Remarks by Brian Murphy

Kick-off hearing of the Joint Legislative Committee to Update the Master Plan - December 7, 2009

Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. The Chair asked if I might reflect on some of the lessons learned from the review in the late 1980s, and what those lessons or reflections might have to say about the core issues that frame your work.
Let me say from the outset that the work of the Committee is framed by a contradiction between the crisis that we are in, and the long-range historical stakes that the Master Plan actually raises. One of the lessons we learned is how difficult it is to address historic issues from within the framework of an immediate legislative session, even two sessions, much less one framed by a recession and a fiscal catastrophe in the state. So I will say at the beginning that that this is one of those rare opportunities where members of the committee can ask themselves questions that are not about next month, next week, next year, but really are about the future of the State of California.

Let me say three things about what I believe Clark Kerr and the Commission with whom Chancellor Young worked understood the stakes to be. And given the limits of time, I'll only say them as aphorisms. The first is that everyone on that Commission and everyone on every subsequent review of the Master Plan understood the dependence of an economy that is going to grow upon this system. The absolute core of California's economy-particularly in a global, post-industrial world-is a higher education system second to none. That linkage was understood in the very beginning. Clark Kerr, one needs to remember, was a labor economist, and understood the dependence of the economy on an increase in productivity in the State of California, and the necessity of public investment in order to grow an economy. Put simply, people who misunderstand the role of public investment in the provision of public goods like higher education in favor of short-term tax advantages simply don't understand how advanced capitalism works.

It is useful, therefore, in the Committee's reflections, to bring in some folks who can help you understand that linkage. So that it's not all short term stuff. What is the long-term linkage between public investment and higher education and economic development? The Chinese clearly understand it. They are predicting that they are going to try to produce several University of California systems. I think they will learn it is harder than they imagine to do that. But on the other hand, the investment is a core part of their industrial strategy. Western Europe is engaged in a serious review of its system of higher education, in the creation of a coordinated continental system capable of producing men and women capable of generating an economy deeply competitive with our own.

The President of the United States gets it, when he makes the argument that the United States, in order to be globally competitive, needs to move the percentage of adults who have degrees or certificates from its current 39% to perhaps 60%, or at least 54%. Canada's best in the world at 53.5%. The President gets it. In order to reach his goal, we would have to produce in the country 157,000 more graduates each year for the next decade. The State of California has just set the country back two years. We just lost 2 years in this last year alone, if the numbers remain at 300,000.

Second, the framers of the Master Plan, with a very different demographics from our own, understood that the economy was just a part of it. To put it in colder terms, social peace was also at stake. Kerr and his colleagues aimed to rationalize or order the disparate pieces of the puzzle. Mission differentiation was also a way of allocating scare resources. And if you're going to fund the most elegant public research university in the world, at the level it requires to be funded, they needed to, even at that point, reduce access from 15% to 12.5%, which meant the necessity of growing the CSU and the community colleges significantly. Inside of that is what goes on within every family within this state, particularly between March and April, when they wait to hear whether it's possible for them to go to higher education, which is in fact the expectation that there is a place for me, an expectation within every family that children have in fact this astonishing opportunity afforded to no other society in the industrialized world, none. Nowhere in Europe, nowhere else. That in fact there is a space. Social peace emerges when people have that fundamental belief.
In Europe, the critical issue around higher education planning is what they call social cohesion. It is the capacity for an incredibly class-stratified society, now with immigrants, to integrate its people with an educational system whose tracking currently forbids the opportunity of a huge number of people to actually avail themselves of higher education.

The third, if I can frame it in the way that we spoke about it the late 80s, is that it is not hyperbole to say that democracy is at stake. In the late 80s, the phrase "multicultural democracy" was adopted by a bi-partisan committee across the aisle, because that committee understood that the stakes were within a multicultural society. There are lots of multicultural societies. Peru, India, even South Africa with apartheid was "multicultural." But to be a multicultural democracy meant that you would actually put aside the resources so that the children of immigrants now would have the same opportunity that earlier immigrants had. And that the democratic society of this state depended on an educated people who were deeply, broadly, wisely educated in rich and complex ways. It was not uniquely about technology and science or what made us competitive in the economy, but it was also about the poetics and the literature and the language of our people. For us to live together progressively, and to engage each other democratically, higher education is absolutely required.

So, the first lesson from our earlier review was an understanding which was almost touching in its emotion. For member after member of our committee said, "For once, I have the chance to do something that really matters long term." But how unbelievably hard that is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. So the second lesson of the first Master Plan, and it's actually historic, is please don't modify the Master Plan back to the current fiscal crisis. To adjust what the state has depended on for 50 years to what you can now pay for is a disaster. You'll hear various versions of that in various ways. You have to reaffirm the promise, not compromise it by reorganizing it to what you can afford now.

I don't think you can duck on the revenue question, and we did. At the end of the report in 1989, in order to achieve bi-partisan agreement, I reduced what could have been a deep and principled critique of Proposition 13 to a pale banality, a phrase about artificial limits of state revenue. I believe your challenge is to call out to the surface the limits of this State's current fiscal system because you can't solve higher education reform absent a fiscal reform of the State. The California Tax Association has recently released a document: "10 Policies for $20 billion," and I recommend it to you. I don't think this committee will be able to do its work unless it self-consciously, honestly, addresses the contradiction between the limits of the current resource system and the needs, of not just higher education, but social welfare and health, and K-12.

Finally, I want to repeat what John said. One of the things that was quite remarkable about the reform of the late 80s was the degree to which, when faced with a balancing act between what you might call an economistic rational approach to the system ("without it, the economy cannot grow"), and a moral imperative, that committee chose the language of a moral imperative. The fiscal realities framed our work, as indeed they must. But we never forgot (Senator Neilsen remembers this), we never forgot what this is about, what it meant to live in a society that meant seriously that men and women have the opportunity not just to earn, but to be democratically empowered. And that vision, which is very powerful, ought guide your work.

One final reflection, based on what we discovered. I came to this building having taught for years, and had to learn its ways and rhythms and protocols. I think I learned, with all due respect, that Legislators are typically not good organizers. You don't mobilize communities, typically. Communities need to mobilize themselves to be up here. Any assistance you can give to the unions, to the students, to the faculty, to the leadership of these systems, to make public representation of their needs, you will shift the dialogue up here. The committee in its own dialogue will not be sufficient. We found ourselves in many, many meetings like this, with elegant things being said, and it was just deaf outside. So I urge you to give very conscious thought to how to engage the people in making their voices heard outside these walls and inside these halls.

Thank you.

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Brian Murphy is a member of the Vasconcellos Project Board, and the President of De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Prior to his appointment at De Anza, he served as the Executive Director of the San Francisco Urban Institute and Director of External Affairs at San Francisco State University. He has also taught Political Theory, Urban Politics, and American Government at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara University, and San Francisco State, and holds a BA in Political Science from Williams College and a Masters and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He worked in the California State Legislature as the Chief policy consultant in reviewing California's Master Plan for Higher Education, and has worked in international development projects in Afghanistan, Algeria, and Jamaica.