Travis Fife: EVP should focus on financial transparency of UC, not Gov. Jerry Brown

As students at the University of California, we stand in a difficult middle ground between two massive institutions that determine our financial fate.

On the one hand, we have UC leadership: UC President Janet Napolitano just executed a bold political move by passing a tuition increase plan in spite of a whole host of student demonstrations expressing opposition. On the other hand, we have Gov. Jerry Brown who seems to be trying to find any excuse or scapegoat to avoid giving more money to the UC.

In response to the tuition increase plan, our Undergraduate Students Association Council External Vice President Conrad Contreras released a two-step plan to both lobby Brown for more state funding and also push for more financial transparency from the UC.

While these are both commendable objectives, the most important part of Contreras’ plan is his goal of increasing the financial transparency of the UC. Up to this point, students have largely either been left out or ignored by the people making the decisions that directly impact their chances of receiving or continuing higher education. Financial transparency can help shift the power dynamic between the UC and student leaders to not just keep students informed, but also allow them to be a larger part of the decision making process.

Financial transparency is one part of solving a problematic power dynamic within the UC where students feel shut out from decision making. There are already three university student governments – UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Riverside – prepared to vote on resolutions that would express no confidence in Napolitano and the UC Board of Regents. These resolutions are supposed to signal the student body’s lack of trust in the regents to represent their interests. While these are ultimately just symbolic resolutions, they are symbols of the way students feel excluded by the decision making process of the UC.

It’s true that the UC is transparent in the sense that it releases an annual budget. But the way the UC calculates the cost of a student’s education and thereby justifies potential tuition increases is definitely not transparent enough. In fact, its method of reporting costs doesn’t even comply with requirements from the state legislature after passing Assembly Bill 94. The bill requires the UC to break expenses down between undergraduate, graduate and research costs, but the UC’s method of data collection made this impossible. Some experts also believe that the University’s method of calculating the cost of education is faulty. This reveals that there’s a need to reevaluate how the UC discloses its budget as well as how it calculates the costs that go into that budget.

Disclosing more information about the UC budget would let the students settle for themselves the dispute between Napolitano and Brown over how efficiently funds are spent within the UC. Students could voice concerns over the structure of the budget and question the necessity of the tuition hike proposal from a more informed perspective.

While lobbying Brown is an important step to prevent a potential tuition increase, he has demonstrated a willingness to only give funds when they are contingent on the UC assimilating to his vision. For the EVP’s office, putting more focus on transparency gets to the root of a larger problem than just this policy – it’s a step towards giving students information that gives them more power to criticize the UC.

While it’s true that a primary goal of the regents and Napolitano is to make decisions that further the interest of the students, another primary goal they have is to be accountable to the students the system is built for. By depriving students and members of the UC community of the chance to give proper input into the decision, they are not properly serving their constituents.

For the EVP’s office, this means they shouldn’t view Brown as their “main targets”, as Contreras said in his proposal. The state does have a responsibility to provide more funding, but the communication gap between students and administrators on this issue reflects a power structure that permeates through every other policy decision the UC makes.

This criticism isn’t to defend Brown either. His proposed method of funding the UC is to give small increases and get on his soapbox about online classes and financial efficiency. But this only justifies the potential of increasing tuition, not the UC’s tight-lipped approach to the situation.

There’s a subtle paternalism in all this. People in power make decisions for students who have relatively limited political sway. UC leadership can claim it’s working in the best interest of students and it may end up being right. But when decisions are made for students, without student input, they end up being more unilateral exercises of power than decisions that reflect the wishes of stakeholders.