UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi wrote the following op-ed for the March 4 issue of The Sacramento Bee:

I grew up in a working-class town on a small Greek island in the 1950s, where the idea of going to college was beyond our wildest dreams.

Our town was home to families still recovering from World War II and the devastation of Nazi atrocities and genocide. My parents, very poor and without any college education themselves, barely survived to start a family. And at the time, Greek institutions of higher education were all private and charged more for a single quarter of classes than my father made in a year.

Only when the Greek government made colleges public and tuition-free in the 1960s was I able to pursue my dreams, first an engineering degree in Greece, then graduate training at UCLA, made possible by public as well as private philanthropic support.

Time to speak out

And so, as university leaders and students organize this week in Sacramento and across the state to speak out about access, affordability and other issues critical to the future of public higher education, these matters are intensely personal for me.

No state has as much to lose as California if we do not act quickly to reprioritize our commitment to higher education for our children, our long-term economic well-being and ourselves. Consider that between 1950 and 1967, California invested 22 percent of all state spending in public services and public infrastructure. The investment created one of the world’s greatest public higher education systems.

Today, six of the University of California’s 10 campuses, including Davis, are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities, a designation reserved for the leading research institutions in the United States and Canada. My own campus is known worldwide, especially for its contributions to global agriculture, animal and human health and its cutting-edge innovations in energy efficiency.

This academic excellence is no accident. It is the fruit of generations of sacrifice and investment by Americans in their children’s futures, beginning with the federal Morrill Act of 1863, which created the land grant universities (including UC Davis, founded in 1908) and continuing through California’s transformative Master Plan for Education, unveiled in 1960.

UC budget ‘slashed’

Now, in stark contrast, the University of California has seen its state funding per student fall by 50 percent since 1990. In the past year alone, total state funding for UC was slashed by 20 percent. As a consequence, at UC Davis we’ve had to cope with a cumulative budget shortfall of $150 million since July 2008 (including a $115 million shortfall since May 2009). The California Community College system anticipates a cut in enrollment of more than 250,000 students. And California State University anticipates a cut of 40,000 students.

Unlike the planning and investment that catapulted the University of California to worldwide pre-eminence, today’s financial crisis for higher education is a result of unintended consequences that can be traced back to June 6, 1978, when an overwhelming majority of California voters approved Proposition 13. The result has been a steady disinvestment in the state’s future.

Proposition 13 rolled back property assessments to 1975 market value levels and stipulated that they could not be raised more than 2 percent in any fiscal year.

More importantly, it mandated that actual property taxes could not exceed more than 1 percent of a property’s cash value, authorizing the state Legislature to determine how those taxes would be apportioned among the many competing public purposes.

‘Genius and vision’ of master plan

California has long led the nation in its number of gated communities that provide their own public services, exemplifying a view of government services as a private choice, as if one could review potential government programs the way one would check off options on a cable television plan.

Lost in this privatized version of government is the sense of communal belonging, of obligation to any social entity larger than the self, and of any responsibility to future generations.

If ever this state and nation needed to formulate a long-range plan for the future of its higher education system, now is the time.

At the recent World Universities Forum in Davos, Switzerland, I spoke about the need for a Morrill Act for the 21st century and for the federal government’s reinvestment in public higher education.

And California must reassert the genius and vision of our own master plan for higher education through increased state investment.

It is time that we match the commitments made by our parents, a generation that built this country for the benefit of their children, for our children and for our children’s children.

Today we must choose the sacrifice of collective investment in the public research university as a shared good leading to continued national prosperity and security, rather than the shrunken, caste-bound future of the privatized university.

Today, even in the face of a lingering recession and two wars, is the time for renewed sacrifice for the benefit of future students.

Today is the right time, our time, to begin the building.