"California’s financial crisis jeopardises one of the world’s finest universities"

The Economist inform s methat the University of California system is in peril due to the financial crisis faced by the state.

THE best public higher education in the world is to be found at the University of California (UC). This claim is backed up by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, which provides an authoritative ranking of research universities. The UC’s campus at Berkeley ranks third behind two private universities, Harvard and Stanford. Several of the other ten UC sites, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind. Californians are justifiably proud.

It is therefore no small matter that this glory may be about to end. “We are in irreversible decline,” says Sandra Faber, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who has inadvertently become a mouthpiece for a fed-up faculty. University excellence, she says, “took decades to build. It takes a year to destroy it.”

I have also been reading Fareed Zakaria's book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, which has a chapter tracing California's governmental economic woes to the political process that limited the taxes that could be levied by the state government in what he feels is an excess of democracy -- opening decisions to the voters without appropriate safeguards of reprentative government for professional decision making not to mention safeguards for individual rights.

I am a product of the old California educational system, not only of public schools but with degrees from UCLA, Berkeley and UC Irvine. My parents were imigrants with limited economic means, and I could not have afforded an education other than in public universities, and I greatly benefitted from the quality of the University of California campuses in my time.

The system was open to kids who were in the top eighth of their high school classes, except for some schools (such as my Engineering Colleges) which had further limited enrollment and required examinations for entry. Thus the state was offering a great education to its best students as a right. The economic success of the state is in part due to the educational system it supported! It also had a great junior college and state college system, not to mention great private colleges and uiniversities such as Cal Tech, Stanford and USC.

In a later day, I might have been able to finance a college education in more expensive schools by taking out student loans. I have been able to work as a volunteer and public servant in part because I did not carry the huge debt that might have acrued from all those years of university education. I think that in that volunteer and public service I may well have justified the subsidies that California provided for my education, not to mention the taxes I have paid on the income that education allowed me to earn,.

I am sad to hear that the University of California system may lose it quality as a result of failure of the state to continue its adequate support!