California's public higher education system has for a long time been lauded as one of the finest in the world. But for the last several decades, budget cuts and privatization have resulted in the steady erosion of this system, as well as K-12 education in the state and other public sector services. It was told that privatization and choice--in the form of vouchers, charter schools, and online education corporations--would correct failing schools. By 2010, reality has discredited this experiment. Privatization, choice, and the standardized test regime of No Child Left Behind failed to produce the promised results. But the foundations and think tanks with their own political agendas and funding to back them, and education businesses who profited significantly from experiments in the privatization of higher education are not about to admit any mistakes. Yet another example of public education mismanagement began in 2009, when the California State University (CSU) chancellor invited Sir Michael Barber, discredited guru of Great Britain's deliverology management method--another failed privatization scheme--to give a workshop to the system's top administrators on the implementation of deliverology within the CSU. This article recounts the California Faculty Association's (CFA) efforts to make sense of deliverology in the context of changes that have taken place in the CSU both prior to and after the 2009 Barber workshop and to connect these changes with those taking place in other university systems both nationally and globally. (Contains 43 endnotes.)