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Submission: UCLA’s privatization pushes operation costs onto students

By Todd Lu

Oct. 24, 2014 12:00 a.m.

UC President Janet Napolitano made it clear this April that the UC system was turning its attention toward more private sources of revenue and partnerships with private industry to offset the lack of state funds. The University experienced state cuts in education in 2008-09 and 2011-12. The University acted upon its plans to expand investment into the private sector, implementing new investment programs over the summer. The expansion of investment programs in the UC system reflects a larger national trend called privatization, in which university administrators use cuts in state funding to push for major reconstruction of how public universities operate.

This June, Napolitano lifted a 25-year restriction that banned the UC from investing in companies that commercialize products derived from its research. This would allow the UC to take equity and directly invest in companies that rely on campus research facilities and incubators. Napolitano thereafter announced that a newly formed UC Innovation Council – an 18-member body of venture capitalists and business executives, among others – would be able to advise the UC in private investment. In September, the UC decided to create a $250 million investment fund called UC Ventures to finance startups targeting the UC’s research.

Investment policy changes are also taking place at UCLA. In the same month, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block announced that a nonprofit company, Westwood Technology Transfer, would help guide UCLA in its investment and entrepreneurial decisions. WTT would partner with UCLA’s Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Sponsored Research, which manages patents and markets products created from UCLA research, to choose which projects or companies the university should fund.

The privatized model stands in contrast to what a public university ought to be – an institution uninfluenced by business interests that produces knowledge and provides affordable education to the next generation of critical thinkers.

The difference between the privatized university and the public university is a matter of priority. A public university prioritizes affordable student education and academic research while a privatized university – and the managers leading this reconstruction – is more interested in the university as a reputable enterprise. In a privatized model, the university outsources investment decision-making, among other operations to private companies, and shifts operational costs from university management and the state to students and their families.

In the privatized model, administrators manage the university like a business that advertises to the consumers – students – to generate a cut of profit for the salaries of a growing number of senior administrators. According to the UC 2014-15 budget report, UC student tuition goes toward UC core funds, which in small part pay for senior management salaries, among other things.

As a result of privatization, the cost of university operations is transferred onto students rather than, as it has historically been, on the state and federal government. UCLA tuition and fees nearly tripled for incoming in-state undergraduate students from $5,112 to $14,392 between 2000-01 and 2013-14 and well over doubled for in-state master’s students from $6,220 to $15,288.38 during the same period, adjusted for 2014 inflation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s inflation calculator.

In response to the tuition increase, UCLA students took out more student loans. The average loan debt upon graduation increased from $16,475 to $20,229 per student from the 2001-02 to the 2012-13 graduating class. To make matters worse, UC management is beginning to talk of tuition and fee increases. Toward the end of last month, Napolitano teleconferenced UC student newspapers, echoing that the UC Regents will “have to look at the tuition again.”

Furthermore, tuition hikes and outsourcing operations were made undemocratically by the UC Regents. Students have no practical institutional mechanism with which to determine our school system’s economic decisions. Thus, there is little choice for us other than to organize and express our grievances to UCLA administration outside of institutional mechanisms like USAC, which has no voting power in the UC Regents.

Organizing students to protest and rally against privatization may seem like a daunting task, but student activists have time on their side. The tuition hikes will not come this year, but probably in the near future. Also, the Westwood Technology Transfer and Office of Intellectual Property partnership is in a one-year transition period while board members gain an understanding of how university operations work. In the meantime, I will also organize with my fellow students. I urge all readers to do the same.

Lu is a second-year political science student and the research coordinator for Student Collective Against Labor Exploitation (SCALE) at UCLA, a student group committed to creating a democratic and free campus.

Email Lu at [email protected].

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