A bill currently moving through the state Legislature would extend to college journalists the same First Amendment protections already enjoyed by California’s high school students. There is, however, one caveat: It will not apply to the University of California, unless the UC Board of Regents decides to adopt similar protections voluntarily.
The reason is autonomy, a provision inserted into the California Constitution that essentially insulates the university from politics. That provision exempts the university from following any laws the regents don’t like, except for the state’s open-meeting regulations.
Understanding the benefits — and limits — of autonomy now is more important than ever: In the face of the UC compensation scandal, one lawmaker has proposed changing the constitution to show that the university is not above the law, and others have quietly hinted at doing something similar, if the university doesn’t shape up.
Though the threats are most likely cheap talk, scrapping UC autonomy may not be such a bad idea.
What Autonomy Can’t Do
Formed in the spirit of the Progressive Era, the University of California is structured around the old Progressive ideal of putting specialists in charge of government and taking partisans out. For example, the regents are appointed for 12-year terms — longer than the governor who appoints them serves. The appointments are staggered, to keep one governor from stacking the deck in favor of his preferred policies.
However, none of these measures have been enough to truly keep politicians out. As the Progressives eventually realized, you just can’t take political calculations out of politics.
At the height of the UC Berkeley student protests in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan made UC President Clark Kerr’s tenure one of the main prongs of his gubernatorial campaign. After Reagan won, the Board of Regents sacked Kerr (the same board earlier imposed anti-communist loyalty oaths on faculty).
In recent years, the state Legislature has gotten very good about using the power of the purse to manhandle the regents. Though lawmakers can’t tell the regents what to do, they can certainly make the billions in tax dollars they send to the university contingent on specific policies, and have done so with much enthusiasm.
In fact, the Legislature has even gotten involved in decisions about admissions: At the height of the state budget crisis, lawmakers added a special rider to the state budget requiring the university to accept a specific amount of students, or turn up for hearings at the Capitol and refund the money.
Even autonomy, it would seem, hasn’t been able to keep pernicious politics out.
Who Needs It, Anyway?
Today, the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education is heralded as an ingenious blueprint that assures every California high school student a place at a college campus. However, in the 1960s, the California State University (or, more accurately, its predecessor, the State Colleges) agreed to sign on only after the University of California agreed to back a constitutional amendment giving the state college system similar autonomy.
However, legislators were not keen on ceding control of more institutions, and the proposal was defeated even before it could make it to a statewide ballot.
Ironically enough, the Master Plan was related to autonomy in another way: Top UC administrators rejected the first chairman appointed to the committee that would draft the plan because they feared that his close connections to lawmakers (he worked for the Legislative Analyst’s Office) would allow him to expose the various accounting tricks the university used to hide its finances from the public.
Indeed, in many ways, autonomy has made the university an opaque fiefdom ruled by lawlessness; the regents, after all, meet only about half a dozen times a year, not nearly enough to provide oversight for an organization that controls nearly $16 billion a year.
And, of course, having supposedly apolitical regents has not kept the university from making political decisions. After all, policies that govern the use of racial preferences in university admissions or about investment in Sudan are inherently subjective, based on individual preferences and values.
Instead of having these decisions made by an elected Legislature — still the most representative government body in the state, no matter what the pitfalls of democracy may be — they are now made by an appointed board, made up mostly of rich, white men.
Truth be told, making the university more accountable to the state probably wouldn’t keep future pay scandals from happening. But it might provide some enterprising reporters with enough protection to expose them.
