The past month has borne witness to a series of proposals by the newly-minted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to impose some measure of fiscal austerity at the University of California in the midst of the state’s budget crisis. Included are a 10 percent hike in tuition for in-state undergraduates and more drastic tuition increases for out-of-state, graduate and professional students, along with a reduction of money redirected to financial aid from fee increases, from 33 percent to 20 percent. On Feb. 2, this writer sat down with Dr. Michael Parrish, a UCSD history professor of over 30 years, who is directly involved with faculty consultations on how the university should cope with budget cutbacks. Below are some excerpts from the conversation:

Horse: Has [a fee increase] restricted access in the past? I mean, you can always take out years and years of loans. Have students demonstrated that they’re willing to do this for a UC education?

Parrish: My sense is that in the last few years, the financial aid contribution has contributed roughly 48 to 52 percent of the cost. The rest is the responsibility of the student and the parents. That’s going to change for this year – in other words, the student and parent contribution will have to be more, because the financial aid contribution will be cut in a significant way. We no longer have a public university in a sense of a commitment by the legislature and the governor Ö

The essentials of the partnership was that it was promised by the governor that every year, the university would receive enough dollars to educate the new students who would come. The basic agreement was that for every new student, the university would get $8,500 – that is the marginal cost of educating a student. It doesn’t really cover the whole cost; it doesn’t really cover things like dining hall facilities, computer labs, etc… Whatever the governor does, the legislature is not committed to giving the university even any new money for the new students. That’s why the Regents basically said, “”we’re going to cut enrollment – we’re not going to take maybe 3,200 students who are eligible, and who should be here next year, but we can’t educate them because we’re not getting any money from the legislature for these new students.””

H: And the university has already made capital investments?

P: No, the capital side is OK – the state has provided capital funds for buildings. That’s fine – the problem is the operating side. The state provided money for the new campus at Merced, and the various bond issues have been passed in the last five to six years. It’s not the capital budget that’s hurting, it’s things like operations, maintenance on the buildings we already have – there’s no money there for that! The point is that the State of California has failed to keep the promises made in the partnership Ö What this means is that right now, faculty salaries in the university at all levels, from full professors to assistant professors, UC salaries are seven to nine percent behind our competition, our comparison universities Ö If you’re trying to hire the best young professor in engineering or history or biology, the University of California cannot match the salary that person will be offered at Duke or Stanford, or even public schools like Michigan. We’re at a competitive disadvantage at getting good researchers and good scholars.

H: Another big part of the cut has been to the Institute for Labor Relations. Is that worrying, that this might be a targeted political cut?

P: The problem here is that between 1995 and 2000, when the state had a lot of money coming in because the dot-com boom, California was receiving, in one year, $16 billion in capital gains taxes, as well as another couple billion in stock options taxes Ö and the university benefited. Now some of these programs, like the labor institute and others, were the pet projects of people in the legislature. The labor institute was the pet project of [State Senate President Pro Tempore] John Burton (D – San Francisco). There was another institute, the Mind institute, which was the project of [State Sen.] John Vasconcellos (D – San Jose). The university did not ask for any of those in its budget requests. They were research activities that the legislature said, “”you must do this,”” so they laid all this money on the university thinking it was going to be permanent. Of course, when the revenues went down – this year the state will only get $7 billion or less in capital gains – the university has lost a huge amount in revenue … Now, if you want to operate it, you have to go out and raise private capital.

H: So on the issue of private capital, then, is that worrying? UCSD is one of the most-funded research universities, per faculty member, from federal research grants.

P: That helps us to the extent that if we didn’t have the $1.6 billion that does come back. For every federal contract or grant, a certain percentage of that is called “”overhead money,”” or the cost to the university to do research. That money comes back to the university, and a share of it comes back to each campus depending on how much it generates. My sense is that UCSD is now number one or number two in the UC system – I think we’re ahead of [UC] Berkeley.

H: I think per faculty member we’re ahead of everyoneÖ

P: Yes, that’s probably true, but in terms of the total amount, we might be behind UCLA, although I’m not certain. But those do help, because those are dollars that supplement what the state provides. If it were not for those dollars, we would be in deep trouble, because some of those monies can go to help recruit faculty, or some of it can go to reconfiguring laboratories, some of it can go into the library. Without those soft dollars, we would be in a real fix. But you can’t use that money for everything. You can’t use it to hire faculty, you can’t use it for TAs, you can’t use it, by and large, for the instructional program, you can only use it, by and large, for research.

H: Do humanities and social sciences suffer disproportionately from budget cuts because they don’t have the kind of federal funding engineering and sciences can get?

P: [Engineering, natural sciences and physical sciences] are able to operate their departments without as much dependence on state dollars. To that extent, [humanities and social sciences] are disadvantaged. If those three divisions didn’t get this outside money, they would have to rely more on state funding. Just in terms of enrollment numbers, they would get a bigger share of state dollars.

When the state gives the campus money, it is divided up by enrollment. If you’ve got 3,500 engineering students and 2,800 biology majors, universities have to have the money to teach those students. The history department has 500 students, tiny in comparison to engineering or biology. If everyone was dependent on state money, our position would be worse. That’s not to say it’s good.

H: Are you feeling the effects here at the history department? Is there a tangible difference in being able to hire faculty or keep on postdocs?

P: We can’t offer the best graduate students the best financial aid that many of the private schools can. Even if we have an outstanding candidate who wants to come to UCSD to study history, our offer is often $3,000 less than say, Stanford or some other private school, so we lose the student.

H: That affects faculty research?

P: That affects undergraduate education, because at some point the graduate student becomes a teaching assistant. If he’s not the best teaching assistant compared to who you might have had, the undergraduates suffer.

I’ll tell you what the big debate is right now, what is happening right now, which will have a big impact. How do you distribute the limited financial aid that will come back to the university, as a percentage of tuition and fees? How do we distribute it among the campuses, and among graduate and undergraduate students? This is going to be the most brutal and the most contentious inside the university, to say nothing of our relationship to the governor and the legislature. In the past, there was a sharp wall of separation between undergraduate financial aid and graduate financial aid. University policy was that the money that was returned from undergraduate fees went exclusively to undergraduates in terms of financial support, and graduate student fees went to the graduate students.

There is now the proposal, I think coming from the president’s office, that that wall be torn down, that there be one pot, and it would be distributed according to different rules. In effect, some money that would have gone to undergraduates in the past would be diverted to graduate financial aid. As you know, the teaching assistants are unionized, they’re a part of the United Autoworkers Union.

Part of their contract with their university requires the university to pay their fees. Who’s going to pay that? Is it a cost of instruction? Well, you could say it is, because this is an employee benefit. But is it also a part of graduate financial aid?

The problem is that it’s both. There is going to be a bitter battle in the university over whether you should take a piece of what is going to be returned and normally go to undergraduate aid and use that to help pay the contractual obligations of the TAs. This is going to be a knock-down, drag-out, bloody battle, because in a sense you’re robbing the undergraduates to pay the contractual obligations of the university.

But there’s another issue here, and that is some campuses have more TAs than others. In other words, the growing campuses like San Diego, Irvine, Riverside, and to some extent, Santa Barbara, have a larger contractual obligation to pay than UCLA or UC Berkeley, or the medical school, UCSF, which doesn’t have TAs (UCSF has no undergraduates). It’s going to be a pretty nasty battle – how to maintain contractual obligations. How do you maintain access for your undergraduates who need the money, especially those who are poor? Are you going to have to take money away from needy undergraduates and reallocate it to graduate students – is that fair? This is going to be brutal.

H: What do you think the end result is going to be?

P: I don’t know – ask me in another month. I’m on a faculty committee statewide that is going to debate on Feb. 10 and recommend things to the president. The president can do whatever he and the chancellors decide on, and the Regents. I suspect there is going to be a push to maintain the wall – I suspect there’s also going to be a push by faculty to say, “”look, before we begin to raid the financial aid pot, let’s see if we can look on each campus to find other kinds of money that hasn’t already been committed or pledged, or whatever.””… Could we find that money anywhere else? I don’t know.