Unhappy in Its Own Way an Institutional Biography of UC Santa Cruz

Unhappy in Its Own Way An Institutional Biography of UC Santa Cruz Ronnie D. Lipschutz Summary Reports from the many outposts of higher education across the United States and the world reflect often-lurid power struggles, among faculty, staff, administrators and even institutional governors. No one is very interested in the normal everyday operation of organizations, most which is pretty dull. When change is thought to be required, administrations tend to launch centralized initiatives that seek to reform or quickly quickly how the organization operates. This, however, is much like trying to turn a supertanker on a dime. It cannot be done. Moreover, such plans, if they are implemented at all, are likely to turn out quite differently from the original vision, with subsequent planning attempts to undo the damage caused by earlier plans. In the corporate world, planning is passé, and the notion that higher education is “in crisis” has led to a continuing craze for rapid institutional innovation through new management strategies and “leadership,” both seen as simply individual skills that can be learned and deployed. These have come to substitute for careful consideration of the many factors and forces that universities face, both internally and externally. Do such things work? This book serves two purposes: First, it a reflection on the world faced by universities across the United States, 20 years into the 21st century. The so-called crisis of higher education in the United States has come to occupy many minds and managers, including faculty, administrators, pundits, politicians, scandalmongers and even Presidents. Whether there is such a crisis is questionable, in part because it is linked to larger changes in political economies, between the end of World War II and today, that made higher education possible on a large scale and seem defective today. The very ontologies of higher education—often expressed in the form of “mission statements”—have been called into question. Second, it is an “institutional biography” of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) which tries to untangle the complex decision and relations that, over time, constitute large, bureaucratic entities such as UCSC. As is true of many human institutions, universities are complex communities shaped by and responding to a range of “institutional logics” that specify the frameworks, structures, personnel and practices that are required for it to function. Much of what I cover in this book has been described and addressed elsewhere (see the bibliography). But none of those sources examine the institutional and organizational development of the campus in terms of struggles to instantiate power and authority, even though much of an institution’s biography comes down to this. The full manuscript of this book is available at https://sustainablesystemsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Unhappy.pdf Table of contents Acknowledgments…………………………………….………………………………………………………….ii Chapter 1: By way of preface………………………………………………………………………………1 Part I: What’s up with Higher Ed? Chapter 2: The University as Institution and Organization ……………………………16 Chapter 3: The tragedy of strategic academic planning…………………………………34 Chapter 4: The political economy of the “crisis” in higher education……………51 Part II: Fiat Lux, Fiat Tenebris Chapter 5: The University of California—Institution and organization……………71 Chapter 6: Field of Dreams, Dreams of Fields: The Origins of UCSC………………97 Chapter 7: A potted history of UCS ………………………………………………………………120 Chapter 8: Running UCSC: On paper and in practice ……………………………………148 Chapter 9: Making and breaking the Colleges ………………………………………………171 Chapter 10: Never Fulfilled—Strategic planning at UCSC ……………………………200 Chapter 11: “Great plans are like streetcars” ……………………………………………233 Chapter 12: What’s the matter with UCSC? …………………………………………………269 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………………285 © 2020 by Ronnie D. Lipschutz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Acknowledgments I have written this book about the university campus that has been my academic home since 1990. Academics rarely write about their home campus in any depth or detail, since it is too much like hanging out the dirty laundry, revealing family secrets and being too personal (a particular attribute of those living in California). This book is not “research” in the generally understood sense, either, although the bibliography runs to more than 30 pages. It is not an exposé, either and not my intention to embarrass or demean anything or anyone. Yet, I cannot avoid telling stories about both colleagues and the campus, even if under conditions of anonymity. To be sure, I am fairly safe in writing, since I am well past risking tenure, promotion or even employment, although I might alienate friends both high and low.1 I apologize to anyone who might be offended and will certainly correct or change anything that might be construed as inaccurate. I want to acknowledge those who helped with access to materials, whom I consulted and who I spoke with and interviewed. These people include Irene Reti and everyone at McHenry Special Collections, Matthew Mednick in the Academic Senate Office, Kim Lau, Terry Burke, Ronnie Gruhn, Nirvikar Singh, Karen Bassi, Bill Domhoff, Barbara Laurence and, especially, Rick Diamond. I owe special thanks to those whose oral histories provided invaluable background for and history of UCSC, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and Dean McHenry and Carlos Noreña, whose archival collections included many important documents. I apologize to those whom I may have forgotten. This manuscript is a work of both history and opinion, and all faults and flaws are mine. Please be sure to comment and correct those of the latter you think are insupportable. 1 I once made a comment to a colleague about my low esteem for the architecture of Colleges Nine and Ten—I called then “gemeinschaft,” since the look a lot like the superstructure of mines. My colleague was deeply offended; he had been involved in the architectural design of the two colleges. Oops! Chapter 1 By way of a preface All happy universities are like one another; every unhappy university is unhappy in its own way.2 I. Introduction This book is an “institutional biography” of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), my academic home for the past three decades. An “institutional biography,” as opposed to a simple history, institutional analysis or organizational description, tries to untangle the complex decision and relations that, over time, constitute large, bureaucratic entities. As is true of many human institutions, universities are complex communities shaped by and responding to a range of “institutional logics” that specify the frameworks, structures, personnel and practices that are required for it to function. The differences among universities are in the details and, while broad design and exogenous factors are critical to operation, those details matter a great deal to operation. Whether there are any “happy” universities in the United States thus depends on how far into the details one wishes to delve. This book is also a reflection on the world faced by universities across the United States, 20 years into the 21st century. The so-called crisis of higher education in the United States has come to occupy many minds and managers, including faculty, administrators, pundits, politicians, scandalmongers and even Presidents. Indeed, whether there is such a crisis is questionable, in part because it is linked somehow to larger changes in the political economies, between the end of World War II and today, that have made higher education possible on a large scale. The very ontologies of higher education—often expressed in the form of “mission statements”—have been called into question as a result. The fault, if there is one, is not in the organizations themselves but in ourselves, since we cannot, as a polity, agree on the ontologies of the society in which we live. Let me make clear my working hypothesis regarding these differences: organizations are constructed and operate on the basis of two primary factors: power and wealth. Whose power and wealth is a focus of constant conflict and struggle, but they are nonetheless central. To be sure, visions, missions and ideals are important in shaping an organization, but it is the distribution of power and authority, both formal and informal, that determines how the organization will be structured and governed, the availability of resources that determines what is possible and whether visions and missions can be fulfilled and the practices (or habitus) of those who staff it that allow 2 Paraphrased from Anna Karenina— "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" —with apologies to Leo Tolstoy. Nabokov flipped the original Tolstoy quote in the beginning of his novel Ada: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.” 1 it to operate. When authority is under-determined, the resulting power struggles may come to shape organizational structure in a fairly ad hoc way. When such unintended these structural arrangements impose constraints on what can be tried or implemented, struggles over scarce resources will be won by those who have effective power and authority. Finally, faced with these circumstances and constraints, the agents throughout the institution will adapt, innovate and improvise as necessary for them to fulfill

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