Capitol Weekly reports about a radical proposal to spare the UC system major financial pain amid massive budget cuts: close three campuses.
Don't worry: UC Irvine makes the cut.
Barely.
]
Having just lopped off five sports, Anteaters could be jumpy about such a notion. (By the way, you know what sucks? Being a swimmer who transferred to UCI from the University of Arizona.)
However, it is the UC campuses at Riverside, Merced and Santa Cruz that would close under the
plan hatched by a UC San Diego sociology professor and signed onto by
22 department heads.
“We suggest . . . you drop the pretense that all campuses are equal,
and argue for a selective reallocation of funds to
preserve excellence, not the current disastrous blunderbuss
policy of even, across the board cuts,” reads the letter Andrew Scull and his crew of 22 sent to UC President Mark Yudof. “Or, if that is too hard, we suggest that
what ought
to be done is to shut one or more of these campuses
down, in whole or in part.”
Scull considers the UC system to be broken into three tiers. The first includes UC Berkeley, Los Angeles and San
Diego. Irvine, Davis and Santa Barbara occupy his second tier. Riverside, Merced and Santa Cruz are Scull's bottom feeders.
Yudof
hasn't exactly bought the plan. Shortly after receiving the letter, he
presented his plan to the Board of Regents to subject some 100,000 UC
employees to furlough days
and pay cuts, to go along with increased student fees and mandatory
campus-specific and system-wide cuts. The board bought the plan,
without mentioning the idea of closing any campuses.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.