CSUN University News Clippings

Editorial: Consequence of state dysfunction

(November 4, 2009)

It’s unnerving to see that Cal Poly Pomona has to figure out which majors and disciplines might have to be terminated to meet budget demands caused by the state’s economic crisis.

This is the surest sign yet that California’s great system of public universities is starting to unravel. Along with the state’s overburdened transportation system and a water-delivery system that’s flirting with natural disaster, this development confirms that some of the things that once made California great are crumbling around us.

The prospect of devastating cuts in the Cal State University system gives us the particularly ugly feeling that we’re eating our own young, metaphorically speaking.

Our University of California, Cal State University and community college systems collectively were once the envy of the world. They made California great by educating everyone from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, national business leaders, engineers and doctors to nurses, teachers and technicians.

Those educated people made the California economy one of the greatest in the world, bigger than that of all but a handful of countries.

Now that greatness is more endangered than the Delta smelt. California is staring into the abyss rather than fixing its gaze on the top of the mountain.

If we can’t offer top-flight educational opportunities to our own children, who will power the economy of California in the future?

To be sure, some reasonable changes may result from CSU’s budget-driven self-makeover. Perhaps some majors and departments should be concentrated at particular campuses rather than offered throughout the system, in the same way that engineering and agriculture majors gravitate to Cal Poly.

But California must not tolerate sustained deterioration of public college and university opportunities for its young people.

We’re seeing now the fruits of the state’s legislative paralysis, the inability to set and maintain proper priorities whether because of special-interest influence, voter-approved constraints or basic incompetence.

Just last week, government-reform proponents unveiled proposed initiatives that would call for the state’s first constitutional convention in 120 years. Repair California, a coalition of groups helmed by the Bay Area Council, a business group, wants a convention limited to four topics: making state government more efficient and effective; reforming election and initiative processes and reducing special-interest influence; reforming the state budget system; and improving state government’s working relationship with local governments.

Further study of the details of their proposal is needed, but on the surface we’re all for it. California has become dysfunctional, and we don’t think our executive and legislative leaders can fix it in the normal course of business

Publication: Daily Bulletin