A competent chancellor would have been on top of identifying inefficiencies in the system and then crafting a plan to fix them. Competent oversight by the Board of Regents and the legislature would have required him to provide data on problems and on what steps he was taking to solve them. Instead, every year Birgeneau would request a budget increase, the regents would agree to it, and the legislature would provide. The hard questions were avoided by all concerned, and the problems just piled up to $150 million of inefficiencies….until there was no money left.

It’s not that Birgeneau was unaware that there were, in fact, waste and inefficiencies in the system. Faculty and staff have raised issues with senior management, but when they failed to see relevant action taken, they stopped. Finally, Birgeneau ($500,000 salary) engaged some expensive ($3 million) consultants, Bain & Company, to tell him what he should have been able to find out from the bright, engaged people in his own organization.

In short, there is plenty of blame to go around. Merely cutting out inefficiencies will not have the effect desired. But you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. An opportunity now exists for the UC President, Board of Regents, and California Legislators to jolt UC Berkeley back to life, applying some simple oversight check-and-balance management principles. Increasing the budget is not enough; transforming senior management is necessary. The faculty, Academic Senate, Cal. Alumni, financial donors, benefactors await the transformation of senior management.
The author, who has 35 years’ consulting experience, has taught at University of California Berkeley, where he was able to observe the culture and the way senior management work.

(Cal. (UC Berkeley) ranking tumbles from 2nd best. The reality of UC Berkeley) relative decline are clear. In 2004, for example, the London-based Times Higher Education ranked UC Berkeley the second leading research university in the world, just behind Harvard; in 2009 that ranking had tumbled to 39th place.)

University of California, Berkeley in the news

The best way to stimulate the economy is simple: dramatically cut the taxes of those who earn the money and create the jobs. There’s no middleman (government) needed. Let people keep more of the money they already earn. Now that’s the most powerful economic stimulus plan in the world. Give taxpayers and job creators like me a vacation for the next year from income taxes and watch the economy rebound. Watch real estate prices rise again. Watch the stock market soar. Watch credit and capital markets start to lend again. Watch jobs increase. Give taxpayers and job creators dramatically and permanently reduced taxes, so we can keep more of our own money, and get ready for the greatest economic expansion in history.”

Possibly. The problem here is the assumption that given lower taxes or no taxes for both individuals and businesses, that the money they save will be used for expansion, leisure, etc. Perhaps, but more and more people are simply saving it away for a really rainy day in the future. Money in the bank does little to stimulate the economy except make said banks have greater holdings. We cannot assume that given a bigger paycheck (due to lower taxes) will result in more spending. In the recent past, this assumption proved partially true, but in today’s recession, I would say, not true any longer.

Please explain why you think this statement makes sense. Shouldn’t innovators and benefactors have people in their debt rather than the other way around?

The truth is that the STATE of California innovates exactly *nothing*.

I am a long time Libertarian and honestly, I felt that way about Root, but lately, I am warming up to him. I hope he stays and becomes stronger in his libertarian outlook.

California is a “FAILED STATE”. Look it up.
I am wrapping things up in this state where I have lived all my life and moving out. Now, there are many here who will say “good riddance” because I have not approved of the insanely liberal and corrupt state of politics here. There is a difference though. I have paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars in state taxes over my lifetime. The ones who will say “good riddance” to me are more often than not the recipiants of my generosity. That has come to an end.

Unfortunately, the problems here are unsolvable by a democratic government. I can only see these problems solved in a benevolent dictatorship. But, since that’s not likely to happen, and since most dictatorships aren’t benevolent anyway, the problems here are not solvable. Since these problems are not solvable, all anyone can do is protect one’s own assets and plan to bail from the state ASAP.
Eric von Schonberg

Yes, California would be much much better off if they had passed something like TABOR (Tax Payers Bill Of Rights) which was passed in Colorado back in the ’90s (which Colorado voters foolishly voted to suspend for a few years in 2006).

As crazy as it may sound, Root is correct. California does have a spending addiction, and the biggest culprits are the prison guard unions, the Democrats in the Assembly with their automatic increases every year, and the Teacher Screecher Unions.

Had California followed the Colorado model of the 90s, they would not be in this mess at all!

Cramming animals into tiny cages where they can hardly move an inch their whole lives is cruel, and Californians were right to phase out that form of animal abuse.

While the opponents of Prop 2 tried to scare voters with the claim that the egg industry would simply move to Mexico, there was never much merit to the assertion. In fact, even Dan Sumner, the author of UC-Davis’s anti-Prop 2 economic report conceded in a July 24, 2008 article in the Sonoma Index-Tribune: “I personally think that’s unlikely…Mexico doesn’t produce much feed corn and that’s why Mexico isn’t a logical place for production.”

Even Simon Shane, the editor of Egg Industry magazine, questions this campaign claim. In the December 2008 issue, Shane editorialized about the “no on 2” campaign’s message regarding Mexico:

“We should recognize that the strategy based on ‘food safety and import substitution from Mexico’ was invalid and unrealistic from the outset. Both arguments were unconvincing, unsupportable, and were easily refuted.”

You have some valid points, but I don’t think it’s fair to scapegoat a very popular anti-cruelty initiative for California’s admittedly very serious budget problems.