California’s Faculty Lounge: A Bottomless Pit

, Malcolm A. Kline, Leave a comment

California professors have become so ravenous even a liberal Democratic governor cannot satisfy their hunger. “Jerry Brown’s terms as governor have been bad for [California State University] CSU and [University of California] UC funding,” Christopher Newfield, an English professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara writes in the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “The doubling of tuition revenues has not actually made up for the state cuts followed by small annual increases.”

“In the UC case, campuses also need to find another $700 million a year for pension costs they didn’t have ten years ago, and additional money for buildings that the state doesn’t build anymore.” Newfield goes on to complain that Brown gave the state universities a 3 percent increase when they wanted 4.