The budget presentation to the Regents today: did the Regents hear from UCOP that the Brown cut of 20% of state general funds is a disaster for the educational core that needs to be blocked, and that concessions on budgetary transparency and rationality, and reductions in administrative overhead need to be made? I criticize Bob Samuels' proposal in a comment on his recent post. Much more needs to be said on various sides. .
The Regents by now should have passed the Educational Policy committeee measure on "individualized review" of every application. It requires the "human read of every application that provides background on the available opportunities and challenges faced by the applicant within his or her school and community," among other things. This was required by the famous Powell Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), and reaffirmed by Justice O'Connor in the Bollinger decisions in 2003 (v.. Grutter and v. Gratz. Non-compliance (arithmetic admissions formulae that assigned points for race and other factors) were the rationale behind the anti-affirmative action upheavals in 1994-95 that led to the suspension of UC affirmative action and a decline in the representativeness of the UC student body from which the university still hasn't recovered (though the ban was rescinded in 2001). So it's not too soon to be holistic, and welcome.
Up at 1 pm today is faculty and staff "competitiveness" - various compensation issues. Up at 8:50 am tomorrow is the open session on Compensation that will announce closed-session decisions about executive comp among other things - and it's right after Public Comment.
Today's Election May Be Close
3 hours ago
5 comments:
Here's the swill release from UCOP today.
"It may be program closings, it may be layoffs," Yudof said. Each campus is in the process of figuring out where to cut, he added. "We are long past the time when we can just cut the fat."
http://tinyurl.com/4cmrg78
yes, and read Yudof suggesting "thousands and thousands of layoffs." http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/jan/19/uc-regents-face-grim-budget-reality/
Yes, and
"Uniformed and plainclothes UC police and yellow-jacketed private security guards" graced the Regents meeting yesterday.
Christ, it's all happening so fast.
Judging from yesterday's meeting, it appears that President Yudof personally is leaning towards shrinking the university while attempting to bolster its quality. That would I guess indicate raising admissions standards and accepting fewer students. From whence would the savings then arise? One supposes this would mean reducing contingent faculty, offering fewer classes and I guess consolidating business offices. And of course any savings from reducing enrollments will be offset by reductions in tuition revenues, making it all the harder to obtain substantial savings from this approach.
But in keeping with UC's decentralized management system, and perhaps also since no easy solutions are at hand, UCOP apparently plans to leave a lot of discretion to the individual campuses as to where each chooses to make cuts. This will put further pressures on existing fault lines within each campuses organizational structures, i.e. the internal competition for resources within each campus. And the time horizon for these battles to play out looks to be very short indeed.
yes read between the lines of CFO Peter Taylor on Patt Morrison http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-morrison/2011/01/20/bleak-milestone-not-just-for-the-university-but-fo/ i'll post on this over the weekend.
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