Sitting at the lunch table in the conference room outside his Oakland office, University of California president Mark Yudof seems like an improbable candidate for the role he now occupies. He’s too self-deprecating, too amiable, too understated in speech and manner to come across as the hard-nosed executive that he is, much less to seem capable of coolly taking the abuse he’s been getting. This man doesn’t act like a tough CEO whom you could imagine starting his day by pumping iron or riding a stationary bicycle under a sunlamp. (At lunch, he asks if I’d like to share his matzo.) In his photos, someone said, he looks like a “bowling ball in pinstripes.” But because he heads one of the most distinguished research universities in the world, and because of events that even he could hardly have foreseen, Mark Yudof may have a greater impact on the nation’s public universities—and maybe on all of higher education—than anybody else in America. Press him, and he talks like a man on a mission.

Yet between where he sits now and where he needs to take his financially battered institution to maintain both its excellence and its accessibility to poor and middle-class students—always a tough trick, but nearly impossible in a state as fiscally troubled as California—there’s a rough road on which the dangers are probably greater than the opportunities for glory. Yudof’s job, he tells me in one of our interviews, is “to preserve, protect, and defend the University of California in all of its unique features.” But, like Winston Churchill’s vow to preserve the British Empire, this promise could have an ironic outcome. Given the dismal state of the state and the enormous budget cuts California education has suffered as a result, the UC system may remain excellent—but can it remain public in anything but name? Alternatively, could it rapidly erode in quality and reputation and become just another Purdue or Arizona State? “It took more than 50 years to build this university,” says San Francisco financier Richard Blum, who, as chairman of the UC Board of Regents, was instrumental in bringing Yudof to California in 2008. “It wouldn’t take anywhere near that long to tear it down.” The stakes are enormous. If anything symbolizes California’s opportunities, creativity, and innovation, it is this university system.

After 18 months, Yudof is taking most of the heat that should properly be directed toward Sacramento. Last fall, infuriated by the salary cuts, layoffs, and fee hikes the university was forced to enact, union and student demonstrators occupied buildings on the UCLA, Davis, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley campuses. They stopped the Regents’ November meeting at UCLA three times with shouts, chants, and songs. When the meeting ended, UC officials had to be escorted by cops in riot gear through a gauntlet of demonstrators. “Chop from the top,” read the placards in the day’s protest at Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, which some people tried hard to link to the free-speech demonstrations of the 1960s. “Lay off Yudof.” “Yudof is a fascist.” In the East Bay, protesters have attacked Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s home with burning torches in the middle of the night; crowded the lobby of Yudof’s offices, demanding a confrontation with him; appeared more than a half dozen times at Yudof’s rented home in the Oakland hills; and yelled at him outside the Jewish Community Center in Walnut Creek, where he was to give a talk. “Your outright immoral…corruption,” read one email to Yudof’s office, “is disgusting.” “May you rot in hell, you insensitive, incompetent, useless bastards,” read another. Another simply stated: “YOU SUCK.”

Yudof, the son of a Philadelphia electrician and, for much of his career, a professor of constitutional law—he sometimes still refers to himself as “a Philadelphia lawyer”—was chancellor of the University of Texas system when the UC Regents came calling, and president of the University of Minnesota before that, and he was widely regarded as a success in both jobs. Which is to say that he has plenty of experience running big state universities and dealing with statehouse politicians. David Kirp, a professor of public policy at Berkeley, as well as a longtime Yudof friend and sometime colleague, tells how Yudof would fly around Minnesota on a little plane to generate public opposition to governor Jesse Ven­tura’s proposed budget cuts. When Yudof left in 2002 to take the Texas job, leaving the university a bigger and grander place than when he came, even Ventura joined the chorus of praise for Yudof’s accomplishments. In light of UC’s—and California’s—myriad problems, the Regents couldn’t believe their luck when he accepted the job. “I would have jumped off the bridge if we hadn’t gotten him,” says Blum. “This guy is tough, he listens, he’s patient, he makes decisions promptly, and he knows what BS smells like.” In November 2009, Time magazine named Yudof one of the 10 best college presidents in the country.

But Yudof has never been tested as he’s being tested now. From the day he accepted the job, he knew that his first tasks were to clean up the mess he had inherited in his own office—formally known as UCOP, the University of California Office of the President—and to restore the univer­sity’s credibility, which had been badly scarred by an exec­utive-compensation scandal under his predecessor. What Yudof didn’t know—and what, appar­ently, nobody told him—was that the mess in the mother house in Oakland was small potatoes compared with California’s monument­ally dysfunctional state government. Neither Blum nor anyone else could have predicted the depths of the recession that began in 2008 and made California’s already monstrous budget deficit even larger. But for more than a decade, Sacramento had been stuck in political and fiscal gridlock—much of it self-inflicted, some imposed by voter initiatives and some by the state’s crazy tax structure and its convoluted budgeting process. Always betting on the come, the legislature and the governor had patched things together each year with borrowing, deferrals, and other budgetary gimmicks, meaning that when the economy turned really sour, most of the creative-financing options had been exhausted.

Like most other public universities, UC had long suffered from a shrinking share of state funding. By its calculations—numbers that are always squishy because of cross-subsidization—the system now gets just under half as much per student from the state as it did 20 years ago. Along the way, both UC’s tuition and its student-faculty ratio (and thus class sizes) slowly crept up. But the current California budget crisis, which began in 2007 and is almost certain to get worse, makes the declining slope of state support look more like a cliff.

Yudof’s task, therefore, has been not merely to fight for more money—from the state, from private donors, and maybe, he hopes, from the federal government—but also to simultaneously inflict the employee “furloughs” (meaning pay cuts), layoffs, enrollment reductions, course cuts, and steep student-tuition hikes (a 32 percent jump for undergraduates, from just under $7,800 in fall 2009 to $10,300-plus by fall 2010) that, by the calculations of UCOP’s green eyeshades, were made necessary by the steep, sudden reduction in state appropriations. The $621 million that Sacramento cut from UC’s budget this fiscal year represents a fifth of what the university system had been getting. In effect, UC is providing less for a higher price. For an institution long regarded as California’s crown jewel, that cumulative loss—and the possibility of more to come—is a devastating blow. “Get a Nobel Prize, have a pay cut,” said UCSF biologist Elizabeth Blackburn last October, after she learned that she and two other scientists, one of them a Berkeley graduate, had won the 2009 Nobel for medicine. What was happening to the university, Blackburn said, “breaks my heart.”

When I asked Yudof whether he would have taken the job had he known then what he knows now about California’s fiscal mess, his first answer was “no answer.” Then he phoned the next day to say he’d thought about the question overnight. He’d had a call from an administrator friend at Notre Dame that morning, he said, who’d told him that “the nation needs you to succeed.” It sounded vaguely apocryphal, even self-serving. But it resonated with a man who had made up his mind, as he neared his 65th birthday, to assume a larger mission. In this recession, UC is hardly the only college or university system in the nation suffering severe budget cuts. In Florida, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, classes and sometimes whole programs have been suspended and students pushed out for lack of adequate state funding. “People are watching,” Yudof told me, “because we are the best.” Yet at that moment, as he began his second year in the job, it seemed clear that despite his determination, political smarts, and tough skin, he was still feeling his way.

Nearly half a century ago, Clark Kerr, who helped build UC into the great institution it has become, declared that the system was “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labor.” With its 226,000 students on 10 cam­puses, its academic stars, its world-class research facilities in a score of disciplines, and its historic promise of access for low-income students—even now, in a bow to an old fiction, UC charges “fees” instead of “tuition”—there was, and is, no other place like it. It therefore didn’t require much explanation when Yudof told the Sacramento press corps, in the summer of 2009, that “I don’t understand how it is that I receive visitors from Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Korea who tell me how their nations aspire to build research universities modeled on the University of California. And yet, when I make the rounds here in Sacramento, I hear that the state cannot continue to invest in its own economic engine.” He was “baffled,” he said, and went on to note the “supreme irony that the system that has spawned imitators all over the country and the globe is in danger of unraveling in its own backyard.” Of course, Yudof wasn’t baffled. He was furious.

UC is hardly alone in California in taking a hit. The state’s fiscal crisis has decimated almost every item in the budget, including the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system, with its 450,000 students, and the state’s three-million-student community-college system. CSU has been forced to reduce enrollment and, like the community colleges, also slashed course offerings for 2009–2010. But California’s community-college fees are still the lowest in the country, and CSU’s costs, even after the fee increases, remain below the national average for similar institutions. However, the $10,300-plus that UC will be charging this fall—while less than half of the $26,000 average sticker price for tuition at private prestige universities—is nearly 50 percent higher than the $7,000 average for U.S. public universities. This will hurt UC as much as it hurts its students.

Regardless of academic excellence, the political legitimacy of a democratic institution like UC rests heavily on its ability to draw a socially and economically diverse spectrum of students. Two months ago, retired Berkeley director of admissions Bob Laird published a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle savagely attacking Yudof and the Regents for making “disastrous changes in fee and enrollment policies that will sharply limit opportunities for California residents and severely damage the already meager enrollment levels of African American, Latino, and Native American students, and the enrollment of low-income students in general.”

In theory—and in the opinion of Yudof and others—federal grants and other financial aid should shield low-income students from most tuition increases. Close to a third of UC undergraduates have Pell Grants, federal financial aid awarded to low-income students; that’s more than at any other major research university and double the percentage of Pell grantees at Harvard and Stanford. UC has also made it a policy that almost no student from a family with an income of $70,000 or less (the figure was recently raised from $60,000) has to pay any tuition fees, and Yudof tells me that UC will try to raise enough money to increase that threshold to $80,000. Yet the high sticker price itself often appears to discourage poor and what UC calls “underrepresented” minority students from even applying. At the same time, as tuition goes up, middle-class students and parents will be the ones helping to subsidize financial aid for the poor. And, as Laird pointed out in his Chronicle piece, students don’t pay only tuition. UC pegs the average annual price of attending, including room, board, and books, at $28,000.

There was always a myth, says Blum, that the state would faithfully take care of the university and, by inference, protect the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education negotiated by Kerr. Among other things, it guaranteed all Californians who could profit by it a place somewhere in the state’s three-tier higher-education system, at little or no cost. But in recent years, the state has again and again broken its commitments to UC. Now, Yudof says, “the access part of the Master Plan is in tatters.”
        
Yudof’s job of stopping the erosion of taxpayer support for higher education is made particularly treacherous by the fact that UC’s own leadership still has a lot of credibility to regain, both inside and outside the university. Beginning in 2005, the Chronicle uncovered and made hay of a series of cushy, under-the-table executive-compensation deals—vacation perks, lavish housing allowances, soft retirement cushions, executive jobs for significant others—some of which even the Regents hadn’t known about. Most were attempts to make up for the low published salaries that UC believed it needed to pay campus chancellors and other valued executives in order to avoid severe political backlash. But when the perks became public in a time of tight budgets and rising student fees, the strategy backfired, damaging the university far more severely than any competitive on-the-record salaries would have.

Even worse, perhaps, UCOP was stacked with more tiers of titled administrators, their secretaries and gofers, vice provosts, executive directors, directors, coordinators, vice presidents, associate vice presidents, and assistant vice presidents—over 2,000 employees in all—than it could possibly need. Blum, who made his fortune turning around struggling corporations, describes it as an “outmoded and dysfunctional” administrative structure resulting from an accretion of “cumbersome and enormously expensive layers of bureaucracy.” Yudof says he’s since saved UC $60 million by eliminating 500 of those positions.

Nonetheless, there are still scores of UC executives making well over $200,000 a year, even after taking 10 percent pay cuts in 2009. When he was hired in 2008, Yudof’s total compensation was set to be more than $800,000, counting housing, car allowance, pension, and other benefits—it has since been cut by some $60,000 owing to UC’s austerity budget. Such salaries are not out of line with those at other major universities; many at UC, in fact, are comparatively low, and they look pathetically low next to the pay of corporate exec­utives, whose astronomical salaries are the ultimate drivers of compensation in higher education. E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State, gets $1.5 million a year, and many private-university presidents—including those at Columbia, Penn, University of Southern California, and Vanderbilt—also earn more than $1 mill­ion. And then there are the high-six- and seven-figure incomes required to attract medical-school deans and professors and football coaches, like Cal’s Jeff Tedford, whose contract guarantees him $1.8 million a year, plus bonuses that can bring the total to almost $3 million.

But such comparisons don’t mean much—even with the generous benefits UC pays—to the custodians, administrative assistants, clerks, cafeteria workers, and lab techs who earn $40,000 or even less and, in some cases, had to take furloughs (though most with salary cuts of only 4 percent). Nor, as some legislators pointed out, would those comparisons generate much sympathy from the hundreds of thousands of Californians worried about keeping their homes and jobs—if, indeed, they still had them. Half a century ago, Kerr refused to take more than $45,000 a year to avoid any implication that the presidency is “a business position.” He prophetically warned one successor, David Gardner, that to follow the corporate model would lead to trouble, which it soon did: In 1992, another year of budget cutting and fee increases, inflated reports that the retiring Gardner had quietly arranged for a $2.4 million pension package nearly blew the dome off the Capitol.

Residual distrust from this history has generated an amalgam of sober attacks, paranoia, and populist opportunism that UC officials must spend an inordinate amount of time deflecting. Charles Schwartz, a retired Berkeley physicist, has contended for years that most state funding doesn’t go to undergraduate education but to other UC programs. And in the fall of 2009, as the Regents were discussing the tuition increases, UC Santa Cruz’s Robert Meister produced a paper purporting to show that UC had improperly pledged student fees to the repayment of construction bonds.

At the same time, Lakesha Harrison, the president of Local 3299 of AFSCME—the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which represents some 17,000 UC workers—argued vehemently that the UC system had billions in reserves, that its hospitals and medical schools were sitting on hundreds of millions in “profits,” and that its executives were shamefully overpaid. Yudof and the Regents didn’t do themselves any favors by awarding what appeared to be sizable pay increases to some two dozen administrators. UC officials argued that many of those executives were taking on new duties—in some cases, the additional responsibilities of people who had left—and essentially doing two jobs, and that those changes collectively saved money. But at UC, as at most universities (not to mention private industry), the gap between executive pay and the compensation of blue-collar workers was still nothing short of scandalous.

Yet UC appears to have spent down most of its reserves. There is no huge pool of cash, and the medical school and hospital “profits”—those that were not committed to medical staff as incentive pay—have to be banked against losses from other years. By the middle of 2010, the federal stimulus money that has partly cushioned the blow of the state’s budget cuts in 2009–2010 will also be gone. In the 2010–2011 budget, UC is asking the state for an additional $913 million, which Yudof knows he has little chance of getting. Thanks to the fee increases, UC can get through next year with an extra $400 million, he tells me. But if there are further reductions in state funding, as there may well be, he’ll “push it back” to the campuses to make the program cuts and impose the furloughs that they regard as necessary. “We can’t impose furloughs again from the center,” Yudof explains, meaning that somebody else will have to take the heat.

It’s also likely that the unacknowledged march to “privatization,” or heavy reliance on entrepreneurial income and even steeper fees, will continue. Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau is planning to admit a significantly larger percentage of out-of-state students, including foreign students, who pay a lot more tuition than California residents do and thus represent a sort of profit center. (Birgeneau says that the University of Toronto, which he headed before coming to UC Berkeley, was a far more cosmopolitan place with many foreign students. Because Berkeley is already educating 2,600 students for whom it gets no state money, Sacramento has no right to complain if the percentage of in-state students at Berkeley keeps going down.) Berkeley is also partnering with the University of Illinois and BP, formerly British Petroleum, in a $500 million deal to develop new energy sources. Meanwhile, a new, 24-member UC Commission on the Future—headed by Yudof and Russell Gould, the current chairman of the Board of Regents, and composed of Regents, faculty members, students, administrators, and some outside VIPs—is trying to determine “the size and shape” of UC in the years ahead, and to improve efficiency in the system’s operations. Among the commission’s ideas: a three-year degree and the creation of an 11th “cyber campus” that would combine some tutoring with online instruction, a low-cost venture that would both accommodate more students and be a moneymaker.

Yudof, in answer to my questions, argues that those things don’t necessarily add up to privatization, as long as UC has a large number of poor students and maintains its excellence. Call it what you will: As the cost of attending well-endowed private universities like Harvard and Stanford becomes increasingly competitive with Berkeley’s or UCLA’s fees, UC, with its relatively large classes and meager amenities, will have an increasingly tough time attracting top students, teachers, and researchers.

For years, when faced with budget crises, UC presidents played nicey-nice with governors and the legislature. In 1987, expecting special treatment, UC even refused to join the rest of the education establishment in a campaign to revise a state spending limit that was inflicting serious damage on schools. Yudof isn’t playing nicey-nice. The university, he told the Regents, can’t “continue faith-based budgeting.” He tells me that he doesn’t blame the governor or individual legislators—what else could he say?—and that the problem is the system itself. Even in Texas, government worked better and was more transparent than in California, where budget deals are cooked by five people—the governor and the leaders of the legislature—in a closed room. Still, in collaboration with CSU chancellor Charles Reed and Community Colleges chancellor Jack Scott, Yudof and other UC leaders are organizing an “advocacy campaign” that enlists students, alumni, community leaders, and faculty to persuade voters, legislators, and a notoriously disengaged business establishment how crucial higher education is not only to the state’s econ­omy, but also to its very status as a good society. Yudof says he’s already got 200,000 people on board to write letters in support of UC, though there’s no way to know how much more they’ll actually do. 

In his first year as president, Yudof went to Sacramento close to two dozen times to meet with legislators, staffers, and, at least once, in combination with Reed and Scott, the governor. The reception was always friendly, Yudof reports, even from a legislator who sent out press releases savaging Yudof afterward. But the president plainly still has an uphill climb. (One UC political scientist tells me that Yudof should have moved half his office to Sacramento.) UC remains the gold standard, says Democratic state senator Lois Wolk, one of the wisest members of that chamber and the wife of a retired UC Davis law professor. Californians still want to send their kids to UC. But the legislature has a terrible choice, Wolk says. Where, in the list of urgent needs, does the university fit? Sacramento is like the Balkans, adds Wolk’s senate colleague Loni Hancock, also a Democrat. “Every interest group has its chunk. The university is at risk, like everything else.” And what will happen in 2010–2011, when the deficit is expected to run to $20 billion?

The governor, at least, seems to be listening. Early this year, after two decades in which the growing state spending for prisons has far outstripped that for UC and CSU, he proposed a constitutional amendment that would eventually cap prison spending at 7 percent of the budget and guarantee that a minimum of 10 percent go to the universities. This would radically reverse the relative proportions in current budgets, but how the governor’s proposal will fare in the face of opposition from the powerful prison guards union—either in the legislature, where it would have to win a two-thirds majority, or with voters—is uncertain. Nonetheless, even a campaign for a ballot measure would give UC a major opportunity to get its message to voters.

In Sacramento, Yudof’s most vocal nemesis is senator Leland Yee of San Francisco, a Berkeley graduate who authored one bill prohibiting CSU from raising executive pay when budgets were being cut and calling on the UC Regents to do the same, and another that attempted to end UC’s historic constitutional autonomy altogether and grant the legislature oversight. The first bill was passed with bipartisan support but later vetoed by the governor; the senate’s leadership shelved the other. Yee, who is reportedly planning a run for San Francisco mayor and avidly courting the public employee unions whose complaints he channels, says that what bugs him the most is “the general sense of unfairness in the allo­cation of resources”—that is, the combination of high executive compensation and low pay for blue-collar workers. He wants “a strong university—UC should get more money,” he tells me. And Yudof “genuinely wants to do well.” Yet as we speak in his San Francisco office, Yee’s fond recollections of his role in the demonstrations at Berkeley’s People’s Park in May 1969 seem like nothing so much as nostalgic association of those days with the sniping at UC now. “You don’t want a place,” he says, “where the workers want to burn the place down.” When I ask whether UC would lose good executives if it didn’t pay competitive salaries, he replies that “other things attract people,” that academic quality and reputation are equally important. That thought is eerily reminiscent of former governor Jerry Brown’s oft-quoted remark that university employees enjoy “psychic rewards” and should therefore be satisfied with modest pay. (As if Yudof doesn’t have enough trouble already, Brown, who never hid his contempt for UC and inflicted deeper cuts than his predecessor Ronald Reagan did, may become governor yet again.)

Yudof has acknowledged some of Yee’s complaints. He knows, he said at a Sacramento press lunch, that he inherited the “story of an institution so entitled and disengaged, it wouldn’t get involved in the process in Sacramento; so arrogant, it wouldn’t provide even the most basic accountability or transparency to the people who foot the bills. I’m here to tell you things are different now. You are going to be seeing me and other UC advocates until you are sick of us.” Still, he said, he didn’t understand “why nobody would raise their voice in serious opposition, as some in state government [e.g., Yee] seek to throttle the one institution that promises the solution to California’s economic woes.”

Yet it would be surprising if UC got much of anything from either Sacramento or tax-averse voters soon. In November 2009, a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California showed high public regard for UC, CSU, and the community colleges, but when it came to reversing their slide with better funding, 68 percent opposed higher fees and 56 percent weren’t willing to pay higher taxes.

This leaves Yudof’s most ambitious hope, which reaches well beyond California. “The model for support of public universities in America is broken,” he often says, meaning there’s an urgent need to develop a whole new funding system for higher education—one in which the federal government would assume a much larger responsibility. Although most Americans don’t know it, the United States, tied with New Zealand as the world leader in higher education in 1995, has been falling rapidly behind. This country is now below 13 industrialized nations in the per­centage of young adults who have gradu­ated from college, and still slipping—a factoid that Yudof repeats frequently. From where is the leadership to reverse that slide more likely to come than the nation’s leading public university system? For Yudof, that means, among other things, getting the Obama administration to understand that if it really wants to upgrade the nation’s educational achievement and technical skills, then the feds have to go beyond the traditional assumption that public higher education is primarily a state responsibility. “You can have all the Pell Grants you want,” Yudof tells me, “but they’re not much good without capacity”: the classrooms, labs, and professors to teach the students who get those grants.

In a white paper that Yudof clearly pitched at the feds, this need is described as “simply too important to leave to state governments that seem disinclined or unable to pursue it. In other parts of the world, particularly in Asia, higher education has been embraced as a national responsibility. America should do the same.” Washington subsidizes highways, airports, and passenger rail service; what’s so different about higher education? Could a program be devised that would, for example, peg some form of federal aid to an institution’s enrollment of Pell recipients or other low-income students? That would both support struggling colleges serving needy students and, of course, help UC, without the risk of federal meddling in curricula and other politically sensitive matters. UC people were told there was interest in Washington, but they don’t expect anything before 2012.

However, Yudof has a more fundamental problem: the inherent tension between an essentially elite institution with high standards and its democratic mission as a public univer­sity—“public” at least in name. That public-ness makes it vulnerable not only to political pressure, but also to the nagging question of whether nine general campuses, some created at least in part to satisfy regional boosterism and development interests, can replicate and sustain the great array of departments and research programs associated with the flagships at Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. There have long been people, both inside the system and out—among them former Berkeley chancellor Chang-Lin Tien—who have argued that the flagship UC campuses should get more favorable treatment in terms of resources and pay scales. Constantly trying to turn campuses like the recently established UC at Merced into fledgling Berkeleys, they argue, is impossible and a terrible drain on resources. Does Irvine really need a law school or Riverside a medical school? Does the state need nine doctoral programs in political science?

Yudof tells me that he’s optimistic, a statement probably required by an unwritten clause in his contract. The age of the great university statesmen who spoke on a great many subjects beyond their own institutions—Charles William Eliot, Robert Hutchins, Woodrow Wilson, Alexander Meiklejohn, Nicholas Murray Butler, Mary Bunting, Clark Kerr—is most likely gone. But the stakes now are nothing less than California’s greatest treasure. If Yudof can keep the wolf packs from UC’s doors for another two or three years, if he can educate and energize his alumni and a lot of other Californians along with them, and if the UC commission’s imagination is equal to the large size-and-shape questions it’s supposed to address, then Yudof may yet have a chance to fulfill the expansive hopes of his friend at Notre Dame. And if he can get the federal government to provide broader support for higher education, then he will have accomplished something historic. But these are all daunting, enormous ifs.