Strapped UC Schools Seek More Autonomy

The very first thing I learned about the desire of the business and law schools at the University of California to wriggle out from under the dead hands of UC headquarters and the state Legislature is this:

None dare call it "privatization."

The term "confuses more than illuminates," Christopher Edley, the dean of Berkeley's law school, Boalt Hall, wrote in an op-ed in these pages last year.

The issue, unsurprisingly, is money. Public university administrators all over the country are getting fed up with declining support from their state and local governments, which measured as dollars per enrolled student hit a 25-year-low in 2005, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"I don't think any public institution can fund to fullest extent what it takes to be one of greatest business schools in the world," Judy Olian, dean of UCLA's Anderson School of Management, told me this week.

Along with Boalt, Berkeley's Haas School of Business and UCLA's School of Law, Anderson has been waging a very delicate campaign to win more autonomy from the UC Regents in setting its tuition and faculty pay scales. The issue is delicate because the schools' relationship with the UC system is intimately bound with their public mission, which includes educating the most qualified Californians regardless of their financial resources. There's also some concern that, as the law and business schools go, so will the UC system. Eventually that leads to the question: What does it mean to have a state university?

The impulse toward self-sufficiency is a rational response to an off-campus phenomenon -- the decline in the state's budgetary support of UC has been picking up steam. Things have reached the point where administrators and faculty have lost all confidence in the state government as a reliable funding partner.

The record suggests that traditional levels of state support of 60%-80% are relics of the distant past, given competing demands on budget dollars and the Legislature's refusal to raise taxes to meet them. At Anderson and Haas, the state's share of the budget is now only 20%. At UCLA law school it has fallen to 38% from 59% in just the last two years.

The law and business schools at UCLA and Berkeley feel the crunch because they compete with wealthy private institutions for the most-qualified students and most-heavily recruited professors. The system's other law and business schools also are strapped, but don't compete in the same market; the system's medical schools have access to other outside resources, including clinical fees and research grants and contracts.