Davis Faculty Association

by Ben McCoy

The Academic Senate Special Committee on Transportation and Parking was appointed in June of 1999 in response to growing faculty concern regarding escalating parking fees and the increasing practice of replacing existing parking lots, which had already paid for from parking fee revenues, with expensive multi-level parking structures. The Committee was given the charge “to investigate matters related to the availability and cost of campus parking and to make recommendations to the Senate regarding appropriate strategies aimed at securing convenient and affordable campus parking for all faculty, staff and students who have need for it.” Although commissioned to present its final report to the Academic Senate in the fall of 2000, the Committee has issued an interim report, providing some details on their investigations and findings, and putting forth a collection of principles and recommendations intended for immediate consideration by the Academic Senate.

The interim report lists five recommendations:

1. A moratorium should be declared on parking fee increases through June 2001, in order to allow faculty, staff, and students the opportunity to systematically review and discuss policies and plans of the Administration regarding parking and transportation on the UCD campus.

2. Budgets for capital construction should include replacement costs for any parking facilities and spaces removed by construction, or that have to be temporarily constructed because of building projects. Continuing projects such as the campus Center for Performing Arts should be included. In that specific case, the fund raising campaign should be expanded to cover the entire project, including the parking that the Center would require as a major regional venue for artistic events. Campus employees should not be asked to pay twice for capital costs of parking facilities.

3. A transportation and parking impact analysis should be required for each capital construction project that is embodied in the five-year planning document of the campus. The Academic Senate Divisional Committee on Academic Planning and Budget Review should review each analysis.

4. Campus Administration should investigate the financing of parking facilities on the campus of CSU, Sacramento, and neighboring community colleges. A study should determine how those institutions are able to provide parking for much lower fees than are charged, or projected to be charged, on the Davis campus. The Administration should report its findings to the Academic Senate.

5. The Divisional Academic Senate should adopt legislation that fixes responsibility systematically to review campus parking problems and policies by creating a Joint Standing Committee (DDB 30) on Transportation and Parking. That Committee should include representatives from all impacted campus constituencies (faculty, Academic Federation, UCD Staff Assembly, and students), and report annually to their various constituencies including the Academic Senate Representative Assembly.

by Barry McLaughlin, who serves on the systemwide FWC and on the Faculty Association board at UCSC

Most faculty do not think about their retirement plan until late in their careers. They have heard that the University offers a good plan, but they do not know much about the details. They know that there is a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) built into the plan, but few faculty know how it is determined. In particular, few realize that the value of their benefit shrinks considerably as they get older. Presently, the UCRS Board makes certain adjustments to assure that the benefits of a given cadre (based on year of retirement) do not fall below 75% of the consumer price index (CPI) for the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas. However, there is no guarantee that the COLA will stay above 75%.

The current formula for determining the COLA for retired faculty is a complicated one. The Regents allow 100% up to 2% COL increase; nothing additional between 2% and 4%; and 75% of everything from 4% to 9%. If the COL is between 2% and 4% in a given year, the faculty receive only a 2% increase. This is what happened this past year. The COLA allowed by Social Security, which is pegged to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), was 2.4%. However, the Regents’ formula only allowed for a 2% increase.

Over the years, this leads to a considerable loss in real income for retirees. For example, look at a hypothetical situation of a faculty member retiring in 1984 with a benefit of $50,000. In 15 years that amount would have grown to $68,302 with the COLAs allowed by UC. If COLAs were the same as those given by Social Security over this period, the amount would have grown to $78,665. If the COLAs were tied to the Consumer Price Index in California over that period, the amount would have grown to $82,394.

For some years now, the Regents’ cost of living assumption has been 4%. This means that that retirees’ future compensation is estimated with a 2% increase each year (the remaining 2% falling in the 2-4% gap). The difference between 2% and 4% is considerable over a period of time. Consider a UC faculty member retiring today with a $100,000 retirement income. In 15 years this amount would have grown to $134,587 with a 2% increase annually; with a 4% annual increase the amount would have reached $180,094.

Presently the retirement fund is at an all-time high—over $32 billion. This is a staggering amount of money. In 1991 when the University was concerned about the surplus in the fund and began the VERIP programs, the amount of the fund was about $12 billion. The fund has almost double that amount now—after the VERIPs. No one has paid into the retirement fund since 1992. Indeed, active faculty will have two sources of retirement income—their benefits from the retirement fund and their required 401(a) contributions.With the enormous surplus now in the UC retirement program, it seems appropriate to discuss ways to assure that the real value of faculty retirement benefits does not suffer severe erosion. Two actions seem especially worth considering: (1) eliminating the 2%-4% gap, and (2) providing retired faculty with a guarantee that their income will not fall to less than 85% of the cost of living in California.

Active and retired faculty should be concerned about the Regent’s conservatism regarding the retirement fund in the light of future economic realities. It is true that the University of California has a very good retirement program. The benefits exceed those of many other programs. Most retired faculty are happy with the program. However, current and future retirees can expect to live longer than their predecessors—with increasing health care costs. As matters stand presently, they can expect to see a severe decline in the real value of their income relative to the cost of living in California.

by Charles Nash

The following is a brief update regarding the status of AB 1773, legislation which the UC and CSU Faculty Associations are co-sponsoring. The bill attempts to delineate the role played by the faculty in controlling the subsequent use of original material presented in their lectures, and in particular preventing the posting of class notes on off-campus commercial web sites. This issue strikes home because Versity.com lists some 40 UCD courses in their recent ad in the California Aggie. In at least several cases that we know of, the faculty members whose courses have been so posted on the Web did not know of it and, furthermore, they object to such posting. The notes are inaccurate and potentially damaging to the faculty members’ reputations.

The Faculty Associations and the Administrations of UC and CSU have very different views about the content—and indeed the very existence of such legislation. The FAs believe that case law has established that Section 980 of the California Civil Code gives faculty members an exclusive ownership of original material presented in their lectures. The University Administrations have adamantly opposed the inclusion of any language in the proposed legislation that would give the faculty such ownership either overtly or by implication. In testimony before the Assembly Judiciary Committee the Chair of the UC Systemwide Academic Council opposed the very existence of legislation dealing with disposition of lecture materials, arguing that this subject would better be dealt with via “shared governance.”

The members of the Council of UC Faculty Associations believe otherwise. The 1969 California Appellate Court decision which confirmed that a faculty member could (and did successfully) sue a commercial note-taking firm for damages arising from the sale of unauthorized course notes contains the caveat: “We are…convinced that in the absence of (contrary) evidence the teacher, rather than university, owns the common-law copyright to his lectures.” We see a real possibility that “shared governance,” which often implies that each side gives a little, could result in “contrary evidence” which would afford the university intellectual property rights which we believe it does not currently have.

The faculty ownership of classroom utterances has been clearly recognized in both English and American law since Abernethy v. Hutchinson in 1825, and we have no wish to allow that situation to change so early in the 21st century. The UC and CSU Faculty Associations commissioned an independent intellectual property practitioner to prepare a White Paper on the current status of State and Federal Copyright laws as they pertain to classroom lectures. The interested reader can find this document on the DFA website on the Current Activities page. Copies of it have also been sent to all the members of the new UC Standing Committee on Copyright, which had its first meeting on May 3.

The fate of our proposed legislation (AB 1773) is by no means certain. Indeed, the text has been changing virtually on a daily basis in an attempt by ourselves and the bill’s author, Assemblymember Gloria Romero (herself a CSU Professor of Psychology), to find compromise language that would induce UC and CSU to rescind their present formal opposition to the bill in question. Whether it succeeds or fails, our hope is that the introduction of AB 1773 may have raised the consciousness and attracted the interest of enough faculty members across the system to insure that any policies stemming from “shared governance” will not jeopardize the existing rights of the faculties in California’s public post-secondary institutions.

UC faculty do not receive retirement credit for supplementary work paid out of grants or for summer school teaching. Medical school faculty likewise receive retirement credit for only a portion of their salary. Here is the background on this problem. The UC retirement plan is a Defined Benefit Plan (DBP). That means that at retirement, each faculty member will receive a defined monthly amount based on years of service (service credit), average of the highest three years of compensation (HAPC), and age at retirement (age factor). Employer and employee contributions each month have built up a substantial pool of funds for these monthly disbursements. Employee contributions are automatically deducted from pretax wages at roughly the rate of 2% to 4% less $19 a month for faculty with Social Security and 3% for those without.

Recently, the UCRP pool of funds has been large enough to meet payment obligations without receiving any employee or employer contributions. For good reason, UCRP management decided not to stop employee contributions but to continue the monthly deductions. The pretax amount deducted each month is defined according to the level of employee compensation, and thus is considered a Defined Contribution Plan (DCP). If employee contributions to the UCR pool of funds would be required again in the future, then it would be simple to stop the DCP contributions and resume the UCRP contributions without affecting the amount in the monthly paycheck. At retirement, the amount an employee withdraws is based on how the employee has invested these funds and not on a predetermined formula. The employee can direct DCP funds into any of the UC managed investment funds, such as Money Market, Equity, or Fidelity. If the employee does not specify, the monthly DCP employee contributions are invested in UC-managed Savings.

The current controversy is the level of employer and employee contributions to DCP accounts for summer teaching and funded summer research salaries. The University has come under pressure to include summer teaching salary and funded summer research in retirement compensation. So far, the administration has been reluctant to do so because those amounts may vary each year. The reason is that faculty could increase the highest three years of covered compensation by teaching summer school or working on funded summer research for three consecutive years near the end of employment. This would have a major impact on the actuarial levels required for the UCRP pool of funds to meet obligations.

Instead, the University is considering making a contribution to an employee’s DCP account. To get this employer contribution, the employee would be asked to make a matching contribution on the eligible amount for summer teaching salary or summer funded research. The university has suggested the rate of 7%, with 3.5% from the University and 3.5% from the faculty member. The Faculty Associations have argued for a higher level, 14%, corresponding to University contributions on covered compensation to the UCRP pool. Of this 14%, we believe the employer portion should be 10% and the employee 4%. Recently the Faculty Associations wrote a letter (please see below) to President Atkinson and circulated it widely throughout systemwide Senate committees to explain why the higher contribution level is more equitable.

Feb. 14, 2000

Dear President Atkinson:

I am writing to you on behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, which are, by far, the largest independent, dues supported organizations representing the faculty at the campuses of the University of California. Our members have urged us– and we urge you– to support an important policy change in the University of California retirement plan. The Council would like to address the issue of level of employer and employee contributions to DCP accounts. We believe the University should make a comparable contribution to retirement for summer salaries and funded summer research as it does for regular gross earnings. The normal cost of the UCRP Defined Benefit Plan is currently about 14% of salary. Using this amount as the guideline, the employer should contribute 10% of summer teaching salaries or funded summer research to employee DCP accounts and the employee 4%. Moreover, we urge that this change in policy take place as soon as possible, preferably at the beginning of fiscal 2001.

The FA’s understand that there has been discussion of a 7% contribution level, to be divided between employer at 3.5% and employee at 3.5%, based on the current contribution rate used for DC Plan temporary and part-time employees. We believe that the proper contribution comparison is to full-time faculty. For example, at the Comparison 8 institutions that offer only a Defined Contribution Plan (DCP), Harvard, University of Michigan, and Stanford, all of them include summer school or summer research salary in their benefit formula. At Harvard, there are no employee contributions and the employer contributes 10% up to the Social Security wage base and 15% of salary over that level for faculty aged 40 or over. At Princeton, the employer contribution is 9.3% up to the SS wage base and 15% over on all salary paid by or through the University. The lowest level of employer contributions at Stanford is 5%, with escalating amounts up to 10% for increased employee contributions. At the University of Michigan, a large public university system much like UC, the employer contribution is 10% of eligible gross salary, which includes summer teaching and funded summer research.

The Faculty Associations believe that 10% would also be a fair level of contribution for the University of California, with the employee contributing 4% into the DCP accounts. Such a policy would bring the University of California in line with the policies at the Comparison 8 and with other major universities. It would preserve the same level of contribution for summer teaching salary and funded research as it does for the regular academic year. This policy would be welcome by faculty in all disciplines who regularly teach summer school or engage in funded summer research. Given the high level of competition for faculty in all fields, this change in policy would help make the University of California retirement benefits more attractive in faculty recruitment and retention.

Sincerely,
Mary Ann Mason President, UC Faculty Associations

SCAPP Reminder: Recently, the Academic Senate appointed a special committee to study faculty pay and promotion practices. The committee has been asked to finish their tasks and submit a final report by May 1. We have heard from the Committee that they are greatly concerned that they may not receive sufficient input from faculty. We are reminding DFA members that the Special Committee has established an e-mail address (SCAPP@geology.ucdavis.edu) to which members of the Academic Senate may address their concerns and comments; all communication will be confidential. The committee has organized its work by forming three sub-committees to address: (1) Comparison of salary data; (2) Campus Personnel Policies, Procedures, and Practices; (3) Inter campus Comparison of Personnel Policies, Procedures and Practices. We also encourage you to contact members of the Special Committee with information relative to their task. The committee members are: Howard Day (Geology), Anna Marie Busse Berger (Music), Colin Cameron (Economics), Robert Hansen (Vet. Med. Mole. Sci.), Ines Hernandez-Avila (Native Am. Studies), Martin Privalsky (Microbiology), John Robbins (Medicine, Med. Sch.), Robert Rucker (Nutrition), and Edward Schroeder (Civil & Env. Engr.). The DFA has commented on the issue in email bulletins that are provided on our web site http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~dfamhays/

DFA Election: According to the bylaws of the DFA, it is time to appoint a nominating committee and fill vacancies on the DFA board. Maintaining strong leadership is essential to DFA success in pursuing faculty interests. Please contact Myrna Hays by return email to nominate yourself or a colleague to either serve on the nominating committee or on the DFA board. We need your help.

Who Are the DFA Members? As we hope you know, the DFA board is actively seeking to recruit new members in order to strengthen our base of support. Often, as we talk with faculty to invite them to join the DFA, they ask who on the campus currently are members. In past DFA newsletters we have often listed the DFA membership. We plan to provide such a membership list on our web site. We would like to include your name and hope you agree that this will be useful; if you disagree, please let us know. And we urge you to actively seek new members to recruit. The new web site is a good place to start by informing potential members of DFA activities.