Dear friends, family, and colleagues,
For many of you it has been a long time since we were last in contact;
I wish that I was writing now in order to set up a long overdue
conversation, or to fill you in on happy developments in my life.
Instead, I am writing because I feel compelled to give you a first
hand account of some disturbing events which occurred on the UC
Berkeley campus this week.
This Wednesday, November 9, UC Berkeley students staged a rally and
march with the goals of protesting a proposed 81% fee hike and drawing
attention to the increasing fiscal crisis facing public education in
California. After the march, students held a General Assembly meeting
in which they formed a consensus to build an encampment (a la Occupy
Wall Street) on Sproul Plaza. Students made this decision with full
awareness that, earlier in the week, the UC Berkeley Chancellor had
issued a letter stating that camping constituted a violation of the
campus code.
Shortly after the tents were pitched, while students were playing
music on guitars, painting signs, and chit-chatting in true UC
Berkeley fashion, police forces began gathering. What ensued was
nothing less than two separate police attacks on non-violent student
protesters. Two police forces (UCPD and the Alameda County Sheriff's
Department) and hundreds of police officers in full riot gear advanced
on students who had linked arms to form a human barricade around the
tents. The riot police formed a line with batons drawn, held in both
hands across their bodies, and they moved forward as a block, jabbing
the batons towards the line of students in unison. Behind them were
several officers holding automatic weapons that looked like something
out of Grand Theft Auto--tear gas launchers? rubber bullet
guns?--which they sometimes pointed directly at students' heads and
bodies.
I witnessed a young woman on the ground being repeatedly attacked with
the end of a baton by a police lieutenant from the Alameda County
Sheriff's department. I saw two young men get tackled and arrested,
one as a tactic to break the line of locked-armed students, and the
other for trying to pick up a tent pole. I also saw two young women
get their hands stamped on by a policeman's boot when they tried to
pick up a bike light in between our line and the officers'. And this
was just in my small corner of the first and less intense standoff.
In the second, the police forces were more aggressive, and many
officers (as opposed to only a few in the earlier event), were--for
lack of a better word--rabid. They repeatedly attacked students with
batons with ZERO provocation. In total, 39 people were arrested in
both confrontations, and many more were beaten, including two students
in a class I am currently teaching and a fellow graduate student from
my department.
I was fortunate enough to escape these events with only minor scrapes
and bruises. I am shaken, however, and more angry than perhaps I've
even been in my life. On Thursday morning, I had visions of booting
police officers in the face while I was in the shower. For the rest
of the day, I intermittently cried and swelled with outrage. When I
saw police officers on Sproul plaza standing around in small groups, I
literally could not raise my eyes to look at them. Predictably
enough, I have been completely mobilized into action by Wednesday's
events, as have thousands of students and community members who have
been shocked and outraged by the videos they've seen (see below this
message for links to a few videos I hope you take the time time to
check out).
I am incredibly proud of Cal students who courageously held the line
and remained completely peaceful throughout the day and night. We
continuously shouted "peaceful! protest!" particularly when the police
were acting most aggressively. There was not a rock or bottle thrown,
and the chants consistently demonstrated empathy with or at least
respect for the humanity of the police ("We're doing this for your
children!" or "Stop beating students!" or "You are the 99%!").
The larger point here is that we live in a society in which this type
of police use of force is entirely normalized. It is expected, and in
fact justified, that the roll-out of police in riot gear is the first
response to non-violent student protesters. I mean, the students were
violating the law, right? They should have known that this is what
they would get. What did they expect?
I ask instead, in what world are militarized riot police an
appropriate response to students with tents????? And I challenge you
(and all of us) to think through what Wednesday afternoon might have
looked like if the use of force was OFF THE TABLE.
In the aftermath of these events, I had the urge to ask the Chancellor
to articulate the threat that the encampment posed that justified the
kind of response we saw on Wednesday. And in fact, he issued a letter
to the campus community doing just that on Thursday. It turns out,
while he supports marches and rallies as forms of protest, encampments
pose a threat to sanitation and hygiene, and he is worried about the
campus administration's ability to manage conflicts arising within
(Needless to say, I, too, am worried about the administration's
ability to manage conflict after Wednesday's events, but I digress).
I would argue that this standoff is not about hygiene, sanitation, or
conflict management; nor is it simply about a few students with tents,
as those of us who are sympathetic to the protests have argued. This
is about establishing a space within which dialogue across divisions
of race, class, gender, religion, and ideology is encouraged,
facilitated, and prioritized; within which any and all participants
are provided the consistent opportunity to give voice to their ideas
and concerns about the nature of the society they live in; a space in
which the creativity and imagination necessary to visualize inclusive
and egalitarian political, economic, and social systems are nurtured;
a space in which I, for one, feel like I can participate without
making ethical compromises. THIS is the threat that these encampments
represent. And this is also the reason that so many students,
including me, are willing to defend their construction with our
bodies.
With much love and, for the first time in my life, real hope for a
better future,
Nicole
Videos:
This site contains a video from the afternoon attack which has gone
viral, and a photo of the plaza an hour or so after the second attack,
when even more students gathered and held the second general assembly
meeting of the day (in which they formed a consensus to call for a
UC-wide strike on Tuesday, November 15):
This is a video from the first attack which I uploaded from the camera
on my phone. This advance occurred after the police had already torn
down the encampment, and resulted in them reclaiming a few feet of
dirt. It doesn't capture police beatings in as clear detail as the
previous video, but it gives you an up close and personal sense of the
atmosphere among the student protesters as well as what it was like to
be standing peacefully in a line, only to be advanced upon by a row of
riot police:
This video was taken by a stranger who was in a very similar position
to me during the clash in the evening. Since it's not clear, let me
remind you that students were gathered on the lawn distributing food
and hanging out before the police officers moved into formation and
formed the line you see here (in other words, the students did not
approach a line of riot cops, but rather were approached while
peacefully assembling). Whoever took this video got a much better
angle on the events that I was witnessing than I did with my camera
phone:
For more, search for "Occupy Cal" on YouTube.
Showing posts with label UC Berkeley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UC Berkeley. Show all posts
Friday, November 18, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Operation Excellence Memo
A message to members of the Berkeley campus community from the Operational Excellence Executive Committee
While we continue to absorb this week’s budget announcement from Governor Jerry Brown of a proposed $500 million reduction to the University of California state appropriation and study its implications for the Berkeley campus, we are more than ever convinced of the importance of the success of Operational Excellence (OE). We want to take this opportunity to update the campus about the progress of Operational Excellence and specifically, the results of one part of the organizational simplification initiative begun last fall that addresses our management structures.
We have for some time now been pursuing a number of different approaches to meet our budget challenges and reduce our reliance on state funding. Our plans have focused on both revenue increases and cost reductions and include both short- and long-term strategies. We have realized revenues through growing philanthropy, increasing research funding, higher student fees, and a rise in the number of students paying non-resident tuition.
Operational Excellence is a major strategy for reducing our administrative costs while simultaneously improving the quality of our operations. OE is designed to create efficiency, improve organizational performance, and reduce our costs over the next three years, on a recurring and ongoing basis, by at least $75 million dollars per year.
The Operational Excellence diagnostic report, completed and accepted in Spring 2010, identified that contrary to best practice in well-run organizations, we have too many supervisors who supervise only a few people and that elimination of management layers could save up to $20 million annually. In September, we set out to design new organizational structures across campus by asking our Deans and Vice-Chancellors, including the Chancellor’s office, to have unit restructuring plans ready to implement in early 2011 which would meet savings targets by creating higher spans of control, that is, having fewer supervisors manage more people.
While unit restructuring is never an easy or simple exercise, I am pleased to report that
our Deans and Vice Chancellors put forward extremely high quality submissions that collectively exceeded our expectations. In total, the plans prepared by the unit leaders will deliver savings of as much as $20 million. As importantly, we will create a flatter and healthier organizational structure which will have about one third fewer managers and will focus our best managers on developing talent and actively managing the organization.
The campus expects to eliminate approximately 280 full time positions, half involuntarily and half through removal of vacant positions, retirements and voluntary separations, mostly before June 2011. Although this is positive news for our cost savings effort, we are saddened to announce that nearly 150 staff on our campus will be laid off. The reductions in our staff workforce have already begun and will continue through this fiscal year and beyond. Those leaving will be notified by their managers, with appropriate severance arrangements for those who qualify, including training and counseling services. We want to express our thanks and recognition to the staff who are leaving for their service to the university.
The reductions in workforce span all levels of our organization, including mid-management levels; about one-quarter of the positions eliminated have salaries plus benefits of $100,000 and above. We have significantly reduced the number of managers who supervised fewer than three people. Prior to the restructuring about 45 percent of our supervisors had fewer than three direct reports. Now, this has been reduced to 20 percent, and the campus has achieved an over-all average span of seven direct reports per supervisor. This significant elimination of layers of reporting will make us more nimble and productive.
We are encouraged by these initial results that we will meet our overall goals for Operational Excellence. Wide engagement with the campus has taken place for the second phase of Organizational Simplification, the designing of shared service centers for the delivery of common administrative functions in Human Resources, Finance, and Information Technology. A draft report for campus comment will be published in the next month. The remaining six initiatives, Information Technology, Energy, High Performance Culture, Procurement, Finance, and Human Resources continue to evolve their business cases and plans.
As was stated last September in a Chancellor’s memo, these are particularly stressful times for our staff and for managers who are working to realize these changes. We repeat how important it is that we all acknowledge the critical role that Berkeley managers and staff play in the success of our teaching and research mission. We are committed to treating all of our employees with dignity, respect and fairness while recognizing that in the end, we will have fewer administrative positions on campus. In addition to crafting a somewhat smaller workforce, our goal is to rationalize policies and procedures such that many staff will find their jobs more rewarding and less frustrating. As the OE initiatives are implemented, staff will continue to have opportunities for career growth.
We want to thank all of the many initiative sponsors, managers and volunteers who are engaged in helping us develop our plans, and our campus community for its engagement with this important effort. Your unit heads will be able to answer questions you may have about your individual unit restructuring. The OE Program Office will continue to provide information and updates on progress on their website athttp://oe.berkeley.edu
Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
George Breslauer, Executive Vice-Chancellor and Provost
Frank Yeary, Vice-Chancellor
Andrew Szeri, Operational Excellence Program Head and Dean of the Graduate Division
While we continue to absorb this week’s budget announcement from Governor Jerry Brown of a proposed $500 million reduction to the University of California state appropriation and study its implications for the Berkeley campus, we are more than ever convinced of the importance of the success of Operational Excellence (OE). We want to take this opportunity to update the campus about the progress of Operational Excellence and specifically, the results of one part of the organizational simplification initiative begun last fall that addresses our management structures.
We have for some time now been pursuing a number of different approaches to meet our budget challenges and reduce our reliance on state funding. Our plans have focused on both revenue increases and cost reductions and include both short- and long-term strategies. We have realized revenues through growing philanthropy, increasing research funding, higher student fees, and a rise in the number of students paying non-resident tuition.
Operational Excellence is a major strategy for reducing our administrative costs while simultaneously improving the quality of our operations. OE is designed to create efficiency, improve organizational performance, and reduce our costs over the next three years, on a recurring and ongoing basis, by at least $75 million dollars per year.
The Operational Excellence diagnostic report, completed and accepted in Spring 2010, identified that contrary to best practice in well-run organizations, we have too many supervisors who supervise only a few people and that elimination of management layers could save up to $20 million annually. In September, we set out to design new organizational structures across campus by asking our Deans and Vice-Chancellors, including the Chancellor’s office, to have unit restructuring plans ready to implement in early 2011 which would meet savings targets by creating higher spans of control, that is, having fewer supervisors manage more people.
While unit restructuring is never an easy or simple exercise, I am pleased to report that
our Deans and Vice Chancellors put forward extremely high quality submissions that collectively exceeded our expectations. In total, the plans prepared by the unit leaders will deliver savings of as much as $20 million. As importantly, we will create a flatter and healthier organizational structure which will have about one third fewer managers and will focus our best managers on developing talent and actively managing the organization.
The campus expects to eliminate approximately 280 full time positions, half involuntarily and half through removal of vacant positions, retirements and voluntary separations, mostly before June 2011. Although this is positive news for our cost savings effort, we are saddened to announce that nearly 150 staff on our campus will be laid off. The reductions in our staff workforce have already begun and will continue through this fiscal year and beyond. Those leaving will be notified by their managers, with appropriate severance arrangements for those who qualify, including training and counseling services. We want to express our thanks and recognition to the staff who are leaving for their service to the university.
The reductions in workforce span all levels of our organization, including mid-management levels; about one-quarter of the positions eliminated have salaries plus benefits of $100,000 and above. We have significantly reduced the number of managers who supervised fewer than three people. Prior to the restructuring about 45 percent of our supervisors had fewer than three direct reports. Now, this has been reduced to 20 percent, and the campus has achieved an over-all average span of seven direct reports per supervisor. This significant elimination of layers of reporting will make us more nimble and productive.
We are encouraged by these initial results that we will meet our overall goals for Operational Excellence. Wide engagement with the campus has taken place for the second phase of Organizational Simplification, the designing of shared service centers for the delivery of common administrative functions in Human Resources, Finance, and Information Technology. A draft report for campus comment will be published in the next month. The remaining six initiatives, Information Technology, Energy, High Performance Culture, Procurement, Finance, and Human Resources continue to evolve their business cases and plans.
As was stated last September in a Chancellor’s memo, these are particularly stressful times for our staff and for managers who are working to realize these changes. We repeat how important it is that we all acknowledge the critical role that Berkeley managers and staff play in the success of our teaching and research mission. We are committed to treating all of our employees with dignity, respect and fairness while recognizing that in the end, we will have fewer administrative positions on campus. In addition to crafting a somewhat smaller workforce, our goal is to rationalize policies and procedures such that many staff will find their jobs more rewarding and less frustrating. As the OE initiatives are implemented, staff will continue to have opportunities for career growth.
We want to thank all of the many initiative sponsors, managers and volunteers who are engaged in helping us develop our plans, and our campus community for its engagement with this important effort. Your unit heads will be able to answer questions you may have about your individual unit restructuring. The OE Program Office will continue to provide information and updates on progress on their website at
Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
George Breslauer, Executive Vice-Chancellor and Provost
Frank Yeary, Vice-Chancellor
Andrew Szeri, Operational Excellence Program Head and Dean of the Graduate Division
Friday, November 20, 2009
Wheeler Occupation List of Demands
From: sinkorswim@riseup.net
Date: November 20, 2009 12:21:21 PM PST
To:prg@berkeley.edu
Subject: DEMANDS!!!
We at the University of California Berkeley students are occupying Wheeler Hall as both a symbolic and practical action. We are occupying because of the 32% student fee increase, because the UC funds and budget are not transparent, because we want to make UC Berkeley a safe campus for all undocumented (AB540) students, because of the disgraceful "leadership" we have seen from the Board of Regents and President Yudof and a multitude of other reasons too numerous to list here.
We are therefore unable to leave until you:
1. Rehire all 38 custodial AFCSME workers laid off
2. Drop all charges and provide total amnesty to all persons occupying buildings and involved in student protests concerning budget cuts
3. Maintain the current business occupants of the bears lair food courtand enter into respectful and good faith negotiations
4. Preserve Rochdale apartments leased to berkeley student cooperative for $1 a year into perpetuity
Date: November 20, 2009 12:21:21 PM PST
To:
Subject: DEMANDS!!!
We at the University of California Berkeley students are occupying Wheeler Hall as both a symbolic and practical action. We are occupying because of the 32% student fee increase, because the UC funds and budget are not transparent, because we want to make UC Berkeley a safe campus for all undocumented (AB540) students, because of the disgraceful "leadership" we have seen from the Board of Regents and President Yudof and a multitude of other reasons too numerous to list here.
We are therefore unable to leave until you:
1. Rehire all 38 custodial AFCSME workers laid off
2. Drop all charges and provide total amnesty to all persons occupying buildings and involved in student protests concerning budget cuts
3. Maintain the current business occupants of the bears lair food courtand enter into respectful and good faith negotiations
4. Preserve Rochdale apartments leased to berkeley student cooperative for $1 a year into perpetuity
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
CONT: Can Doubling Out-of-State Students Save Berkeley's Budget?
BACK TO POST
We are told that at a recent meeting with some Berkeley faculty, Berkeley's Chancellor Robert Bigeneau offered ideas about how to make up this year's $147 million cut over 3 to 4 years. One of these is getting much more revenue from Non-Resident Tuition, otherwise known as NRT.
The figures from this meeting are that UCB's 2009-10 class will be 13% out-of-state. This figure includes international students (their numbers are up 205% from a small base of under 100 in 2004.) This is an increase from 11% out-of-state in Fall 2008.
How many students is that? Berkeley recorded 24,636 undergraduates that year, of which 2427 were out-of-state US or out-of-country and thus required to pay NRT. NRT was $19,068 for 2007-08, so multiplication gets us a gross NRT revenue for the Berkeley of $46,278,036 - or $46 million for short.
There are going to be more boring paragraphs like that in this entry, I have to warn you. But it will all be worth it in the end.
Fast forward to the current year. Enrollment tables aren't ready for this fall, but last fall Berkeley had 25,151 undergrads, and probably no more this year given enrollment restrictions. NRT is now $22,020 per year, and if 13% of Berkeley's 2009-10 undergrads must pay NRT, which is somewhat more than 3200 students, then the campus is collecting about $70.5 million in gross tuition from out-of staters.
Chancellor Birgeneau is reported to have envisioned a doubling of the percentage of out of staters to about 25% of the Berkeley undergraduate population. By comparison, this year's University of Michigan 1st year class is 34% out-of-state. Birgeneau then went on to say that a doubling of the percentage would yield about $70 million a year, apparently 3-4 years from now.
The fact that the campus seems to double out-of-state students and still winds up with the same revenues does have a good explanation: the $70.5 million is a gross revenue figure, meaning that it doesn't subtract scholarship funds (or "return-to-aid" - RTA), additional admissions and recruitment costs, and other factors. Some studies suggest that "net tuition" is sometimes as low as half of the tuition sticker price, and Berkeley officials seem to have done some such calculation. Once a campus starts to compete seriously for "blue chip" students that have excellent academic records and can also pay most of their tab, a campus makes a larger number of discounted offers that are expensive for the campus to make. (It also starts to spend more on student centers, football stadiums and other lifestyle features.) In this case, it would also take years to get the full student population to the 25% out-of-state level, since the campus is increasing the ratio of out-of-state students one 1st-year class at a time. All things considered, Birgeneau is being pretty conservative about the net revenues such a move would produce, which is very much to his credit.
All this of course raises the policy question all over again: if each out-of-state student nets $11,000 of new money to the campus, is the sum worth the impact a doubling of their numbers would on the campus and the state, not to mention the further reduction of public support for public funding? But we need to do more adding and multiplying before we can consider it.
There are three issues with the argument for NRT's financial benefits.
The first is that there's a ramp-up to the 25% figure, so perhaps as little as $20 million of new money would be available in 2010-11. The second is that the "present value" of $70 million in four years is quite a bit less than that. It could probably be generated by investing some unexpended funds from various parts of UCB's current operating budget, without any risky policy changes.
The third issue is the most basic: net NRT revenues are just much smaller than the size of the cuts, and can fix only a small piece of the problem.
The new money needs to be compared to overall revenues and expenditures, not just to the $147-150 million that was cut this year. Berkeley spent about $545 million on instruction in 2007-08, and $423 M on research, meaning that about 62 cents of a dollar that is split between instruction and research goes to instruction. To oversimplify, if you add in Student Services ($117 M), 62% of Academic Support ($73 M), of Institutional Support ($79 M), of Operation and Maintenance of Plant ($47 M), and let the other categories go, you get to an expanded total of $861 million for Instruction. (Yes, I do believe Instruction is intimately tied to Research - I'm just trying to make the best hypothetical case for NRT.) The whole nut of UCB expenditures is $1.8 billion.
In this budgetary context, $20 million is 2.3% of my expanded Instruction figure, and about 1% of Berkeley's total expenditures. In Year 4 of this scenario, after the out-of-state percentage of the undergraduate population has doubled, the Chancellor's $70 million would amount to 8% of this year's Instructional funds, or under 4% of this current year's total budget. Massive tuition increases and cost increases may change this percentage, or factors may cancel each other out and leave us at that percentage, so I'll omit compounding growth and other fun details.
Now back to the policy. It seems obvious to most of us who follow politics that there is a replacement effect between private and public revenue streams: if voters and politicians see that you can make up for cuts in taxpayer funds with an increase in a user fee like tuition, they will happily cut taxpayer funds so that somebody beside them - the user - has to pay. There's a certain short-term logic to this, fueled by ordinary human dumbness and selfishness. Unfortunately, UCOP has refused for years to acknowledge the theoretical possibility of this problem - at least with their faculty - and have never bothered to quantify this replacement effect, at least publicly.
But the Regents have been raising fees 7-10% a year for all but one of the years of this decade. Why would a single voter assume that UC still needs the allocation of state money that it had in 2001, or 2007? For every thousand dollars of per-student fee increases, how much General Fund money have we lost? If fees explode in the next couple of years, how much more GF will we lose? Throw in "out-of-stater" politics, how much more is that loss likely to rise?
Still omitting ethics, educational, and social implications, here's what I see. I am looking at a low revenue yield for NRT (under 5% of total campus budget, and under 10% of expanded Instruction), and am looking at negative budget politics (20% GF cuts this year, 60% cut since 1990, and no official claims that the worst is over).
So my conclusion is this: doubling out-of-state students isn't worth it. Berkeley shouldn't do it.
BACK TO POST
BACK TO BLOG
We are told that at a recent meeting with some Berkeley faculty, Berkeley's Chancellor Robert Bigeneau offered ideas about how to make up this year's $147 million cut over 3 to 4 years. One of these is getting much more revenue from Non-Resident Tuition, otherwise known as NRT.
The figures from this meeting are that UCB's 2009-10 class will be 13% out-of-state. This figure includes international students (their numbers are up 205% from a small base of under 100 in 2004.) This is an increase from 11% out-of-state in Fall 2008.
How many students is that? Berkeley recorded 24,636 undergraduates that year, of which 2427 were out-of-state US or out-of-country and thus required to pay NRT. NRT was $19,068 for 2007-08, so multiplication gets us a gross NRT revenue for the Berkeley of $46,278,036 - or $46 million for short.
There are going to be more boring paragraphs like that in this entry, I have to warn you. But it will all be worth it in the end.
Fast forward to the current year. Enrollment tables aren't ready for this fall, but last fall Berkeley had 25,151 undergrads, and probably no more this year given enrollment restrictions. NRT is now $22,020 per year, and if 13% of Berkeley's 2009-10 undergrads must pay NRT, which is somewhat more than 3200 students, then the campus is collecting about $70.5 million in gross tuition from out-of staters.
Chancellor Birgeneau is reported to have envisioned a doubling of the percentage of out of staters to about 25% of the Berkeley undergraduate population. By comparison, this year's University of Michigan 1st year class is 34% out-of-state. Birgeneau then went on to say that a doubling of the percentage would yield about $70 million a year, apparently 3-4 years from now.
The fact that the campus seems to double out-of-state students and still winds up with the same revenues does have a good explanation: the $70.5 million is a gross revenue figure, meaning that it doesn't subtract scholarship funds (or "return-to-aid" - RTA), additional admissions and recruitment costs, and other factors. Some studies suggest that "net tuition" is sometimes as low as half of the tuition sticker price, and Berkeley officials seem to have done some such calculation. Once a campus starts to compete seriously for "blue chip" students that have excellent academic records and can also pay most of their tab, a campus makes a larger number of discounted offers that are expensive for the campus to make. (It also starts to spend more on student centers, football stadiums and other lifestyle features.) In this case, it would also take years to get the full student population to the 25% out-of-state level, since the campus is increasing the ratio of out-of-state students one 1st-year class at a time. All things considered, Birgeneau is being pretty conservative about the net revenues such a move would produce, which is very much to his credit.
All this of course raises the policy question all over again: if each out-of-state student nets $11,000 of new money to the campus, is the sum worth the impact a doubling of their numbers would on the campus and the state, not to mention the further reduction of public support for public funding? But we need to do more adding and multiplying before we can consider it.
There are three issues with the argument for NRT's financial benefits.
The first is that there's a ramp-up to the 25% figure, so perhaps as little as $20 million of new money would be available in 2010-11. The second is that the "present value" of $70 million in four years is quite a bit less than that. It could probably be generated by investing some unexpended funds from various parts of UCB's current operating budget, without any risky policy changes.
The third issue is the most basic: net NRT revenues are just much smaller than the size of the cuts, and can fix only a small piece of the problem.
The new money needs to be compared to overall revenues and expenditures, not just to the $147-150 million that was cut this year. Berkeley spent about $545 million on instruction in 2007-08, and $423 M on research, meaning that about 62 cents of a dollar that is split between instruction and research goes to instruction. To oversimplify, if you add in Student Services ($117 M), 62% of Academic Support ($73 M), of Institutional Support ($79 M), of Operation and Maintenance of Plant ($47 M), and let the other categories go, you get to an expanded total of $861 million for Instruction. (Yes, I do believe Instruction is intimately tied to Research - I'm just trying to make the best hypothetical case for NRT.) The whole nut of UCB expenditures is $1.8 billion.
In this budgetary context, $20 million is 2.3% of my expanded Instruction figure, and about 1% of Berkeley's total expenditures. In Year 4 of this scenario, after the out-of-state percentage of the undergraduate population has doubled, the Chancellor's $70 million would amount to 8% of this year's Instructional funds, or under 4% of this current year's total budget. Massive tuition increases and cost increases may change this percentage, or factors may cancel each other out and leave us at that percentage, so I'll omit compounding growth and other fun details.
Now back to the policy. It seems obvious to most of us who follow politics that there is a replacement effect between private and public revenue streams: if voters and politicians see that you can make up for cuts in taxpayer funds with an increase in a user fee like tuition, they will happily cut taxpayer funds so that somebody beside them - the user - has to pay. There's a certain short-term logic to this, fueled by ordinary human dumbness and selfishness. Unfortunately, UCOP has refused for years to acknowledge the theoretical possibility of this problem - at least with their faculty - and have never bothered to quantify this replacement effect, at least publicly.
But the Regents have been raising fees 7-10% a year for all but one of the years of this decade. Why would a single voter assume that UC still needs the allocation of state money that it had in 2001, or 2007? For every thousand dollars of per-student fee increases, how much General Fund money have we lost? If fees explode in the next couple of years, how much more GF will we lose? Throw in "out-of-stater" politics, how much more is that loss likely to rise?
Still omitting ethics, educational, and social implications, here's what I see. I am looking at a low revenue yield for NRT (under 5% of total campus budget, and under 10% of expanded Instruction), and am looking at negative budget politics (20% GF cuts this year, 60% cut since 1990, and no official claims that the worst is over).
So my conclusion is this: doubling out-of-state students isn't worth it. Berkeley shouldn't do it.
BACK TO POST
BACK TO BLOG
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
UC Berkeley Mitigations in the Furlough Program
August 24, 2009
Dear Colleagues:
Only this week have we learned the final disposition of many elements of the furlough plan's impact on UCB faculty. You have already received a transmission from Nathan Brostrom, which outlined the proposed plans for campus closure (December 23-January 6; March 22-26) and certain other features, and which informed you of convenient links, both UCB and UC Office of the President (UCOP), through which you can find answers to many specific questions.
I am writing to alert you to the many ways in which the furlough plan was changed dramatically in response to the faculty and staff feedback solicited by President Yudof and received as well by us. The original plan was highly standardized and provided very few exclusions and mitigations. By contrast, the final plan, altered both centrally and locally, contains the following features that were not in the original plan. I summarize here only those concerns that were most strongly and widely advocated in your feedback. More detailed issues are addressed in the links provided in Nathan Brostrom's CalMessage of August 20.
MITIGATIONS IN THE FURLOUGH PROGRAM
1. The salary reductions are now graduated into seven bands, ranging from 4% to 10%.
2. Pensions and benefits are not affected by the pay reductions.
3. Summer 9ths, from whatever sources (administrative stipends, endowed chairs, grants, etc.) are not affected by the pay reductions; they may be calculated on the 100% base salary.
4. The UCB Committee on Research will soon announce a plan for allocating to about 150 of the lowest-paid ladder faculty (those with base salaries below $85,000) summer-salary supplements equivalent to their pay reduction this year, in response to the submission of non-competitive research proposals. These faculty are disproportionately concentrated in the arts and humanities and the humanistic social sciences, including these disciplines within selected professional schools, such as Education and Social Welfare, among others.
5. All new ladder-faculty recruits who begin in residence July 1, 2009 or January 1, 2010 will be "made whole" through a partnership between deans/chairs and the EVCP that supplements their "recruitment allowance" using non-State funds for this purpose. This is in response to your arguments that ethical, legal, and reputational risks would attend the inclusion in the furlough program of these new ladder-faculty hires, who had recently been recruited in a competitive context.
6. Faculty are not required to provide university service during the mandatory and elective furlough days.
7. Some senior faculty have asked whether they may transfer a portion of the yield of their endowed chairs to colleagues in need. This may be done if the allocation is to be used for legitimate research purposes and is consistent with the terms of the chair. "Legitimate research purposes" include summer salary for a period during which the faculty member is engaged in research.
8. The following categories of employees are exempt from the furlough program:
a. all academic student employees (ASEs, which includes GSIs)
b. all post-doctoral fellows
c. all those paid 100% on grants and contracts, and
d. all those on H1-B visas.
We await word from UCOP on whether lecturers (Unit 18) will be exempt from the program. This remains a matter of discussion with the union.
9. Faculty with grants and contracts, research gifts, or endowed chair income who wish to pay themselves for furlough days during the academic year may do so, assuming that, in the case of grants and contracts, their granting agency explicitly allows the practice, and, in all cases, that they plan to conduct research on the indicated days. Other recruitment and retention funds may not be used for this purpose, as they are derived from State-funded sources (as also in #5, above).
10. For the policy on faculty and research staff whose appointment is split between grant funds and State funds, please consult the relevant UCB and UCOP websites.
11. Furlough days, both mandatory (11 days during campus closures) and elective (one's total furlough days minus 11), will be added to the normal 39 days of allowable, compensated days for earning outside income. Of course, this action and the previous one are mutually exclusive.
12. The Office of the President has decided that faculty may not take their elective furlough days on those days when they are scheduled to teach.
13. It is our intention to urge the Office of the President to eliminate or, if events necessitate, to drastically reduce this furlough program after one year, ending August 31, 2010.
WHY CALL IT A "FURLOUGH"
We acknowledge that the concept of "furlough" better fits the life circumstances of staff than of faculty, most especially those faculty who do not have external funding for research or consulting. For that reason, some faculty have expressed dismay that they may not take furlough on days they would otherwise be teaching. In the case of faculty, this program may better be thought of as a temporary pay reduction. However, had we used different rubrics for faculty and staff, it was possible that, for technical reasons, several of the above mitigations would not have been permissable. Indeed, it was for that reason that the Academic Senate's Budget Committee urged us to use the term "furloughs" rather than "pay reduction" when describing the faculty program.
FACULTY-STAFF RELATIONSHIPS
Many faculty have expressed concern about our valued staff employees who are not covered by any of the above mitigations. On the one hand, it is undeniably the case that most staff do not have the alternative sources of income that inform many of the faculty mitigations above. It is equally true that staff employees are subject to layoffs while faculty are not. On the other hand, our staff have been allocated more furlough days than faculty because they are year-round employees, and staff receive genuine vacation days during the mandatory and elective furlough days. In any case, our staff will be feeling a disproportionate share of the pain during the coming years and we ask you to please be attentive to their needs and accord them the respect, recognition, and support they deserve. We are proud of the fact that, unlike many private universities, our staff employees are not shouldering the burden of the furlough program alone. With faculty participation, this furlough
p
rogram has, in total, generated savings that would otherwise have required about 450 staff layoffs to accrue.
Thank you for your assistance as we attempt to navigate through the difficult waters in which the State currently finds itself.
George W. Breslauer
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Dear Colleagues:
Only this week have we learned the final disposition of many elements of the furlough plan's impact on UCB faculty. You have already received a transmission from Nathan Brostrom, which outlined the proposed plans for campus closure (December 23-January 6; March 22-26) and certain other features, and which informed you of convenient links, both UCB and UC Office of the President (UCOP), through which you can find answers to many specific questions.
I am writing to alert you to the many ways in which the furlough plan was changed dramatically in response to the faculty and staff feedback solicited by President Yudof and received as well by us. The original plan was highly standardized and provided very few exclusions and mitigations. By contrast, the final plan, altered both centrally and locally, contains the following features that were not in the original plan. I summarize here only those concerns that were most strongly and widely advocated in your feedback. More detailed issues are addressed in the links provided in Nathan Brostrom's CalMessage of August 20.
MITIGATIONS IN THE FURLOUGH PROGRAM
1. The salary reductions are now graduated into seven bands, ranging from 4% to 10%.
2. Pensions and benefits are not affected by the pay reductions.
3. Summer 9ths, from whatever sources (administrative stipends, endowed chairs, grants, etc.) are not affected by the pay reductions; they may be calculated on the 100% base salary.
4. The UCB Committee on Research will soon announce a plan for allocating to about 150 of the lowest-paid ladder faculty (those with base salaries below $85,000) summer-salary supplements equivalent to their pay reduction this year, in response to the submission of non-competitive research proposals. These faculty are disproportionately concentrated in the arts and humanities and the humanistic social sciences, including these disciplines within selected professional schools, such as Education and Social Welfare, among others.
5. All new ladder-faculty recruits who begin in residence July 1, 2009 or January 1, 2010 will be "made whole" through a partnership between deans/chairs and the EVCP that supplements their "recruitment allowance" using non-State funds for this purpose. This is in response to your arguments that ethical, legal, and reputational risks would attend the inclusion in the furlough program of these new ladder-faculty hires, who had recently been recruited in a competitive context.
6. Faculty are not required to provide university service during the mandatory and elective furlough days.
7. Some senior faculty have asked whether they may transfer a portion of the yield of their endowed chairs to colleagues in need. This may be done if the allocation is to be used for legitimate research purposes and is consistent with the terms of the chair. "Legitimate research purposes" include summer salary for a period during which the faculty member is engaged in research.
8. The following categories of employees are exempt from the furlough program:
a. all academic student employees (ASEs, which includes GSIs)
b. all post-doctoral fellows
c. all those paid 100% on grants and contracts, and
d. all those on H1-B visas.
We await word from UCOP on whether lecturers (Unit 18) will be exempt from the program. This remains a matter of discussion with the union.
9. Faculty with grants and contracts, research gifts, or endowed chair income who wish to pay themselves for furlough days during the academic year may do so, assuming that, in the case of grants and contracts, their granting agency explicitly allows the practice, and, in all cases, that they plan to conduct research on the indicated days. Other recruitment and retention funds may not be used for this purpose, as they are derived from State-funded sources (as also in #5, above).
10. For the policy on faculty and research staff whose appointment is split between grant funds and State funds, please consult the relevant UCB and UCOP websites.
11. Furlough days, both mandatory (11 days during campus closures) and elective (one's total furlough days minus 11), will be added to the normal 39 days of allowable, compensated days for earning outside income. Of course, this action and the previous one are mutually exclusive.
12. The Office of the President has decided that faculty may not take their elective furlough days on those days when they are scheduled to teach.
13. It is our intention to urge the Office of the President to eliminate or, if events necessitate, to drastically reduce this furlough program after one year, ending August 31, 2010.
WHY CALL IT A "FURLOUGH"
We acknowledge that the concept of "furlough" better fits the life circumstances of staff than of faculty, most especially those faculty who do not have external funding for research or consulting. For that reason, some faculty have expressed dismay that they may not take furlough on days they would otherwise be teaching. In the case of faculty, this program may better be thought of as a temporary pay reduction. However, had we used different rubrics for faculty and staff, it was possible that, for technical reasons, several of the above mitigations would not have been permissable. Indeed, it was for that reason that the Academic Senate's Budget Committee urged us to use the term "furloughs" rather than "pay reduction" when describing the faculty program.
FACULTY-STAFF RELATIONSHIPS
Many faculty have expressed concern about our valued staff employees who are not covered by any of the above mitigations. On the one hand, it is undeniably the case that most staff do not have the alternative sources of income that inform many of the faculty mitigations above. It is equally true that staff employees are subject to layoffs while faculty are not. On the other hand, our staff have been allocated more furlough days than faculty because they are year-round employees, and staff receive genuine vacation days during the mandatory and elective furlough days. In any case, our staff will be feeling a disproportionate share of the pain during the coming years and we ask you to please be attentive to their needs and accord them the respect, recognition, and support they deserve. We are proud of the fact that, unlike many private universities, our staff employees are not shouldering the burden of the furlough program alone. With faculty participation, this furlough
p
rogram has, in total, generated savings that would otherwise have required about 450 staff layoffs to accrue.
Thank you for your assistance as we attempt to navigate through the difficult waters in which the State currently finds itself.
George W. Breslauer
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Seed corn in peril at Berkeley
California's universities in trouble
The Economist Aug 6th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
California’s financial crisis jeopardises one of the world’s finest universities
THE best public higher education in the world is to be found at the University of California (UC). This claim is backed up by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, which provides an authoritative ranking of research universities. The UC’s campus at Berkeley ranks third behind two private universities, Harvard and Stanford. Several of the other ten UC sites, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind. Californians are justifiably proud.
It is therefore no small matter that this glory may be about to end. “We are in irreversible decline,” says Sandra Faber, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who has inadvertently become a mouthpiece for a fed-up faculty. University excellence, she says, “took decades to build. It takes a year to destroy it.”
California has been suffering serial budget crises, the latest of which was resolved last month in a rather desperate deal between the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the legislature. It contained huge cuts, including $2 billion lopped from higher education. The UC alone has lost a cumulative $813m of state funding in the last fiscal year and the current one, a cut of 20%. The second-tier California State University (Cal State), with 23 campuses the largest in the country, and the third-tier community colleges have also been clobbered.
The cuts threaten the legacy of two visionaries, Edmund “Pat” Brown, governor from 1959 to 1967, and Clark Kerr, who was in charge of the UC during those years. Kerr envisioned the state’s public universities as “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour.” In a 1960 master-plan he created the three-tiered system.
His ambition was simple. First, to educate as many young Californians as affordably as possible. The best students would go to the UC, the next lot to Cal State and the rest to community colleges with the possibility of trading up. Second, to attract academic superstars. Kerr went about this like a talent scout, and his successors have continued the practice. The UC campuses have collectively produced more Nobel laureates than any other university.
But the master-plan has been under strain for years. State spending per student in the UC system, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 40% since 1990, says Mark Yudof, the current UC president. The Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan think-tank, projects that California’s economy will face a shortfall of 1m college graduates by 2025, depressing the prosperity of the entire state. Public universities, which award 75% of all the state’s bachelor degrees, will be largely responsible.
Academic excellence is likely to be the first victim. Both the UC and Cal State are planning to send professors and staff on leave, cram more students into classrooms and offer fewer courses. Attracting and keeping academic stars, and the research dollars that usually follow them, will become much harder.
It is already happening, says Ms Faber. She recently hired three world-class assistant professors whose salaries are now at risk. Other universities have begun to get in touch with them, she says, and they will probably leave. Their best students may go with them. “We are eating our seed corn,” the professor laments.
The Economist Aug 6th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
California’s financial crisis jeopardises one of the world’s finest universities
THE best public higher education in the world is to be found at the University of California (UC). This claim is backed up by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, which provides an authoritative ranking of research universities. The UC’s campus at Berkeley ranks third behind two private universities, Harvard and Stanford. Several of the other ten UC sites, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind. Californians are justifiably proud.
It is therefore no small matter that this glory may be about to end. “We are in irreversible decline,” says Sandra Faber, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who has inadvertently become a mouthpiece for a fed-up faculty. University excellence, she says, “took decades to build. It takes a year to destroy it.”
California has been suffering serial budget crises, the latest of which was resolved last month in a rather desperate deal between the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the legislature. It contained huge cuts, including $2 billion lopped from higher education. The UC alone has lost a cumulative $813m of state funding in the last fiscal year and the current one, a cut of 20%. The second-tier California State University (Cal State), with 23 campuses the largest in the country, and the third-tier community colleges have also been clobbered.
The cuts threaten the legacy of two visionaries, Edmund “Pat” Brown, governor from 1959 to 1967, and Clark Kerr, who was in charge of the UC during those years. Kerr envisioned the state’s public universities as “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour.” In a 1960 master-plan he created the three-tiered system.
His ambition was simple. First, to educate as many young Californians as affordably as possible. The best students would go to the UC, the next lot to Cal State and the rest to community colleges with the possibility of trading up. Second, to attract academic superstars. Kerr went about this like a talent scout, and his successors have continued the practice. The UC campuses have collectively produced more Nobel laureates than any other university.
But the master-plan has been under strain for years. State spending per student in the UC system, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 40% since 1990, says Mark Yudof, the current UC president. The Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan think-tank, projects that California’s economy will face a shortfall of 1m college graduates by 2025, depressing the prosperity of the entire state. Public universities, which award 75% of all the state’s bachelor degrees, will be largely responsible.
Academic excellence is likely to be the first victim. Both the UC and Cal State are planning to send professors and staff on leave, cram more students into classrooms and offer fewer courses. Attracting and keeping academic stars, and the research dollars that usually follow them, will become much harder.
It is already happening, says Ms Faber. She recently hired three world-class assistant professors whose salaries are now at risk. Other universities have begun to get in touch with them, she says, and they will probably leave. Their best students may go with them. “We are eating our seed corn,” the professor laments.
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