<p>University of California President Mark Yudof is proposing a university-wide 8% across-the-board pay cut for all faculty and staff earning more than $46,000 per year, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. Alternatively, the savings could be achieved by giving all faculty and staff 21 days of unpaid furlough---which amounts to much the same thing.</p>
<p>This is certainly going to put a chill on faculty recruitment and retention in the UC system.</p>
<p>Yudof proposed the pay cuts as a way to pay for 1/4 of the University's $800 million budget deficit over the next fiscal year. Another quarter would be made up by tuition increases, and the remaining half by unspecified budget cuts across the 10-campus system.</p>
<p>Yes, definitely tough times for the UC. We hear that there will be programmatic cuts as well. Time to degree will be longer.</p>
<p>Yudof has also appointed a task force to review its retirement system (UCRP), since employee contributions were redirected to personal pre-tax accounts for over 14 yrs due to healthy overfunding. With the recent downturn of the market, UCRP is now funded at 95%…with a prediction of a further decline even with the restart of employee contributions…</p>
<p>Well, this isn’t unlike the state of Delaware… all employees will take an 8% pay cut and a 2% reduction in health care benefits. I wish ours had a threshold, though. Even though my mom only makes $25,000, she’s still taking a 10% pay cut - AND she had 3 furlough days this year.</p>
<p>Delaware seems to be prioritizing its students over its staff. I’m not sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s mostly a true thing. This year they guaranteed to meet full need for in-staters with cumulative loans capped at 1/4 the cumulative COA. Unlike most state schools, Delaware is highly endowment-dependent… so it at least controls most of the funding, but the endowment is down just like all the privates.</p>
<p>^ Ah, I see. I was a little confused, since compared to most state schools–especially around the same level academically, e.g. Maryland–UDel is quite well-off.</p>
<p>The Fla. governor vetoed a 4% pay cut for state employes making over $45 k a year. College employees had been excluded from that pay cut for fear the universities would have even more difficulty retaining and attracting good faculty.</p>
<p>Hawaii is also instituting 3 day a month furloughs for government employees. My S (Dec grad) works for the State of Hawaii and while he and we are very glad he has a job, a 13.8% pay cut is tough.</p>
<p>“University of California President Mark Yudof is proposing a university-wide 8% across-the-board pay cut for all faculty and staff earning more than $46,000 per year, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. Alternatively, the savings could be achieved by giving all faculty and staff 21 days of unpaid furlough—which amounts to much the same thing.”</p>
<p>If savings can be achieved by 21 unpaid day fuloughs, maybe there are too many staff and faculty members.</p>
<p>Looks like things are a little bloated at the UCs.</p>
<p>“This is certainly going to put a chill on faculty recruitment and retention in the UC system.”</p>
<p>Depends on the competition. Because so many schools are operating in the red right now or have cash flow problems, including the top schools in the country, faculty recruitment and retention may not be a problem right now.</p>
<p>The state of California has to cut back. It can not continue to run with the pay scales, pensions, and health care benefits that exist. The UCs are not going to be immune.</p>
<p>Most of the other states HAVE to cut back too. Their economic models are not sustainable.</p>
<p>The UC is in a tough spot borne of political factors more than economic ones. California is dysfunctional in its budget system due to four factors:</p>
<p>1) Prop 13 requires a supermajority of 2/3 of the votes to in the legislature to approve a budget or tax measures. This supermajority translates into the tyranny of the minority because</p>
<p>2) the mutual backscratching of gerrymandering “safe” legislative districts, wherein the politicians pick their voters instead of the voters picking their politicians, means the most competitive races are in the primaries, resulting in very liberal Democrats and very conservative Republicans and very few moderates in the state legislature, exacerbated by</p>
<p>3) term limits, which keeps politicians of both parties hewing to their ideological orthodoxies of their respective activists as, since they’re not going to be in the State Assembly or State Senate for a long period of time, they always are favoring short-term policies and pandering to the ideological base they’ll need for support to the next political job they aspire to; term limits also shifts the relative balance of power towards the lobbyists and the bureaucracy because the politicians don’t really have the time in place to develop expertise in the nitty gritty of whatever specialized issue is their calling, be it education, water policy, transportation, whatever, and the whole budgeting process is warped by</p>
<p>4) a runaway cancer of the initiative process which has locked in so much of the state budget via the voters being asked to do the Legislature’s job in that vast areas of the budget are now “off limits” for any legislative adjustment. And initiatives now mostly mean the opposite of what they’re labeled, e.g., something sponsored by “Citizens for a Safe Environment” is probably an initiative to permit off-shore oil drilling…or require it…and something sponsored by “Citizens for Responsible Drinking” is probably an industry-backed measure to reduce alcohol taxes.</p>
<p>The UC’s are part of the budget that’s not locked in and thus are extremely vulnerable when crunch time comes. Only 17 percent of the UC’s budget is funded out of the state’s general revenue but that 17 percent is unevenly distributed and the cuts are probably going to be substantial.</p>
<p>Reducing student count is a painful but fiscally responsible move on behalf of the UC.</p>
<p>I continue to think that the UCs might be better off if there were no state funding at all. Turn them loose to become financially independent. Yes, they would lose 17% of their budget - but they would also be free of state rules that force them to spend money in places they don’t want to…</p>
<p>That would be extremely difficult for the campuses that don’t have significant endowments (UCLA, Berkeley) and would ravage the areas that don’t have significant amounts of grant money, such as the engineering and medical areas.</p>
<p>Places like UC Merced and UC Riverside would probably be goners.</p>
<p>Wait, wait, isn’t that backwards? Don’t the medical and engineering areas have lots of grants, and the, oh, say, linguistics and classics departments have less? And which UC campuses have more endowment than Berkeley and UCLA?</p>
<p>I do agree that Merced and Riverside would be gone in short order if they were cut loose.</p>
<p>Sorry, awkward construction in my post: the engineering and medical areas tend to have the grant money, those that don’t will be ravaged. Maybe my post sounded better in the original Russian.</p>
<p>It does result in a tyranny of the minority, but the 2/3rd budget rule in California did not come from Prop. 13. It predates Prop. 13 by many years. The rule was originally enacted in the 1930s to counteract some of the effects of the ‘New Deal,’ was broadened in 1962 and 1978 and finalized in 1996 by Prop 218.</p>
<p>I understand the political considerations, but don’t know why it would be termed a total waste of resources. There’s now a college there and students are being educated. How is that a total waste of resources?</p>