Sometimes those little jokey page-filler articles deep within a
newspaper tell us more about the world we live in than the front
pages.
This was plainly the case last week when the more avid newspaper
reader might have come across a story about a 20-year-old American
man who is auctioning ““ yes, auctioning ““ his forehead
on eBay.
Andrew Fischer, from Omaha, Neb., said he would tattoo a
non-permanent logo or brand name on his forehead for 30 days. Last
time I checked he had received 123 bids, with the largest bid over
$25,700.
Is anything safe from the sprawling tentacles of corporate power
these days? The military, hospitals, schools, social security
““ it seems nothing now is sacred in the face of a quick buck
from the leech-like corporate sector. A man is now even trying to
turn his face into a billboard. Should this be a warning to us
all?
What’s even more interesting to us as students are his
motivations. He said he would use the money to pay college fees
““ he is planning to study graphic design.
But even if he made it to UCLA he would find an institution that
is pimping itself in the same way. The great pride that should be
associated with being an excellent public institution is slowly
frittering away. Both UCLA and UC Berkeley’s law schools have
been increasingly turning to private donations for funding.
In another article in the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Edley
Jr., the dean of the Boalt School at UC Berkeley, could be found
opining, “If the state is unwilling or unable to pay the
bill, we need a strategy that does not depend on a miraculous
turnaround.”
I decided to get in contact with someone who would know more.
What would increased private funding mean?
I chatted with Professor Earl Thompson, an economist at UCLA
specializing in monetary and economic theory, who said,
“Private universities do fairly well in this world. The trick
to having a great university is to have a great budget. So if more
legitimate private donors show up to offer financial support to UC,
we should accept it. We should even solicit private support and
(we) regularly do.”
What are the economic drawbacks, I asked. “Given the
alternatives, there are none.”
So what’s the problem, I thought. The university gets more
money, and we, in turn, get world-class teaching and facilities.
Why didn’t we do this a long time ago? Next on my list was
the UCLA law dean, Michael Schill. He seemed to be a little more
coy than Edley and Thompson (he went to great pains to
“resist any description of what is going on as
“˜privatization,'” and reassured me repeatedly
that UCLA has no intention or desire to privatize).
Maybe I could get some less zealous answers from him. Did he
accept there are drawbacks to private funding? “There are no
drawbacks to private fundraising.”
This all struck me as slightly strange. There was so much going
for privatization or ““ to use Schill’s favored
euphemism ““ “seeking alternative sources of
revenue,” but there was very little against it. In the face
of this wall of silence I feel I must fill in the blanks.
When discussing privatization, I always feel it is more useful
to think of profitization. Whatever way you look at it, the
introduction of private funding into any enterprise changes its
whole complexion. It moves from working for the people it serves to
working for the stockholders or backers of the private body.
Private donors are not altruistic bodies who spend their time
looking around for a university in need. They are calculating
profit-maximizers who see an opportunity for making money and
snatch it.
Now there’s no doubt that short-term increases in revenue
are a benefit that does come with private funding. That is
incontrovertible. But there is a very marked correlation between
the amount of private funding a university receives and the fees it
charges. Just look at any of the private institutions in the United
States, like Yale, Harvard or Princeton. They all charge more than
three times as much as UCLA.
On top of this, an increase in fees affects the ability of
students to pursue careers in “public interest” fields.
At the moment, graduates of the Boalt Law School at UC Berkeley are
about twice as likely to work for socially conscious companies than
are private law school graduates from Stanford and USC.
But most importantly, while people like Schill will give lip
service to the fact that “neither the state, the UC
administration, our campus, nor our faculty want us to be anything
other than a public institution,” privatization has an
inevitability about it. The trend toward public disinvestments in
higher education could spell the end of public universities
altogether. Currently the state contributes as little as 44 percent
of the UC law budget, according to Schill.
But people like Thompson, Edley and Schill are not the villains
of this story. With the current university predicament ““
falling revenues per student ““ for the professors and deans
of this world, there seems to be no alternative.
“All too often the education process is entrusted to
people who appear to have no understanding of industry and the path
of progress,” the European Roundtable of Industrialists
observed in 1998. “The provision of education is a market
opportunity and should be treated as such.”
This is what this great public university has become ““ a
market opportunity. We will soon be “intellectual
capital,” finding our debt-ridden way through the
“knowledge economy.”
If you fancy making life hell for the big corporations,
e-mail Kennard at mkennard@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.