A New Name for a New Kind of University System - Part 6

Privatization Without Representation

Merriam-Webster defines “dilemma” as “a usually undesirable or unpleasant choice.”

 
We’ve used the term “dilemma” in recent blog posts to describe the challenges facing PASSHE’s Majority Financial Stakeholders—the students, parents and alumni donors—who now provide 75% of the cost of a PASSHE university education, but select 0% of PASSHE’s 174 governance board members.
 
The State, in the person of its elected officials, now provides 25% of the cost of education, but despite being the Minority Financial Stakeholder, continues to select 100% of PASSHE’s 174 governance board members.  
 
We call this contradictory and un-American situation “Privatization Without Representation,” which is really an example of “Taxation Without Representation,” which led to the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the enormous transformation of America from a group of oppressed and disrespected colonies into a sovereign, respected and independent nation.
 
But that transformation required great effort and enormous personal sacrifice and would not likely have happened absent the heavy costs imposed on the Colonists as a price of their freedom and independence. 
 
“Privatization” is nothing more than a secret form of “Taxation,” in which the State has quietly shifted the cost of public higher education onto the private checkbooks of the students, parents and alumni donors.
 
Unlike taxes, however, which usually get a thorough public debate before being enacted or raised by the State Legislature, the State stealthily shifted the cost of public higher education to PASSHE students, parents and alumni donors by one percent per year for 65 years.

From 1950 to 2015, the State share of PASSHE’s annual revenue fell gradually from 90% to 25%, while the share provided by PASSHE students, parents and alumni donors grew gradually from 10% to 75%.
 
It is not an exaggeration to say that PASSHE’s majority financial stakeholders have been “taxed” with the burden of supporting what the State, the media and the public mistakenly continues to call “public higher education,” even though these fourteen universities are now, financially speaking, already 75% private.

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone.” Confucius

 
The PASSHE universities haven’t been truly “public” in any meaningful sense of that word since 1993 when the State share of its funding first fell below 50%.  But for the past 22 years, the State has continued to privatize the PASSHE universities, financially speaking, while still clinging to 100% control of the seats on PASSHE’s governance boards where all decisions affecting PASSHE’s majority financial stakeholders—the students, parents and alumni donors—get made without their input, much less their approval.  
 
It is the enormous, if slowly evolving, shift in funding of “public” higher education over the past 65 years that prompted the titles of our recent blog posts:  “A New Name for a New Kind of University System.”
 
Continuing to call the fourteen PASSHE universities “public” when 75% of its annual revenue comes from the private checkbooks of students, parents and alumni donors is a clear example of incorrect language.
 
Using such incorrect language conveys incorrect information to the World RE the truth about PASSHE.  
 
And in the absence of that truth, what needs to be done about PASSHE remains undone.
 
A new name, with “PASSHE” as a “State-Designated University System” is needed for these reasons:

·         PASSHE continues to be referred to as a system of “public” universities, when that is no longer true.  That may have been the case when Act 188 took effect in July of 1983 because then, the State was providing a majority (63%) of the funding from “public” (i.e., taxpayer) monies; tuition provided 37%.

·         By 1993, the State share of PASSHE funding first fell below 50% (49%), and tuition provided 51%.

·         By 2013, the State share fell to 25% and the share provided by tuition and alumni donations hit 75%.

·         West Chester University recently attempted to secede from PASSHE to become a “State-related” university.  That attempt failed, in part over the need to break up the multiple unionized bargaining units that have tightly bound the fourteen PASSHE universities together since the 1970s.

·         As desirable as State-related status would be to some if not all of the individual PASSHE universities, a next best alternative, which provides many but not all of the benefits of individual State-related status, would appear to be PASSHE as a “State-related System of fourteen universities.”  That might help solve some of the bargaining unit issues since no bargaining units would need to be broken up.  But there are other serious obstacles to applying the term “State-related” to a PASSHE system.   

·         A key obstacle to PASSHE ever becoming a “State-related system” of 14 universities is one of purpose.  Only the PASSHE universities—and none of the four current State-related universities—have a legal (Act 188) mandate “To provide high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.” That statutory purpose aligns perfectly with the original intent of public higher education in America: To provide access to a high quality education for students with limited financial resources (The End), by providing taxpayer-funded subsidies to “public” universities (The Means) to achieve that noble End.

·         The proper name then for the PASSHE system is not “State-related,” but “State-designated.”  The PASSHE universities have been designated by Act 188 to provide the traditional “public university purpose,” despite not receiving the level of State funding normally associated with the word “public.”

 
The “undesirable or unpleasant” choices in the dilemma facing PASSHE’s Majority Financial Stakeholders are these: 1) to permit the status quo of ‘privatization without representation’ to continue with all of the negatives that encouraged West Chester University to attempt secession from PASSHE: or 2) to fight the status quo with the goal of achieving the freedom and independence that would come with PASSHE as a State-designated System in which the majority and minority governance shares would be approximately equal to the respective funding shares of the majority and minority stakeholders.
 
To be continued.