On the use of furlough days, all UCOP had to do was keep quiet. Why couldn't it?

Faculty around the system spent weeks discussing whether 6 or 10 or some other number of their up to 26 days of furlough might be applied to instruction, and Academic Council's August 5th statement on furlough implementation recommended that 6 furlough days be assigned to days of instruction and that up to 10 be allowed. Council's recommendation rests on longstanding faculty obligations to partition their workload among teaching, research and service according to their own professional judgment in formal consultation with their department, the Senate, and immediate administrators (faculty are responsible for "approval of course content and manner of instruction" APM-015). Council's recommendation was also in compliance with APM-005 (via President Robert Sproul in 1935), which states that the planning and committee supervision and reporting of an individual's workload does not violate academic freedom if the plan is "reasonable" and "the plan has come into being through the democratic means of discussion and mutual give and take, within the Faculty, rather than arbitrarily imposed from without."

But then UCOP declared that the number of instructional furlough days would be zero. They would all occur on research and service days, or could be used to make money outside the university via consulting.

I believe this is the first direct intervention by UCOP into faculty teaching decisions since World War II. Please send information to the contrary, if any exists. It rests on the President's new emergency powers (paragraph 2), granted less than six weeks before this use.

We get a fair amount of email, and haven't yet heard a good word about this decision. Many faculty had been opposed to canceling lectures - we try desperately to cram in material and hate to cut even five minutes of class, and we do fret about our alleged unpopularity with taxpayers - but these faculty were still in favor of faculty choice. Other faculty members describe the decision as a challenge to shared governance, as an assault on the mission of public universities, as "authoritarian" and "Stalinist." Note the general tone of the comments on each of these posts. The decision adds the insult of an order about teaching to the injury of pay cuts and budget cuts, and it shows.

The problems go on. The decision is more draconian than that at CSU, explicitly rejects an Academic Senate position about teaching (the heart of faculty authority), and puts PR concerns ahead of faculty's stated preferences and of their professional autonomy. It increases the gap between UCOP and the campuses by building on its summer precedent of overriding formal faculty bodies, unions, and the majority views of those who speak out (the UCI petition for delay and better thinking that attracted 2800 signatures in 5 days, UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff's letter which received 1000 signatures in the same period, the 2:1 preference for a rethink expressed in a poll on this modest blog). It replaces calls for "university-wide open dialogue" with old-school top-down control. It increases the gap between Berkeley and the other campuses (to its credit, Berkeley used a preexisting calendar reform as a partial furlough workaround -- 6 days converted to teaching duty without lectures -- and backfilled lower-end professorial pay with the help of Senate research funds). It hardens the status gap between the science faculty, who mostly can top-up via extramural grants, and the non-science faculty, who mostly cannot, for it invites the former to engage in outside consulting, and the latter to spend more unpaid time with their students, which it implies that state-paid faculty would, absent a UCOP prohibition, be happy to harm.

None of this fits with the fundamental principles of a university, based on free exchange, collaborative co-governance, dialogical testing of all ideas, full evidence for major claims, and mutual accommodation. So why does UCOP act this way?

Much of the answer is that it is now a business center with little contact with academic activities. For years now, many of UCOP's administrative functions have been duplicated and surpassed on the campuses - technology transfer, capital projects planning, collaborative research support. Even the Education Abroad Program, with its complex systemwide and international infrastructure, had lost much of its enrollment to departmental and campus alternatives. In the absence of a meaningful daily role in the system - and deep knowledge of the campuses - UCOP seems to have become closer to outside political constituencies, particularly the Regents, associated donor circles, and the Governor than it is to the campuses. In the process, it lost the political clout to exert a unifying and balancing influence within the system, and seems also to have lost its intellectual and ethical vision of what ex-President Bob Dynes called "One University." That vision had been egalitarian, oriented towards top-quality education for all, and also towards the highest evolution of each of UC's campuses. But for years campuses have mostly approached UCOP to cut the best deal for themselves, and to placate them in ares like bond funding, state general fund distribution, indirect cost recovery, and legislative relations where UCOP has final say.

UCOP has been sliding for some time towards replacing service with authority (see the UCPB restructuring memo for a detailed discussion). It has also focused on top-level state political and business affairs, with particular loving devotion to the Governor's office. Some of us have long criticized this imbalance. I got more proof of it during a trip to Sacramento with a faculty group in early 2008: several leg staffers complained that UCOP cuts deals with the Governor behind the legislature's back, asks for less than the leg would give it, and was unable to resolve the compensation scandals that had lingered for several years.

We have a new president in UCOP, and yet the biggest surprise is how little has changed. President Yudof's most visible public statements are a defense of executive compensation, his least temperate comment was reserved for a legislator concerned with accountability, and he has been entirely silent on a deeply unpopular Governor Schwarzenegger's inflicting of the largest cuts on California higher education in its modern history.

President Yudof has better graphics and more tweets than this predecessor - 100% more tweets - but the strategy of deference to a destructive executive remains largely the same. So does the disproportionate attention to senior management needs that alienates the legislative majority and increases the chances for public funding cuts.

This is where we get back to the furlough question. The point of the faculty taking some of the furlough on instructional days was not to shortchange our students: we know them, care about them and teach them. The point, as many on this blog, Option 4's page, and elsewhere have observed, was to "make the cuts visible." Instructional furloughs were to be a useful teaching tool. And yet they also implicitly posed a challenge to UCOP, in three ways.

They said, implicitly, "your years of silence on the damage the cuts do has failed."
They said, "we are now going to address the public ourselves, through our own workplace."
They said, "the 'new normal' for state funding your mistakes helped create is not acceptable to us."

UCOP's reply to the people most affected by the state funding cuts that UCOP silence had helped produce - campus classroom teachers and related staff - is now this:

you'll take these cuts in silence too.

UC to UCOP: we can't afford your strategies anymore. We need to try our own.

Dear Henry, Gene, Melvin, David [UCSB's Chancellor, EVC, Dean of Social Sciences, Executive Dean]:

As you know, there has been support on this campus for taking some furlough days during instructional days (and, as I and others argued at the town meeting, a strong argument can be made for taking all furlough days on instructional days). The 8/21 message from Interim UC Provost Lawrence Pitts (pasted in below) appears to be a direct order from UCOP that no furlough days be taken on instructional days. How will our administration respond if/when faculty decide to violate this apparent directive? I won't repeat the arguments for taking furlough days on instructional days, but I will note that this directive seems to me (and to many others) to violate our principles of shared governance, as well as individual campus autonomy.

Hoping for clarification,
Rich Appelbaum

UCOP’s decision to ban taking furlough days on teaching days is entirely unacceptable, comprising one more egregious assault on the mission of the CA public universities. The most unsettling piece of Interim Provost Pitts’ statement is contained in the quote below, which displays a shocking misrepresentation of the mission of the state's research universities.

Asking the faculty to carry a full teaching load during furloughs is a large request, but in my mind is justified by the University's paramount teaching mision. Research is permitted on furlough days, but for many faculty this extra research will not be remunerated unless they have grants in which there are funds that can be reallocated to pay for increased effort. And since furlough days are not "service days", they can be used for outside professional activities that may be remunerated.

To say that teaching is "the paramount mission" belies the fact that these top-tier institutions exist in order to produce scholarly research as well as to teach undergraduates and train future scholars and professionals. Any reasonable awareness of the merit evaluation process in the UC system should convey the message that research weighs even more heavily than teaching in the achievement of promotions, tenure, and step increases within rank. Pitts' statement that "research will be permitted on furlough days" is almost laughable. University faculty do not do research "on the clock." They do it constantly, and it vitally informs their teaching. Service assignments that make up a small part of our assessed "merit" (committees, professional offices, etc.) will have to be sandwiched in somewhere. as they always are; for the most part they will continue to be done, as at present, out of sense of duty to the university and the professions. The only fair and reasonable assignment of furlough days would allocate approximately half of them to instructional days, as instruction comprises about half of the expected--and evaluated and compensated--workload of faculty.

It is reassuring to learn that the Academic Council opposed the plan embodied in the Pitts directive. So much for shared governance. Apparently all of the chancellors were consulted in advance of this announcement, according to Senate Chair Mary Croughan's accompanying memo. It is not clear how the individual chancellors stood, or whether they were united or divided in advising on this decision. Nor is it suggested that individual campus senates were consulted.

The Pitts and Croghan memos indicate that the main impetus for requiring that no furlough days be taken on instructional days was the fear of adverse public reaction to inflicting harm on students who have already suffered a string of recent tuition increases. Yet obviously this "harm" would not have been perpetrated by faculty, but rather by the governor, legislature, and regents, who together chose this draconian method of reducing expenditures. On the contrary to their reasoning, one important reason for taking a fair portion of our furloughs on teaching days--a reason already well and repeatedly articulated in faculty town halls and other gatherings across the system and supported by hundreds of faculty--is precisely to make the public aware of the consequences, not only for this year's students but for California higher education in general over the longer term, of the unwise and irresponsible revenue and fiscal policies that the state has too long been pursuing. The UC system is in jeopardy already. Not only are students asked to bear an ever higher portion of instructional and other costs; privatization is underway as more and more of the universities' budgets are coming from external sources. On top of being unable to hire replacement faculty, we can expect even more departures from all of our UC faculties for other jobs as a result of these arbitrary and unreasonable policy decisions.

UC faculties should strenuously object to the Pitts furlough policy. We should be prepared to organize on individual campuses and system-wide to follow the reasonable plans already well advanced around the system to apportion a fair complement of teaching days as furlough days, while making alternate educational experiences available for students. Also, in light of this latest development, faculty should seriously consider organizing in some independent manner in order to have adequate representation. We should communicate our objections to this UCOP policy by individual emails to our chancellors and urge them to explore immediately the extent of possible individual campus autonomy in crafting furlough days policies.

by Mary Furner

The Berkeley EVC's announcement that 3 teaching days per term will be converted to reading days has been posted on Brad de Long's blog. The EVC also states that the recommendation comes from a study group recommendation delivered to him in May, before the current budget crisis, summer-long furlough debate, and recent UCOP decision to ban furloughs on instructional days.

The official Berkeley plan is very similar to a plan circulated at UCSB by the History Department and others to respond to the furlough by converting week 10 on the 10-week quarter system to a reading week. This kind of plan has been prohibited. It appears that Berkeley will offer reduced instructional days, but not the other campuses.

de Long's entry is weirdly oblivious to the furlough issue raging all around him.

The administration at UCI, following UCOP's lead, has been driving a wedge between faculty and students-staff since this whole budget crisis began. Unfortunately, according to Mary Croughan's response to the Pitt memo, the faculty seems to stand, like the proverbial cheese -- completely alone.

When the furloughs were first implemented, I remember talk that this was not going to be a salary cut, because we wouldn't be asked to do more work for less pay, we would, as a faculty be asked to work less for less, like the staffers at the DMV and the nurses of the state public health offices. If you have visited a state office recently, you can tell that the employees are overworked the lines are long, and in the immortal words of one UC Chancellor, workers are "spending more time with their families."

There will no doubt, be a great deal of comment on the furlough memo, but let me state first and foremost, that there is a class of assistant professor in the humanities, arts and social sciences who is going to be hit hardest and whose voices will not be heard, especially by the fictional "public" whose resentment of the professorial class is being inflamed by our own administration's anxiety about the "image" problem.

There are families at UCI whose sole breadwinner is an assistant professor making 62K a year. With a furlough, this prof will be making less than 60K a year. Now I know that no one is going to cry for us -- yet -- but when you consider that this person has spent eight years in Ph.D. training, sacrificing a bigger pay check for some modicum of job security and employment stability, you know that the social contract of academic employment for humanities, social sciences and arts professors has for all intents and purposes been broken. Asking a med school prof making six figures for a bit sacrifice is very different from asking an assistant professor to do so. But our Chancellor is asking for unity at this time, threatening to characterize voices of dissent as coming from the unfaithful and the traitorous. But lest anyone be mistaken, the contract was broken not by the faculty, but by state legislators, and University administrators, I name you Bob Dynes for signing away our future with Schwarzenegger. The "people" and the "public" are being used as a bludgeon...by the pseudopopulist administrative class.

An untenured professor may indeed want to spend more time with his/her family, but at what cost to the family budget?

While I was at the University of Minnesota and here at UCI, there was much hand-wringing about the lack of minority students in the Ph.d. pipeline. There are barely any working class students in the pipelines either. With the massive cuts that threaten the integrity of our very mission, I wonder what the administration will do to justify its destructive attitude toward the alleged mission of a public university and its constituents and employees. They're people too....

The administration often acts as if the faculty is a pr liability, rather than its most critical asset.

Commentary shall be forthcoming.

CHANCELLORS
ACADEMIC COUNCIL CHAIR CROUGHAN

Colleagues:

After speaking at length with all of you and a number of other people with an interest in the issue, we have decided that faculty furlough days will not occur on instructional days (days for which a faculty member is scheduled to give lectures, lead classes or workshops, have scheduled office hours, or have other scheduled face-to-face responsibilities for students).

The furloughs that have been necessitated by the severe University underfunding by the State are causing significant problems for faculty who have restrictions on research and service as well as increased teaching workloads; employees who have fewer days to do their work and sometimes fewer colleagues to help them; administrators who have reduced staff and budgets to accomplish their complex tasks; on top of lower salaries for everyone. Students too will suffer the effects of the underfunding--larger and fewer classes, and increased fees, as were imposed for this fall instruction period, among other burdens. In such difficult times, I believe
that we must do everything we can to ensure that the students continue to receive all of their instruction. Asking the faculty to carry a full teaching load during furloughs is a large request, but in my mind is justified by the University's paramount teaching mission. Research is permitted on furlough days, but for many faculty this extra research will not be remunerated unless they have grants in which there are funds that can be reallocated to pay for increased effort. And since furlough days are not "service days", they can be used for outside professional activities that may be remunerated.

We understand that the furlough plan will cause hardships for the entire University family. As such, the President and the Regents are committed to do everything possible to ensure that the plan ends after 12 months.

We will continue to work closely with faculty, students, staff and administrators to find the most efficient and thoughtful way to address the problems that will arise this year. You have my pledge that we will make the University as effective and productive as we can under the current budget problems, after which we will help you all plan for better times ahead.

Best wishes,


Lawrence H. Pitts
Interim Provost and Executive Vice President
Academic Affairs

cc: President Yudof
Executive Vice President Lapp
Senior Vice President Dooley
Vice President Lenz
Vice Provost Greenstein
Interim Executive Director Price

This memo was distributed to some Senate committee chairs with the following explanation from Senate Chair Mary Croughan

Dear Council Colleagues



I have received word from Provost Pitts regarding the decision as to whether furloughs can affect instructional days. As you will see below (and attached), the decision was made to not have faculty furlough days take place on instructional days (days for which a faculty member is scheduled to give lectures, lead classes or workshops, have scheduled office hours, or have other scheduled face-to-face responsibilities for students).

This decision was made after Provost Pitts and others developed a proposal on the pros and cons of having furlough days taken on instructional days. I want to take this opportunity to thank Helen Henry, Steve Plaxe, and Bob Powell for their extraordinary work on the proposal; they ensured that the proposal maintained the sentiments expressed at Council. The proposal was then discussed with the EVCs, Chancellors, State Government Relations, and Public Affairs. With the exception of our Council statement endorsing the concept that furloughs should affect instructional days, nearly all other groups expressed very strong concerns that the public would perceive that the students were receiving less education following several years of fee increases and anticipated additional increases. The "optics" with the public and legislature regarding potential future fee increases proved a driving factor in the decision to not have furloughs taken on instructional days.

I know that many of you have been awaiting this document; I'm sorry not to be bringing you news in line with Council's recommendation. But the President and Provost look forward to discussing their decision with those of you present at the September Council meeting.

All the best,

Mary

I draw your attention to Chris's commentary in the Chronicle a prescient ten months ago, which is archived under the "UC and CSU Statements." You can also read it here. This is probably somewhere on the site already, since it is a historical document, but it's worth reading again. (Thanks, Anonymous, for the correction! I still wish I had a strike-through option.)

While I'm correcting myself, do take a look at the UCB furlough information, now posted under "Furlough News."

60,000 UC Union Members Call for Vote of No Confidence in Yudof (from UC-AFT)

WHEREAS University of California (UC) President Mark Yudof has declared his intention to force crippling cuts on UC’s vital services and programs, and

WHEREAS the furloughs, layoffs , and student fee increases proposed by President Yudof are unnecessary and extremely harmful to the University and its public service mission, and

WHEREAS as recently as July 2009, UC’s strong AA1/AA bond rating was reaffirmed by Moody’s Investors Service, and UC’s Medical Centers reported a strong 5.2% operating margin and $171 million in profits for the three quarters ending March 31, 2009,and

WHEREAS UC has consistently refused to comply with state law in making transparent its financial transactions, and

WHEREAS the University, as a leading institution of higher education and a recipient of American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds, is expected to reign in fraud, waste, and abuse, including excessive executive compensation, and

WHEREAS Roughly 3,600 UC employees earn over $200,000 in yearly salary, Chancellors currently earn an average of 22% more than their predecessors, and President Yudof earns nearly 200% more than his predecessor, and

WHEREAS President Yudof’s planned solution to decreased State General Fund appropriations bars high-wage University employees from contributing a balanced share to the budget solution, while deliberately placing thousands of vulnerable low-wage Californians at risk, and

WHEREAS Yudof’s plan fails, at the expense of vital services, to redistribute over $220 million in savings to the University by reasonably reducing spending on UC employees who gross over $200,000 annually, and

WHEREAS we see at University of California a profound crisis of principles and priorities, and we have a duty to act in unity to preserve our University and the services we provide to the people of
California,

LET IT BE HEREBY RESOLVED THAT the University of California Union Coalition calls for a Vote of No Confidence in President Yudof, commencing on August 26 and concluding on September 3.

[Signed by California Nurses Association, UPTE, UAW, AFSCME, CUE, AFT]

The Executive Board of the AAUP has issued a statement calling for full information and transparency regarding campus budgets, and for faculty to resist cutting salaries to avoid cuts in areas not central to higher education or to achieve budgetary "flexibility". Sounds very familiar, but very well put. Here is the first paragraph:

Recent decades have witnessed: (a) a systematic shift of institutional monies from educational to administrative expenditures; (b) a disjuncture between rapidly rising tuition versus overused and underpaid contingent faculty and graduate student employees; (c) a growing gap between rising numbers of Full Time Equivalent students and the numbers of tenure-track faculty; and (d) a growing gap between faculty/academic professional and senior administrative salaries. Each of these patterns work to the detriment of educational quality, institutional effectiveness, student access and success, and broad social benefit.

August 19, 2009

Gary Strong
University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

Dear Mr. Strong:

This letter is intended to express our outrage and dismay at the impending closure of the Arts Library, an entity that is unique on the West Coast in its offerings and resources. As instructors—at UCLA and beyond—in the arts, architecture, art history, film, television, theater and the humanities we all see the UCLA Arts Library as an indispensable resource to fulfill our pedagogical mission. As creators and researchers we all see the UCLA Arts Library as a critical part of our respective practices. Furthermore, a dedicated arts collection is a staple of all great universities public and private. On all of these levels it is unconscionable that this library, one that services the myriad needs of hundreds of faculty and thousands of students in some of our nation’s best departments in the arts and humanities could even be considered for closure.

Those who did not see the closure of the Arts Library buried in your blog entry of August 4, 2009 found out about it though word of mouth, Facebook, email and water cooler rumors. The lack of any effort on the part of library management to consult arts and humanities faculty about these plans points to a lack of transparency in the library’s operations that we find most troubling. This lack of transparency is further underscored by library management’s failure to consult with the UCLA Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication on this critical issue.

If the Arts Library closes, it is impossible to see how YRL and SRLF, facilities that are already bursting at the seams, can accommodate an additional 180,000+ objects. Given that in YRL’s renovations accommodations are being made for meeting spaces—including a café “with seating area and service counter”—it is even more difficult to imagine how the Arts Library’s collections can possibly be brought into this building. We are deeply concerned that once the Arts Library closes its doors that its collections—some of which are singular to this library—will be dispersed and rendered inaccessible. We are equally concerned that the library’s excellent staff will disappear with its collections.

We understand the seriousness of the budget situation; we understand that over 85% of the library’s operating budget comes from 19900 funds; we understand that library management, like the rest of the university, has had to make enormously difficult and painful decisions regarding reductions. We do not understand library management’s failure to apprise the Senate Library Committee—on which you sit—of its plans before a decision was reached; we do not understand library management’s failure to consult arts and humanities faculty as a means of discussing the repercussions of this closure or to come up with more tenable solutions to this crisis; we do not understand library management’s failure to communicate its decision (or the process in its making) directly to the UCLA community. Such secrecy and opacity gives the impression that the Arts Library closure was to be presented at the beginning of the school year as a fait accompli. This is simply not acceptable.

We protest the closure of the Arts Library. We demand that you hold an open meeting on this serious issue for interested faculty and students at the beginning of fall quarter. At the end of the day, we are deeply invested in the Arts Library, and we look forward to coming up with a solution that will keep this vital institution in operation.

Sincerely,

Headlines and Quotes
By Gerald Barnett

I was working through Chapter 8 of the Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University and had just gotten to the discussion of how universities in Michigan and Texas were already viewed more as “private” when my head grew heavy and my sight grew dim and I had to put the book down and rest. I guess I must have actually fallen asleep right there at my desk, because the next thing I know, a newspaper is floating down from the ceiling and it lands on my desk. The front page has this huge headline, and it reads:

UC FACULTY TAKE ANGER OUT ON STUDENTS

"Yeah, they canceled a bunch of lectures, but it doesn't matter because the lectures weren't that much help anyway," said UC Santa Barbara junior Rosalind Orlando.

“Oh, no,” sleeping-me thought, that’s not good. “How did those folks manage to get so twisted around in the press? Not only are they on the wrong side of the wrong issue, but the students don’t seem to care anymore. It’s like they have given up on expecting a great education at UC.” I was thinking that can’t be true when a second newspaper fell down right on top of the first, with an entirely different headline:

UC FORCES FACULTY TO REDUCE INSTRUCTION DAYS

"UCOP forced us out of the classroom--we're really devastated at this failure to protect our time with students," said Professor Anon, a spokesperson for the faculty at UC Santa Barbara.

“Woah, that’s sure different,” I thought in my sleep, “How very clever, pushing the administration around to force instructional days off, and then putting the squeeze on them in the press. I was somewhat in awe, wondering how the faculty had pulled that one off and what they’d do next when yet a third newspaper, much heavier than the previous two landed with a thud on top of the others. It was a Sunday edition and the sales inserts were strewn over my desk and the floor.

UCOP FORGES DEAL WITH GOVERNOR’S OFFICE WHILE FACULTY FRET

"Out of this crisis we have created a bold new Master Plan for education that restores critical funding and reaffirms our commitment to world class public education," said Mark Yudof, President of the University of California.

"UC once again leads the nation in innovation in public education," added Lt. Governor John Garamendi, who brokered the arrangement to take 17 top professional schools and graduate programs across 7 participating UC campuses private while increasing transparency and public oversight.

"An exciting part of the new Master Plan," added Dean Edley of Boalt Hall, "is that we now have funding so that all curriculum materials for these 17 elite programs will over the course of the next three years be made freely available at a new open digital university portal, creating a virtual new UC campus available to the world."

"We were totally taken by surprise by this scope of this announcement, which goes well beyond michiganizing UC and which we have opposed repeatedly over the past two months. We are calling on the Academic Senate to investigate whether administrative procedures were properly followed," said Faculty representative Prof Anon. "We will sue to stop this if we have to," said another professor, asking not to be named.

“We cannot help but be pleased with this new model,” said CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, “It shifts vital state funding to the increased student load we will be carrying as a key player, and opens up the 23 campuses of our system to conduct applied research directed to the immediate needs of the people of the state.”

This was about all I could take—UC now with private parts talked about in the press—and working with CSU—it was all impossible, really, since the credit crunch will hit middle class students next. No one will able to borrow to pay for a private education. As I shook my head in disbelief, I realized I wasn’t alone. There, in the office chair beside me was Clark Kerr himself, hands folded in his lap on top of a pile of ads he had picked up off the floor, waiting for me to finish reading.

“Gerry,” he says, “what’s on your mind? You’re upset. And I see you’ve been reading my book.”
“Yes, very much so, Dr. Kerr” I reply. “I worked for six years in a building on a UC campus that carried your name. It was planned to be seven floors high, but they ran out of money after four and by the time they came around to finish it, the earthquake codes had changed and they had to leave it looking like a concrete bunker, complete with a sealed off third elevator shaft that goes to nowhere. But they did later find $6m in remodeling and security upgrades so the new chancellor’s office would be comfortably protected from potential protestors.”
“Ah, yes. That campus that was such a success for a time, and yet I was sad to list it in Chapter 5, with the reforms that failed.”
“But that’s not what’s upsetting me at the moment. It’s this headline in the paper—it seems like the politics of caution have blown away, but this seems more like financially successful programs pushing the rest out of the lifeboat. Can public education become essentially private like this, shifting the financial burden disproportionately onto students and their families rather than on all residents of the state, as if an education is merely a personal acquisition, like buying a car or a membership in a club, and not a vision for a society populated by trained intelligences from all walks of life and economic backgrounds?
“Well, yes, there is that,” replied Dr. Kerr, nodding his head, “The budgetary crisis is too great for the usual politics of caution, and UC was asleep at the wheel in its public advocacy, and the students have been useless this time in fomenting a creative rebellion. I suppose, instead of splitting today’s best from the rest, UC could....
But just as Clark Kerr was about to suggest a really great alternative, a fourth newspaper fell from the ceiling, and landed on my head with such force that I startled awake. I had caught just a glance at the headline and it has haunted me as much as anything…

REGENTS SHUTTER UCOP AS FACULTY AND STUDENTS MARK NEW ERA

“The savings alone will make up our remaining budget gap, and the freedom to develop our educational mission offers tremendous opportunities for the future,” said the new Chair of the Regents Chancellors Council, Michael Drake, “and with four campuses now fully private, and two more moving to the Cal State System’s augmented research program, we can concentrate on developing high quality state-funded programs at the remaining three public UC campuses.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Ticker points to a story coming out of the University of North Carolina. The full story is here.

It seems that the administration there has been growing faster than the faculty and student enrollment. Not news, right? Here's the kicker, though: "The university now admits that some of these people were in jobs that were not vital." And this is what UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp has to say: "That's troubling.... We're here to educate the citizens of North Carolina and produce scholars that help North Carolina and the rest of the world with their problems, and if we are spending money on the administration, we are not spending money on that."

In the coming months, on-line education is going to being receiving a lot of attention and some funds, especially in light of the Edley proposal for the 11th campus of UC. I think we all have to look closely at the new Dept of Ed study that claims that on-line education is more effective than face-to-face, develop studies of our own, as faculty of bricks and mortar institutions. We also need to say to people like Jonathan Kaplan of Walden University that we are already using a lot of teaching tools in on-line environments such as eee, and that the choices between face to face and on-line education are not either/or. We should ask Edley about his proposal, invite him to speak to faculty, CPB, Faculty Senates on the various campuses outlining what his proposal for an 11th UC campus would mean for the 10 existing ones. I would be very curious to know -- and I'm not pre-judging it at all. I taught part of a writing course on line last summer that worked beautifully. I would like to know how an entire campus goes virtual...

Cross-posted from Robert Samuels, Changing Universities

Monday, August 17, 2009

Who are the High Earners in the UC System

Like many people, I was wondering about who exactly are the people making more than $200,000 a year in the UC system. Using Jeffrey Bergamini’s great salary data (http://ucpay.globl.org), I analyzed the different categories of employees in the over 200K club. I also looked at how these groups increased over the two-year period from 2006 to 2008. Here is what I found (with Jeffrey’s help):

First of all, I broke the employees making over $200,000 into six basic groups: administrators, medical faculty, athletic coaches, business school professors, academic professors (excluding business and law professors), and law professors. These six categories accounted for over 95% of the revenue of the over $200,000 club, which had a total gross pay of over 1 billion dollars in 2008. The top group was the medical faculty, which had 2,296 people making a total of $680 million in 2008. This same group in 2006 had 1,748 employees with total earnings over $502 million. In other words, over a period of two years, the UC added 550 new people from the medical field into the over $200,000 club for an additional cost of $178 million (which is about the total savings for the entire furlough plan).

The second biggest group was the administrators. In 2008, there were 397 administrators in the over 200k club making a total of $109 million, and in 2006, the same group had 214 members for a collective gross pay of $58.8 million. This group and its collective salaries, then, almost doubled in just two years. If you want to know where the UC money has been going, this is a great place to start.

The third biggest group is the academic professors outside of law, medicine, and business. In 2008, there were 415 academic professors making over $2000,000 for a collective gross pay of $96.6 million. In 2006, this same group had 215 employees at $49 million. In other words, the number of academic professor’s outside of the professional schools making over $200,000 basically doubled in a two-year period. During this time, the faculty salaries in the UC system continued to fall beneath the national average, and so what we are seeing in the UC system is an incredible widening of faculty salary inequality: the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.

In the case of the business school faculty, in 2008, there were 372 faculty making more than $200,000 for a collective gross pay of $93 million, while in 2006, there were 193 in this group with a collective gross pay of $46 million. Once again the pay of this group doubled in two years: they do not call themselves business faculty for nothing.

In the case of law professors, we find that in 2008, there were 85 making over $200,000 for a collective pay of $21 million, and in 2006, this same group consisted of 57 employees making a collective $13 million. For some reason, this group did not double its earnings, but it still showed a healthy increase.

The final group is the athletic coaches, which in 2008, there were 24 coaches making over $2000,000 for a collective payout of $12.8 million. In 2006, this same group had only 11 members with collective earning over $5 million. So athletic coaches in this category more than doubled their earnings in two years.

What all of these statistics tell us that that UC does not have a budget problem; it has an out-of-control compensation problem. Moreover, it is the people at the top, just 1.5% of the employees (out of a total of 240,000 workers) who make 11% of the total compensation, and this group increased its wealth by close to 40% in just two years. Did you get a 40% raise in the last two years?

Bob Samuels, UC-AFT

Oakland Tribune columnist on the recent administrative pay raises. Are UCOP and UC Regents "tone deaf"? And does calling the salaries "necessary to retain top-tier talent" justify them?