Should UC be more like a Corporation?

By Anonymous

This morning I received an email informing me that the ICR rate is going up.  As usual, this applies to current projects that have already been funded at a lower rate.  This means I'll lose direct funding to cover higher ICR.  Needless to say, no benefit from increased ICR has filtered back down to me.

A couple months ago I hired a new postdoc.  Ahead of her arrival, I asked my sysadmin (entirely paid by direct charges to extramural grants) to set things up in her office.  He reported that the office was quite dirty.  I contacted the building coordinator to get it cleaned, and he sent me a cost list of various cleaning services and asked for an index number.  Considering that NSF probably would not approve office cleaning as a direct charge, I demurred.

There was also no phone in the office.  My fund manager sent me a cost list of various phone services that the campus provides to its "customers".  The ongoing monthly charges are so tiny, it's not clear to me how it is worthwhile to allocate them to individual index numbers.  I suppose the tiny charges add up to something substantial systemwide, but what about the personnel time involved in the paperwork for all this nickel and diming?

Last week the business office reviewed network charges to make sure the right person and fund source was paying for each computer connection.  I realized that one of my computers was used primarily for instruction and service; therefore it was not appropriate to charge it to an extramural grant.  I asked my department to cover the tiny monthly cost, but they replied that they had no funds available for this sort of thing.  The solution was for me to use the remnant of my start-up funds, but once that is gone, my chair does not know where the money will come from -- aside from incorrectly charging a sponsored research project.
 
It occurred to me that the increasing corporatization of UC may not be such a bad idea.  After all, corporations don't charge their employees for the phones on the desks or for the maintenance of their work computers.  Corporations provide office cleaning more frequently than once per year (decade?).  And don't innovative tech corporations free their researchers from petty paper-pushing so they can focus on what they are best at?  Maybe working at a corporation might be a step up in efficiency and pleasantness from the current conditions at UC.