Submission: Professor proposes agenda to new UC president

The appointment of Janet Napolitano to be the next president of the University of California has caused various reactions. Some have complained about the secretive nature of the Regents’ selection process. Some have complained about her record as Secretary of Homeland Security and predict more privatization and more policing of the campuses under her leadership.

As a long-time member of the UC faculty, I was drawn to take another approach, one involving some teaching. Since Ms Napolitano comes from outside of the higher education establishment, I choose to regard her as a blank slate, something like a new student entering our halls.On my blog, University Probe, I wrote a series of lessons, titled UC 101, that describe some well-known problems at the UC and offer suggestions for our new president. These are practical ideas intended to deal with real issues that are internal to UC governance and also have important resonance with the general public outside of the campuses. Here is a brief summary of those suggestions.

• The new UC president should bring an end to the excessive, corporate style, compensation packages given to the university’s top executives. A policy statement from the Berkeley faculty 20 years ago said that no executive at an institution of higher education should receive more than twice the average compensation given to its full professors. Such a policy also flies in the face of the Regents.
• The UC president should be an active advocate for all of public education: that means actively opposing the push toward privatization. In particular, Janet Napolitano should engage in support of San Francisco State University; should open up the internal decision making processes of the UC administration; and should express principled respect for unionized workers here and elsewhere. These are ideas that fly in the face of the Regents.
• It is long past time for UC, and all research universities, to clean up an atrocious accounting habit that puts all of the cost for professors’ academic salaries, covering their work as teachers and researchers and professional experts, onto the bills of undergraduate students. A new state law requires UC to report the cost of undergraduate education as separated from the cost of graduate education and research activities. If this is done honestly, then it will be acknowledged that undergraduate tuition at UC, as at other research universities, pays far more than the full actual cost for the university to provide undergraduate education.
• While much talk has been offered about UC making its administrative functions more efficient, the data show an extraordinary and continuing growth in management positions throughout the system, both on the campuses and in the medical centers. I have estimated that this excessive management wastes about one billion dollars per year. The new president can call the executives responsible for this bloat to account.

This is my proposed agenda for the new president. Others may want to add further items. Who will keep score on her performance? That is up to you.

Schwartz is an emeritus professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and writes and edits a higher education blog at UniversityProbe.org.