UC staff misses out on expected raise

By Noah Grand
Daily Bruin Reporter

University of California faculty and staff won’t get their
expected pay raise unless changes are made to Gov. Gray
Davis’ proposed 2002-03 budget.

Due to the state’s financial difficulties, the budget did
not provide any money for a Cost Of Living Adjustment ““ a
raise given to all faculty and staff to reflect inflation.

The budget must still be approved by both houses of the state
legislature and Davis, giving the UC months to appeal for more
state funds for pay raises.

“Our top budget priority is going to impress on the
legislature that in order to retain and attract quality personnel,
we are going to need more state funding for salaries,” said
UC spokesman Paul Schwartz.

While the UC requested a 5.5 percent pay increase for faculty
and staff ““ including a COLA and merit increase along with
other bonuses ““ the governor’s budget only provided a
1.5 percent merit bonus, which is awarded to faculty and staff
based on the quality of their work.

His budget also lacks a COLA increase for California State
University faculty and staff but provides a 2.15 percent COLA
increase for faculty and staff working at community colleges.

At last week’s UC Regents meeting, Regent S. Sue Johnson
brought up the possibility of increasing student fees to make up
the UC’s budget shortfall.

This added revenue could fund pay raises, but any fee increase
would not go entirely toward pay raises, said Richard Goodman,
chair of the Academic Senate’s Planning and Budget
Committee.

Increasing student fees is a possibility, but it should be
avoided to uphold the university’s mission to educate the
public, Schwartz said.

“Part of the university’s mission is to be
accessible and affordable to as many people as possible,”
Schwartz said, adding that the state budget is the most appropriate
place to look for additional funds for a pay increase.

Max Espinoza, higher education consultant to Tony Cardenas, the
state assembly’s budget committee chair, said Cardenas would
be extremely critical of any move to raise student fees at this
point.

“We want to insure access (to the UC) is maintained even
in a financial crisis,” Espinoza said. “We will fight
to maintain that commitment as much as we can.”

The UC is also concerned that with decreased state funding over
the past few years, UC salaries will no longer be competitive with
other universities, causing faculty and staff to leave the system,
Schwartz said.

“At some point, that is going to cut into the quality of
education at the UC,” he said.

But with most public and private universities facing economic
problems, Goodman said that faculty are less likely to leave for
private universities now than a few years ago during the stock
market boom.

“My sense of the private universities is their portfolios
have been hammered just as much as ours,” Goodman said.
“I think the privates’ ability to poach is much less
today than it was two years ago.”

Most of the funding for UC faculty and staff pay raises comes
from the Partnership agreement with the governor, while private
universities fund pay raises through stock investments, he
added.

The Partnership, which is supposed to provide a 4 percent
increase in the UC budget annually, only provided a 1.5 percent
increase this year.

Even though the UC must deal with cuts to most parts of its
budget, many of the other state departments are dealing with larger
cuts than the UC.

“It’s going to be one of those years across the
board where everyone’s going to have to get by with a little
less than they would like,” said Sandy Harrison, spokesman
for the state Department of Finance.