A committee of University of California regents approved a plan today that will force most of UC’s 180,000 employees to take unpaid leave and pay cuts as part of a plan to address cuts in state funding. The regents’ finance committee voted for the emergency budget plan to close a $813 million budget shortfall. The full board is expected to approve the committee’s decision Thursday.
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by Laurel Rosenhall , The Sacramento Bee.
Representing at least 323 UC scientists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences, UCSC astronomy chair Sandra Faber and junior colleague Mark Krumholz led a charge to urge the Regents to approve a salary-reduction plan for one year only. If the cuts of 4-10 percent – the highest percentage assigned to those earning more than $240,000 annually – continues into future years, the two scientists said student interest in UC will drop significantly if prominent young faculty members accept offers from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other top league universities. "This is an irrevocable tipping point," Faber said at a press briefing, where she was flanked by a dozen other faculty members from UC Berkeley and elsewhere. "If the proposed cuts in the president’s plan are maintained for more than one year, UC as we know it will start to collapse," Faber said. "Now is the time to invest more in UC, not less. It’s like eating your seed corn."
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by J.M. Brown, The San Jose Mercury News.
For the last generation, campaign after campaign has cut back on government and rationed these opportunities. While most state government expenditures have been flat when corrected for population growth, higher education has been cut and cut. The University of California, billed as the greatest public research university in the world, has lost 50 percent of its per-student state funding since 1990, while still being expected to keep California at the top of the world’s knowledge economy… What do such cuts mean? All other things being equal, 25 percent cuts mean 25 percent fewer courses for more students or a 25 percent increase in the size of courses that remain. Students will learn 25 percent less, and take 25 percent longer to graduate. Because 25 percent of four years is one year, college will now only deliver three years of learning in four more costly years.
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by Christopher Newfield and Stanton Glantz, The San Francisco Chronicle.
One persistent suggestion is that we dip into "rainy day" reserve funds scattered throughout the system’s 10 campuses. Surely, proponents argue, this is a rainy day. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. A large portion of these reserves, in fact, were created for specific academic and research initiatives. Other funds in this category function as endowments dedicated to specific uses, which cannot be altered. Finally, some funds have been set aside to support university operations and repay principal and interests on bonds. There’s also the question of what lies ahead. If state funding continues to decline and federal stimulus dollars dry up, we will face an even worse scenario in fiscal year 2010-11.
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by Russell S. Gould and Mark Yudof, The San Francisco Chronicle.
It’s an uprising of UC employees – joined on paper by more than 1,000 UC professors, scientists, doctors and faculty – who question why the well-heeled, $19 billion university system can’t backfill $813 million in cuts from the state without ordering top-to-bottom pay cuts through unpaid time off… In their letter, the professors say the regents have a "moral obligation to protect this institution from the tyranny of the minority" instead of making cuts. Earlier this week, hundreds of UC scientists and doctors sent similar letters to the regents warning of the devastating impact of the cuts.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
There’s blood in the water, and Vicki Ruiz knows everyone can smell it. "The privates have come calling," says Ruiz, dean of the University of California at Irvine’s School of Humanities. "I’ve lost very valued faculty members to Yale, to Northwestern, to Penn, to Pomona, to Scripps…" …Like many in the system, Nosek [vice chancellor for administration at California’s Davis campus] sees the university’s fiscal problems rooted in the state’s political problems. To appease lawmakers, Nosek says the university has cut deals that weren’t in its ultimate best interest. "I certainly believe we have been part of the problem as far as leadership in higher education at UC, because we have allowed the political process to have too much influence on what we do in operating the university," Nosek said.
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by Jack Stripling, Inside Higher Ed.
About 10 University of California employees demonstrated outside the home of UC President Mark Yudof, protesting his proposed budget cuts at the 10-campus system. The employees on Sunday said they disagreed with the proposed furloughs that would affect roughly 80 percent of the system’s 180,000 employees.
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by AP, The San Jose Mercury News.
The UCSF Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to approve a resolution denouncing salary cuts for faculty and staff at UC’s 10 campuses. Faculty members at UCSF want each campus to have the authority to deal with the budget crisis in its own manner. They said that such salary cuts at UCSF’s medical center, which includes its graduate school, teaching hospital, and research laboratories, could trigger a significant exodus of talented faculty members, the loss of lucrative federal research grants, and a reduction of staff hours that could adversely affect patient care. The Academic Senate at UC San Diego sent a similar letter to Yudof, requesting "local budgetary autonomy" to decide how to make its own budget cuts. UC San Diego, the letter said, "will be irreparably harmed" by cutting salaries across the board or implementing other options proposed by the UC president.
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by Jim Doyle, The San Francisco Chronicle.
The cost to attend California State University this fall could rise by 30 percent compared with the year just ended, an increase experts said could drive students out of school… University leaders hope to absorb much of their budget cuts through furloughs. They say salaries make up more than 85 percent of CSU’s budget, so they can’t cut their budget significantly without reducing wages. On Wednesday, the CSU faculty union – representing 23,000 professors, librarians and coaches – announced that it would put the furlough proposal to a vote of its members. Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, put out a statement saying, "After a great deal of back and forth, it is now clear that the CSU Chancellor has rejected CFA’s demands that his furlough proposal include a proportionate reduction in the faculty’s workload."
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by Laurel Rosenhall , The Sacramento Bee.
More than 300 of the nation’s most noted scientists from all 10 University of California campuses have warned Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that proposed cuts in the UC budget would endanger the future of science and technology in California and threaten the state’s economy.
"Further cuts in the magnitude being contemplated in the latest round of budget proposals would undermine prospects for economic recovery and damage California’s competitiveness for decades," the scientists said in a letter that was also circulated to 25 of the Legislature’s most influential leaders.
The letter pointed out that California’s productivity growth produced by technological innovation between 2002 and 2o11 – much of it stimulated by the achievements of UC scientists in medical and physical research – has been estimated at $5.2 billion and would create 100,000 new jobs.
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by David Perlman, The San Francisco Chronicle.