Politics and Press

Lament for a great university

Though it has not gone unnoticed, there has been too little written about the disastrous decline that must inevitably occur in one of the world’s great universities, arguably the finest state university in existence, the University of California at Berkeley. Compared to the cultivated mustiness of the elite UK universities, or the inborn snootiness of the French écoles superieurs, not to mention the artificiality and class structure of such ridiculously rich private US outposts such as “America’s McGill”, Harvard, or the somewhat seedy centres of German knowledge such as LMU München, Berkeley has long offered an almost unique mixture of intellectual intercourse and natural beauty mixed in with a splendid library and a revolutionary streak that keeps the place jumping. And that at a price normal people can afford with some belt-tightening, unlike those with tuitions of $50,00 a year, who have also coincidentally come under great financial pressure as their hedge-funded endowments have collapsed in the last year. Poor Harvard has seen its endowment sink from 40 billion Dollars to either 30 or 22 billion, depending on who you believe, a sum that does not lead to displays of sympathy at working-class Berkeley
But unless something completely unexpected happens, the budget of the University of California system will face a shortfall of 600 million dollars next year, an 8% cut from last year’s budget and by law the system cannot run in a deficit. So this staggering sum of money must be taken out of the hide of the universities themselves, and it seems that the board of Governors has decided to simply pass the pain on to everyone equally. Chico State University and many others like it will thus have the same problem as Berkeley, to somehow cut 8% of the budget. The disaster at Berkeley can only lead to a sudden serious decline in the quality of the library, the closing of small non-profitable departments, the loss of elite faculty members as they search for greener pastures at expanding Canadian universities, which are largely unaffected by the economic crisis since hedge fund betting is illegal there, as well as the loss of the youngest and the brightest since there will be a hiring freeze. The only hope is that the injury time will be relatively short and the recovery from a potentially debilitating attack can still be attained.