The Wrong Lebowski
Reagan inherited the best public university system on earth and spent eight years explaining that it was the problem.
Now California’s a peculiar kind of place, and I don’t mind sayin’ so.
Folks come out here to invent themselves. Always have. Fella arrives with nothin’ but a good jaw and a way of talkin’, and if the light hits him right, why, he can be anything he says he is. Sometimes that’s a beautiful thing. Sometimes it ain’t.
And it happens there were two Lebowskis in this story. One of ‘em built somethin’. The other one stood in the middle of it, in a real nice suit, tellin’ folks how hard he’d worked.
I’ll let the Dude take it from here. He was there, more or less.
Brandt Would Like to Show You Around
So Brandt’s giving me the tour, and I gotta say, the man is thrilled.
Here’s the Master Plan of 1960, sir. Three tiers, community colleges and state colleges and the university, everybody who can do the work gets a seat. Here’s the water project. Here’s the freeway system. Here’s — and Brandt does a little thing with his hands here — here’s the university system, sir, more Nobel laureates than any public institution on the face of the earth.
Here’s the periodic table, sir. Berkelium. Californium. Lawrencium. Seaborgium. Four boxes on the wall of every chemistry classroom on this planet, and they’ve all got California on them, and one of them is literally named after the school.
And it was free, sir. Tuition free, for any kid in this state who could hack it. Written down and reaffirmed and everything.
And I’m nodding along, man, because it is impressive. That’s an actual civilization somebody built out of a desert and a lot of arguing.
Then I go: hey Brandt, so which of this stuff did he do?
And Brandt does that laugh. You know the one. The little nervous one that isn’t really a laugh so much as a door closing politely in your face. Ha ha ha! Well, sir. Mr. Reagan has been a tremendous steward —
Right. Sure. Steward. Got it.
Because none of it was his. Pat Brown built the water and the freeways. Clark Kerr and a legislature built the Master Plan. Ernest Lawrence1 built the cyclotron and a generation of chemists filled in the bottom of the periodic table, and the whole apparatus was paid for by every poor bastard in California who ever bought a gallon of gas.
Reagan showed up in 1967 and inherited a functioning machine he had not designed, built, funded, or so much as visited. And then he went to war with the people using it.
Walter Has Been Reading About the Regents Meeting
“Three weeks.”
Walter, buddy—
“THREE WEEKS, Dude. He takes the oath in January of ‘67 and three weeks later he walks into his first Board of Regents meeting and Clark Kerr is FIRED. Same room. Same day. Chronicle called it a big victory for Reagan, which — thank you, at least somebody was writing it down.2”
“And you want to know the part that makes my eye do the thing? During the campaign he was in regular contact with the Bureau about Kerr. About the PRESIDENT of the university system. Because Kerr wouldn’t come down on the students the way Hoover wanted. That’s not a policy disagreement, Dude. Nobody fires the head of a university system over a policy disagreement three weeks into the job. That’s a hit. He campaigned on a hit and then he made good on it before he’d found the fucking bathrooms.”
He did also propose a budget cut and a tuition charge at the same meeting.
“Am I wrong?”
You’re not wrong.
“And then — and I need you to be sitting down for this one — when Berkeley says we can’t absorb that cut, his people float the idea that maybe the university could sell off its RARE BOOK COLLECTION. The books, Dude. Hock the incunabula. That’s the plan. That’s a governor of California looking at the greatest public research university in the world and seeing a pawn shop.”
He also shut down all twenty-eight UC and Cal State campuses in May of 1970. Every one of them. During Cambodia.
“...Every campus.”
Every campus, man.
“That’s not education policy. That’s an occupation.”
The Quiet Part, Out Loud, in a Newspaper
Okay, so here’s where I gotta drop the bit for a minute.
October 29th, 1970. Reagan’s up for reelection, six days out. His education adviser, a Hoover economist named Roger Freeman on loan from the Nixon administration, gives a press conference to defend the record. The Chronicle runs it the next morning under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education,” which is a hell of a headline.
And what Freeman says is that “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.” That this is dynamite. That they need to be selective about who gets to go through.
That’s the argument, man. Not the budget. Not the deficit. Not fiscal prudence, not belt-tightening, not any of the language they used in public. The actual objection was that education had gotten cheap enough that the wrong people were getting it, and educated people who are annoyed about things are difficult to govern.
Price as a filter. Not a side effect of the policy. The point of the policy.
And I’ll give you the complicated part, because Maude would make me anyway. Freeman also said his reference point was Germany, and that he’d watched it happen. He was born in Vienna in 1904 and got out after Hitler. So this wasn’t some country club reactionary — this was a man who had personally seen a society come apart and concluded from it that the danger was too many educated people with nothing to do.
He watched fascism up close and came away thinking the problem was the professors.
Motherfucker.
Maude Runs the Ledger
“The system he considered a discipline problem is the one that produced the outcome he benefited from.”
She doesn’t look up. She never looks up.
“Tuition-free public education produced the Nobel run, the national laboratories, and the trained technical population that built the state’s postwar economy. That economy produced the property values. In 1978 the property taxes on those values were capped, which removed the revenue base underneath the system that had generated them in the first place. The snake, and so forth.”
Okay but he didn’t actually get tuition though, right? Legislature blocked him.
“Correct, and you should say so in print before somebody says it for you. He fought for tuition at the four-year institutions and the Legislature refused him. What happened instead is that in 1970 the Regents imposed a hundred-and-fifty-dollar ‘educational fee’ — and a state senator named Rodda said at the time, on the record, that this was tuition with a different word on it. The fee language then persisted for decades while the number climbed.”
“He lost the vote and won the argument. Which is the more durable of the two. Policies get repealed. Premises do not.”
And that’s the tell, isn’t it. When an institution has to lie to you about what it’s charging you for, the fight’s already over. Nobody euphemizes a principle they still hold.
The Man on the Wall
I want to tell you about a guy.
Kid goes to UCLA, then Berkeley, on the cheap, because that’s what those places were for. By 28 he’s discovered plutonium. Over his career his group turns up ten transuranium elements and he reorganizes the bottom of the periodic table into the shape you’ve been looking at your whole life without knowing whose idea it was. Nobel Prize at 39. Chancellor of Berkeley. Then a decade running the Atomic Energy Commission under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, working the Limited Test Ban Treaty along the way.
Element 106 is named seaborgium. They did it while he was still alive, which had never been done, and there was a real fight about whether you’re allowed to.
Glenn Seaborg is what the free system produced. He is the single most complete refutation of Roger Freeman’s entire argument that has ever drawn breath. An educated proletarian who ended up putting his own name on the periodic table and then spending ten years trying to keep everybody from being vaporized.
In 1983 he sat on the commission that produced A Nation at Risk — the report announcing that American education was in crisis. He’s right there on the signature page. University Professor of Chemistry and Nobel Laureate.
I don’t have a joke for that one. I’ve been trying for a week.
Donny
“Who paid for the cyclotron?”
“Donny, you’re out of your element.”
Everybody, Donny. Everybody paid for the cyclotron.
Condolences
Here’s the thing I can’t get past.
In 1986, Reagan spoke at a scholarship dinner for Eureka College, the little school in Illinois he went to. It’s on the record. It’s in his own library.
He says his family couldn’t pay for the schooling. Says they lived close enough to the tracks to hear the whistles. Says he worked every summer and saved every dollar and it still wasn’t enough — so the college covered the rest with a scholarship, and campus jobs, and by letting him defer part of his tuition until after graduation. Says they did it for a number of other kids too. In the depths of the Depression.
The college took a chance on him.
Now go back to how he defended the California tuition plan. He said tuition had to be accompanied by adequate loans, to be paid back after graduation3.
Same deal, man. The exact same deal. Study now, settle up later.
Except when Eureka did it, an institution absorbed the risk because it decided a kid was worth it. And what he wanted for California was that shape with a lender wedged into the middle of it and nobody taking a chance on anybody at all. He got a gift and proposed a product.
Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost.
Said by a man who never lost anything, in a room he didn’t build, to people who were paying for the room.
Now the Dude, he takes the long view on account of he don’t have much choice.
That fella won. I ain’t gonna pretty it up for you. Every tuition bill in this state runs downhill from one meetin’ in January of ‘67, and there’s a whole generation payin’ on somethin’ a man decided when they were nowhere near born.
But them four little boxes are still on the wall. Berkelium. Californium. Lawrencium. Seaborgium. Ain’t nobody takin’ ‘em down, ain’t nobody sellin’ ‘em off with the rare books. Some kid in a chemistry class in Fresno is lookin’ right at ‘em this mornin’ and don’t know a damn thing about any of this.
Which I suppose is its own kind of abidin’.
Yeah, that Lawrence from Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory
Gee, who from today does this sound like?
Indeed, you can lay the start of school loans at the feet of St. Reagan. Remember that every time some Never Trump chud points at Reagan as the rock of their conservatism. Fuck.