Venice, Italy on May 8, 2026   

by Sean L. Malloy, Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), UC Merced

In September 2025, I wrote a guest post for this blog entitled “Why Should We Stand Up for the UC?” that placed much of the blame for the current federal assault against the University of California on the complicity and weakness of UC leadership, including the Regents, UCOP, and the Academic Senate.  In bowing to the false claims of antisemitism that have served as the Trump administration’s pretext for attacking American universities and unleashing police and administrative terror on anti-genocide protesters, the UC invited federal intervention while crushing the grassroots movements of students, faculty, and staff that not only stood up for the best values of humanity, but also represented the best defense against rising fascism and authoritarianism.  

UCLA Royce Hall on May 14, 2018   

By early spring of the annus horribilis 2025, the UCLA Senate had lost patience with a UCLA Administration that had locked it out of any meaningful role in major decisions.  

The new CFO, Stephen Agostini, appointed in 2024, wasn’t working with the Senate in established ways. A new chancellor, Julio Frenk, had arrived in January, was to be inaugurated on June 5^th, and seemed okay with increased opacity.  The Senate chair, Kathy Bawn, must have been worried that something much worse than shared governance could get locked in by the new administration. 

The Strike continues with no end in sight.  Although there have been tentative agreements concerning Post-Docs and Academic Researchers, in the Academic Student Employee and Student Researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues.  This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although the UAW made significant adjustments in its proposal UC responded with little change.  You can see the latest UAW wage proposal here and the latest UC wage proposal here.  

It is impossible from the outside to tell where the negotiations are headed.  But what I want to try to do here is offer some suggestions for how we could think about the gap, how we got here, and what we might do in the future to alter the conditions that have created what is undoubtedly a crisis at the University, and a depressing foreshadowing of the end of UC as a serious research university.  If the latter does happen the responsibility will ultimately lie with UCOP and the Regents with some support from the campus Chancellors.

The first point is that it seems clear that there is a fundamental gap in the way that each side is defining these negotiations.  UC is approaching this as if it were a conventional labor negotiation with a class of workers whose position is fundamentally stable.  The UAW and its supporters on the other hand, start from the position that they have been placed in an untenable economic position.  Given the fact that TA wages have barely kept up with national inflation over the years combined with the extreme cost of housing in California, they cannot continue with relatively minor adjustments in the dollar amount of their monthly pay.  To make matters worse, UC's latest offer has a first year adjustment that is about equal to current inflation.  In this light, UCOP appears completely out of touch with the reality of life on campuses and indifferent to its lack of knowledge.

This image of autocratic disregard was only deepened by Provost Brown's appalling letter to the faculty last week.  Although much of it was standard UCOP pablum, he inspired widespread faculty hostility with his closing flourish threatening faculty members who refused to pick up the work of striking workers with discipline beyond the docking of pay.  For the last three years, faculty and lecturers  have performed an enormous amount of additional labor to keep the university afloat during the pandemic: transforming their courses, spending additional time with students, planning for campus transformations, and putting their research duties on the side to maintain "instructional continuity" as the administration likes to put it.  After all this effort, for the Provost to threaten disciplinary action for those who choose not to pick up the work of striking TAs or to act upon their own convictions about academic integrity, manifests a contempt for the faculty that is hard to ignore.

It's important to grasp UC's budgetary situation correctly.  Most importantly, the usual invocation of the university's 46 billion dollar budget needs to be put aside.  Most of that budget is tied up in the medical centers or in funding for designated purposes.  The real budget that is relevant is the core budget made up of tuition, state funding, and some UC funds.  It comes in closer to $10 billion (Display 1) and is largely tied up in salaries across the campuses.  As Chris and I have been pointing out for nearly 15 years, UC has been subject to core educational austerity surrounded by compartmentalized privatized wealth (although we should notice that the medical centers barely stay in the black).  This crisis will not be overcome by hidden caches of money floating around the university.  The problem is deeper than that:  its roots lie in the combination of state underfunding and the expansion of expensive non-instructional (often non-academic research) activities that have taken up too much of campus's payrolls.

But I want to stress that this reality does not mean that the graduate students are being unreasonable in seeking wages that enable them to perform their employment duties and pursue their studies.  Instead, it is a sign of how deep the failure of the University has been in (not) providing a sustainable funding model both for students and faculty supporting students.  The Academic Senate has been pointing to this problem for at least two decades.  In statements and reports from 2006, 2012, and 2020, the Senate has repeatedly insisted that graduate student support was insufficient and proposed steps to improve it.  Even the administration itself has sometimes recognized its depth.  To take only one example from 2019, UCOP's Academic Planning Council declared that:  

UC must do better at financially supporting its doctoral students, particularly as it seeks to diversify the graduate student body. The University cannot compete with its peers for talented candidates if it does not offer competitive support. In 2017 the gap in average net stipend between UC and its peers was nominally $680.3 In actuality the gap is much greater due to California’s high cost of living - with factored in, the average gap in doctoral support is closer to $3,400.4 This is a huge difference but not insurmountable. The Workgroup urges UC leadership to make every effort to close the gap so that the quality of UC’s doctoral programs is maintained and enhanced.

UC campuses, with planning and prioritization, could guarantee five-year multi-year funding to doctoral students upon admission. According to current data, about 77 percent of doctoral students across UC receive stable or increasing net stipends for five consecutive years.5 (Appendix 1.) With some exceptions, this multi-year funding is relatively consistent across campuses and disciplines. However, this funding is typically not presented as a full five-year multi-year guaranteed package upon admission. Offering five-year funding upon admission would enhance recruitment of high-potential students, offer financial security, and address one of the chief stressors for doctoral students - worry over continued funding while in the program.

In addition to offering guaranteed five-year funding, the University must address the issue of graduate student housing. Graduate students, many of whom have family responsibilities, face enormous challenges in finding affordable housing. Without a targeted effort to address graduate student housing, UC’s capacity to attract and retain qualified candidates is at serious risk.  (4-5)

And yet the problem persists.  The Academic Senate has stressed this issue repeatedly and with great force.  A recent letter from the UCLA Divisional Senate's Executive Board has pointed its finger at the problem--the need for renewed state funding.   It is time for the administration to do something to fix it--and something that doesn't simply damage other parts of the academic endeavor.

UCOP will continue--as they always do--to insist that we cannot get more money out of the state to pay for what needs to be done.  But let's press on that point a little more.  It is certainly possible that we are heading for a recession--the Federal Reserve seems determined to induce one to put labor in its place.  But does that mean that the state doesn't have the capacity to respond to an emergency at the University?  Despite all the talk about a budget shortfall, Dan Mitchell at the UCLA Faculty Association Blog has been pointing out that the situation is far less clear than the Legislative Analyst is insisting (and the University is repeating).  For one thing, revenues have been higher than expected and that even with the possibility of a downturn the state has around 90 billion dollars in usable reserves. If the state won't help it's not because of economic necessity but a matter of political choice.  After all, the Governor had no problem finding $500 million to pay for a private immunology research park at UCLA that provides little, if any, real benefit to the campus academic program.  The Governor and the state can do more for the educational core of the University than they are doing: and if UCOP and the Regents can't show the state how necessary that is, then one wonders again what their purpose is.  

I want to make one final point.  UC is the research university of the state and UC insists that graduate education is at the heart of its purpose.  But if UCOP actually agrees with that then the question must be: what do we need to do to have academic graduate education in a sustainable form?  What resources do we need to enable students to both contribute to the larger functioning of the university and to pursue their studies?  Are we willing to have only graduate programs where students have family money or have already flipped a startup?  Or where they are here to gain an additional credential to take back to their jobs?  Does UCOP remain committed to UC's contributions to disciplines across the spectrum of knowledge?  Or does it only care about graduate students (and others) as cheap and disposable labor?  

I don't expect that these negotiations or this strike can answer or settle these questions.  But UC is at a crossroads and the university--especially its leadership--must face up to that.  The long-term question raised by the strike is whether UC will continue as a research university; if we don’t make it possible for future scholars to attend, we will have forfeited our purpose.  There is an opportunity here to take the first steps towards creating a new sustainable vision of a twenty-first century research university.  Or we can continue as we have in decline.  The choice ultimately is UCOP's and the Regents'.

****

(I've focused here on the ASE unit because the Student Researcher Unit is admittedly a more complicated problem.  The vast majority of GSRs are supported by external grants and those grants have both limits and their own rules.  To some extent UC has been negotiating with someone else's money.  That doesn't mean the situation is impossible but rather that it has to be implemented in such a fashion as to protect Principal Investigators from damaging unintended consequences.)

After UC president Janet Napolitano announced her resignation, effective August 2020, the prospect of searching awoke a quotient of dread. "The Regents will pick," one Senate elder told me.  "They won't listen to us. They don't care what we think."  The idea here is that a small group of uber-regents will pop out another person whose remoteness from educational functions and faculty they will deem a virtue.  This has become a national trend: secretive searches that look for a chief executive who will preside over the university rather than develop it from within, and reflect the interests of the governing board ahead of those of the university's multiple constituencies.  Examples include presidential searches in South Carolina and Colorado this past spring.  The conflict is also present at UC (see this post for national as well as local background). 

But the UC Regents do have a formal search process.  Called Regents Policy 7101, it requires a number of steps.

The first is that the Board Chair forms a Special Committee comprised of six Regents and other ex officio members (paragraph 1).  The membership of the new Special Committee is posted here.

The Chair of the Special Committee then "consults with the full Board of Regents at the beginning of the search for the purpose of reviewing the relevancy of the criteria to be considered and approved by the Board of Regents and discussing potential candidates (paragraph 4). During the search, "all Regents will be invited to all meetings with all constituencies."  The Regents then make the final appointment, although Policy 7101 does not specify whether the full Board votes or how that vote proceeds.

The important features here are (1) the Board retains exclusive decision rights over the selection of the president and (2) every member of the Board has equal access to the meetings that constitute the search.  The Policy protects the rights of regents whom the Chair does not appoint to the Special Committee--the process is not to be controlled by the Board Chair's Special Committee or a small group of allied Regents--and affirms the Board's sovereignty over the search.

But there is also (3): in between the beginning and the end of the Policy comes a potentially huge and dynamic systemwide consultation process conjured in luxuriant description.

B. The Chair of the Special Committee will invite the Academic Council to appoint an Academic Advisory Committee, composed of not more than thirteen members, including the Chair of the Academic Council and at least one representative of each of the ten campuses, to assist the Special Committee in screening candidates.

C. The Special Committee will consult broadly with constituent groups of the University, including the Academic Advisory Committee appointed by the Academic Council, Chancellors, Laboratory Directors, Vice Presidents, students, staff, and alumni. To facilitate consultation, there shall be appointed advisory committees, each with no more than twelve members, of students, staff, and alumni. The student advisory committee shall be appointed by the Presidents of the graduate and undergraduate student associations and shall include at least one student from each campus. The staff advisory committee shall be appointed by the Chair of the Council of UC Staff Assemblies and shall include at least one staff member from each campus. The alumni advisory committee shall be appointed by the President of the Alumni Associations of the University of California and shall include at least one alumna or alumnus from each campus. Such consultation will be for the purpose of (1) reviewing the relevancy of the criteria approved by the Board of Regents and (2) presenting the nominee or nominees to members of the groups at the conclusion of the search.

In classic UC style, the executive decision making body has parallel advisory groups that allows the appearance of consultation but which it can also ignore.  Hence the pessimism of some Senate elders. On the other hand, the advisory committees have a power of self-constitution and also activity.  The only stated rule is a cap on the number of members. The named advisory committees are:

• Academic Advisory Committee
• Student Advisory Committee
• Staff Advisory Committee
• Alumni Advisory Committee

The Policy puts no limitations on the activities of the committees.  How do these Advisory Committees (ACs) actually influence the Special Committee and the overall Board?

The standard theory is prestige: find the most prominent or trusted insider from each campus and create what management theorist Clayton Christensen likes to call a "heavyweight team."  In the case of the Academic Advisory Committee (AcAC), prestige theory assumes that the regents recognize academic (or senate service-based) prestige and would honor it by adapting their views.  Each heavyweight would be recognized as speaking authoritatively for the (leadership of the) particular campus.

Here's the problem: I know of no evidence that the last three presidential searches have worked this way; the evidence I do have suggests the opposite.  Business culture does not respect academic culture, the class gaps between professors and most regents are too wide, and the key feature of Christensen's heavyweights--decision rights--is stripped from the ACs. 

If this isn't enough to undermine AC leverage, there's also the structural weakness of the committee.  With the AcAC, each campus gets one person to represent its ladder faculty; this committee has a maximum of 13 people for a systemwide ladder faculty of over 11,000 (pdf p 94).   This faculty is divided among 10 campuses, between campuses and medical centers, across all the disciplines, which have diverse needs, and across racial groups, which also have diverse needs.  The idea of one person representing hundreds or thousands of their colleagues makes no epistemological (or political) sense.  It is also a recipe for an incoherent voice coming out of the AcAC, which Senate handpicking of membership can ease only at the price of lost diversity of views.

But the UC advisory committees could affect the presidential search, by using their committees to prompt campus discussions about the presidential search in the context of the immediate future of UC.  All of the Advisory Committees could set up a series of events in which they talk with their constituents on each of 10 campuses.  They listen to hopes and fears, gather ideas about leadership needs, hash them over, and then transmit the resulting comments, recommendations, or demands to the Special Committee.  One faculty member suggested a "UC Day" in which town halls happen across the UC system at the same time. The ACs would have to identify a deadline that would fall before the Special Committee's long-listing and short-listing of candidates such that it (and the Board overall) could fully consider the input.  Each committee could do its work in about 6 weeks--2 campus visits a week (if not all done at once), plus a week to debate, formulate, and forward recommendations.  The scope of the issue is limited and the reports should be short.

Another benefit of using the ACs as a public fulcrum: town halls and other public events would be newsworthy.  Whatever they think of professors, unions, and students, governing boards do care about institutional reputation, media coverage, and what they hear back from VIPs as a result of that.  They also care about the public debates and collective movements that shape public opinion and apply political pressure.  A recent example is the issue of food insecurity and student homelessness.  For years, the Board were told UC financial aid took care of low-income students and they took no action to mitigate student poverty.  Then, sometime after Bernie Sanders put free college on the political map in late 2015, the media started covering student hunger and homelessness.  The UC Regents responded by forming a Special Committee on Basic Needs in late 2018.  The actual results have a long way to go, but the point is that governing boards do respond to public discourse, eventually, academic discourses included.

In short, though UC governance has a top-down 19th century structure, the Regents are most likely listen to faculty, students, alums, and staff under three conditions: their Advisory Committees (A) represent a real constituency brought together by a consultation process that (B) speaks publicly about its views of the University in a way that (C) publicly (re)frames the University's needs for its next president.  The idea is to create an interest, a buzz, an excitement, a university-wide discussion over what we do and don't need, and, more importantly, to construct a constituency which then builds discourses that have an institutional and political existence.  There are no guarantees, but the wager is that the state's media would cover a process in which a university system holds a discussion about its current goals and consequent leadership needs on all ten campuses.   The process would upgrade the level of public discussion about California higher ed both inside and outside the University.

This process would also help locate potential presidents with one vital skill, which is gathering exactly this kind of information from their own institutional grassroots.  This might seem irrelevant to the president's main job of political lobbying, but it is not. Recent history shows that a president without deep knowledge of the university's daily life simply cannot make the statewide case for the University's public benefit and fiscal needs.  UC's advisory committees could set an example of the creation of this kind of profound, inspiring knowledge that the University needs in its next president. 

I do hope the current Academic Senate leadership, Chair Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Vice Chair Mary Gauvain, rapidly set up a systemwide faculty fact-finding and deliberative process via the Academic Advisory Committee, details TBD. UC needs a new president with deep understanding of the University's issues, people, and potential, and the ability to learn directly from them.

Photo credit

Reflections on the 150th Anniversary Symposium of the University of California Academic Senate, Part I, by Anneeth Kaur Hundle (Asst. Prof. of Anthropology) and Ma Vang (Asst. Prof. of Ethnic Studies & History), UC Merced. Photo courtesy of Merced Prodigy. 

Arrival in Oakland

We felt anxious as we entered the cocktail reception that preceded the keynote and first panel of the symposium and celebration. Located in a large hall of the iconic Waterfront Hotel on Jack London Square in Oakland, we felt like out-of-town infiltrators, from the seemingly otherworldly UC Merced of the San Joaquin/Central Valley and rural California. We felt out of time and place in the almost entirely white space of senior UC Academic Senate leadership, and marked by our generational, racialized, gendered, and cultural differences.  To the right of the entrance was a bar, and most of the attendees had gathered around it, engaged in exuberant conversation as they sipped on cocktails and greeted each other like old pals. People turned to look at us with friendly smiles and also quizzical looks of non-recognition--they did not know who we were and what we might be doing there.

A little nervous but determined, we maneuvered through the crowded entrance to look for a seat. We spotted our fellow panelists and moderator already seated at a table, and upon their invitation, took our seats at the table. Exchanging glances wrought from friendship and solidarity, we thought a drink or two might be in order to make it through the night. We worked our way through the crowd back to the entrance and bar.

The feelings of nonbelonging lingered through the evening’s panel and those of the next day. To be clear, we also belonged at the symposium because we are UC faculty and, at the suggestion of one of our senior faculty mentors at UC Merced, were invited to present a talk for the 150th anniversary of the UC Academic Senate based on our perspectives as junior faculty at UC Merced. However, we also felt that we were token faculty of color in the exclusive space of senior Academic Senate leaders. We were not sure if our visible phenotypical presentation of “difference” as faculty from UC Merced was conflated with or would even erase our substantive, intellectual contributions about our experiences of UC Merced as a neoliberal university. Were we there as objects to represent diversity or were we there to speak as subjects of history about the UC system?
   
Thinking the “Twenty-First Century Neoliberal Research University”

Our talk at the anniversary symposium was based on a longer, collaborative paper that we co-wrote together, alongside UCM student contributions, which is now in press in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies and which provides an analysis of UC Merced as an exceptional university and institution in the UC system because of its origins, development, and expansion in the context of neoliberal conditionality specific to the Californian and U.S. context from the late 1980s onwards. Our mode of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the UC “multiversity” (to use former President of the UC Clark Kerr’s phrase) and the academic senate was to think about the UC’s mission to uphold public values, connect to larger civic issues and social problems, and envision a democratic polity. Importantly, we did not speak from administrative, or technocratic-managerial perspectives, but as professors and teachers who are deeply invested in the stated public mission of the UC, and who must provide our students with intellectual toolkits to understand their society and circumstances. Thus, our talk was positioned in relation to the everyday struggles of navigating UC Merced and the UC system as junior scholars and researchers, teachers, and mentors for minoritized/racialized and working class students.

Our mode of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the UC Academic Senate began by stating student demands that were expressed at the 2016 celebration and groundbreaking of the UC Merced’s 2020 Project, the next phase of UCM’s campus expansion.

UPRISE (Uprising People Power to Resolve Issues of Space and Equity) is a graduate and undergraduate student coalition at UC Merced, largely led by queer women of color, that demanded the redistribution of university resources for student needs as well as the recognition of their humanity, dignity, and personhood on campus. The student coalition called for cultural and other student centers, increased funding for mental health services, better undergraduate student recruitment and retention, resources for the critical race and ethnic studies program, the diversification of the faculty, and the de-militarization of the campus.

Foregrounding campus structural inequality and the student activism of students of color in our lecture, we argued that UC Merced enacts neoliberal projects by retooling concepts and ideals central to historical and liberal-humanist visions of the University of California--projects such as “diversity,” “access,” “equity,” and “public”--to put them in line with neoliberal campus expansion initiatives. In mobilizing these concepts, rooted in a model of the UC informed by the 1960s-era Master Plan for Higher Education, we addressed how the work of late capitalist inequality is made invisible and normalized in the day to day workings of UC Merced.

We also addressed neoliberal processes as a relationship between late liberal capitalism and multicultural diversity discourses, suggesting that the university deploys “diversity speak” as a technology of governance and mode of managing difference and students’ substantive demands for racial and economic justice through what we define as top-down “neoliberal solidarity projects” (i.e. the celebration of “first-generation” identity etc.)

Finally, we explored the relational politics and practices among staff, faculty, and students of color to comprise what we describe as “nonaligned solidarities in formation”--solidarities that inform a set of strategies of both “playing along” and resisting the university’s neoliberal governance and management of its subjects. Such solidarities are often fractious, messy, and precarious, but they reveal a sense of community and belonging to UCM, as well as a bottom-up vision for a just university that functions to actually serves its students, faculty and staff of color, and communities of California’s Central Valley.

Our intention was to make visible our experiences, those of our students, and both the neoliberal development and governance of UC Merced to showcase the capitalist contradictions of the UC system (much of which is now majority students of color, and which features growing structural inequality) and to build a necessary link between the ongoing labor of the UC Academic Senate’s responsibility to supervise the academic mission of the system and the reality of faculty and student of color needs.

We did this knowing that we had yet to experience sitting on higher level, system-wide Academic Senate committees, and knowing full well that the Academic Senate’s mandate of democratic and decentralized governance exists to represent our needs and demands in lieu of being formally unionized faculty. Our discussion of UC Merced was not meant to parochialize or marginalize the campus as an anomaly, as many in the UC system continue to see it, but rather to suggest that our racialized and gendered experiences, alongside the extraction of our labor, speaks to a larger problem about the UC system as a “neoliberal multiversity.”

We hoped that those in attendance understood that our commitment to the new campus, and to a region of California where people from our own communities (Hmong and Punjabi Sikh) live, requires a serious critique of the contradictions of building a new university that celebrates tokenized and phenotypical diversity, yet does less to direct resources towards understanding the complexity of student personhoods and livelihoods in the region.

For instance, we are concerned about the market-driven instrumentality of educational priorities that result in the divestment of critical humanities education, critical race and ethnic studies, and globally-informed coursework, including language courses, that speak to the realities of student life stories and non-Western forms of knowledge. We wanted to stimulate serious conversations about how the dilemma of neoliberal development and governance at UCM is shaping the direction of the UC. Indeed, public discourse about UC Merced touts it as the “future of the University of California" based upon the high percentage, 53%, of Latinx students. (UC Berkeley and UCLA have 13% and 21% Latinx student populations respectively.) This is what we mean by "neoliberal diversity" logic" UCM’s development and expansion depends on the visible appearance of Brown and Black bodies on our campus, while its diversity discourses and ideologies undermine more substantive financial investment for the hiring of under-representative Latinx faculty and faculty who specialize in course-work relevant to Latinx students.

Thus, as public funds for higher education dwindle, we wonder, are UCM's struggles indeed the future of the University of California system? How would the Academic Senate address our concerns, and how could we work to re-invigorate the Senate with a new sense of urgency and creativity, working towards collective goals of securing public investment, defending the public mission of the UC system, and committing to hiring faculty of color to help educate the next generation of students of color in the UC system?

We presented our talk on the final panel of the day, and at that point, many important guests at the symposium, including UC system President Janet Napolitano and Provost Michael T. Brown, had already left. We had not pre-circulated our talk, and so the discussants on the panel provided commentary that was independent of the talk. Unfortunately, there was no additional time for a question and answer period, which limited intellectual engagement with the talk's ideas, beyond several questions that came from audience members after the symposium was over for the day.

Our overall sense was that we both visibly represented the abstract notion of “diversity” of the UC system, and also provided “raw material” or “data” about the day-to-day experiences of junior faculty and students of color at UCM. Thus the content of our talk, particularly its critical analysis of neoliberal diversity, was relegated to the margins of the intellectual conversations at the symposium, rather than helping to formulate the constitutive core of conversations by and about the Academic Senate.

In the end, it wasn’t that those in attendance did not understand the concerns we raised. It seemed that they valued our perspective of critical disruption and understood it to be a part of the historical tradition of the UC. Yet the critical substance of our talk was still co-opted into a celebratory narrative about the UC as an institution that values diversity and the public good. The logic of this narrative prioritized the ways in which the UC had successfully fulfilled its mission of administrative and managerial planning to establish and open UC Merced.

We don’t discount the opportunities that UCM has afforded us as tenure-track faculty in a highly precarious job market, or the important ways it has provided and expanded access to higher education for undergraduate students from California. However, we continue to worry about the quality of that educational access.  We are worried about high lecturer to tenure-track faculty ratios.  For example, in Fall 2018, the proportion of contingent to ladder-rank UCM faculty was 143 to 249,  meaning that over 1/3rd of the UCM faculty are off the tenure track.

We are worried too about over-worked faculty and staff, and the lack of additional tutoring and mentoring services for first-generation, poor and working students.  We are worried about insufficient numbers of critical humanities course offerings, and of faculty of color who can serve as mentors for the students who take them.  "Trickle-down economics” had revealed to us the ways in which ideological and increasingly fictive notions of the universalized public university and its liberal-humanistic imperatives mask late liberal capitalist university development and its negative ramifications for its racialized and gendered subjects.

In the end, we left the conference reeling from the burdensome weight of the universalist, liberal-humanist tradition of the University of California, established in 1868.  We will address this issue in a future post.

In the latest fallout from last spring's disastrous, and disastrously handled, audit, Governor Brown has just signed a new law that tightens up legislative oversight over UC Finances.  You will probably remember that the State Auditor challenged UCOP's handling of funds and accused UCOP of intervening in the audit process in order to gain more favorable responses from campus officials (although UCOP denied the allegations).  In response, the State transformed UC's budget.  And now the state is increasing its intervention into UC budgeting.

In what can only be seen as a response UCOP's role in changing campus responses to the Auditor's inquiries, the new law forbids communication between UCOP and a campus

whenever a request for information relating to the security of funds of the University of California is made by the California State Auditor’s Office pursuant to these provisions to one or more campuses of the University of California, would prohibit those campuses from coordinating their responses with, or seeking counsel, advice, or similar contact regarding their response from, the Office of the President of the University of California before submitting the requested information to the California State Auditor’s Office. The bill would require the California State Auditor’s Office, when requesting information under these provisions, to include a statement in the request that it is requesting the information pursuant to these provisions and that the request for information is not to be shared with the Office of the President of the University of California.

In addition, the legislature demands increased fine tuning of the University's cost of education calculation both in terms of the relative costs of undergraduate education, graduate education, and health science education and by funding source.  Given that UC has consistently insisted that this demand is unreasonable, we can expect further political tensions between Sacramento and the University.

Chris and I have long called for greater transparency about spending and funding sources.  And I can understand the State's desire to ensure that the information it receives during audits not be tampered with.  Still, this latest statute raises a series of important issues:

1) When the accusations about tampering first broke, UC announced that it was hiring an independent investigator to examine the charges.  Has that report been concluded?  If so, when will it be released?  What did it determine?  If it hasn't been concluded then why not?  And when can we find out what actually happened?

2) As I pointed out earlier, the State's response continues to be based on the notion that legislators and the Regents are the most appropriate people to co-govern the university with UCOP.  But as has been proven repeatedly, neither the Legislature, nor the Regents, nor the Governor nor UCOP, for that matter, has demonstrated much grasp of the educational and research practices of the University.  What is needed is greater internal democracy rather than simply legislative demands.  And that internal democracy should be applied to the question of how to achieve the highest academic accomplishment, not simply how to achieve the greatest savings or, as far too many local administrators seem to think, develop the latest private sector fads.

3).  When will there be genuine accountability at UCOP and the Board of Regents?  As the audit,  this year's budget, and this legislation demonstrate, UC has become extremely vulnerable to outside pressures and the political status of the University is remarkably low.  Does anyone really believe that the people who have brought the University to this point are the ones to correct it?  And given the destructive forces emanating from Washington, does anyone expect that the budget or the political climate is going to get better?

4) Shouldn't the Senate take a leading and public role in formulating proposals to recenter the University on its academic missions?

The Office of the President is asking for authority to lower UC's contribution to retiree health benefits.  This reduction would take the form of removing UC's commitment to a payment floor of 70% of aggregate retiree health premiums (7).  This figure had been set as part of the long and public discussion over benefits and debates that surrounded the President's Task Force on Post-Employment Benefits and approved by the Regents in 2010.  That discussion you may recall was long and involved and resulted in a series of steps (including the restarting of University contributions) to help improve the long-term stability of UCRP.  Importantly, at that time employees agreed to what was, in effect, a pay cut through resumption of employee contributions to a retirement system that had been poorly managed by the Regents.  These debates were heated and the results controversial.  But they resulted in what current Senate Chair Chalfant has called an implicit "social contract."  UCOP is now seeking the authority to shred a significant part of that agreement.

Just as striking has been the lack of genuine consultation with either faculty or staff, let alone serious public discussion of the implications of further shifting the burden for retirement costs onto employees.  There was no formal proposal distributed to the Senate for systemwide review; the relevant systemwide Senate committees were only consulted about a related issue concerning a proposed limit of 3% annual cost increases, a proposal not included in the current UCOP request (2) I do not know if any of the staff organizations have been consulted. The Regents item offers no justification for the action: no modeling to suggest its real financial effects on the University or its employees, no consideration of its implications for recruitment and retention and certainly no acknowledgement of the labors and reasons for the establishment of the 70% floor in the first place.

Nor is there any explanation for why circumstances have changed so drastically that UCOP is asking for what seems to be unchecked authority to reconfigure retiree health care.  Indeed, as the Senate notes, it "is also troubling that the proposal will be presented to the Regents Finance and Capital Strategies Committee rather than the Governance and Compensation Committee, which has the topic of benefits in its charter" (2).  The new Regent organization was supposed to provide clearer lines of responsibility and greater transparency of decision making.  This treatment of an issue of broad workplace concern as a technical financial issue does not inspire confidence that that is the case.

For all of these reasons, the Senate, CUCFA, and the CUCEA have opposed this proposal.  They are right to do so.

I cannot leave without noting that, whatever one's perspective and judgement about the State's Audit of UCOP, one clear lesson that I would have thought had been learned was the need for greater transparency about decision making, more open debate about important university issues, and the increased importance of providing reasons.  In pushing this proposal at the July Regents meeting (and it is an action item not a discussion item) UCOP instead is suggesting that the Regents approve an ill defined, inadequately justified rush item whose real implications for the University have not been seriously debated.  If UCOP insists on moving forward with this proposal it cannot be surprised if its already damaged legitimacy among faculty and staff shrinks even further.

UPDATE: THE ITEM HAS BEEN DELAYED UNTIL THE FALL

Are senior administrators now less likely to involve faculty in major management decision than before?  The Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) is worried enough to have written "A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors." The statement emerged from agreement among Faculty Association representatives from every campus.

CUCFA calls on officials to hire only those candidates who "support the value of public education." Everyone says they support this value, so CUCFA says what its members believe its components to be. First comes the recognition that "efforts at privatization have failed to sustain the University's central mission of education, research, and service for the people of California."  The statement spells out the elements of post-privatization: focusing on core mission rather than capital projects, serving more resident students rather than more high-tuition students from out-of-state, dialing back administrative growth while capping management salaries, "opening the budget to meaningful faculty review and input," and increasing contact with the surrounding society.

CUCFA's definition of "public" reflects national and international trends that have been slower to develop in California than elsewhere.  One is deprivatization. I first heard this term used to describe current changes in Poland's university system, but deprivatization is implicit in the Free College movement launched in U.S. politics by Bernie Sanders. The premise is that people can analyze the effects of privatization, and, if found negative, can lower tuition rather than raise it, raise public funding rather than lower it, reduce student debt rather than increase it, and expand research cost coverage rather than shrink it. Where there's a will there's a way, and the way here is particularly obvious.

 A second trend is postmanagerialism--or so I'll call it here. Large private and public organizations now operate under widespread cynicism about their good will and effectiveness. Decreasing proportions of U.S. residents think corporations are on their side.  Something similar is happening to public universities, some of which, like UC and CUNY, have tripped themselves up in a series of scandals that shed doubt on their devotion to public service.   You don't have to be familiar with the literature about learning organizations to believe that the low-information professor and the cognitively isolated senior manager each undermine universities.  Universities need smarter human systems that we have now, and strong shared governance can help bring that about.

A third trend the CUCFA statement reflects is the demand for epistemological diversity, driven in large part by academics working in the global South.  Societies are both internally diverse and quite different from each other, and need their university research to reflect variable demands--say for non-GMO pest-resistant crops, or for democratic theory that does not assume constitutional unity or a common language.  University diversity has, in recent decades, been undermined by audit culture, which norms universities towards "best practices" represented by the institutions that dominate global rankings, whose template is Anglo-American.  As part of its normal operation, audit introduces quantitative management practices that make collaborative governance seem unnecessary: a manager doesn't need to know her faculty and departments and make complex judgments based in large part on informal knowledge, but just have research output measures, impact factors, and rankings of departments and faculty members.  Such metrics make personal interactions seem superfluous, and intellectual diversity unnecessary.  Such standardization is now being contested and is likely gradually to be pushed aside. It will be replaced by multidimensional forms of evidence and judgment that require more rather than less interaction among members of universities, and more openness to one another.  CUCFA's push for shared governance makes epistemological diversity easier to achieve.

Our current, highly unrigorous definitions of the public university make sense if the future is going to extend the past two decades.  But it won't. The public university going forward will have to rediscover the effectiveness of shared resources, mutualized costs, and collaborative governance. It will need to discover much stronger meanings of public.  If this is right, then CUCFA's statement is ahead of the curve.

President Napolitano's formal proposal for a new pension tier has been posted in the Agenda for next week's Regents' Meeting.  I do not have time today to offer a detailed reading of it (although Chris and I hope to have something up soon). But on first glance it does differ in some significant ways from the majority positions of the Retirement Options Task Force that President Napolitano had appointed last fall. The pension options for faculty (especially faculty who are hired at a salary below the PEPRA cap) appear to be better than the ROTF proposed while the pension options for staff are worse than the ROTF proposed.  One thing that hasn't changed is that retirement benefits for the proposed 2016 Tier will be worse than for the 2013 Tier, let alone the 1976 Tier that includes all pre-2013 employees.

If I can't offer a full reading of the proposal it is possible to respond to another issue raised by the President's announcement: the significance of the announcement and the process it concluded for the state of shared governance at UC.   And on this score the implications are clear and unacceptable. The entire pension reduction process has been marked by a fundamental disregard for the institutions of shared governance.  It builds upon and is a culmination of series of actions begun under the previous administration that has eroded both the principles and practices of shared governance.  The result is not only a narrowing of perspective on decision making but the managerial disconnect that I discussed recently.

REVISITING THE PENSION PROCESS

As you know the pension plan emerged from the so-called committee of two process consisting of President Napolitano, Governor Brown, and selected members of their staff.  The Senate's Committee on Planning and Budget was effectively excluded from the committee until it was completed.  Having agreed to pension changes without consultation and without a clear sense of what the effects might be, President Napolitano established the Retirement Options Task Force last summer, to be chaired by her Executive Vice President Rachael Nava. The Task Force fulfilled its charge under a vow of silence and then sent their report in the middle of December.  At that point, President delayed release of the report for a month which insured that the Senate had only 30 days to analyze the proposal and provide comments from around the system.

Put bluntly, the process was set up in a way that there will be no meaningful shared reflection on President Napolitano's decision with the Governor to reduce pension benefits (and therefore compensation) for future employees of UC.  As I have pointed out in an earlier post, the President's office has agreed to sacrifice the compensation possibilities of all future employees in exchange for a small portion of UCRP's present unfunded liability.  UCOP chose to do this without genuine consultation with the Senate or the Unions (who at least have the right to negotiate this process), despite the fact that a wide-ranging discussion of this issue had taken place only a few years earlier, and without even gaining a commitment from the State to assume responsibility for pension costs moving forward.  Indeed, as Chris has noted, this agreement to lower the long-term compensation structures for faculty and staff was part of a budget deal that gained little in terms of the ongoing fiscal needs of the University.

Despite the acute time constraints, a variety of Senate committees put together reports, pointing out a wide range of problems with the proposal and revealing that the imposition of the pension agreement would not only clearly reduce employee pensions but also potentially raise costs on campuses. This is because campuses would need to offer higher salaries and other compensation to make up for the loss of the benefits of UC's traditional retirement system. Among other unanticipated unwelcome outcomes was the further fragmentation of the faculty and staff and the increase of burdens onto campuses.

Although the President's final proposal does address some of the many, many problems raised by various constituencies, her announcement reinforces the extent to which UCOP now marginalizes the practices of shared governance at the University.  Her statement does not acknowledge the strong objections, of the Assembly of the Systemwide Academic Senate, minimizes the very serious and extensive analyses offered by the Academic Senate as an unnamed part of the "input I received from faculty and staff," and places her personal interpretation of individual comments above institutional governance.  Unfortunately, this attitude is not a one-off.  It builds on the exclusion of the Senate from the Budget discussions, the management overreach of the Medical Center centralization, and the President's rewriting of the UC policies on investment in the work of the University's scientists.  It extends the Yudof administration's disregard for Senate objections to the Salary Supplement Plan, not to mention the debacle of the University's Commission on the Future in which the sidelining of the Senate led to UCOP's overestimation of the benefits of online education and of other technological fixes, like UC Path, for alleged inefficiencies.

IMPLICATIONS

There are certainly arguments that can be made--in the pension arena as elsewhere--about appropriate changes in University organization.  But these discussions should take place in a meaningful and open way before decisions have been set in stone.  Even in the final proposal, UCOP doesn't seem committed to this sort of discussion.  In discussing those who suggested that the deal she struck with the governor was a poor one for the University, the executive summary asserted:

Some members of the University community argued that the PEPRA cap should be rejected altogether. This argument fails for compelling reasons. The PEPRA cap is only one part of a comprehensive agreement with the Governor that provides nearly $1 billion in new funding to the University, among other benefits. The Regents have already endorsed this agreement. To reject the PEPRA cap and undo the agreement would require the University to raise resident tuition by 28 percent over the next three years or somehow find other sources of equivalent funding. In today’s political and economic environment, such a result is highly unlikely and undesirable.

Let's unpack this statement.  Of this billion, $436M comes from the short-term contribution to pay down the UCRP unfunded liability (itself generated because of long-term poor management by the Regents).  Another $500M is the result of the Governor's four-year commitment to funding increases (about $125M a year) and a one-time $25M payment by the legislature in exchange for admitting 5000 additional resident students.  Even the $125M barely exceeds inflation--it does not restore the cuts from earlier years and had already been proposed by Governor Brown.  But critics, myself included, have pointed out that the $436M contribution is a one-time commitment in exchange for a permanent reduction and could have been handled more effectively through an extension of the STIP borrowing plan.  The additional claims about the $500M are somewhat misleading since the first two years of support had already been agreed to--what this agreement does is add two more years (so $250M).  And the $25M will cover half of the marginal costs on campuses for the introduction of the new students. If the President follows through on her plans to add another 5000 students that will simply increase UC's underfunding.

I make this point because it is important for the future to understand the limitations of this deal and what it means for the budgeting process--secretive throughout--that produced it.  The President insists that it is a good deal.  But even the Legislative Analyst (not a friend of the University) thinks that as a matter of state policy the state would be wise to pay down far more than this $436M.  If we are facing a permanent change in the pension shouldn't the University have insisted on a permanent commitment from the state to fulfill its responsibilities?  And are we to assume that if the president had not agreed to this agreement in the first place that the governor and the legislature would simply withdraw the existing funding agreement for the out years?  Of course we will never know.  But if we had an effective process of shared governance and considered reflection by the Senate we might not be facing these questions at all.

President's Proposal

March 11, 2016

MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY

Dear Colleagues:

I am writing to outline the proposal for the new retirement program I am bringing to The Regents later this month that includes new retirement benefits for future UC employees.

As a reminder, the new retirement benefits will apply only to UC employees hired on or after July 1, 2016. Current employees and retirees are unaffected by these changes as accrued pension benefits are protected by law and cannot be reduced or revoked.

Before getting into the specifics of my proposal, I want to share with you my thinking behind it.

The University of California is a very special institution. There are other fine universities, but there is no other university on the planet that contributes as much to the public, in as many ways as UC does. Arguably, no other single institution does as much for so many.

And at the heart of everything we do, and the excellence UC is renowned for, are our talented faculty and staff. Our people are what make UC great.

Maintaining excellence on such a massive scale is no small task. And it does not come cheaply.

Everything we do — from teaching students, to treating patients and training the next generation of doctors, to redefining the boundaries of what we know, to creating technologies that give rise to new industries, to helping to ensure the vitality of California’s agricultural resources, and everything in between, requires significant financial resources.

When I accepted the opportunity to lead UC two and a half years ago, it was clear to me that one of the most important goals of my presidency would be to maintain UC’s excellence while ensuring a solid financial foundation for UC’s future.

This core principle of protecting both UC’s excellence and its long-term financial health was the basis for last year’s multi-year funding agreement with the State, and is the primary driver of my retirement proposal.

The budget agreement with the Governor and the Legislature last year marked a significant milestone in support of this goal by creating an era of increased State funding and financial stability for the University. Importantly, the agreement reflects the State government’s recognition of the need to invest in UC.

Under this agreement, UC is receiving nearly $1 billion in new annual revenue and one-time funding over the next several years, which will help ensure the University’s long-term financial stability and provides critical funding for many UC priorities.

Among other things, this funding allows us to budget for regular pay increases for faculty and staff over the next several years, and make merit-based pay a more regular component of our systemwide salary programs.

The $1 billion includes $436 million in one-time funds to help pay down our unfunded pension liability, which is key to ensuring the long-term fiscal solvency of the UC pension plan.

To help secure the financial stability of UC and as part of the agreement, I am proposing to The Regents that they approve implementation of a new set of retirement benefits for future UC employees hired on or after July 1, 2016, that limits the pensionable salary for future UC employees, mirroring the cap on pensionable pay for state employees under the 2013 California Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act (the “PEPRA cap”).

Following completion of the budget agreement, which was approved by The Regents, I convened a systemwide task force to suggest options for the new retirement benefits for future employees, consistent with the PEPRA cap.

Task force members included faculty, staff, and representatives from the Academic Senate, the Staff Advisors to The Regents, the Council of UC Staff Assemblies, UC labor unions, and UC administrators.

The task force submitted its recommendations to me in December, and during January and February,

I invited members of the entire UC community to share with me their thoughts about those recommendations.

I want to thank the task force members for their good and thoughtful work, and also the hundreds of faculty and staff who shared their comments, concerns, and ideas with me.

Many of you expressed concern that a new set of retirement benefits could harm the University’s ability to attract and retain top-tier faculty. Improving overall employee compensation and the stability of the UC pension plan were also common concerns. Another concern many of you raised was the need for more retirement education and services to help employees prepare successfully for retirement.

For those of you who shared your views with me, I want you to know I paid close attention. My proposal addresses not only these concerns, but other priorities as well.

Building upon the work of task force, and after much discussion with numerous stakeholders and careful consideration of the input I received from faculty and staff, I will be bringing a package proposal to The Regents that will allow us to:

• Ensure UC’s long-term financial stability, including keeping the UC pension plan strong and continuing to pay down our unfunded pension liability;
• Within the fiscal constraints we face, maintain the caliber of UC personnel and the University’s excellence by offering attractive overall compensation, including retirement benefits, for new faculty and staff;
• Focus on overall employee compensation by (1) allowing UC to budget for regular pay increases for faculty and staff, and (2) making merit-based pay a regular component of systemwide salary programs to reward employees based on their contributions to the University;
• Preserve UC’s quality, which requires recruiting and retaining quality personnel, especially faculty, by devoting resources to help campuses attract and retain faculty and key staff, and improve the student experience; and
• Offer enhanced retirement education and counseling services to all UC employees, as part of the University’s commitment to help employees be “retirement ready.”

Regarding the new retirement program specifically, I am proposing that future employees hired on or after July 1, 2016, be offered a choice between two options:

Option 1 – Pension + 401(k)-style supplemental benefit: The current UC pension benefit capped at the PEPRA salary limit (currently $117,020) plus a supplemental 401(k)-style benefit for eligible employee pay up to the Internal Revenue Service limit (currently $265,000).

Option 2 – New 401(k)-style benefit: A new stand-alone 401(k)-style plan with benefits-eligible employee pay up to the Internal Revenue Service limit (currently $265,000).

Since we compete in a global market for faculty, often against elite private institutions that can typically pay more than UC, maintaining a pension benefit along with a 401(k)-style supplement is important to attracting and retaining the caliber of personnel we need to maintain UC’s excellence.

At the same time, our workforce is highly diverse and people have different retirement needs and goals. A new stand-alone 401(k)-style retirement benefit allows us to offer an attractive retirement benefit to employees who work at UC for only a few years and value a portable retirement benefit they can take with them, and/or who prefer to personally manage their retirement savings.

You can find a chart that further summarizes the features of the two options online herePDF.

In short, I believe this proposal supports the University’s ongoing excellence and will significantly bolster the long-term financial stability of UC and its retirement program, while providing critical funding for other University priorities.

I again want to thank the task force members, and the many faculty and staff who shared their views with me. The input I received from the task force and the University community was invaluable in formulating this proposal.

Yours very truly,

Janet Napolitano
President

The statement can be found posted at: http://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/compensation-and-benefits/2016-retirement-benefits/presidents-proposal.html

UPDATE: More detail can be found at: http://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/compensation-and-benefits/2016-retirement-benefits/faq.html

In the context of ongoing doubts about the value of Defined Benefit pensions to public institutions and the people who serve them, we offer two pieces of essential reading for your long weekend.  One is the UC Academic Senate Chair's letter to President Janet Napolitano (Hare) about the Senate review of the recommendations of her Retirement Options Task Force (ROTF). Posted a day after the Academic Senate Assembly rejected the ROTF recommendations in their entirety, this 6-page letter summarizes over one hundred pages of Senate commentary from across the UC system. The commentary is distinctive for detailing the abundant negative consequences of the proposed "2016 Tier" ROTF proposals: one is that the higher salaries required to make up for lower retirement benefits will come out of strapped campus operating budgets, insuring more structural crises of the kind the Berkeley campus announced this week.  It is also distinctive for rejecting the Task Force ground rules, meaning both the salary cap on DB pensions for 2016 Tier hires and the mode of its imposition--the back-room deal between two people, Gov. Jerry Brown and UC President Napolitano. The Hare letter notes that the ROTF recommendations "received no positive support," and that their effect would help change UC into "a stepping stone to a better institution rather than a university where faculty invest their lives and careers." Pointing out that since no current employees would be affected,"no comments can be ascribed to self-interest," the Senate letter notes that members saw the ROTF options as "the latest in a series of [UC] compromises to quality."   At a time when Jerry Brown and the rest of the Sacramento Democrats seem bent on making UC average, when even epochal decisions are often made by small, hand-picked executive groups, and when most Task Force members and assorted onlookers treated the cap and  new tier as a done deal, the Senate committees have rebelled.

We cross-post a second piece below. Published yesterday in the Daily Cal under the title, "Retirement Plan Impacts Entire Community," this article by Celeste Langan (an English professor and Berkeley Faculty Association Co-Chair) could also be called, "How Defined Benefit Pensions Support Academic Labor." In addition to offering a useful summary of the critique of the ROTF plan (paragraphs 3 and 6), Prof. Langan ties the need for real retirement security to the early-career sacrifices made by academics of all fields, as they spend the first five to fifteen of their prime earning years on reduced or nonexistent salaries in preparation for their careers. To put it another way, academics in effect subsidize society in the formation of the high grade of "human capital" represented by everyone from anti-viral molecular chemists to pre-Columbian art specialists. Those who later get tenure-track jobs have freer and more interesting work than do most Americans, but the loss of much personal income can reasonably be balanced by DB stability (and efficiency).  Prof. Langan implies that the generic hostility to pensions is undermining the university's ability to reproduce its own existence, and that in any case pensions are not something academics need to be defensive about.

*****

What’s all the fuss over pensions about? Why should you bother reading about retirement benefits, especially when the proposed changes don’t affect current faculty and staff, whose pensions are secure? Surely there are more important concerns in this age of austerity: Aren’t we expecting the campus to announce budget cuts this month? What about lecturers, custodians and parking attendants seeking a living wage, and students faced with rising fees and food insecurity?

Here’s why it matters: Unless we resist, the UC Office of the President is prepared to institute changes to the way faculty are compensated that will accelerate the privatization of the University of California. In effect, UCOP wants to make the remuneration of faculty and staff more and more dependent on the monoculture of “the market,” thereby undermining the partial protection from economic insecurity upon which the intellectual freedom of academic work depends. Although more subtle, the proposed changes are as much an attack on the principles of academic freedom as Wisconsin’s weakening of tenure protection for its university faculty. These are strong claims, I realize, so let me explain.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the only thing wrong with the current retirement plan for UC employees — UC Retirement Plan, or UCRP — is that both the California state legislature and university stopped making payments to it for 20 years — when investment returns were so robust that regular payments seemed unnecessary — until the financial collapse of 2008. Rather than collaborate on a gradual plan to fix the consequence of these suspended payments, however, Gov. Jerry Brown and UC President Janet Napolitano have privately negotiated a deal that places blame for the problem on the structural foundation of UCRP: defined benefits. The agreement is a bad deal, because it will neither significantly reduce the unfunded liability nor yield significant savings for the university. For that reason it ought to be opposed; we should return the proffered $96 million to the state and retain our current system. But we also need to consider more carefully what’s at stake in the attack on “defined benefit” plans such as the UCRP. While there’s been much criticism of Napolitano’s agreement to the PEPRA cap of $117,000 pensionable salary, that’s not the real issue; UCOP has made clear its intention to supplement benefits for higher-earning faculty and staff. The more fundamental interest — made explicit in the FAQs and other documents about the proposed plans — is to shift “risk” to employees. Even before she had appointed her “Retirement Options Task Force,” Napolitano had announced her intention to introduce a full “defined contribution” plan.

The difference between “defined benefits” and “defined contributions” is fairly simple, although the names are confusing. The employer makes “contributions” in both cases (contributions are deferred compensation, where the employee foregoes a higher current salary for future retirement security). In “defined benefits” (DB) plans, the employer invests these contributions, and the risk is lessened by scale; “defined contributions” go directly to the employee to invest privately in IRAs. In DC plans, if you don’t invest wisely, or if the market crashes, your retirement savings are wiped out (as happened to many with DC plans in 2008). The UCRP, by contrast, uses the DB model, described as “golden handcuffs.” Long recognized as the university’s “competitive advantage” in hiring and retaining a dedicated faculty and staff, the UCRP encourages long-term employment because the percentage of pensionable salary is multiplied by years of service. You can more easily dedicate your academic life to long-term projects or to research topics not likely to yield a “commercial application” if you know your retirement benefits are secure.

UCOP defends the shift from DB to DC as “facilitating shared responsibility between UC and employees for individual retirement readiness.” That defense is galling for two reasons. First, the statement suggests that employees have not been sharing responsibility for retirement readiness, despite the obvious fact that employees contribute 7 to 8 percent of their salaries to the UCRP. But what’s almost sinful about UCOP’s moralizing tone is that it entirely ignores the enormous financial risk undertaken by scholars. In order to gain expertise in a discipline, develop an original research project and intern as teachers, graduate students postpone full-time employment for an average of six to 10 years, often taking on debt to pay fees or to supplement inadequate stipends (I remember my elder sister asking me, “Do you know I’ve made $400,000 while you’ve been in graduate school?” That was 25 years ago, and she was only making $50,000 a year). They take on this risk despite the (increasing) scarcity of tenure-track positions. Then, if they are lucky and talented enough to find employment — at the ripe age of 36, the average for assistant professors hired by the university in 2013-14 — they must move to areas such as Berkeley where housing costs are prohibitive. While home ownership has long been an alternative investment strategy for safe retirement, few assistant professors are now able to accumulate the savings that might enable a down payment on a house in or near Berkeley.

It’s clear that UCOP will not realize significant savings by capping defined benefits and paying higher salaries and supplementary contributions to offset the cap. What it would accomplish — and this is why their plan should be opposed — is the erosion of an ecosystem that has allowed research and free inquiry to flourish. Opponents often describe both tenure and defined benefits as obsolete, vestigial privileges. I’d suggest the reverse: The academic “guild” model (long apprenticeship, secure employment and retirement) offers proof that freedom is best protected when workers and thinkers are not subjected to the vagaries of the market, when they’re liberated by long-term investment strategies from the pressures of quick profit and just-in-time production.

As I mentioned in my post on the Budget, the Regents will be considering a proposal to alter the governing structure of the medical centers.  This proposal is a somewhat improved version of an earlier, and admittedly worse, plan that was presented at the Regents September Meeting.  The effects of these plans will be to give the Executive Vice-President--Health greater authority, to increase the ability of the medical centers to influence the Regents more directly, and to grant greater autonomy to the health care system more generally.  In both its substance and its creation it points to serious problems in UC's internal governance.

First as to substance.  The proposal will expand both the size and the authority of the Regent's Committee on Health Services.  It would be continue to have six Regental members but would now include the Executive Vice President--Health, two Chancellors from campuses with medical centers, four outside "experts" effectively chosen by the Executive Vice-President--Health, and one faculty member from a medical center to represent the Academic Senate.  These eight new individuals would be non-voting members.  The Committee would have increased autonomy regarding transactions up to certain limits (5) including those relating to compensation. (1)  The Committee's opinion would be required on capital projects that could affect the Health System. (4)

Now as I said, this proposal is an improved version of a proposal first floated at the September Regents Meeting.  In that earlier proposal, the Executive Vice-President--Health and the two Chancellors would have been voting members.  In addition, they would have been granted "primary responsibility" for UC Health capital projects.  (5).  This set up raised the possibility, given the size of the committee and quorum rules, that the Executive Vice President--Health and the two Chancellors might establish a committee policy because only two Regents were in attendance.  Nor was there any proposal for faculty input.  In the end, Regents at the September meeting did voice skepticism about these proposals and the Academic Senate strongly opposed the plan.  The result is the modified version we have now.

Still, there is no reason to throw laurels.  For one thing, one point stressed by the Academic Senate and not addressed in the revisions is the all but complete disregard for either the teaching or the research components of the UC Medical Centers which are, after all, university medical centers.  This plan pushes those concerns aside for an emphasis on the business of health care.  But unless one can include in strategic planning the teaching and research elements of the UC Medical Centers it is unclear what the medical centers are doing as part of the University.  Medical faculty I have spoken with are deeply uncomfortable with this aspect of the new plan.

There is one perhaps even deeper issue here.  The proposed changes are based in a Rand Study begun in the middle of March 2015, completed in June 2015 and based on review of some of the analytical literature, interviews with UC and UC Health Care Administrators as well as some administrators from other academic medical centers and publicly accessible UC documents.  (2-3) The study's authors acknowledge that due to "the short timeline of the effort, a detailed analysis of the AMCs’ finances and operations was beyond the scope of this project." (3) The heart of the report is really about the problems of communication and lines of authority within UC Health Care.  Yet on the basis of a rushed report that was unable to do a detailed analysis of how the system actually worked and raised all sorts of internal issues, UCOP is proposing to increase the authority and autonomy of the medical centers.  I can understand why the medical center administrators would want greater authority and autonomy but is this any way to make policy? What about the impact on the campuses and the University as a whole?

The end result, then, is that thanks to push back from some Regents and the Senate a poorly constructed and rushed policy has been replaced by a modestly improved proposal.  But the proposal is still based on the shaky foundations of the Rand research and the claims of the Medical Center administrators.  Once again, the Senate has been put into a position of trying to improve a policy proposal that should not have been made in the first place.   Instead, the serious issues that face the Medical Centers in the new world of the ACA should have been carefully studied--studied by the many faculty experts on health care that are at UC.  Unfortunately, like too many other issues in the recent past, UCOP did not identify a problem and engage with the faculty in a shared search for possible solutions.  Instead it presented a proposal and left the Faculty to smooth out the edges.  The Senate remains on the defensive and well thought-out solutions remain over the horizon.