well. That will never be a major source, but it plays a role. Those are the pieces, actually, to play with.
DB: Regarding the planned fee increases in the University of California system, some students are working multiple jobs to pay their fees right now. What would you say to those students?
GB: It’s tough. All I can say is I understand their pain here. We’ll have to do the best we can. … There should be financial aid available for the students with the lowest incomes. …
It’s painful. Some students will escape without having to pay more because they have all their aid packages, but for more students, I think you’re right about this: We’re caught. We’re right at the point where not everything is going to be covered.
I can’t give you an adequate response in the sense that there’s simply no alternative, I think, in raising the cost to education if we’re going to keep the education excellent.
I think there is a way if we want to degrade the education, but that doesn’t make sense. … We have to keep an outstanding institution.
DB: Have you been working at all to help restore the hours of Night Powell, a service that students are really disappointed to have lost?
GB: As I understand, it’s $125,000 to keep it open and restore the hours, and the librarian made a smart decision: He’s looking at a reduced budget, and he’s trying to figure out how he can keep books in the library and keep services that are critical, and tried to cut down on the number of hours of many of the libraries because it’s very expensive. …
What we’re hearing is that the students think its too great a sacrifice. It’s too important for a whole variety of reasons, so we’re going to find a way. Whether we have friends of the university help us out, which would be nice, or whether we just find internal reserves.
And I think the students can help as well. I don’t want to get ahead of the story because I want to see what Cinthia Flores says the students can do, but I thought it would be a partnership role. Maybe we can cost share and figure out a way to keep it open.
DB: How will UCLA and the UC keep its prestige in light of all these sacrifices?
GB: I’m worried. I’m worried that it has been damaged already because reputation doesn’t always reflect reality. … I’d say that some damage has been done already because there’s a lack of confidence in California.
When I go to other states, the first thing people say to me is how sorry they are for me, and that doesn’t make you feel very good. And it’s interesting because when you look at some of the other states, we’re better than some of the other states still, but the delta’s been big ““ the change ““ and that’s the hard thing to adjust to. …
I don’t think the reputation will be permanently hurt if we can put actions in place that will stabilize the institution, and what I mean by stabilize the institution is to continue to maintain a faculty that remains world-class, not lose our faculty and continue to attract the quality students we’re attracting.
DB: As we’ve seen things in the economy get worse, are there any areas specifically that you feel exhibit some inefficiencies?
GB: There are obviously some inefficiencies, and we’re looking for them. I’ll say one thing: This school has gone through successive cuts, and each time inefficiencies have been kind of wrung out of the system. There has been an evolution of improving efficiency in a number of areas.
You see this quite dramatically in energy use. The buildings are getting greener and greener, and we are leaders in these areas. …
Another area is that we’re asking the deans to look at our majors that have grown over the years with more required courses.
I suspect that most of you are not going to get Ph.D.s in the area that you’re studying; you’re going to go on to law school or business school and medical school. How much as an English major, for example? How many courses is really ideal for an undergrad who is not going to be going on?
Perhaps there have been too many courses over the years. We want you to achieve some disciplinary expertise; we don’t expect you to be Ph.D. level in your understanding of the field. So we’re asking each school to look at their majors and see if they have become unnecessarily burdensome.
DB: Isn’t reducing the number of classes required going to reduce the quality of the education?
GB: I don’t think so. I may be wrong, but we have to look at national averages, and we seem to be at exactly the same required courses as everyone else, and we’d have to ask whether reducing it would make sense, looking at the ones where we’re larger than everyone else.
When I was in the biology department at (University of Virginia), all of a sudden we had an animal behavior requirement. That’s because the person who wanted to teach the class wanted to screen out nonmajors.
You look at biology, and you have to have biology, cell biology, nature of biology, but you probably don’t need animal behavior if you’re becoming a molecular biologist, and probably no one will fault us for striking courses like that as an example.
I think the advantage will force our students into taking a broader set of courses and becoming broader in the knowledge base. … You have to look closely.
You wouldn’t want the community to think that we’re providing UCLA light, but we have to recognize that most of our students are not going on for Ph.D.s, and if they do, they often take the same classes again, and therefore it’s not useful.
DB: What are your three most important goals for the next three years?
GB: One thing is the fundraising goal. I want to move substantially ahead to raise the endowment for students. If I’m not sitting on a few hundred million dollars, I’m going to be depressed, and that’s a major goal.
I want to have completed the review of our academic programs, looking at our curriculum and rightsizing it ““ appropriate range of majors and how to be more efficient. How to match our academic program to the needs of our students in the next year and a half.
The third area is financial restructuring of the institution, developing a model that’s sustainable, and I can’t say what that model is going to be because it depends on where the state’s going. But we have to go into steady state in terms of our financial model because parents and students have to know from year to year what their tuition is going to be.
We can’t have this every year that you wake up and have more money to pay, but parents and students have to know that when you enter UCLA, this is the rate.
DB: What was your response to the student, faculty and staff walkout that took place on the first day of school?
GB: I wasn’t a fan, to be quite honest with you. I wasn’t a fan of the walkout on the part of the faculty. And again, people do what they feel they have to do, and I respect people’s emotions and intensity of emotions and their beliefs in this. …
I really think that you want to direct your frustrations, I say, to the direction of Sacramento. No one here in this administration, nor the faculty nor the students have caused this problem. …
We’re not the ones who have really led to the current financial situation we’re in. …
I’m not saying Sacramento has extra money. They do not have extra money, but they’ve got to place higher education at a higher priority than they’re placing it. I mean, it’s that simple.