Letter To SJSU President Whitmore

HERE IS MY EMAIL LETTER TO JON Whitmore, President of San Jose State University, in reply to his opinion letter published in the San Jose Mercury News Feb. 5th “Holding the line on cuts to California university funding is not enough.”

As I graduated as a President’s Scholar from SJSU so I think my opinion might be of some value to the President regarding the funding of the universities.

Dear President Whitmore:

Saving higher education in California will in fact take a bold new vision in Sacramento.  Your opinion piece is correct in stating that the state is losing many of its best students to out of state institutions.  But that statistic was accurate in 1990 and has since become dramatically more evident.  It is also true the state’s most promising engineers end up in Texas (Austin for instance).

Mayor Chuck Reid, speaking at the National Mayor’s Conference broadcast on CSPAN TV in December last year, said (to paraphrase) the City of San Jose would soon have only one employee,  a fireman on overtime, the balance of San Jose’s revenue will be spent paying public employee benefits.

What astonishes me is California institutional leaders arguing over the ever diminishing shares of the state’s budget pie like Soviet nomenklaturists rather than confronting what is needed to do to EXPAND THE ECONOMY OF THE STATE and taking a smaller slice of a larger state revenue pie.

California statistically is in the later stages of decline and decay.  As the LAO’s 2010-1011 governor’s budget analysis points out, it is politically unlikely the federal government will bailout California over the near or long term.

What I would suggest is that some of the Academic Senate faculty be assigned to conduct research in the archives of the SJSU library.  There researchers will find the bold new vision the state and CSU/UC systems need to reform and rejuvenate state government.

In the books stamped  “San Jose Normal School” on the flyleaf, if they are still there in the book stacks, (I used to read them while taking a break from my OR comparative government studies) is in this collection of San Jose Normal School books a bold vision of how a state education system can operationally create and empower an economic Juggernaut.

I also suggest the CSU/UC system send faculty from the mathematics, economics, and political science departments to Washington and Texas since, as you know these are the states where the most promising engineers and students have migrated, to conduct comparative government efficiency research.

What this comparative research might conclude is the state’s bureaucracy and political leaders, largely educated in the CSU/UC system, need to drop out of their ideology, and tune in to the practical real world of educational and government systems that have proven to work optimally.

As an alumni I would be happy to help if asked.

Sincerely,

Val McMurdie

408.410-41855

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