It’s Spring Break, finally. And I am sick. Again.
Being sick over Spring Break has become a regular feature of my working life at UC Berkeley over the past decade. It may be just that I am getting old and my body can no longer sustain the intensity of work it once could. And yet everyone I talk to at this point of the semester these days – whether they be professors, staff, or graduate and undergraduate students – tell me the same story. They are exhausted, burnt out, and keep getting sick. This is the human cost of the lack of public investment in the University of California.
For sure the pandemic made the working life of anyone who teaches, let alone those of professors who also have to research and write for our next pay-raise or promotion, much, much, harder. We have had to adapt our classes and our teaching styles to online and in person modalities several times. And we have had to help our students navigate those transitions as best we can as they struggled with both their mental and physical health as well. But this is not a pandemic story.
I have worked at UC Berkeley as a professor for 23 years and during that time my workload, like those of my colleagues, has intensified so much that it no longer feels sustainable. Since 1990, state funds per student at UC Berkeley have declined by 38% in real terms, while enrolment has grown by 47%. In 2012/3, UC Berkeley had 35,346 students. Last year there were 43,932, and the plan is to enrol 51,201 students by 2029/30. We are told that growing enrolment increases access to higher education, but the proportion of students from underrepresented communities has risen just 6 per cent since 2012.
Instead, increasing the number of students at Berkeley is a way of wringing more toil from all of us who work here. As state funding has fallen the numbers of tenure track faculty have flatlined. Since 1990, the number of faculty has declined by 9.6%, forcing the student-to-faculty ratio to rise from 18-1 to 30-1 by 2020. As class sizes have increased so the volume of grading and administrative work has become almost unmanageable as was painfully evident during the grading strike by graduate student teaching assistants last year. All of us – faculty, graduate and undergraduate students alike – now have to navigate the complexities of such a large campus with fewer academic support staff. No less than 400 staff positions have been cut since 2015. Those staff who remain are as overwhelmed with work as everyone else.
Then there are the students themselves, the most remarkable population on campus. The word student no longer describes who they are as the rising cost of tuition and attending UC Berkeley has made them another class of workers. Quite apart from their academic studies many of them are working 20 to 30 hours a week, commuting for hours to get to campus, as well as caring for family members or loved ones. In recent years, they have had to manage all this during a global pandemic, when the nation’s political system and economy lurched from crisis to crisis, and while the climate crisis has wracked us with biblical scenes of droughts, fires, and intense storms and floods.
This is not how a university or any organisation should be run. It is simply not sustainable to have to work this hard at a job that for many people does not pay enough to be able to make ends meet living in the Bay Area. No wonder the other pandemic on our campus is the mental health crisis. And, of course, the campus does not have the funds to provide the resources to deal with that either.
It is the system that is broken but the human cost is one that all who work and study at UC Berkeley know all too well. It is time that the state, and all of us tax-payers, start reinvesting in public education so we no longer have to tolerate a university that is run at the expense of the bodies and minds of its professors, students and employees.
This post is a personal reflection by James Vernon, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History, UC Berkeley, and Chair of Berkeley Faculty Association.