My tenent’s daughter was an average student, but she bogged down completely when algebra was introduced. I simply told her “arithmetic is algebra, only done with numbers” and it fell into place for her and she got her first A in it.

Uh, why? I don’t recall that Prop 13 said anything about education funding or the university system, just that revenue couldn’t be increased faster than valuations without a vote. I do remember the anti-13 politicians saying they would “have to” reduce education, police, fire, close the parks, and sell the redwood forests for lumber, but in fact total revenue grew faster than inflation, on average. (I’m sure that broke down during Jimmy Carter’s “Administration”, but on average.)

The real issue is that other things than the university system got higher priorities on that revenue.

[Monroe] Deutsch was then quite willing to talk about the university and particularly about the University of California, which was his whole life. But he never talked about himself. He had been born into one of San Francisco’s wealthy families and decided early to spend his life in public service. But being pathologically shy, he was unable to endure public exposure, let alone run for office. And so he had invented for himself the role of eminence grise of the California university system, or rather he decided it would become a “system.” He made himself “Provost” and went underground., literally as well as figuratively. Then he designed the multi-campus university which California became after World War I when UCLA was first started; and he designed California’s multi-tier system of university, state colleges, and junior colleges, which would maintain the scholastic excellence and exclusivity of the university and yet enable every high-school graduate in California to attend a tuition-free state institution of higher learning. Deutsch also largely designed the ingenious system that gave the university fiscal autonomy by guaranteeing it a fixed sum from the state for each student admitted. He pushed for state commitment to higher education as California’s first political priority, and commitment to excellence as the university’s first educational priority. “I didn’t know that there would be a Hitler and that we would suddenly be able to hire fifty or sixty first-rate scholars and teachers,” he said; “but I started fifteen years ago to make the state and the university ready for manna from heaven, should it even rain down.”

I find it ironic that when I voted in the affirmative on Proposition 13 I was living in Deutsch Hall.

We’re waiting. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Please God, give me the strength not to use this as a straight line.

I think that the industrial metaphor also applies to the production of teachers. They are workers on the assembly line, and as such they don’t need training in the subject but only in screwing in some widget.

Clearly I need more coffee.