Bill Lyne's blog

Here at the blog, we still remember that ad in the back of 1970s issues of Rolling Stone (when it was still on newsprint and still about music) that invited readers to send five dollars to the Universal Life Church and become an ordained minister, fully empowered to perform weddings, funerals, etc.

So we weren’t surprised to read in the Seattle Times (6-4-10) that an internet company in West Virginia called American Public University is offering Walmart employees “college credit for performing their jobs, including such tasks as loading trucks and ringing up purchases.” (Really, we’re not making this up.) Apparently, workers can “earn up to 45 percent of the credits needed for an associate or bachelor’s degree while on the job.”

Is this a great country, or what? Now, if you get a job that requires absolutely no college coursework, to say nothing of a degree, you can soon find yourself almost halfway to a degree simply by doing that job. No wonder we’re cutting funding to universities. Why pay for chemistry labs or history professors when people can get paid minimum wage, stock shelves, and earn college credits all at the same time?

The Walmart slimeballs are, of course, pitching themselves as working class heroes. “We want to provide you with more ways and faster ways to succeed with us,” the head of Walmart’s U.S. division told employees at the company’s annual meeting. The chief administrative officer, reaching for ever higher levels of condescension, said, “People will surprise you if you give them opportunities.”

This would be funnier if it weren’t so much like what’s happening in real higher education policy. Washington’s Higher Education Coordinating Board has a mandate to produce tens of thousands more baccalaureate degrees in the next twenty years. And judging from the HEC Board’s “System Design” discussions last year, they don’t really care how they get them. Applied baccalaureate degrees, online degrees, degrees from for-profit companies, and credit for “life experience” are all on the table. The HEC Board and the legislature are hell-bent on getting people more credentials, but they’re not interested in paying for genuine education.

And all of this gets trotted out with the same sort of populist rhetoric that flows from Walmart execs. “Educating more people to higher levels” was the battle cry of the HEC Board last year. It should have been “Rushing as fast as we can toward mediocre and worse 4 year public education.”

Kittens born in an oven aren’t biscuits, teenagers with five dollars and a Universal Life card aren’t ordained ministers, and diplomas from places like American Public University aren’t legitimate baccalaureate degrees. The education marketplace is booming while real education is rapidly disappearing.

As community and technical colleges and for-profit “universities” continue to grow, public, four-year universities are starving and becoming increasingly more private. This will have a devastating effect on all of American society and culture. The space program, cancer research, American social mobility, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, and the free speech movement all have deep roots in American public universities. Their disappearance and transformation into institutions available only to the privileged will dramatically change the United States. At a time when emerging economies like India and China are investing in genuine liberal arts and sciences education, the United States generally and Washington in particular are turning more and more toward narrow technical and vocational training.

The cure for cancer isn’t going to be found at a community college, and the Vietnam war would have ended a lot later if college students had all been working at Walmart.

Here at the blog, our political education has come fast and furious. We still have a lot to learn, but there are two things we know for sure:

1. Stuff that is pure bullshit if it’s said enough in enough of the right places takes on the obduracy of sacred writ, and becomes very hard to challenge, no matter how dumb it might be.

2. Budget problems are really political problems.

In category 1 we have the widening divide between Washington’s public universities and its community colleges. A brief glance at the facts makes it clear that this state’s government places far more value on two-year higher education than it does on four-year higher ed. Washington ranks in the top five in community college participation rates and in the bottom five in four-year college participation rates. Washington is now first in the nation in the percentage of its higher education budget that is devoted to community and technical colleges. In the last twenty years, Washington has invested four times more in two-year colleges than in four-year colleges.

When we go trolling among legislators and their staff looking for explanations for this disparity, we inevitably encounter a series of myths:

Myth # 1: Only community college students get, need, or want jobs. In the 2010 supplemental state budget, the universities were once again cut more than the community colleges. This was done in the name of “Workforce Training.” The governor, legislators, business leaders, and staff from the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges all told us that the best way to turn the economy around is by training people for the sorts of lower middle class jobs that they would never consider for themselves or their children. Listen to the “workforce training” rhetoric for too long and you come away thinking that only people with Associates degrees get jobs and that those who get four-year degrees are only looking for navel-gazing self-fulfillment, with no intention or probability of ever joining the workforce.

But the facts, of course, are that people with 4-year degrees stand about a four times better chance of getting a job—a better job that pays more:

“Workforce training” might be better described as “policy enforcement of class barriers within the workforce.”

Myth # 2: Community and Technical Colleges are a more efficient, better bang for the buck. This is probably the most sacred of the CTC sacred cows. The reasoning is that since the community colleges are running faculty sweatshops, with mostly part-time, badly paid, no-benefits instructors, they must be generating education on the cheap. But in fact, administrative costs at the community colleges are higher than they are at the state universities and the gap between university-level instruction costs and community college instruction costs is rapidly shrinking. For every full time student who enrolls for the 2010-11 school year, Western Washington University will receive $4,485 from the State General Fund. For every full time student who enrolls for the 2010-11 school year, a Washington state community college will receive $4,614 from the State General Fund. Soon students will be paying the same tuition for an “applied baccalaureate” degree from a community college that they would pay for a real baccalaureate degree from a state university. So you can get a bachelor of applied arts degree in interior design from Bellevue Community College (sorry, Bellvue College) for the same price as a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Western.

It gets worse when we start looking at output. Washington’s state universities, despite being chronically underfunded, have the best graduation rates in the country. About 19% of all the people who enter community colleges actually finish. A qualified high school senior who goes directly to a four-year university is four times more likely to get a bachelors degree than the same student who goes to community college with the intent of transferring to a four-year college.

Myth # 3: Washington’s public universities are elitist and arrogant. This rolls myths 1 and 2 into a one-liner seasoned with lots of easy shots at Mark Emmert’s salary. It depends heavily on traditional anti-intellectual suspicion of the book-learnin’ that alienates students from the “real world.”

State-supported public universities are actually the opposite of elitist, designed to give regular people the same educational opportunities available to the elites who can pay very high prices to attend private universities.

What is in fact elitist is a bunch of comfortable politicians and policy-makers creating budgets that deny higher education to people below the middle of the middle class while at the same time spouting clichés about the common people. It’s pretty ironically elitist to call the universities elitist as you are cutting their state appropriations and driving their tuition up, making them more and more the playgrounds of the privileged.

Beneath these myths lie some pretty straightforward political realities. Businesses don’t want to pay taxes to support state universities when they can recruit people with college degrees from around the country. State universities are in six legislative districts, while community colleges are in thirty-four. The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is as organized and politically influential as the Higher Education Coordinating Board is dysfunctional and politically hopeless.

All of which brings us to the second truth we’ve learned here at the blog: budget problems are really political problems.

Yes, the state economy’s bad and times are tough. Yes, everyone needs to tighten their belt and do their share. But state universities have been asked to do far more than their share:

Cutting our state universities more than almost any other universities in the country has been a political, not a budgetary, choice. And it is clear that we need to come up with political solutions.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

And in politics, nothing communicates better than money and votes:

Help support the revival of public university education in Washington:

Help us show our representatives that university education is a voting issue:

Just as surely as spring melts into summer, just as caterpillars inevitably emerge as butterflies, the 2010 legislative session has ended (a little late) and the election season has begun. Our elected representatives and those who aspire to be our elected representatives have transformed from stately and distinguished leaders and policy makers into hustlers haunting union halls, front porches, living rooms, and coffee shops, handing out their resumes and pictures like auditioning actors, looking for money and votes. It’s poignant and oddly reassuring.

Our public universities have always been deeply involved in the legislative part of the process, not so much the election part. And that’s a big part of the reason we’re still the state’s rainy day fund and the stepchildren to the community and technical colleges. We haven’t been bringing any money or any votes, so we’re not on the top of any legislator’s list.

So now we want in.

FYI PAC is an independent, unaffiliated political action committee, launched to support candidates who understand the value of Washington’s public universities. We welcome contributions from anyone who supports affordable, accessible, quality four-year public education in Washington.

For years, university students, faculty, and administrators have been going to Olympia making excellent arguments for the state to better support its public universities. Here at the blog, we’re mostly teachers, and every teacher knows that even arguments most excellent don’t make a dent until somebody’s listening. And nothing makes legislators listen more than money and votes. So check out FYI PAC and help make the voices of our universities heard in Olympia.

A Big UFWS thanks to everyone in the state legislature who had the courage to raise the revenue to keep vital state services available in Washington.

For Washington’s public state universities, the news in the 2010 supplemental state budget was bad, but it could have been worse. After months of concern and threat, funding for the State Need Grant and much of the funding for student Work Study was preserved. This funding will help to make sure that public university education remains available to qualified students from all income groups.

Each university must accommodate a 6.3% cut to its state appropriations, on top of the 25% to 30% reductions to state appropriations that were imposed in last year’s biennial budget. This will of course mean fewer and larger classes and more time and money spent earning degrees.

On each of our campuses, the United Faculty of Washington State is working hard to make sure these cuts have the least possible impact on our students.

The 2010 legislative session was a difficult one for everybody, but there were some signs that our continuing effort to help the legislature understand the precarious position of Washington’s public universities had some effect.

UFWS is committed to continuing to work with our administrations, students, alumni and elected representatives to make sure that our outstanding universities survive these tough times. 

A tip of the blog hat to TVW and Inside Olympia for giving us college folks a chance to explain ourselves.  Mike Bay, TVW Director of Programming, and Austin Jenkins, Inside Olympia host and consensus lead dog of Olympia reporters, are both gents of the highest caliber. 

Link to TVW.

So if you’d called your bookie a month ago and said, I’ve got a thousand bucks that says the United States Congress will pass sweeping health care reform before the Washington State Legislature will pass a supplemental state budget, you probably could have gotten pretty good odds.

Unlike their big brothers and sisters in D.C., the Republicans in Olympia aren’t doing parliamentary somersaults or calling anyone baby killers, they’re mostly just waiting to go home. This is all about Democrats in all their diversity—the blue-greens, the road kills, the legislators in swing districts, and most of all leadership. The official story is that this standoff is about sales tax, but those in the know seem to think it boils down to a staring match between the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.

Here at the blog, we’re feeling a little bit like Republicans, relegated to the sidelines and living the life of a bargaining chip. The proposed cuts to state university operating budgets in the house, senate, and governor’s proposals are bad, badder, and worse, respectively, but the worst could be yet to come. That’s what happened to us last year, when the 11:59 deal-making of the reconciliation budget ended up cutting us more than either the house or the senate proposals.

In Monday’s paper, we got a roundabout reminder of why that possibility means a dimmer future. The Seattle Times took a break from its daily blaming of state employees for everything wrong in the state of Washington and ran an Op-Ed piece from Department of Commerce Director Rogers Weed. Mr. Weed set out to smack down Idaho Governor Butch Otter and set him straight on how much better our state is for business than his. He cites our “skilled work force” as one of the primary reasons why businesses should choose Washington, and then goes on to give the misleading impression that we grow that work force at home:

We invest in our people because companies need great talent to innovate and grow. Washington has more adults with at least 12 years of education (over 30 percent with bachelor’s degrees) than any Western state and ranks sixth among all states.

Mr. Weed should count himself lucky that he didn’t get struck by lightning for using the words “invest,” “Washington,” and “education” in the same paragraph. We have a lot of educated people in this state, but most of them were educated somewhere else. Washington ranks 48th in four-year college participation rates and 3rd in the importation of people with college degrees. Washington ranks 45th in the nation in K-12 funding and 48th in higher ed funding. We yap a lot in this state about the value of education, paramount duty, blah, blah, but when we look up at the reality of the funding scoreboard, it’s painfully clear that we don’t even come close to walking that talk.

What separates Washington from Idaho is what Mr. Weed calls an “enviable quality of life,” which boils down to a beautiful and temperate west side and the Pacific Ocean. If Washington were where Idaho is and we invested as little in “our people” as we do now, we’d make Idaho look like this side of paradise.

The $18,000 dollars that the state is spending each day to fund the special legislative session would pay for three plus years of tuition at Western Washington University. And the most depressing thing is that we’re spending that tuition money on the short strokes. We’re paying for pissing matches and arguments over tenths of percents instead of discussions of how to permanently right the ship. As wrong-headed as much of the “reform” and “footprint of government” talk can be, at least it’s trying to take on something big.

Washington ranks 35th in the nation in total taxes as a percentage of personal income and at the same time we have the most regressive tax structure in the country, taxing poor people at more than 5 times the rate of rich people. We’re a low tax state that dumps most of the burden on low-income people. Neither of those problems will be fixed in this special legislative session.

But imagine what we could do if we just started taxing the right people and just bumped our tax base up to say, 30th in the nation. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to invest in so many people educated in other states.

Dear Speaker Chopp,

We are the leaders of the United Faculty of Washington State. We represent 2200 faculty and educate 31,000 students at Washington’s Regional Comprehensive Universities.

We write to you knowing that you are working hard to find the right balance of new revenues and spending cuts in order to balance the 2010 supplemental state budget. We know that you are facing many difficult problems and facing hundreds of competing interests, and we are confident that you will ultimately do what is best for our state.

As you continue your deliberations and negotiations, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you of the importance of our state’s four-year higher education institutions. Our state universities and college are key to Washington’s economic recovery and future.

Each of the proposed supplemental budgets includes significant cuts to state appropriations to four-year higher education, ranging from a low of 3 percent to a high of 6.4 percent. We recognize that cuts are inevitable, but we hope, for the sake of our students, that when the final budget is written, the cuts to our universities and college are as low as possible. The proposed cuts are certain to have a tremendously negative impact on our students. Cuts beyond what have already been proposed will be utterly devastating, and will dramatically reduce college access and affordability.

As you know, this year’s cuts will come on top of 23 percent cuts to our state appropriations in last year’s biennial budget. These cuts were some of the deepest in the state and the nation.

These cuts were partially offset by tuition increases that will approach 30 percent in this biennium. These steep tuition increases make it imperative that you do everything you can in your current negotiations to retain funding for the Student Need Grand and Student Work Study Program. Public four-year higher education must remain public and available to all qualified students in Washington.

Again, we understand that you have a lot of tough choices to make. We stand ready to help you in any way we can.

Sincerely,

The United Faculty of Washington State

Bob Hickey, President, United Faculty of Central

Gary Krug, President, United Faculty of Eastern

Laurie Meeker, President, United Faculty of Evergreen

Steven Garfinkle, President, United Faculty of Western Washington

Bill Lyne, President, United Faculty of Washington State

Sandra Schroeder, President, American Federation of Teachers—Washington

Mary Lindquist, President, Washington Education Association

Oscar night had us here at the blog reflecting on our old school movie tastes. We’re suckers for a flick like Casablanca, not just for all the good lines, but also for the way it takes place in the interstices, away from the main action. While World War Two rages outside, beautiful people and character actors alike can find the refuge and time to reminisce, worry about their love lives, and find moral clarity at Rick’s place.

A similar thing happened last Friday in House Hearing Room D at the State Capitol in Olympia. With the battles over budgets and revenues reaching their peaks outside, the House Higher Education committee rounded up the usual higher ed suspects for a work session to talk about the future. Even as their colleagues were penciling out millions in new university budget cuts, House Higher Ed chair Deb Wallace and some of her fellow committee members introduced yet another study of state universities (this one to be conducted by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee), and led an elegiac discussion of the state of Higher Education.

The long overdue intervention against the House Higher Ed addiction to studies and task forces still hasn’t come, so now we’re all looking forward to the latest from the good folks at JLARC. This will certainly be a fresh perspective and no doubt we’ll all learn some new things about the nooks and crannies of higher ed. But the basic ineluctable and obvious facts will remain: Our state universities are funded at some of the lowest levels in the country; Participation rates at our state universities are among the lowest in the country, forcing the state to import truckloads of people with degrees from other states; Our state universities are some of the most efficient in the country; State funding for our universities has been steadily declining, forcing tuition to rise; and if we keep trying to squeeze even more blood from the stone, the education our students receive will inevitably suffer.

Once the presentation of the JLARC plans was over, Committee Chair Representative Deb Wallace pretty much ceded the floor to ranking Republican Glenn Anderson, who could step into a white tuxedo and time machine and look right at home next to Humphrey Bogart at Rick’s. Representative Anderson warmed up with some boilerplate observations about the bleakness of state budgets for the foreseeable future but then really hit his stride as he announced that college is no longer popular and that we had all better get used to the new world order. He told us that salaries for people with college degrees have been flat for a while (as opposed, presumably, to those skyrocketing salaries for people without college degrees) and thus people were no longer seeing the value of higher education. And then he closed with his signature statement, an argument that he has repeated at HEC Board meetings and in the legislature, telling us that for many of his constituents, college was little more than a “parenting exit strategy.” And higher taxes and six or seven grand a year in tuition seems like a lot just to get the kids out of the house.

Well, O.K., that’s one way of looking at it, but we’re not quite ready to give up on the idea that a college education is both a ticket to a better material life and a broadening of one’s intellectual horizons that is good in and of itself. But whether it’s about economic advancement and personal growth or just about finally turning junior’s room into the study you’ve always wanted, the fact is that our state universities are busting at the seams. All six are over-enrolled and turning away thousands of qualified applicants.

But while the evidence seems to suggest that college remains more popular and valuable than Representative Anderson suggests, none of us should be shocked to discover that his core point is as obvious as gambling in Casablanca. No matter how much people may want their kids to go to college and no matter how much they may perceive college as a good thing, right now the political will does not exist in this state to support four-year higher education. While some members of the House Higher Ed committee met with us in House Hearing Room D, their colleagues were right outside fighting about budgets and taxes. Some were worried that they might lose in November if they cut social services, many were worried about their electoral future if they raised taxes, none were thinking that they would pay a political price if they cut appropriations to state universities.

The time we spent last Friday talking about JLARC studies and the nuances of performance agreements and tuition policy probably would have been better spent talking about how we might organize the thousands of students and alumni in this state to help make state universities a voting issue. Until we do that, everything else is just hanging around Rick’s begging for exit visas.

Being a state legislator has got to be a pretty crappy job. You get paid enough to qualify for public assistance, you have to abandon your home and family for two or three months a year, lobbyists and constituents assault you every fifteen minutes expecting you to fully understand and solve their problems, you spend a lot of time locked in a caucus room with the same old faces fighting about the same old things, and no matter what you do, you can pretty much count on half the people being mad at you. That’s when you’re in session. When you’re not in session, you have to spend most of your time sucking up to people for money so you can get reelected and go do it all again next year. And, as with college football players eyeing the NFL, the odds of moving on to the true fame and fortune of the other Washington or the Governor’s mansion are pretty damn slim.

So when we here at the blog look toward Olympia and wonder what the heck they could possibly be thinking, we do so without in any way meaning to question the good will and genuine commitment to public service that animates most of our elected representatives.

But geez.

The governor, the house, and the senate have now all laid their budget and revenue cards on the table, so you’d expect to see some clarity beginning to emerge. But all we really know now is that we don’t know much. Almost from the minute they hit the web, the tax packages started to fall apart. Even the things that everybody thought were no-brainers, like taxes on private jets and cigarettes, have gone wobbly as squads of luxury jet manufacturing lobbyists have parachuted into Olympia and 7-11 owners have delivered petitions on behalf of future lung cancer victims everywhere. The senate’s third-of-a-penny sales tax hike was pretty much dead on arrival, the most striking evidence of which was the spectacle of Senator Rodney Tom voting against the budget he wrote.

Maybe the most peculiar thing about the Democratic caucus meltdown is that it has come in midstream. New taxes were always going to be a two step process and the Dems took the first step without a hitch. The suspension of Initiative 960 brought a lot of noise and some lame photo ops for Tim Eyman, but the vote was never in doubt. With all the blather about flouting the will of the people, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Fall line of Republican attack ads are already in the can. Democrats could now go home on March 11 without having raised taxes one dime and still have to face the tax-and-spend charge in November.

So suspending I-960 and then losing the nerve to actually raise some taxes seems a little bit like getting half a root canal—all of the pain with none of the relief.

The Republican and “Road Kill” Democrat position (and the rationale that Senator Tom offered in voting against his budget) is that the legislature hasn’t done the hard work to reduce state government’s “footprint.” Perhaps the most credible evidence that this is nothing more than union-busting bullshit is that the Republicans, when called upon to offer a budget-balancing plan of their own, can do nothing more imaginative than demonize state workers. When the smoke clears after this session, the legislature will have permanently cut at least $4 billion from a $30 billion state budget. Two-thirds of that budget cannot be cut due to constitutional protections and federal mandates. That means that the final damage will be around 30% to 40% of what was available to be cut.

No, the hard work that hasn’t been done is the hard work of genuine tax reform. Washington has the distinction of being a relatively low tax state with an incredibly regressive tax structure. The taxes that are now being proposed would solve some short-term problems and prevent a lot of suffering over the next couple of years, but they will do nothing to reform Washington’s fundamental tax structure. Until we wake up, join the twenty-first century, and move toward income taxes and away from sales taxes, the current chaotic way of doing things will remain the norm.

Part of us hopes that the collapse this time is complete, that the legislature goes home having done nothing, and that the ensuing disaster will help create the political will to follow the Economic Opportunity Institute and Bill Gates’s daddy toward sane tax policy.

But in the all politics is local department, no new taxes means more cuts than have been proposed in anybody’s budget so far. And the universities are the first place they usually come looking for more cuts.

So here’s hoping that the legislature gets it together enough to kick the can a little further down the road.

The big news in Olympia last week was about the budget, but the real show was about tuition in the House Higher Ed committee.
 
No matter how you felt about the bill, you had to like the Senate floor debate on Senate Bill 6562.  That’s the bill that would have given some tuition-setting authority to UW, WSU, and WWU, provided certain performance targets were met and certain financial aid guarantees were made.  It was the lone survivor of four or five bills regarding tuition that were introduced this legislative session.  SB 6562 was introduced by Senate Higher Education Chair Derek Kilmer, but the version that arrived on the Senate floor had significant contributions from Republican Senator Joseph Zarelli.  The ensuing debate and vote were similarly bi-partisan.  Senators spoke thoughtfully and with very little looking over their shoulders for political consequences.  And the 29-19 vote broke along the line of genuine conviction rather than party lines.   
 
Then something happened on the way to the House. 
 
Whatever the House consideration of tuition lacked in substance, it made up for in Olympia theatre.  After passing the Senate, the bill was referred to the House Higher Education Committee, where the chair, Representative Deb Wallace, didn’t schedule a hearing until Tuesday, February 23, the last day to vote bills out of committee.  This tardiness, along with Representative Wallace’s longstanding opposition to university tuition authority, led to speculation that she would attempt to kill the bill procedurally.  This suspicion seemed appropriate when the bill turned up last on an otherwise pretty dull agenda. 
 
The hearing was barely underway when Representative Scott White, a strong proponent of university tuition-setting authority, surprised Representative Wallace by moving that the agenda be changed to make sure that there was ample time for testimony on the tuition bill.  Much hubbub ensued, with the Democrats leaving the room for a fraught caucus, much to the bemusement of their Republican colleagues.  When they returned, the agenda was changed and testimony soon began on SB6562. 
 
Representative White won the procedural battle, but he lost the war.  After more than two hours of testimony, Representative Wallace chose not to have a vote on the bill.  If she had, it wouldn’t have passed.
 
The testimony, on both sides, was generally pretty good.  Everyone, from students to faculty to university trustees and administrators to business leaders recognized that the real problem is years of declining state support for state universities.  They may have differed on how to approach the problem, but they all understood that our universities are facing a crisis.
 
But on the legislator side of the TVW cameras, there was little more than confusion and piety.  The hearing was supposed to be about SB6562, but by the time the testimony began, there were at least two substitute bills—one from Representative Wallace that simply raised the cap on tuition increases from 7% to 9% and one wonderfully imaginative piece of writing from ranking Republican Glenn Anderson that would have kept legislative and university staff busy for years to come trying to figure out what it meant.  The three different bills would have had dramatically different consequences for the operating budgets of the three universities involved, but that didn’t seem to matter to committee members, as all they really wanted to talk about were lofty principles of “accountability.” 
 
Three or four times Representative Wallace announced that “the buck stops with the legislature,” and several other committee members expressed reluctance to transfer authority for what students pay from the people’s elected representatives to unelected trustees and regents who are accountable to no one. 
 
Here at the blog, we feel pretty strongly that trustees and regents should not see their jobs as much more than hiring and firing presidents and raising money, so we’re pretty sympathetic to the idea of not giving more authority to politically appointed rich people who show up for a meeting every couple of months and may or may not know anything about universities.
 
So the accountability argument would have been interesting if . . . any of the bills under consideration had actually given tuition-setting authority to trustees and regents.  But none of them did.  The Senate bill and Representative Wallace’s bill had clearly defined limits on tuition increases and Representative Anderson’s bill didn’t really give anybody authority to do anything. 
 
All the bluster about who is elected and accountable and who isn’t was really beside the point.  And at the end of the day, as almost every other state in the nation has demonstrated, it doesn’t really matter who sets tuition.  What matters is who appropriates state funds to universities, and that will always be the legislature, and as long as those appropriations keep going down, tuition will keep going up.
 
The nadir of the hearing came when Representative Wallace pushed the whole moral high ground thing too far and gratuitously called the universities untrustworthy liars. She did this in response to University of Washington President Mark Emmert’s testimony.  The whole exchange is worth watching here: 

In response to all the emphasis on accountability, President Emmert points out what everyone from the universities has been trying to point out for a while: pound for pound and dollar for dollar, Washington’s universities are the best in the country.  We’ve felt compelled to point this out at every opportunity in response to all the blog commenters, op-ed writers, and legislators who, no matter how much evidence they see to the contrary, continue to feel that if the universities just cut out all the bloat, greed, and corruption, we’d be O.K.
 
In her response, Representative Wallace doesn’t go quite that far (although she has in the past), but she does continue to pick at a sore that has tormented her since the end of last year’s legislative session.  After last year’s cuts, the universities, the Council of Presidents, and this blog have regularly pointed to the fact that state appropriations to universities were cut by an average of 23%.  This has stuck in the craw of Representative Wallace and some other legislators who feel that we haven’t been appropriately grateful to them for the “hard vote” they took to let the universities double the statutory tuition increases in order to mitigate some of that cut.
 
Well, O.K., but the point of highlighting how state support for universities has been steadily declining has not been to show up Representative Wallace or anybody else.  It has been to try to show how such underfunding threatens to seriously compromise our students’ education, and to try to make 4-year higher education more of a priority for the state.  And it seems ironic at best to chastise the universities for not crowing about tuition increases in a hearing where everyone is beating on the universities for wanting the authority to raise tuition.  And to call the information about state appropriation cuts “misleading” and declare them a reason to be forever vigilant against university dishonesty and skullduggery is just beyond the pale.
 
Washington’s universities had their state appropriations cut by over $400 million last year, and we’re looking at another $45 million cut this year.  Our total funding (state appropriations and tuition) ranks 48th in the nation.  It’s time to stop talking about how to further regulate and control the best universities in the country and start talking about how to fund them.