Aldo Antonelli (UC Davis) calls my attention to the planned faculty walkout to protest the way the University is handling the budget crisis and the faculty furloughs. Professor Antonelli explains:
Given your interest in issues concerning the academic profession, I wanted to call your attention to events developing at the University of California, where faculty across the ten campuses are planning a response to the implementation of furloughs and salary reductions put through by the UC Office of the President (UCOP, in UC-speak).
You will recall that following a 20% cut in the State's general fund appropriation for the University, UCOP adopted a plan for faculty and staff "furloughs" designed to be the equivalent of a 4-10% salary reduction over the next 12 months (the lower percentage applying to those earning less than $40K and the higher one to salaries above $240K). The plan was advertised as achieving savings of about $200M, or one-quarter the amount of the general fund cut. Unions representing professional and technical employees (UPTE), and lecturers and librarians (UC-AFT) had to sign off on the plan, but the furloughs were implemented by fiat for faculty, who are not represented at UC.
There were some doubts about the accuracy of the numbers being passed around. The advertised $200M savings represents only 1% of the University's $20B budget -- and in widely circulated letter to the UC Regents Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff asked if "salary was the best place to cut that 1%". It also later turned out that the furlough program would result in savings of about $515M, with no explanation of where the excess $315M was going to go. Nonetheless, people by and large recognized the unprecedented threat to what was designed to be the greatest public system of higher education in the world.
At the same time, though, a majority of the faculty advocated that at least a few of the furlough days be taken on instructional days in order to convey to the Governor, the Legislature, and the general public that such draconian measures have consequences for the quality and viability of the University. The system-wide academic senate formalized such a request in a letter to UCOP.
It was quite a surprise when UCOP decreed that furloughs were to be taken on "non-instructional" days, i.e., days when faculty were not scheduled to teach or otherwise meet with students. This was widely viewed as the most egregious breach of shared governance at UC since WWII, and prompted a broad discussion on the campuses and on faculty-run blogs about the proper response, including a faculty walk-out proposed for Sept. 24 (first day of classes for all campuses except Berkeley). Needless to say, this is unprecedented. UC faculty have never been inclined to labor action.
In retrospect, this should have been a no-brainer for UCOP: receive the senate request, pay lip service to shared governance, and everything would have been smooth until the next round of cuts. By denying the senate request, UCOP set on a collision course with the faculty that will lead, I believe, to an exacerbation of a more fundamental difference between those who support the ideal of a public university and those who are working for the "privatization" of UC.
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