A Series of Tubes

Last week the UC board of Regents increased student fees by 32%. At UCSC there was an initial protest on Wednesday, and an Occupation of the Kresge town hall building which moved to Kerr hall (an administrative building)  on Friday. The Occupation at Kerr hall was broken up on Sunday. The reason that there are protests is in part due to the lack of change through “proper” channels.  I’d like to take the time to highlight the authority structure of the UC system.  After this, I will solve the future 2010/11 budget crisis.  First, the about page of the Academic Senate:

The UCSC Academic Senate operates as a legislative body and as a system of committees run by and for the faculty. The University of California has a dual-track system of authority and responsibility which presumes that faculty are best qualified to chart the University’s educational course, while the administrators are most competent to direct its finances and organization. In practice, these domains overlap and are interdependent. To function successfully, faculty and administrators depend on a high level of consultation, trust, mutual respect and a tradition of collegial collaboration.

So right from the get go there is a problem.  If you want to get something done through proper and official channels, which of this dual-track authority and responsibility tree do you navigate to get to a solution.  Do you attempt to take up your cause and petition the Academic Senate, or do you go to the Administration?  Obviously the Senate is the preferred authority track for a student.  It contains professors who see the effects of budget cuts in their day to day work and are more connected to the decisions being made.  However the description above suggest that if your problem is budget related, those decisions fall mostly under “finances” and would thus be an administrative decision.  To look at how this system works in practice, and not in theory, it is helpful to look at the minutes from the Academic Senate.

From time to time, budget decisions come up in Academic senate meetings (these meetings are held in Kerr hall which is the building that was occupied).  Below is a quote from the minutes between a member of the Senate and the EVC, EVC stands for Executive Vice Chancellor and is a member of the Administrative arm of the dual track authority system:

From the February Minutes:
Professor Kevin Karplus, Biomolecular Engineering, asked why, given the budget situation, is the campus paying for a security guard in an inactive parking lot. The EVC responded that he assumed Professor Karplus is talking about the future site of the biomedical building and the former site of the tree sit and the EVC does not want the fence torn down or any more destruction at the site. Professor Karplus asked if replacing a fence would cost less than security guards. The EVC said he will take that into consideration.

This request, made in February, seems reasonable.  Why pay for a more expensive guard if repairing a fence is cheaper.  Karplus, seeing wasted funds, tells those in charge of finances to quit wasting money.  I’ve seen the guard in question (actually I’ve seen 2 guards, possibly during a change in shift). I know that there was a private security guard at the construction site last month (I’ll check again next time I go by the site).  At a minimum there have been private security guards, protecting a fenced in parking lot from February till at least last month, if not to this day.  What the EVC meant when he said he would take Kevin Karplus’ comments into consideration is that he hoped that nobody would look into it when he promptly ignored this concern.  This is a minor budget issue.  More serious budget concerns were brought up in May.  Please note that Chancellors fall under the administrative arm:

From the May Minutes:
Professor Onuttom Narayan, Physics, provided a chart showing the that (sic.) at UCSC the growth in faculty has slightly lagged behind that of students; that there has been essentially no growth in clerical staff, and rising above them all is the increase in senior management group (SMG) and management and service professionals (MSP). The difference between the growth rate of the curves is six percent. Each data set is normalized to one at its lowest point, and plotted on a log scale. After explaining the chart Professor Narayan asked the chancellor to explain this apparent increase in amount of senior management on campus, and why, at a time of furloughs, salary reductions, laying off lecturers and staff, we should ignore such a number.

Chancellor Blumenthal responded that he thinks the chart raises a good point, and one of the things he and the EVC are doing is trying to reduce the costs of the administration.

He does think that most of the growth is in MSP, and not senior management. Chancellor Blumenthal said that he is looking at ways to consolidate the positions within senior management and MSPs on this campus. A number of positions over the last year have remained unfilled at the senior level. If you look at current numbers it will be less.

Professor Narayan said the information came from UCOP data, which is available on the UCOP web site, and the two divisions (senior management and MSP) are listed together. Professor Narayan has no idea how to disentangle them, but would agree that probably the most growth has been in MSP.

EVC Kliger said the data should be looked at in more detail. He does not know whether this means a lot of clerical people were reclassified because of change in job duties, and the clerical and MSP people may need to be added together to make sense of the chart. The EVC also said there has been a huge increase in the reporting that the campus has to do; that brings up compliance issues, and that takes many people to get it done. The EVC added that if people look at the budget reductions web site, they will see that the biggest reduction in any unit on campus over the last two years has been in the EVC’s office, and that has resulted in major changes in the way the campus does business. The EVC thinks it is important to note that the administration is leading from the top, and not just assuming that all the cuts need to be made at the lowest level.

The response to evidence that UCSC is not reducing its administration at the same rate as instruction and staff is similar to the earlier case of the security guard.  Administrative officials promise to look into it, but I’m guessing it’s not high on their priority list.  It looks like the administration uses the same tactics when dealing with the Academic Senate as were used with the treesit and GSC occupation: wait it out, hope that memories fade, and completely ignore concerns.  I think the physics professor had a different graph, but the one below shows the same problem (from here:http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?p=469):

The trend above shows that very soon, for every professor in the UC system there will be 1 manager of the UC.  The quote from the head of the Academic Senate below is quite revealing (found here:http://senate.ucsc.edu/meetings/09Oct19/ChairLetter.pdf):

the ill-considered implementation of furloughs, joins two extraordinary challenges to UC’s historic strength – the unacceptable decline in public financial support and the deterioration of a strong faculty voice in governance. Both must be restored.

That statement shows that the Academic Senate, which is supposed to have a “dual-track system of authority and responsibility”, is really subordinate to the administration.  The board of regents of the UC are appointed to 12 year terms and these appointees in turn appoint others (the president, the general counsel, treasurer, chief compliance and audit officer and secretary).  All of this is depressing so I will move on to the positive.  The superhuman blogger that I am, I will now SOLVE THE UC BUDGET CRISIS OF 2010/11.

Most of the solutions to this year’s budget problems at the UC were solved with 1 year band aids.  What that means is many of the “solutions” to the budget are setting things up for more cuts and fee hikes next year.  I have the solution!  Unfortunately solving the future budget crisis requires one to actually look at the UC budgets, which can be found here:

http://budget.ucop.edu/pubs.html

On pages 104 to 106 of the 10/11 UC system’s budget is the section on Institutional Support, which is where the administration is paid.  You cannot read this section without running into the greatly publicized cost savings of $62.2 million realized by firing about 631 people at the office of the president (UCOP).  That means that every person fired was costing the UC system roughly $100,000 a year.  This might sound bad, but the UCOP still has a budget of $293.3 million with 1,439 employees with an average cost of $203,822 per year per employee.  So it looks like the UCOP was actually cutting employees from the bottom.  One would expect that with a $62.2 million dollar reduction in the UCOP from academic years 07/08 to 09/10, the costs for institutional support, which funds the total administration, should have gone down.  Here is what happened in each of those years budgets (numbers are in millions of dollars and are found on some of the last pages of the budget):

Academic Year      IS Expenditures    next years projected Expenditures
07/08               $651.421                     $666.303
08/09               $725.329                     $744.846
09/10               $721.806                     $775.904

As is evident, in the 3 years when this great leap of savings occurred, Institutional Support increased its budget by 10.8%.  The budget also plans for administrative spending to increase next year.   I don’t care if individual departments within the Institutional support mechanism are able to reduce their budget, when the whole block as a whole grows, and Institutional Support is not involved in instruction or research you have to ask questions.  The UCOP will have a reduced budget, if those employees are moved to a different department under Instructional Support.  I’m not saying that is what happened, but where the hell are the budget reductions?  If they weren’t rehired under Administrative Support then while the UCOP reduced their spending by $62 million, Instructional Support ballooned in size by  $132.585 million.

Of course there are other fun parts of the UC budget.  I will highlight my favorite: Provisions for Allocation.  Now what the hell is that?  According to the 2010/11 budget on page 145:

“Provisions for allocation serve as a temporary repository for certain funds until final allocation decisions are made.  For instance, funds allocated for fixed cost increases, such as salary adjustments, employee benefit increases, and price increases, are held in provision accounts pending final allocation.”

Awesome!  It’s a fund where temporary salary increase and bonuses can sit without being part of Institutional Support.  Bonuses benefiting those who messed up are all the rage on wall street, now they can come to a public university near you!  The explanation of how the funds were spent in this section is non-existent.  There is no breakdown whatsoever of how this pile of money is spent.  If there was any place where shady and corrupt spending is happening in the UC budget, this is the place.  And by year (again with the dollar in millions):

Academic year    Provisions for allocation      projected Next year
08/09                     99.940                      95.418
09/10                     90.993                     101.192
10/11                    120.301                     592.142

Yes you read that right, next year the administration is increasing its fund for salary adjustments, and employee benefits by over $400 million.  You just have to look at the minutes from a random UC regents meeting (see the September minutes here) on compensation to know that the UC isn’t hiring janitors with that money.  The administration also uses the private HR firm, Mercer, to tell them what a reasonable salary is, instead of peer reviewed research (a problem looked into in this article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/14/MNGEKIRLKU1.DTL).  I can’t find a single person in the Regent’s meeting minutes with a salary under $100,000.

This all leads to a presentation made to the Regents on the 18th where a projected budget gap of $607.5 million will occur next year.  What this will mean is that using the budget crisis as an excuse, students and faculty should expect another round of cuts and fee increases next year.  A combination of reducing the Provisions for allocation to 08/09 levels and Institutional support to 08/09 levels will result in savings of $616.685 million.  Future budget crisis solved with over $10 million to spare.