Today, we hear constantly that “taxpayers” shouldn’t fund such “entitlements” because they represent cave-ins to powerful unions. This is certainly not the case with the UC retirement system. The current problems with the retirement plan began back in 1991: During a state financial crisis, the regents and the state decided to suspend all contributions to what was then a technically overfunded retirement plan, hoping that its investment income would fill the gap.

Not contributing saved the tax-starved state of California hundreds of millions of dollars and softened the impact of state budget cuts on university operations. But it impoverished the UC retirement system. Within little more than a decade, as the disastrous consequences became clear, the UC Academic Senate began calling for the resumption of contributions. The state refused. Without state funding, the regents declined to restart either the employer or employee contribution.

The situation worsened with the financial crisis of 2008 and the Federal Reserve System’s policy of keeping interest rates at historically low levels. The financial managers of the retirement plan began to borrow from future retirees to honor the pensions of those who had already retired. They spent funds that they had counted on to generate the investment income needed to cover the cost of financing future pensions. The percentage of funded liabilities began to plunge, beginning a downward spiral that could have led to the plan’s financial implosion.

To forestall this, the regents boldly agreed to self-finance the employer contribution in 2010. To reduce the financial shock, however, they approved a plan to ramp up contributions gradually over eight years. The slow ramp-up meant that the unfunded liability continued to grow — to roughly $10 billion (yes, billion!) in 2011. Even with this year’s contribution increases and the start of a tiered system in which new employees receive reduced pension benefits, our combined employer and employee contributions don’t yet come close to covering the interest on this huge unfunded liability. We won’t begin the long, costly process of paying off the interest on this debt until 2018, when the employer contributions rise to 18 percent and total contributions reach 26 percent.

The state’s decision to shift the entire cost of funding the university’s retirement plan onto the university itself has had a terrible impact on students, faculty and staff members. Together with repeated state budget cuts, it has forced the university to keep raising tuition, pushing more students and their families into debt. It’s degraded operations by necessitating massive staff layoffs. Because the 3 percent and 2 percent salary increases that went into effect in October 2011 and July 2013 only partly offset the increase of employee contributions to 8 percent and the skyrocketing cost of health benefits, the decision has also created hardship for many employees raising families in our state, which has a high cost of living. It’s also put the university’s ability to maintain the quality of its faculty at risk by adding to the cost of recruiting and retaining world-class scholars. (Berkeley now ranks 24th in faculty salaries at elite research universities.)

Our new president, Janet Napolitano, should make correcting this situation one of her top priorities. She could start by urging the regents to reduce the current $250,000 cap on retirement plan pensions to $200,000 until the unfunded liability is extinguished. Except for top administrators — whose bloated salaries are so unpopular with many Californians — and some medical and professional school faculty members, very few UC employees are close to reaching this cap. Reducing it would ensure that the pensions of the best-paid few will not drain the retirement funds of the rest while the retirement plan is being restored to financial health.

Above all, Napolitano must use her political skills to remind those in Sacramento that the state’s refusal to fund the employer contribution threatens the university’s historic mission to provide world-class, affordable education to all qualified Californians. It is a shameful retreat from a legal obligation that it continues to honor with all other state pension plans. Napolitano needs to convince the legislators and citizens of California that the refunding of the current retirement plan is in the public interest. UC faculty and staff members serve the public. They are already doing their part to restore the retirement plan’s fiscal health. So are UC students. It’s time for the state to share the burden.

Christine Rosen is an associate professor at Haas School of Business and vice chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association. James Vernon is a campus professor in the department of history and a co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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But upon further inspection, significant excitement over the UC policy is unfounded. As it stands, the policy is contradictory because of a loophole allowing faculty members to submit waivers on a per-article basis to opt out of open publication.

The university cannot call its policy an open access one when it allows some research articles to be exempt to open access over others. The waiver essentially disincentivizes those who work for a public institution from sharing all their research and allows them to pick and choose where their research goes, thereby creating a divide between those who can afford access to a private academic journal and those who cannot. It also isn’t much different from the way faculty members originally differentiated between publishing privately in an academic journal versus publishing for public access.

Additionally, as a co-founder of The Open Access Initiative at Berkeley pointed out, the waiver option is a problem because it could lead to uncooperative publishers taking advantage of authors. Also, by giving faculty members the choice of opting out of open access, there is a good chance the best research will remain in expensive journals exclusively, meaning it will once again be inaccessible to those cannot afford subscription fees.

It is true that some professors will want to choose whether to submit their research for public access or to academic journals. According to Christopher Kelty, a UCLA professor and Academic Senate committee member who drafted the policy, the opt-out clause was included at the faculty’s request. But this clause will misrepresent a movement that is proudly portrayed as universally open. The policy sets a dangerous precedent for other schools to adopt similar policies, thinking that it is acceptable to have open access movements in which openness isn’t actually guaranteed.

The point of The Open Access Initiative at Berkeley was to disseminate UC research for the public’s benefit, whether the public is at UC Berkeley or across the globe. The UC Academic Senate had the opportunity to accomplish this goal, but instead it passed a watered-down version of the policy that probably will fail to accomplish the original goals.

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Lower Columbia College/Flickr/Courtesy

It’s been almost a year since the transfer class of 2014 was admitted to Cal. The agonizing wait was finally over. We were done with community college! Senioritis kicked in a little early (transfer-itis?) as we prepared to leave our little lower-division haven — or hell — and enter the sprawling campus of UC Berkeley.

There were plenty of things we didn’t like about community college, but looking back, there were also a few things that we appreciated. We weren’t at a top public university, but it was home to us. Obviously, it was time to leave, but here’s what we kind of miss — and don’t miss — about community college.

Faculty

• Miss: We were somewhere where everyone knew our name. Having counselors and advisers that knew us on a personal level was reassuring when picking out classes or looking for internship opportunities. Sure, our academic adviser in community college might have been our career counselor and the school nurse as well, but who doesn’t want their resume looked over while getting their temperature taken? It definitely beat having to walk forever just to get from one office to another.
• Dis: The shortage of staff was frustrating. There were always those counselors or professors who weren’t very helpful. If they were the only people available to talk about our Berkeley application or to teach algebra, we were stuck with them until we figured out how to maneuver our own way.

Commute

• Miss: In Berkeley, most of us have two modes of transportation: a) walking or b) public transportation. While we did have to hike from our cars every morning at community college, that was nothing compared to the amount of walking we do here. And AC Transit can be great, but sometimes we miss the independence that came with driving a car.
• Dis: Depending on the community college, the commute to school could be hit or miss, whether it was because of traffic, paying for parking or just finding parking. Now that we’re here, we don’t really miss using our cars on a daily basis. The many different AC Transit routes and rider passes available to all students make it easy to go anywhere in the East Bay. Instead of worrying about studying while driving our 45-minute commute, we can actually study on the bus.

Money

• Miss: Paying very little for classes — need we say more?
• Dis: Sitting in classes with people who weren’t passionate about school in the same way we were. Or people who made class presentations that had absolutely nothing to do with the class content. Or people who walked in on the day of the midterm and were astonished there was a midterm at all. Community college is relatively inexpensive. There was basically no admissions process, and with that comes some people who don’t care that they’re wasting our time.

“Finding” yourself

• Miss: With unit caps and the rush to fulfill core requirements, our time at Cal feels fleeting.  No need to hit the ground running with a four-year plan in community college; we could just ease ourselves into academia. If we found out we hated English literature and teaching but loved organic chemistry and wanted to be a pharmacist, we could switch. In community college, the cost of tuition allowed for us to take time figuring out what they wanted from school.
• Dis: Some of us picked our major senior year of high school and the only time we thought about switching was when our major prerequisite classes at community college were filling up. We had more time and more money, but if we couldn’t get our classes, our entire path of study would have been defined by an underfunded community college system. We were shocked to find freshmen in upper-division classes at Cal: That wasn’t an option for us when we were 18. There wasn’t a whole lot of variety in classes at community college.

Class registration

• Miss: Remember when it was our last semester and our college couldn’t wait to get us out of their system? Our last year before transferring was awesome: We got first pick of all our classes because we were assigned the very first day of registration. Compare that to our upcoming senior year at Cal, where some freshmen have a better Tele-BEARS appointment than we do.
• Dis: All the other years before that last year, when getting classes was a bloodbath, sucked. Our schedules were insane red-eye commutes. We got some classes at 7:30 a.m. We got some classes that went until 10 p.m. Many general education classes had only one section available. Enrolling for classes, a much less fun version of eBay, caused us anxiety.

Reputation

• Miss: If we weren’t into sports, we didn’t have to unwittingly support a sports program that wasn’t any good. While our community college may have had a tennis team, or even a football team, there wasn’t a lot of energy or money put into those programs. If we didn’t care, we didn’t feel we had to.
• Dis: What was our mascot again? The Falcons? The Cougars? The Run-Across-the-Road-Jack Rabbits? And did we ever go to sporting events? Usually not. But everyone knows the Golden Bears, and chances are they’re a fan. Now that we’re at Cal, we can sit with our uncle at Thanksgiving and talk about the finer points of Sonny Dykes’ Bear Raid offense. Searching for a birthday present for someone? Being at a Pac-12 school definitely has its perks, just get them some Cal gear.

Contact Jessica Rogness and Chase Schweitzer at blog@dailycal.org.

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First, my background. I was born in 1974. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, developing an immense interest in chemistry and pursued that passion at Emory University. There I began academic research in a protein chemistry laboratory, learning that academic discoveries could be used to understand and fight diseases. I received a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in biochemistry and molecular biology on protein folding. Right around Sept. 11, 2001, I learned of a series of deadly attacks — still mysterious to this day — which were caused by anthrax spores mailed through our U.S. Postal Service.

This refocused my attention to pursuing research that was both academically cutting edge but also for the betterment of society as a whole, and I went to Harvard University to embark on post-doctoral studies on the structure and function of anthrax toxin. My work there led to novel discoveries, which landed me a tenure-track faculty position in the departments of chemistry and molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley in the summer of 2006. Over this more recent and tumultuous period, we have seen the subprime housing collapse, banking collapses, budget crisis after budget crisis, rollback of benefits and salaries across the board, and most importantly for academics, cuts in federal grants and funding. Despite all that I also became the proud father of two sons.

In discussing the potential merits and pitfalls of the AB 2132 we need to establish how the UC schools evaluate tenure cases. The key areas are 1.) research, 2.) teaching and 3.) service. Generally speaking, the order of importance at UC Berkeley is as stated. The candidate is expected to make seminal research discoveries and work at the frontier of his or her field. Teaching at Berkeley should be cutting-edge, exciting and inspiring. Service generally involves working passionately within the department or wider campus as undergraduate or graduate mentors, faculty recruiters, seminar series coordinators, awards committee chairpersons, etc.

The proposed changes in AB 2132 would require a new fourth area: service to the wider community. The language of the bill is:

“[S]ervice may include but is not limited to serving on community boards and committees, engaging in civic activities, working in outreach programs developed to promote cultural diversity in the student body, consulting with public and governmental agencies designed to address student and community needs, developing programs for underserved populations, research and creative activities that benefit our communities, consulting with or addressing student and community organizations or other service activities that are focused on improving the health and well-being of society.”

The ideals of this type of community service are not at issue with myself and those pre-tenure faculty I have had the chance to speak with on the matter. We agree community service is critical to building a stronger society and nation. I will even say I particularly champion these aims. We ought to be educating the public on improving energy policy, making more resilient local food systems, learning organic gardening, feeding the hungry, teaching science better to young people — especially in the face of 30 percent increases in classroom sizes. Yes, these are our nation’s challenges today. However, we also need some serious perspective on what it means to be a tenure-track faculty candidate in today’s funding climate.

Will the Harvards, Cal Techs and Stanfords out there change their tenure policy to match the UC? I doubt it. Why? Because it will place these schools at a competitive disadvantage for research funding. Placing an additional burden on the UC tenure-track faculty outside of the typical university norm would cause a faculty to commit additional time and resources and potentially distract that faculty from building up his or her laboratory, writing research grants and publishing his or her findings in scholarly journals. Is the groundbreaking work of an academic researcher not worthy enough service to the wider community?

And while I favor more activity in our communities, I urge the California Legislature to not pass AB 2132. Community service is critical for all of us to implement in our daily lives. However, it need not be legislated and required of our next generation of young faculty.

Bryan Krantz is a UC Berkeley assistant professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology who will be up for tenure in several months.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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