Yudof’s Message - California Progress Report

Maybe the governor and legislature, its tax-cutting fanatics most of all, never knew the value of that asset. If they did, they seem to have long forgotten it. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Worse, the people who profess to be the state’s business leaders – the state Chamber of Commerce, the California Business Roundtable, and all the rest-- men and women who are supposed to be concerned about California’s economic vitality -- seem to be ignorant of it as well. When you hear from them these days, all they seem to be concerned about is, as Kerr put it, “low taxes and cheap labor.”

What’s most in jeopardy, not only at UC but at the California State University and at California’s 100-plus community colleges, which educate far and away the largest number of our students, is the investment in people, the crucial skilled workers, the educated citizens, on which California’s future depends. Even now, for a variety of reasons, a smaller percentage of its high school graduates go directly to college than all but two of the nation’s 20 largest states. In New York, some 75 percent of high school grads go directly to college. In California it’s fewer than 60 percent. It’s a terrible time to make college access and quality even scarcer.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Yudof, the president of the University of California, came to Sacramento to remind the Capitol press corps – what’s left of it -- of some of those forgotten things and to chastise them both for their ignorance and their indifference.

“I don’t understand,” he said, “how it is that I receive visitors from Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Korea, who tell me how their nations aspire to build research universities modeled on the University of California.