Davis Faculty Association

The Daily Californian has an article today by Travis Donselman titled “Salaries Responsible for Budget Gap”

The full article is at: http://www.dailycal.org/printable.php?id=109408

An excerpt follows:

The amount of the University budget gap is half of the $1 billion or so the University doles out to its 3,650 employees who earn $200,000 a year or more. To put this in perspective, that means for each UC campus 365 people earn more than 96 percent of Californians. It also means that the “severe financial challenges,” as the UC Office of the President likes to call its budget problems, are as much a product of Oakland as Sacramento.

Arguments about being competitive are as bankrupt as the UC professes to be. By selectivity, the UC Riverside’s business school ranks below San Diego State’s and just above Cal State San Bernardino’s. Yet the $370,000 salary of the UCR business school dean is more than what the president of either campus makes. It is hundreds of thousands more than what these schools’ business deans make.

Article excerpt:

Faculty members and administrators in Texas are speaking out about a recent state law that requires them to post specific, detailed information about their classroom assignments, curricula vitae, department budgets, and the results of student evaluations.

A conservative group whose administrators have close ties to Gov. Rick Perry lobbied for the law, saying it offers important “consumer protection.” Opponents counter that it has created an expensive and time-consuming burden and offers little benefit to the public.

Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers can read the full article at:

http://chronicle.com/article/Texas-Law-Requires-Professors/65450/

A DFA member came across these news items about efforts by Erskine Bowles at UNC to rein in administrative bloat. Our member thought that our Chancellor might also be interested in this issue so we are forwarding the email to Chancellor Katehi for her information.

The stories and background information can be found at

http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/5904760/

http://www.northcarolina.edu/president/index.htm

http://www.unc.edu/chan/chancellors/thorp_holden/090729-budgetoped.php

On Saturday, 17 April, the Sacramento Bee published an Op Ed piece by a UC Santa Barbara freshman who essentially accused UC faculty of being greedy hypocrites. http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/17/2685113/uc-faculty-could-find-a-lesson.html Among other things, Mr. Schneider wrote that:

“Though the path to full professorship requires perseverance, institutional savvy and a workaholic nature, what the survivors of this arduous journey most eagerly pursue is the guaranteed six-figure income at the end of it.”

“The relative wealth and security of academics make them bad rebels. Amid a statewide deficit of nearly $40 billion, an unemployment rate of 12.6 percent and unprecedented cuts to social services, the angry opposition by the UC faculty to a 9 percent pay cut is uninspiring. In particular, the call for solidarity with students and low-wage workers by these same professors is self-indulgent at best, and insulting at worst.”

“The faculty workers could make their opposition to the budget cuts clear, while showing willingness to bear their brunt. A tenured professor making $150,000 a year could preserve the salaries of 10 janitors making $30,000 per year, or save four students from skyrocketing fees by accepting a modest pay cut. The latter have mortgaged their future to student loans; the former, by some calculations, don’t even bring in a living wage.”

The following response was sent to the Bee – so far without any indication of publication:

Nathanael Schneider (Op Ed 4/18/10) evinces sympathy for the plight of the most lowly paid staff at the University of California. The faculty of the University share his concern for the well-being of the staff during this budget crisis. It is very disturbing to witness the impact of the budget cuts on the staff. He suggests that “stratospheric” faculty salaries might be re-directed toward supporting our staff colleagues. He is probably not aware that the current furlough scheme at UC, which in practice is simply a salary reduction for the same work load, was graduated so as to affect the highest salary bands significantly more than the lowest paid employees.  The faculty supported this graduated furlough to protect our lower paid colleagues. Mr. Schneider quotes a salary of $150,000 per year. The facts indicate typical salaries at UC are much less. After a Bachelors degree, followed by 4 to 5 years of PhD study and research, followed in many cases by another 2 to 5 years of post-doctoral apprenticeship (earning currently about $40,000 per year), a new Assistant Professor can start their career at about $56,000 per year with a total of 10 to 15 years of training. After approximately 12 years of normal progress to a Full Professor, they reach about $78,000 per year and finally the quoted $150,000 after another 27 years of normal progress. The faculty of the University did not enter their profession for the remuneration – they became professors because of their love of learning. The Bee should attempt to publish better informed and less misleading discussions of the parlous state of UC.

Chris Newfield is a Professor at UCSB. He is a former Chair of the UC
systemwide Planning and Budget Committee and he has been active in the
Council of UC FA’s. He is very knowledgeable about the University. I
have worked with him through CUCFA and have respect for his mastery of
the facts about UC and his commitment to public higher education. I
recommend that you consider attending his talk – it should be very
informative:

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Christopher Newfield
Professor, English, UC Santa Barbara
“The End of the Public University‐‐and the Beginning of the Next”
Thursday, May 6, 2010
3:00‐5:00pm
King Lounge, Memorial Union

History is replete with nations that declined because their leaders gradually undermined their own best institutions. The U.S. now appears to be doing this to its exemplary higher education system. The lecture will look at the contradictions within the American Funding Model for higher education, discuss two major symptoms ‐ reduced affordability for students and impoverished social and cultural disciplines ‐ and suggest how the decline of public higher ed can be reversed.

Christopher Newfield teaches American Studies in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research focuses on higher education history, funding, and policy, culture and innovation, and the relation between culture and economics. Recent articles have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Le Monde Diplomatique, La Revnue Internationale des Livres et des Ideés, Radikal (Turkey), Social Text, Critical Inquiry, and South Atlantic Quarterly, and include “Ending the Budget Wars: Funding the Humanities during a Crisis in Higher Education,” “Public Universities at Risk: 7 Damaging Myths,” “Science and Social Welfare,” “L’Université et la revanche des ‘élites’ aux États‐Unis,” “Why Public is Losing to Private in American Research,” and “Can American Studies Do Economics?” He is the author of The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880‐1980 (Duke University Press, 2003), and Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008), chairs the Innovation Group at the NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society, runs a blog on the current crisis in higher education, Rethinking the University, and is working on a book called Lower Education: What to do about our Downsized Future.

Cultural Studies Graduate Group Spring 2010 Colloquium Series

Co‐sponsors: American Studies; Art History; Center for History, Society, and Culture; Consortium for Women and Research; Davis Humanities Institute; English; History.