It would be interesting to know how much specific damage the recession is doing to educational reform efforts. It is obvious that all colleges and universities are in a “cutting out the fat” mode, but the question is how they define “fat” – your “fat” may be my “muscle.” The problem was made concrete for me when my signature was solicited for a letter to the Executive Vice Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, protesting the elimination of the position of Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at that institution.

I had been one of the outside scholars on a major University of California system commission on “General Education in the 21^st Century,” co-chaired by Neil Smelser of Berkeley and Michael Schudson of UC-San Diego a couple of years ago. The commission issued a compelling report (in which I played a very minor role) in April 2007 making a number of recommendations for strengthening general education in UC undergraduate programs. One of the recommendations was to strengthen the positions of Vice-Provosts/Deans of Undergraduate Education throughout the system. These positions, intended to reinvigorate general education, had apparently begun to appear on various California campuses in the 1980s and 1990s, but the commission worried that they were not well situated in university administrations, and felt that only by regularizing, funding, and recognizing the positions throughout the system could they be effective promoters of educational reform. Nevertheless, within two years, one or more of these positions was being eliminated at a flagship campus in the system.

Our (I agreed to sign) letter said that “we strongly believe that systematic administrative attention to [the salience of undergraduate education] should be among the last -- not the first -- ducks to fall in the [budgetary] slashing process.” The letter concluded that “the reinvigoration of the historic teaching and learning emphases of the university must remain at the core of the campus’s consciousness and its programs.”

I am certainly not an expert on the Berkeley budget, and I know quite well how deeply financially challenged California public institutions are during this recession. I also know that none of us wants to play a negative sum game, but that is where we all find ourselves at the moment. Still, the symbolic impact of withdrawing support for undergraduate educational reform raises the question of what educational values (if any) are guiding the budget slashers? It seems crucially important that those of us who care deeply about sustaining the quality of undergraduate education pay careful attention to the budgetary choices that administrators are making, and to raise our voices in defense of core values.

Not all ducks are created equal.