Keep Calm and Study On

If Yudof thinks of us as corpses, Katehi wants to see us as cows. "Keep calm and study on."

(via fb)

Behind Closed Doors, UC Regents Again Vote to Raise Admin Salaries

From the Bay Citizen:

Regents of the University of California, meeting for the first time since campus police used pepper spray and riot batons to disperse student protests at Berkeley and Davis, listened to nearly three hours of public complaints about those incidents and tuition increases before chanting protesters disrupted the meeting and drove them from the room.

The Regents then reconvened in a smaller room down the hall from the protesters, where they voted to raise the salaries of nearly a dozen university administrators and lawyers by as much as 21.9 percent.

[...]

The regents also approved salary raises for 10 administrators and managers, including a 9.9 percent increase for Meredith Michaels, vice chancellor of planning and budget at UC Irvine, whose annual salary will increase to $247,275 from $225,000.

Six campus attorneys also received salary increases. The largest increase, 21.9 percent, went to Steven A. Drown, chief campus counsel and associate general counsel at UC Davis. His yearly salary will rise to $250,000 from $205,045.

(pic via Daily Cal)

Senior Administrators Now Officially Outnumber Faculty at the UC

It's official -- the administration continues to grow as faculty and workers continue to shrink. In this context, it's worth noting once again that administrators are the only ones getting substantial raises these days (the Daily Cal has the enemies list). We have to remember that austerity doesn't only mean cutbacks and layoffs -- it also corresponds to hirings and bonuses.

Here's the full report from Keep California's Promise:

In November of 2009, KeepCaliforniasPromise.org posted a report by Richard Evans titled “Soon every faculty member will have a personal senior manager” which pointed out that the number of managers at UC was growing far faster than the ranks of the faculty and that, if the trend continued, it would not be long before there were more senior managers than ladder rank faculty. Richard just sent me an e-mail pointing out that data through April of 2011 was out.

I wondered if the data would show how the “Working Smarter Initiative” and much talked about cuts of $80 million to the UC Office of the President, had combined with promises to first and foremost “preserve excellence in instruction, research and public service… which it cannot do without continuing to attract and retain top-flight faculty” (see, http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/25580) to reverse that trend.

Well, it turns out faculty ranks have declined by 2.3 percent since the 2009 post, at a time when student enrollment increased by 3.6 percent. (I would hope the UC administration wouldn’t try to spin a continuing erosion of a major measure of academic quality such as the student faculty ratio as increased efficiency.)

But we all know the budget cuts have been tough. Even an administration striving to preserve the education and research missions of the University by directing as many of the cuts as possible at administrative overhead might have to make painful cuts to the employees responsible for education and research in such an environment. The cuts to senior administrators must be even steeper, right? At least as steep?

Somehow the ranks of managers have continued to grow right through this difficult period – up 4.2% between April, 2009 and April, 2011. In fact, the dismal prediction of our 2009 post has now come to pass: UC now has more senior managers (8,822 FTE) than ladder rank faculty (8,669 FTE).

Fliers Taken Down By Admin & UCPD

Apparently UCPD & the Administration are once again busy taking down fliers advertising the Austerity Townhall and Thursday Day of Action.

If anyone sees this happening, well, those are your tuition dollars and taxes hard at work.

In the meantime, feel free to put up fliers yourselves.

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Austerity Townhall: What It Is & How To Fight It
September 20, 6 pm, Wheeler Hall, Room 315



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September 22nd Day of Action, Student, Staff, and Faculty Rally at Noon

Quarter sheet.




One Sheet