Inside Higher Ed has a good piece on the fiscal crisis (or bump in the road, depending on your politics) affecting the University of California system (HT: Org Theory).

The budget crisis facing the University of California, a 10-campus system serving 225,000 students, is without precedent. According to the latest projections – and these numbers change all the time – the system can expect last year’s $3.61 billion state budget to be reduced by about $813 million or approximately 20 percent.

While California has unique dysfunctions that explain their particular shortfall, the question of financial viability central to the “public” nature of universities across America. Already, many top public universities, including the UC system, draw their funding from non-public sources (fundraising, investments, grants, etc.). The ability of public universities to effectively fund raise and stay viable makes it easier for state governments to cut back on public expenditures for higher education, as they have been doing throughout the 90’s and 00’s.

Universities have a compelling case to make for public funding. They can persuasively argue that their viability is inextricably linked to a state’s global economic competitiveness. However, making this case poses a double edged sword in the political arena. If your reason for being is to produce a quality workforce, what’s the point of taking a class in Hebrew or Renaissance art? Of course, the standard response is that such courses are vital to the development of a well rounded individual. But as UC English professor Jack Miles points out in the article regrading the need to maintain liberal arts courses:

There are always people who call it frills and say ‘Who needs that? Who needs a symphony? Who needs a library?’ Those voices will always be around, and they become more compelling at a time of triage.…

In my own work, I’ve been examining the increased use of a “global competitiveness” frame in promoting diversity efforts at public universities. What gets lost in the discussion about global competitiveness is how framing dictates policy outcomes. If you sell yourself as primarily producing worker for the labor force (albeit highly skilled), then your institutional framework is going to have to adapt accordingly. This framing poses a critical set of questions for academia: how does your research contribute to economic competitiveness? How does your major contribute? How does the way you use your time as a professor contribute? All these questions, of course, beg the question of whether economic competitiveness is what we really should be selling.