Category Archive

The University of California will soon be considering a governance change that’s as overdue as it is depressing — changing the formal title of students’ payments from “fees” to “tuition.”

For most of the history of the University UC was free or nearly so. The system was created in 1868, but as late as 1956 the student fee stood at less than $100 a year. The state was committed to the principle that, as the university’s 1960 Master Plan had put it, UC would always be “tuition free to all residents of the state,” with teaching expenses absorbed by the taxpayer and fees representing “charges to the students for services not directly related to instruction, such as health, counseling … placement services, housing, recreation, and the like.”

Fees rose to $600 a year by the mid-seventies, and spiked again in the early eighties, but the increases were modest compared to what would come later. (The 1956 fee had amounted to $656 in today’s dollars, while the the 1990 fee was worth $2362 in present-day money.)

Costs to students rose throughout this period — more some years than others — but the premise of public higher education in California remained the same. Students would be asked to contribute to the costs of their education, but the bulk of the price of their instruction — their tuition — would be paid for by the state.

Today, that premise — that promise — no longer exists. Since 1990, per-student state funding for the University of California has fallen by two thirds in constant dollars. (I’ll say that again: For every 2010 dollar that California spent on a UC student twenty years ago, it now spends just thirty-three cents.)

And as state support for higher ed has fallen, UC “fees” have exploded. They now stand at more than $10,000 a year, well above the national average for public colleges, and they could rise by as much as 20% this fall.

As early as 1970, State Senator Al Rodda wrote that it was “no longer possible … to argue that we have not adopted the tuition principle in California.” But by calling tuition “fees,” the university has continued to make just that argument.

Sometime in the next few weeks it will stop.

“There is nothing easier than writing an article against something. It’s just so simple. It writes itself. You’ve just got to be angry about something. And you’ve just got to puff and wheeze with indignation and fury and resentment and bile and malice and the thing writes itself. But if you write anything that’s for something it looks sentimental and cutesy. And it’s so much harder to write. So much harder to write well.”

–Stephen Fry, here.

Peter Thiel made billions from PayPal and Facebook, and now he’s out to change the world.

The radical libertarian Thiel has given up on democracy — that experiment went south when women got the vote, he says — and is investing heavily on space exploration and ocean-surface homesteading in hopes of escaping the rabble. Really.

But while those projects — like his interest in life extension and cryogenics — are nutty but mostly harmless, his latest venture is deeply pathological. He’s leading up a group of investors in the Thiel Fellowships, a program of hundred-thousand-dollar grants to teenaged geniuses who promise to drop out of college.

Really.

“The University of Arizona,” Thiel backer William Andregg declares in a Thiel Fellowship press release, has “no course on ‘how to cure aging.'” That may be true, but it does have whole departments full of courses in fields like biochemistry, genetics, and gerontology. Those courses may not teach you how to cure aging, but they’re pretty good places to get the tools you’ll need for such a project.

Some people get along great without college, of course, and maybe the Thiel Fellows will be in that number. A hundred thousand bucks goes a long way. But come on, Pete. You can’t come up with something better to do with two million dollars than to discourage education?

Today I’m going to be on the radio here in New York at 12:40 pm, talking about the new documentary Chekhov for Children. The film tells a bizarre and wonderful story out of the NYC of the 1970s — a story about public schools and the arts and what childhood is really like.

On Thursday Chekhov for Children has its New York premiere at Lincoln Center. The screening is at 6:30 pm, and I’ll be appearing on a panel discussing the movie right after the show. Tickets are still available.

And on Friday morning I fly to Montreal to participate in the conference Universities at the Crossroads: Crisis in Post-Secondary Education at McGill University. The conference, which begins at 3 pm, is free to attend and open to the public. I’ll be speaking and answering questions from 5:30 to 7:00, with a wine and cheese reception immediately following.

All that plus I get to teach the Bill of Rights, the flappers, and the history of ancient India at my day job. Should be fun.

This is my one-thousandth post to this blog.

That’s it. Just thought you should know. If there’s anything on your mind you’d like to share, feel free.