This morning President Michael Drake outlined his priorities for tackling the $2 billion budget deficit UC faces due to the pandemic. Chancellor Christ has now also promised to outline her plans for our campus next week. Here is the Berkeley Faculty Association’s assessment of where we are now and what is to be done.
Where are we now?
As COVID cases surge across the state and nation, it is worth pausing to acknowledge what an excellent job those in California Hall have done in handling the pandemic and protecting the health and safety of campus employees and students. The chaos on other campuses has been alarming and sobering.
Sadly, we know that at one level the cost of this sensible approach will be a budget deficit of $340m; increased expenditure on necessary public health measures has been compounded by reduced revenues from tuition, residential services, and commercial activities.
Yet, at another level, this deficit is also the product of a much longer process of privatization, which has made the campus increasingly dependent upon revenue-generating enterprises. With state funding per student diminishing by 50% over the past 20 years, just as the student body has become racially more diverse, the inhabitants of California Hall have aggressively sought new sources of income–from tuition hikes, out-of-state and international students, philanthropic gifts, and commercial income. It is precisely these revenue streams that have disappeared with COVID. In the Age of COVID, privatization has been a bad bet.
If in the Age of COVID private revenue seems an unlikely way of reducing the deficit, we also know that there is nothing left to cut. In the past decade, since the Great Recession, the campus has been cut to the bone: faculty numbers have flat-lined as a third of teaching is now conducted by lecturers, many of them with no job security, earning subsistence wages; support staff have shrunk as many services have been outsourced, and our deferred benefits (like pensions and healthcare), that once made good the 30% lower salaries than we earn in comparison to private rivals like Stanford, have been steadily degraded.
What can be done?
We have urged from the beginning that if cuts come, they should start at the top, be progressive, and protect the academic mission of the university.
- In contrast to faculty, the numbers of management staff have mushroomed five-fold over the past two decades, as have their salaries. If jobs have to be lost, they should be from higher-paid management positions, not from the poorly-paid ranks of lecturers or auxiliary staff. It is to their credit that top management in California Hall volunteered to take a 10% salary cut, but this can go further. A 25% cut of the Chancellor’s salary of $532k would sustain 5 lecturers in her former English department.
- Athletics has long been a financial drain on the campus and even the most austerity-minded Chancellors have never tackled that problem. It is now surely time to put academics first. The first step should be renting out or even selling the albatross of the stadium, which currently costs us $18m a year just to service the interest payments. By 2032, when the principal on the loans will need to be paid down, that figure will rise to $37m a year. No amount of fundraising from those who watch the games can justify those figures. In addition, we also need to stanch the wound of our athletics programs that continue to bleed $13m a year. The university is first and foremost a classroom and research laboratory, not a football field nor a publicly funded minor league.
- UCPD costs $138m a year, and the most expensive of all the UC police departments is our own highly-militarized force at Berkeley, which has a lamentable track record of racialized violence. The vast majority of those funds should be redistributed and reinvested in our academic mission.
However, to repeat: we cannot simply cut our way out of this crisis; here we agree with the Chancellor. But we need those in California Hall to recognize that, in the Age of COVID, only public funding can repair our campus, as well as the entire ecology of higher education in California. We need them to commit to the premise that, as our students become more diverse and finally begin to reflect the people of CA, they should not be mired in debt by higher tuition rates or costs of attendance. And to achieve this goal of debt-free public education, we need them to articulate an imaginative vision for the future of higher education in CA as a public good.
Above all, we urge them to support the Keep California’s Promise campaign for the $66 fix. An additional $66 for the median taxpayer would restore state funding of all sectors of California public higher education to their 2000 levels.
Finally, as our students also struggle with the academic consequences of the pandemic, we support the Senate’s effort to be flexible with P/NP requirements for courses during COVID. To vote on this matter there will be an Emergency Meeting of the Senate, 10a.m. on November 30.
James Vernon for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association.