Toward the end of 1996, one of our members from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences asked the DFA to get into the current debate concerning the status of the approximately 90 Cooperative Extension Specialists who are housed in academic departments throughout that College. At a meeting held on January 10, the DFA Executive Board happily voted to do so.
Readers may recall our having reported earlier that in the last couple of years these academic appointees received only the across-the-board range adjustments that went to all UC employees. They did not receive the additional “parity-catch-up” salary increases that went to the Senate faculty and other equivalent ranks (e.g., the Agronomists, Astronomers and PE Supervisors). This omission would have had an immediate adverse financial impact on several Senate faculty who also hold partial appointments in the CE Specialist Series if Chancellor Vanderhoef had not seen the idiocy of what was about to happen and made up the differences from his discretionary funds. We hear that he also took some heat from Oakland for having done so.
A brief synopsis of the recent history of Cooperative Extension may help others understand why these individuals believe that they have been greatly wronged through no fault of their own. In 1988 DANR (the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources) was reorganized and the Cooperative Extension Specialists were integrated administratively into the appropriate subject-matter departments at Davis, Riverside and Berkeley. This move was based on a recognition that CE Specialists were then being drawn from the same academic pool as Senate faculty (which had not been the case in previous decades). Initially, the CE professionals were primarily appointed in the CE Agronomist Series (APM 325), which had a salary scale linked via the APM to that of the Ag Experiment Station Agronomists.
From 1988 to 1995 work proceeded to define the “new” CE Specialist series, and in September of 1995 a new APM Section 334 was issued and everyone was unilaterally transferred to the new title series. By fiat from Oakland, the new APM Sec. 334-18-a linked the salary scale of the CE Specialists to that of the Professional Research Series. The psychological effect of this change was to distance the CE Specialists from their departmental Senate and Agronomist colleagues, thereby undoing some of what the move to the campuses was intended to accomplish in the first place. If something is not done to repair the damage, two years from now, as a result of the agreement with the State to achieve salary parity for Senate faculty, the gap between these two salary scales will range from $5,000 to $10,000, depending on rank and step.
At the request of DANR Associate Vice President Vaux, a universitywide committee chaired by Professor Emeritus Marvin Nachman, a former Senate Divisional Chair from UCR, presented a 20+ page report on the Status of Cooperative Extension Specialists. Their recommendation that “APM Sec. 334-18-1 be revised to link the CE Specialist Series to the AES Agronomist Series rather than to the Professional Research Series” was endorsed unanimously by the DFA Board. The Board felt that it was premature to take a position on the additional recommendation that this title series be afforded Equivalent Ranks status, since doing so requires action by the Regents.
The Board has notified A&ES Dean Schneeman of its support for salary parity for Cooperative Extension Specialists. It was also agreed that the DFA would hold off telling Kaiser Center about it until after the Faculty of the College has taken similar action. It would be inappropriate for the DFA to take the lead in this matter, but we think that the fact that our Board and our members come from every quarter of the campus will add to the impact of a resolution from the College’s Faculty advocating salary parity for their professional colleagues.