For Sale: One College

by Erie Solomon

As an employee of the state of California, urged by my new governor to work on national holidays, I have been seeking an appropriate solution to the latest problem facing the academy: the governor’s insistence on tuition impositions and budget cuts. Since the governor says he represents the best of free enterprise, the colleges must learn from him. Faculty and student reactions to Governor Reagan’s re-arrangement of the financial basis of higher education have been insufficiently imaginative. Letters to legislators, appeals to the electorate, marches on Sacramento — none of these is in the tradition of the open market. Take my own college, for example, San Francisco State, with a glittering English department, a huge and impressive psychology department, the largest drama department on the coast, many firstrate faculty members and students, even a student-run experimental college — why should we restrict ourselves to these fruitless halfmeasures? If poor schools can, according to a recent suggestion, subscribe to a rent-a-dean service, why shouldn’t the pearl of the California state college system sell itself to a state, or to a private corporation for that matter, that will support the college in the manner to which it is accustomed?

I suggest that academic senates, faculty organizations, and student leaders at San Francisco State should instanter raise a sum of money to take a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, offering the faculty, possibly the plant, mayhap the student body — for sale. Smaller ads in the personal columns of other newspapers might attract additional prospective buyers.

Since faculties at California’s state colleges work without benefit of contract, they are under no obligation to the state and could accept the best financial offer immediately. These professors would not have to seek new positions, breaking up their yellowing lecture notes to fit strange courses, becoming accustomed to new committee assignments, different faces at lunch in the faculty club, unfamiliar cabals against the department chairmen.

Other states, feverishly expanding their educational systems on the model of California’s master plan, will immediately be attracted by the chance to purchase a readymade, operating college for a mere fifteen to seventeen million dollars a year, hardly more than goes into the planning alone for a new institution. Here is a highly recommended California college, tooled to handle 18,000 students at once, available now and complete with full faculty, secretaries, syllabi, administrators, catalogues, campus police, teams, even a tradition or two.

Like the St. Louis Browns, the college could move to Baltimore and become a winner. Even better, the college could stay right where it is. After all, Stanford has a branch in England, Johns Hopkins in Italy. Harvard has I Tatti. Surely the charms of San Francisco itself should be a major selling point, and the faculty could cling to their heavily mortgaged homes overlooking the bay. How about State University of New York at San Francisco? Ford Foundation College? Cornell West? Paul Getty University? This plan would leave the college in beautiful San Francisco, far from the snows of Ohio or the winds of Lake Michigan.

More cash would come to California to help its budget from the state that buys the plant and land than Governor Reagan realized from the sale of his ranch. Certainly the Interstate Commerce Commission would sanction a sale that would provide New Jersey, say, with a pleasant branch campus by lovely Lake Merced, a big library with lots of empty shelves available for overstock, an adjustable calendar even now poised midway between the semester and quarter systems in order to articulate with the host school.

The results of such an appeal could be spectacular:

1. Governor Reagan might reap sufficient publicity from the advertisement to move on to greener fields. Possibly other states would pay well for his expertise in reducing a great university to a calm agricultureand ROTC-dominated institution.

2. Publicity resulting from the ad should enable the college to establish a foundation-supported center for the study of such subjects as The Shortest Way with Poor (and scruffy) Students; Why Professors Are Not People; Image Making, the Mass Media, and University Budgets, from Jack Oakie to Mario Savio.

3. Someone might buy us.