UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and several other campus officials authored a controversial proposal released Monday that would give individual campuses more control over local issues, though their plan was criticized by UC President Mark Yudof.
The proposal, released through the campus Center for Studies in Higher Education, recommends that the UC Board of Regents delegate some of its responsibilities to proposed campus boards, which would be composed of the campus chancellor, community members, faculty, students and individual regents.
The responsibilities that the proposal recommends be given to campuses include control over approval of capital projects, academic programs and salaries. The proposal also suggests that UC regents be assigned to specific campus boards for three year terms so as to get to know the issues of individual campuses better.
But Yudof expressed disapproval of the proposal in a Monday statement, stating that he does not support it.
“Transparency, accountability and flexibility are very important in this rapidly changing environment,” Yudof said in the statement. “Chancellor Birgeneau’s proposal has not been appropriately reviewed.”
Campus boards could help both better localize the UC system’s decision-making process and allow campuses to deal with the rapid decline in state funding to the UC in unique ways, said proposal co-author and center director C. Judson King.
“(The boards) would let the campus try to adjust decisions to meet the needs of the campus,” King said. “The idea is to get away from the one-size-fits-all mentality.”
In recent years, increased campus autonomy has been at the forefront of discussions about the future of the UC system. In 2008, the UC Office of the President cut its budget by $56.7 million, over half of which was saved by transferring programs from the office to campuses. And in January, UC San Francisco outlined a proposal that would afford that campus more financial and governing autonomy from the UC system.
Historically, efforts to obtain more autonomy for UC professional schools have fallen short. The UCLA Anderson School of Management made the most headway after it developed a proposal for increased self-sufficiency. However, in part due to faculty opposition, progress has since stalled.
But the history of the devolution of power from the university to campuses stretches long before the past few years. Before 1952, the position of campus chancellor did not exist. Academic Senates were not delegated to individual campuses until 1963.
The proposal lies in tandem with a trend of administrative changes that, over the years, has allocated more responsibility in making decisions to campuses, according to King, a former UC provost who said he has been to over 100 UC Board of Regents meetings.
“It doesn’t take away the role of the regents,” he said of the proposal. “It is difficult for them to delve into understanding the more detailed issues … they would be able to use a greater percentage of their time on statewide issues.”
UC Berkeley School of Information professor Yale Braunstein was also critical of the idea. In a written response to the proposal, Braunstein said there is considerable evidence that the quality of local decision-making is not high enough to justify devolving any additional budget or financial powers to the campuses.
“There is little doubt that the Berkeley senior administration has failed to effectively tackle questions about the size and scope of the academic enterprise,” he said.
But King said changes like the one proposed by Birgeneau and other campus officials have been happening for years.
“There is a long history of devolution of decisions, and I don’t think there have been bad decisions because of it,” he said.
Read the full text of the proposal below:
Damian Ortellado is the lead higher education reporter.
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A great idea that has been too late in coming.
Berkeley needs to remove the shackles of UC for good.
By looking at the list of powers to be devolved, it’s quite obvious that this proposal is based on the campus admin’s desire to raise tuition and take up debt (i.e. capital projects) as much as they wish without systemwide and stateoversight. Also, with only one undergraduate and one graduate student on the Board, positions that will be hand-picked and not elected (also specified in Birgeneau’s proposal), we shouldn’t expect more accountability either.
So fitting that Birgeneau pushes for this now, as he’s already on the way out.
What you needed was a real leader who would have stood up at the beginning of Fall 2010 and said to the students and faculty “I’m going to buck the Regents, and we’re going to take control of this situation, because if we don’t, it will be worse for the faculty, staff and research in the long run and we’ll never get student costs under control – now who’s with me?” Things could have been done. The VAST majority of the campus-by-campus shortfalls are due to health and pension. People could have stepped up and put it on the line and volunteered to go without for a short period of time. Bureaucratic resistance to UCOP and the Regents’ directives could have been accomplished. Let people sue and threaten to sue — the point would be to push the political process to solution. Yeah, whoever was chancellor in that situation would probably lose their job and would probably have been removed — which would only have emboldened the faculty and students.
The problem was that Yudof skillfully bought off the faculty and administrators early on by promising to protect them and their benefits relative to the staff and students. By accomplishing a divide and conquer strategy, there was no base for a university president to build a rebellion on. Now, NOW of course they are starting to realize that Yudof’s promises were all bs anyways and that the university will be hurt more in the long run and NOW they realize the opportunity to take control that they HAD and WASTED. But, you know, these things require sacrifice and being willing to go without, and doing things that comfortable, insulated academics and administrators at other schools don’t have to do. So, if you don’t want to do it the hard way, if you don’t want someone to stand up and lead and put it on the line, then you get this gutless, anemic, two-years-after-the-fact-when-it-might-have-been-remotely-useful report from a lame duck, which will hit everyone in their now-entrenched positions (which offer no hope of actually solving anything, just perpetuating the unsustainable), generate some brief explosions, and then be ignored as the downward spiral continues.
I also find it interesting that one of Braunstein’s primary objections is that delegation might deprive him and other faculty of a raise they were promised by Yudof’s buyoff. If that doesn’t tell you everything about the current situation and how we got here, I don’t know what would.
Yudof doesn’t like it? Then it’s probably a good a idea.
(ok sry, i’m tired, didn’t read this all yet)
I did have the same thought actually, especially concerning his vague statement about why he opposed it..