I am sorry if I seem cynical, it isn’t my nature, but I am reading about the budget woes of Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo and from what I can see they have hired two more ‘administrators.’ Doesn’t sound like a problem to me… at least for administrators.
Cal Poly is not alone, the entire State University system has gone crazy in their pursuit of building little administrative empires. Forbes.com just published a fascinating article on what they call “Bureaucratic U.”
Here are a couple of excerpts:
The ballooning of college administration has resulted in a sharp decline in labor productivity at colleges during a period of technological advancement that has improved productivity in most other industries. It has also occurred at a time when students are getting less for their money: Instruction has shifted from full-time professors to underpaid and overworked adjunct faculty. Three-fourths of new instructor jobs created over the past 20 years have been part-time positions. If the employment trends of the last decade are sustained, then administrative employees will outnumber instructors at four-year colleges by 2014.
Did you know that an academic dean at a doctoral institution receives a median salary of $190,000 (plus generous fringe benefits) or that the median salary of an assistant dean is above $116,000? The College & University Professional Association for Human Resources found that last year senior administrators recorded a third consecutive year of 4% pay increases and a twelfth consecutive year of pay increases above inflation. Nearly 10% of the 425,000 administrative and support staff employees at 272 research institutions earned a salary above $100,000 last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
So, did you know that all of the discussion has surrounded cutting faculty and nothing has been offered regarding administration reductions.
Oh yeah, I forgot… they hired more administrators at Cal Poly.
I think it is only right to expect transparency from our public institutions. The fact that so many appear to be fighting disclosure only causes me to wonder what they don’t want us to see. At the forefront of concerns appears to be the many and varied ‘foundations’ associated with the California State University system that seem to have very little external control and virtually no public disclosure of their activities.
Here are two relevant articles that question how well our administrators are using the funds derived from the backs of students, parents, faculty and staff :
At a time of state budget cuts, student tuition hikes, canceled classes, faculty hiring freezes and layoffs, CSU’s lobbyists have been paid to defeat bills designed to shed more light on CSU executive salaries and perks as well as public records. In 2006, The Chronicle reported that millions of dollars in extra compensation was quietly handed out to campus presidents and other top executives as they left their posts.
Trent Hager, chief of staff for Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge (Los Angeles County), said CSU paid the two lobbying firms in 2007 to derail his boss’ bill aimed at full disclosure of CSU salaries. “They got it sidetracked and killed,” he said.
But nearly $400,000 of those funds were paid to the two lobbying firms during months of the year when the firms performed no services for the CSU system regarding administrative or legislative actions, state records show.
A shocking betrayal of the public trust was revealed today by The Santa Rosa Press Democrat in an investigative report about the Sonoma State University Academic Foundation using donated funds to provide huge personal loans to cronies of foundation board members, some of which may never be recovered.
And what about Cal Poly?
Although the ‘giant black hole’ known as the Cal Poly Foundation has no observable event horizon, it is only one of four foundations on campus:
Associated Students, Incorporated of California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo
California Polytechnic State University Foundation
Cal Poly Corporation
Cal Poly Housing Corporation
The question I have is a simple one: should public institutions be lobbying to PREVENT full disclosure of how they do business? Should scarce educational resources in the hundreds of thousands and in the millions pass through the system to benefit a few without full disclosure?
Okay, the financial problems of the California State University system, in particular, look all too easy to address. As someone who has taught many places over many years, I feel it is safe to say that the CSU — Cal Poly in particular — has lost its way and forgotten it’s basic mission and pursued a program of questionable expansion that has put the universities at the brink of disaster.
If you take a look deeper, one can only wonder how the CSU administration’s most recent actions are consistent with their mission? Here are a couple of obvious conflicts:
1) ARE ALL JOBS EQUALLY RELEVANT IN TODAY’S ECONOMIC REALITIES?
Each of the three functional units (faculty, staff and administration) of a university are being treated as being equally central to the university mission but each area contributes differentially and some functions are clearly more central to the core objectives than others.
Observation:
A) Clearly, although every individual employee values their own job, not all jobs have an equal contribution to the university mission. To meet the budget, some jobs can be combined while others could be eliminated as a luxury of a previous era.
B) Currently, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has taken the approach by reducing the number of instructors as their quick and easy solution. However, this has caused some obviously unforeseen consequences resulting in the closing of classes, reduction in courses and delaying graduation. One Dean was quoted by a student as saying in desperation that they would sign anything (substitutions, et cetera) in order to get a student to graduation. Although this is admirable on one level, is this the was we should be doing business?
C) One work group has grown unchecked for almost three decades … and just since the 1980’s alone, Cal Poly’s administration has grown exponentially and one wonders what effect — if any — this dramatic increase in warm bodies has had on meeting the educational mission. There are titles and positions that didn’t exist just 20 years ago ( provosts, vice provosts, vice presidents, etc.) I can’t help but wonder if returning to the 1980 staffing levels would mitigate the entire budget deficit all by itself?
2) SHARE THE PAIN?
An across the board approach to cost savings is the strategy being employed by the CSU and Cal Poly in budget cuts. Before we look at this question, I have to ask: who is more needed than a professor in meeting the educational mission?
Observation:
In an other worlds, when costs seem out of bounds, the solution most often presented successfully is ‘consolidation’ first, elimination second. Here are a few ideas:
A) Couldn’t the administrative offices of a university run more than one university?
B) Shouldn’t university executives be writing their own emails and letters as happens in the rest of the university? Aren’t floors of secretaries a relic from a bygone era?
C) Shouldn’t University Executive perks (company cars, car allowances, expense reports, special health care benefits and junkets) be eliminated first?
D) Why shouldn’t every administrator ( many hold Ph.D.’s) be assigned one class to keep in touch with what is going on within the university setting? I have made this suggestion many times before. We need to get more value from the assets we already have and if we can’t, then they should go.
E) As an aside, many university presidents have been rightfully accused of pretending to be royalty… this sets a bad example… one wonders why any university president should have university employees over to his home to do any home improvement projects? Most would also question the educational purpose of a wine cellar, the President’s car allowance, and what many might call extravagant living. Here’s a small peek.
“ Carly Baker, the president’s wife, championed construction of a modern and pricey kitchen for the stadium boxes, including the president’s suite, so that his private chef can prepare gourmet meals during a portion of the six annual home games. Cost of the extreme kitchen? Between $300,000 and $400,000…”
As you can see, meeting the educational mission and making sensible cost reductions are not conceptually difficult… it’s not rocket science and — by the way — reductions starts at the top.
Depending on who you talk to, Laura and Karen obviously both had a wonderful adventure this past weekend at the 2009 Association for Psychological Science convention in San Francisco. Who had a better time, made better connections and saw more things is open to debate.
Our daughter Karenhas always enjoyed the internet beginning with her first ‘Val Kilmer’ fan site in the 7th grade. Soon, her siteevolved to a discussion platform for her track and field friends along with publishing a popular web based newsletter. During this time, she encountered many of the troubling issues that face athletes, celebrities and almost everyone who frequents the internet. The same questions came up over and over: how do I make a good reputation? How do I prevent a bad one from developing? And How do I get old stuff ‘off’ that continues to cause problems .
Today, Karen gave a lecture on the impact of social media on reputation management to a Psychology class at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and hoped to answer some of these questions for students. By ‘iclicker’ , she discovered that virtually all of the students were on social media! Consequently, many students find themselves haunted by embarrassing pictures of themselves on the internet and some deeds … well, that they wished others didn’t know about. By example, Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps learned this the hard way. I am told, Karen offered helpful advice.
It was something to think about…
Roger Freberg
(too bad Cal Poly administrators weren’t around to listen)
