The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Jerry acknowledged his long, complicated history with the institution, memorialized in his infamous suggestion decades earlier that the faculty should accept a lesser raise and make up the difference in psychic income. “I know the university never lived that down,” he said at a January 2013 Regents meeting. “I don’t make those statements anymore. That left a scar14 in my relationship with many professors. So today, this is a generous spirit. An opening. A willingness to work together.”

  This time, the state struggled with deficits, not surpluses. After years of eroding support, by 2010 the state paid less than half the cost of educating undergraduates at the university—compared with 78 percent two decades earlier. The year Jerry took office, revenue from student tuition for the first time surpassed state aid.

  During financial crises, the university was an easy target for Sacramento. Unlike most state-funded services, it had the ability to raise money from other sources. The campuses could shift further toward independently funded research. The Regents could raise tuition and admit more out-of-state students, who paid a premium. During and after the Great Recession, the university did all of that. University officials argued they had little choice. The university had lost $900 million during the two worst years of the Great Recession, almost a third of its annual state appropriation.

  The constitutional independence of the university stoked a vicious cycle. Because the Regents could make financial and educational decisions without approval from the governor or the legislature, Sacramento felt less invested. The less invested, the less support, the more the university turned to outside sources, the less it cared what state officials thought, the greater the frustration on both sides. Many still remembered when university fees were a nominal amount, not even called tuition. They felt betrayed by the big jump. Yet even with tuition of more than $12,000 a year, the schools had no trouble attracting students. In fact, as more high school seniors qualified for admission, demand continued to far outstrip the available spots.

  The 1960 Master Plan had been built around the promise of access and quality. Financial pressures had reduced access, especially for California students seeking admission to the more competitive campuses. At Jerry’s alma mater, Cal, one third of the freshmen who entered in 2014 were from out of state—eighteen hundred places that were denied to Californians. Jerry’s battle with the Regents came down to this: He argued they had sufficient funds to restore and even expand access for Californians without compromising quality—a term he questioned, though he failed to offer his own definition.

  The governor did not, as some expected and others urged, take on a badly needed update of the fifty-year-old Master Plan, which had long outlived its subtitle: “1960–1975.” Unlike Jerry’s clearly articulated plans and rationale for funding public schools or realigning criminal justice services, his vision for the state’s higher education systems remained somewhat nebulous. While he had backed off from the idea of “psychic income,” he still believed that teaching at a UC was a “calling,” not merely a well-paid job. He valued a liberal arts education that exposed students to a broad array of knowledge and functioned as a “foundation of citizenship.” He lamented that students did not read T. S. Eliot. He still frequently consulted the work of Sheldon Wolin and Carl Schorske, as well as that of intellectuals he admired who had functioned largely outside the academy, including Illich and Gregory Bateson. As he had through a variety of venues, from the seminary to the Zen center to the Oakland Table, Jerry sought places to nurture a spirit of collective inquiry. He thought the University of California should play that role for a new generation of Californians.

  “We’re dealing not just with UC,” he said to the Regents. “We’re dealing with California,15 we’re dealing with America, we’re dealing with the West. How are we going to make it as us old white guys age?”

  Much of his effort to spark change focused on the university’s financial decisions. At a Regents meeting the week after the passage of Proposition 30 stabilized state finances, Jerry was polite, but direct: “Let’s get real.16 I’m proposing five percent more in your budget. You’re proposing eleven point six. How do you make up the gap?” He impressed upon them the political reality. “I don’t have a Nobel Prize but I know the political climate of California as well as anybody else … the five percent17 we’re going to give you is pretty much what you’re going to get … I’m trying to say this as diplomatically and as warmly and fuzzily as I can.”

  The technological revolution imposed urgency to find new paradigms, he warned, or the schools would go the way of the post office, struggling to survive. He told the Regents about walking through newsrooms of the once powerful California newspaper empires as he lobbied for Prop 30. There were rows and rows of empty desks.

  Over the next year, he attended committee meetings and board sessions, and spent hours talking with faculty and administrators. He asked questions: When did a six-year graduation rate become the norm, and why? Is it financial pressure, or a social norm, or the attitude of the university? Why did graduation rates at different campuses vary widely? He asked them to reevaluate teaching loads and research and ratios between undergraduate and graduate students. He voted against salary packages for new chancellors. He pressed for experimentation with online classes to expand the reach.

  “How do we maintain, enhance, this wonderful institution called the University of California?” he asked at a Regents meeting. “I’m a person who’s been around a long time, I care about this university. I love learning.18 I love research. But I’m a realist. And we’ve got to figure out how to make it work. Together. I want to understand better how you distribute the costs. Let’s unpack the various costs and let’s look at what they are.

  When UC president Janet Napolitano flatly declared at the end of 2014 that without additional state aid, they would need to raise tuition, Jerry forced a showdown. He refused to support a tuition increase and countered with the creation of the “Committee of Two”—he and Napolitano would examine all facets of the university’s spending practices to come up with new ideas. The result was a four-year pact, consistent with the principle of subsidiarity, that included a tuition freeze, increased state funding of 4 to 5 percent per year, and broad discretion in how the university spent that money. When the legislature subsequently tried to tie funds to specific programs, Jerry vetoed the earmarks. He rejected enrollment quotas and instead required the university to submit annual reports on various metrics, including transfers from community colleges, four- and six-year graduation rates, low-income students as a percentage of the population, and spending per degree granted. Both UC and CSU also agreed to use part of their state funds to develop online classes.

  By the fall of 2015, the university’s 248,000 students at ten campuses included more California undergraduates than ever, the single largest increase19 since the GI Bill. For the first time in a decade, each campus enrolled more Californians than before the Great Recession, when schools turned to out-of-state students for revenue. In addition to state and federal aid, the university used a portion of tuition revenue and fees to provide aid to low-income students. Almost 60 percent of the undergraduates paid no tuition, and another 15 percent had partial waivers.

  In 2015 and 2016 analyses that assessed which top colleges in the United States played the greatest role in economic upward mobility20 by offering affordable education to poor and middle-class students, the top five spots were all UC campuses.

  In the fall of 2017, 45 percent of the freshman class were the first generation in their family to attend college. UC launched a “First Gen” campaign on social media and on campuses. The first week of classes, more than eight hundred faculty who had once been in the same position wore FIRST-GEN T-shirts and buttons. They worked to educate colleagues as well, to reframe long-held, outdated assumptions about what successful students looked like and how they acted in class.

  “This is a very powerful state and this is a very powerful university,”21 Jerry told the Regent
s. “We have to lead. I like that idea. We want to lead. I’m not saying exactly how to do that. I’m telling you I am engaged in this challenge. With you. Not against you. Let’s move carefully, let’s look at all the collective wisdom here, and through this wonderful process, let’s make the best decisions we can possibly make. And I pledge that my mind is open. I believe that if you know where you’re going, you’re already dead. So I confess: I don’t know where I’m going. But I know I’m going to get there.”

  23

  Past as Prologue

  The task of introducing the nation’s oldest governor as he took office for an unprecedented fourth term fell to the person who knew him best, first lady Anne Gust Brown. She had grown comfortable with her role, if not the title, much as decades earlier the naturally reserved Bernice Brown had developed a public persona that matched her elegance. Anne, the first attorney in the role, admired the grace with which Bernice had applied her formidable intelligence to raising a family and supporting her husband’s career.

  At Jerry’s 2011 inauguration, bright lights shining in her eyes, Anne had said little in her introduction beyond noting the dignitaries in the audience she could not see. During the ensuing years, she had been the governor’s indispensable partner, key to the successes, failures, and ongoing struggles. On January 5, 2015, she took the microphone1 with assurance, her opening as memorable as it was spontaneous, delivered from notes jotted down that morning:

  How to introduce Jerry Brown? He’s obviously someone known to all of you, and he’s been in the public eye forty years. I guess I can only say, what does he mean to me? When I first met Jerry Brown, the thing that struck me immediately was his mind. Oh my god, this mind that runs at a hundred miles per hour! It is restless. It’s seeking. It’s probing. It’s creative. And frankly, for all of us who work with him, it’s exhausting. But it is so stimulating, that mind of his. What many of you may not know as well is his heart and his soul, which I’ve come to know so well over these years. And that I would say is very firmly grounded in tradition, and principle, and in the past.

  She spoke of his recent passion for tracing family roots, an effort to connect his own past, present, and future. “I think that Jerry more than anyone looks to the past for guidance, to his ancestors,” she said. “For California, especially in this kind of place, this combination makes him a perfect governor. He’s someone we know will enthusiastically and creatively forge a new and bold future for us. Yet he will do so grounded enough in wisdom of the past that we won’t drive off a cliff.”

  Taking his oath in the Assembly chamber, Jerry thought back to January 5, 1959, the day he first entered the ornate room. In cassock and collar, seated next to his eighty-one-year-old grandmother, Ida Schuckman Brown, Jerry had felt out of place, suddenly transported from the seclusion of the Jesuit seminary. “To me, the boisterous crowd, the applause, the worldliness of it all was jarring,” he said in his inaugural address. “That was fifty-six years ago, yet the issues that my father raised at his inauguration bear eerie resemblance to those we still grapple with today.” He ticked them off: discrimination, quality education, air pollution, water resources, economic development, overcrowded prisons.

  In an era when term limits reinforced politicians’ short-term focus on the next election, Jerry fixed his gaze on a far-off horizon. In part that was age, in part his nature, in part nurture. From his father, he had absorbed the imperative to think big. Each man in his own way looked beyond the relentlessness of those chronic conditions and took on challenges others avoided as too risky. Pat Brown had been determined to provide water, schools, and freeways for millions of people who would arrive long after he was gone. Jerry focused on how to prepare a different generation of Californians to succeed in an uncertain future, and how California might lead the way to make sure the world had any future at all.

  “I see California as both a trendsetter2 but also as the state that deals and grapples with the big issues,” he told a group of student journalists. “And the big issues are inequality, climate change, and promoting and handling the innovation that both adds to our quality of life, but also undermines our sense of our traditional identity. That puts us in kind of a hothouse of experimentation, and I think California has to both look to its past and also pave the way for its future.”

  Though he paid the bureaucracy more respect in his second tour as governor, he had little patience for bureaucrats and still not much interest in nuts and bolts. “There is a certain amount of just taking in the laundry,”3 he said, as he focused on stabilizing state finances. “And a certain amount of innovation. I would say I am doing a lot of the laundry here, but I don’t think I have in any way given up on the vision of doing big things.”

  Some big ideas came in response to events. California finally enacted a law that would regulate and monitor pumping of groundwater, after years of drought prompted so much drawing down of well water that land in the Central Valley sank. Other big ideas were public works projects in the tradition of Pat Brown. Jerry championed a version of the Peripheral Canal that had failed to pass in 1982—two massive water tunnels that would bypass the ecologically fragile Delta and modernize the system for moving water from the north to Southern and Central California. Navigating the geographic, political, economic, and environmental divides necessary to make the project financially viable, Jerry faced the same splits his father had confronted. At best, he would leave office long before ground was even broken.

  After deliberation, Jerry embraced a Schwarzenegger initiative, construction of a high-speed train route from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Even during the budget crisis, he found ways to finance the start of what would be a costly, decades-long project, if the entire route came to fruition. Jerry and Anne took part in the groundbreaking for the first section on the day after he was inaugurated for his second term. He dismissed skeptics and naysayers as Lilliputians who lacked vision, much as many had opposed the construction of the BART system in San Francisco decades earlier.

  Jerry used BART as an example of the visionary thinking that shaped California, often in unforeseen ways. Each weekday morning, dozens of students at the Oakland School for the Arts emerged from the 19th Street Station, which had become a catalyst for the revitalized downtown. The construction of BART was financed with a 1966 bond issue championed by Pat Brown. “My father, I don’t think,4 was thinking about Oakland,” Jerry said. “We have to be able to have a politics where we make investments where the full realization is not going to happen for ten or twenty or forty years. But that sense of continuity from the past to the present, but being a part of the future. That’s what it means to be a Californian. Because we are from a pioneering tradition. We need to keep that pioneering going, that experimentation, that innovation, creativity, but at the same time we need to be rooted, in a tradition. And that’s the way I conceptualize things.”

  He pointed to massive, transformative projects undertaken in the midst of economic hardship—the transcontinental railroad, started during the Civil War; the Golden Gate Bridge, built during the Depression. More recently, the Great Recession had not impeded the $2.5 billion NASA project to build, launch, and operate a rover to explore Mars. In the summer of 2012, Jerry joined scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to watch a live feed as their creation took its first walk on Mars. “This is not the first Space Day I’ve declared,” he joked, reminiscing about his early interest in space in 1977. In an era when government had lost legitimacy, he told the scientists, their lab embodied the power of vision and collaboration, hallmarks of the state. “California from the beginning has attracted the bold5 and the imaginative,” he said. “The Gold Rush,6 they came from all over the world too, to extract wealth from the ground, from the rivers, the mountains. Now people come here to extract wealth from the collective imagination of all those that are here.”

  One of Jerry Brown’s proudest accomplishments his first time in office was the creation of the California Conservation Corps, which he
called “an embodiment of the Jesuit seminary, the kibbutz, the Marine Corps, and the utopian community, all in support of ecological values.” In 2016, he presided over the fortieth anniversary celebration, where he was presented a golden work boot. (Courtesy of California Department of Water Resources)

  In raw numbers, migration to California had slowed. Most of the population growth in recent years came from the children and grandchildren of immigrants. That shaped another important demographic change with uncertain consequences. In the land that had always lured people from near and far, for the first time since the Gold Rush, a majority of Californians had been born in the state.

  Anthony Rendon, who in 2016 became the fifth Latino to serve as Assembly Speaker, exemplified those trends and their political implications. He was a third-generation Mexican American, born in 1968. He grew up in Los Angeles, where his father worked for a mobile home company and his mother was an aide at a Catholic school. Rendon graduated from Whittier High School, Richard Nixon’s alma mater. He had terrible grades and knew almost no one who had gone to college. After working graveyard shifts at a warehouse for a couple of years and watching students get off the bus at Cerritos Community College as he headed home, he enrolled. He discovered philosophy, became an avid reader, graduated from Cal State Fullerton, and then earned a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of California, Riverside. After more than a decade as an environmental activist and educator, Rendon ran for Assembly in 2012 to represent a Southeast Los Angeles county district made up mainly of poor, predominantly Latino cities. So few voted that he won the Democratic primary with eighty-seven hundred votes in a district of half a million people. His wife was a second-generation Asian American; her parents fled Vietnam and ended up in Sacramento, where she worked in the fields through high school.