Just in time for Mother’s Day, parents with children in campus childcare faced plans for increased tuition, shorter hours, and reduced staff next fall. Meanwhile, UCOP is putting the final touches on an improved paid family leave program that is still worse than that of comparable employers throughout the state. Why is the University of California trying to cover care on the cheap?
BFA discussed the paid family leave situation in a previous newsletter. The state of affairs with campus childcare is another example of skewed priorities. The Berkeley campus has had an early childhood program (ECEP) for at least 75 years, distinguished by its productive integration with campus in teaching, research and undergraduate employment. Nonetheless, it has also been marked by unconscionably long waiting lists for faculty, staff and student parents, and regular turmoil around funding, all of which were crying out for campus resolution before COVID. Then the pandemic erupted, and prohibitively expensive childcare protocols left the ECEP with a huge current deficit. After threats of partial closure were met by significant parental pushback, they are now proposing to continue in the fall, but without infant care, and with shorter hours and higher prices.
As we contemplate reopening, the country has finally begun to grapple with the profound inadequacies of our “normal” models of care, models that made the pandemic’s devastations deeper and more unequal. So far, despite the pathbreaking intellectual work done by UC scholars on the subject, the administration shows no sign that it has integrated those lessons into its thinking as an employer. Where is our “care infrastructure”?
Leslie Salzinger and Celeste Langan for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association.