SAN FRANCISCO—An improved national economy has allowed government funding of public postsecondary education to rebound, but this is actually the worst time for higher education executives to be lenient about lobbying legislators for additional money.
That was the consensus last week among the chiefs of California’s three public higher education systems during the annual Higher Education Government Relations Conference, which concluded Friday. The three chiefs—Napolitano; Dr. Timothy P. White, chancellor of the 23-campus California State University; and Dr. Brice Harris, chancellor of the 112-campus California Community Colleges—encouraged college officials to aggressively build and strengthen relationships with lawmakers as if the Great Recession were still dragging on.
“Let’s not simply tell them what we need,” University of California President Janet Napolitano said of federal and state legislators. “Let’s tell them what we can do. Let’s not settle for short-term fixes but aim for long-term investment. It’s a losing strategy to [only] say, ‘We need more money.’ Everybody needs more money. There are competing needs all over the place.”
Napolitano’s suggestions drew from her experiences as Arizona’s governor and as President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security.
To illustrate the economic imperatives surrounding adequate funding of colleges and universities, Napolitano used a hypothetical example of California-based, Internet giant Google moving its headquarters to another state.
“We don’t want Google saying our university system failed to produce [an] ample workforce,” she said. “We can tell our state lawmakers that when they’re governor in 20 years … they don’t want to be the governor who lets Google leave.”
