The excellence of the university depends on the excellence of its academic departments and programs, but their success, in turn, depends in part on an effective administration. While academic programs are subject to regular review, this is not the case for administrative units. Last May CAPRA (The Senate Committee on Academic Planning and Resource Allocation) proposed that the Senate be involved in regular reviews of administrative units (Appendix B). CAPRA rightly wanted to understand the causes of the supposed five-fold increase (based on UCOP figures) in Berkeley’s “senior management” over the last two decades, a period in which the number of tenure-track faculty remained more or less constant. The proposal for regular review of administrative units emerged from a genuine concern to improve the functioning of the university. So far, the university administration resisting the proposal, as it did CAPRA’s questioning (Appendix A) and the Senate’s subsequent rejection of the Upper Hearst Capital Project? What is happening to the hallowed shared-governance tradition as the university becomes corporatized?
