Reagan: The First Two Weeks

As soon as Ronald Reagan announced that California's budget for higher education would be slashed by ten per cent next year, bumper stickers saying "Had Enough? Impeach Reagan" bloomed on the freeways. Good-humored as this reaction seems, its suddenness confirms that Reagan made a colossal miscalculation; Californians, even those who pushed him into office with a million-vote margin, never intended him to tamper with the state's tuition-free system of higher education.

The governor's plan was at first ostensibly based on economics alone; he intends to cut all departmental and agency budgets by ten per cent, to erase a $475 million deficit inherited from the preceding Democratic administration. Already he has halted state hiring and closed down most of the service centers in the state's thirteen poverty areas.

What Reagan has suggested is charging tuition of $400 each to California students at the university and $200 each to those at the state colleges. In this way, the state would be able to maintain higher-education budgets at the same level as this year, but with a substantially smaller portion of the funds coming from the state. These recommendations took administrators and even the Board of Regents, the university's governing body, by surprise. They had asked for a fifteen per cent budget hike for 1967-68, because they anticipated a proportional increase in enrollment.

Reagan was hung in effigy on several campuses, but the reaction of university administrators was even more violent and tantamount, his aides say, to "insubordination." Clark Kerr, the president of the nine-campus university system, whom Reagan would like to dump, said that if funds are cut, the quality of education will not be watered down; he would simply ask the Regents to restrict enrollment. Limiting the number of students eligible to attend the university, which is now open to any high school graduate in the top 12.5 per cent of his class, would be a shattering blow to Californians with college-age offspring--one that would surely sour them on Reagan.

Kerr, probably sensing Reagan's vulnerability on this point, took advantage of public hostility to the governor by announcing last week that admissions to the university system would be halted temporarily, "until the financial picture is clarified." The chancellor of the eighteen state colleges had done the same thing the week before.

Meanwhile, other educators are stumping the state explaining what the suggested cutback would do to education. California residents understand very well that Reagan has suggested jettisoning a principle they have always taken for granted: the availability of free college education for their children. But administrators both in the universities and the state colleges are pointing out possible harms that probably never occur to the average Californian. The budget cut, they say, echoing Kerr, would preclude admitting any more students, although 10,000 more prospective students apply to the university each year; it might possibly dilute the quality of training now provided at the smaller campuses; it would ruin the university's competitive position in the constant drive to recruit top faculty members.

Even the possibility of en masse resignations exists. Franklin Murphy, chancellor of the Los Angeles campus of the University and a likely successor to Kerr, has bitterly declared that he does not intend to "preside at the liquidation or substantial erosion of the quality which fifty years of effort have built up."

Unafraid of sounding political, administrators like Murphy even point out that Reagan's ideas about economizing are fallacious. They argue that cutting the budget of the universities and state colleges would force them to limit enrollment and send the overflow to the state's community and junior colleges. Since these institutions get about three-fourths of their funds from the local communities, it would in the end be the local home owners--to whom Reagan has promised tax relief--who would be paying for added junior college costs.

Faced with such open opposition, Reagan has gone before the television cameras--his favorite medium--to try to clarify his proposals and capitalize on the hostility he knows exists toward the "Berkeley agitators." At one televised press conference, the governor said there were reasons other than the economic for charging tuition. Reagan believes it would be "good for students' mental attitudes" to pay, because "some who come to agitate, not to study" might have second thoughts about "noisy, disruptive, and shameful" demonstrations.

Observers feel that this tactic has failed, for no matter how Californians feel about the rebels, they still want tuition-free education. "In the end, everyone thinks only about his own child," one disgruntled Democrat explained. "I want mine to go to Cal and I don't like anyone who gets in the way of that."

What Reagan confronts at this point is the possibility of an early and bitter clash with the legislature over a retrenchment program that now seems unpopular. Even a man of his limited political experience must realize that such a run-in would probably poison any programs he might try to push through in the future.

The members of the legislature should make that abundantly clear to the governor by criticizing his education budget now. Perhaps Reagan's refusal to say anything more about tuition since the uproar will confirm for California voters what some realized in November: their new governor got elected by keeping one eye on the opinion polls and the other on filmed playbacks of his press conferences--and he is likely to continue operating that way.