U.C. Irvine Humanities Lecturer Keith Danner gave an idea of the cuts in his division alone. "On July 1, 2008 we had 80 full time support staff. On July 1, 2009, we had 67 full time staff and with another 26 layoffs coming we will have 41 staff or a 50% cut. These are the people that make departments run." There are rumblings among faculty and staff that the university is top heavy with administrators often paid more than $100,000. Yet while critical of the U.C. administration for not being more transparent in its approach to budgeting and for paying football coaches more than Nobel Prize winners, the protesters know the real problem lies in Sacramento. "It’s not just an economic crisis," says Shannon Steen, a U.C. Berkeley professor who helped form Save the University to protest cuts to the budget, "it’s really a political crisis around the two-thirds rule in the legislature that holds the state hostage to a minority of legislators who are not doing what the people of California want."

Read full article [here].
by Kevin O'Leary, Time Magazine.

Posted: September 25th, 2009, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.