“The Police didn’t beat us with batons; the administration beat us with police”
by zunguzungu
That was one of the chants at Monday’s rally against police brutality. The UC administration, on the other hand, has been trying to deflect attention from themselves by saying stuff like this:
“It’s not all about me, and it’s not all about Yudof. It’s about the university, and people have to decide whether they support the university in a very difficult time.”
Beyond the “with us or against us” crap, what gives Birgeneau the right to be the sole voice of authority speaking for the entire campus community? And what legitimizes Mark Yudof to speak for the university when he seems to open every conversation with the announcement that he’s just a lawyer from Philadelphia? Who are these people that act as chief executive officers in the UC system? (for those of you who aren’t familiar, the UC is a single university with ten campuses; it has a single President (Mark Yudof) and each campus has a Chancellor).
I googled, and this is what I found. I don’t offer the following as an argument, exactly, but it was sort of eye-opening to note how the UC chancellors who actually came from the campus they now serve as CEO of are the rare exceptions; only one chancellor (of ten) was from his own campus, and only one other came from the UC system. And I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, necessarily, for the CEO’s of universities to come from outside; certainly it is part of academic culture to embrace a kind of cross pollination of thoughts and ideas. But I wonder if Birgeneau would have called the police (and outside police) out on his students so quickly if he had deeper roots in this campus. I wonder if Yudof’s loyalties are influenced by being hired by a group of political appointees who themselves have very little in the way of UC roots. I wonder what the effect is of a state of affairs where the entire class college presidents seem to be as rootless as Methodist ministers, and if (as it was for Wesley and the Methodists) switching jobs before they can build a personal attachment to a place and a community isn’t exactly the point.
Here’s the breakdown:
- Before he became Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Birgeneau was the president of the University of Toronto.
- Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi was provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- Before Chancellor Drake went to UCI, he was vice president for health affairs at the University of California’s Office of the President.
- UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T. Yang had been the dean of engineering at Purdue.
- UCLA’s Gene D. Block had been the provost of the University of Virginia.
- Timothy P. White became chancellor at the UC Riverside after being president at the University of Idaho, and had previously been provost and executive vice president at Oregon State University.
- Marye Anne Fox became chancellor of the UC San Diego after serving as North Carolina State University’s chancellor.
- Susan Desmond-Hellmann became chancellor of the UC San Francisco, after being president of product development at Genentech, where she “was responsible for Genentech’s pre-clinical and clinical development, process research and development, business development and product portfolio management.”
- UC Santa Cruz’s George R. Blumenthal, on the other hand, is an actual product of UCSC, though it will perhaps not be surprising that he became Chancellor in an unusual way, stepping in as acting chancellor when the previous chancellor (who had come from the University of Washington) unexpectedly passed away.
- And Steve Kang became the Chancellor at UC Merced after serving as dean of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, which is at least a sister campus within the UC system.
UC/UCB Beat Students by Freewheeling spending of $3 million for Consultants to do Chancellor Birgeneau’s work: It’s a recession do the work internally.The UC President has a UCB Chancellor that should do the high paid job he is paid for instead of hiring an East Coast consulting firm to fulfill his responsibilities. ‘World class’ smart executives like Chancellor Birgeneau need to do the analysis, hard work and make the difficult decisions of their executive job!
Where do consulting firms like Bain ($3,000,000 consultants) get their recommendations?
From interviewing the senior management that hired them and will be approving their monthly consultant fees and expense reports. Remember the nationally known auditing firm who said the right things and submitted recommendations that senior management wanted to hear and fooled government oversight agencies and the public?
Mr. Birgeneau’s executive officer performance management responsibilities include “inspiring innovation and leading change.” This involves “defining outcomes, energizing others at all levels and ensuring continuing commitment.” Instead of demonstrating his capacity to fulfill his executive accountabilities, Mr. Birgeneau outsourced them. Doesn’t he engage University of California and University of California Berkeley (UCB) people at all levels to help examine the budget and recommend the necessary trims? Hasn’t he talked to Cornell and the University of North Carolina – which also hired Bain — about best practices and recommendations that might apply to UCB cuts?
No wonder the faculty and staff are angry and suspicious. Three million dollars is a high price for Californians to pay when a knowledgeable ‘world-class’ Chancellor is not doing his job.
Save $3,000,000 for teaching our students: use the resources of the UCB Academic Senate leadership, worldclass faculty and staff to do the consultats work internally. Anyone at UC/UCB recall that california is suffering a recession?
public universities are into a phase of creative disassembly where reinvention and adjustments are constant. Even solid world class institutions like the University of California Berkeley under the leadership of Chancellor Birgeneau & Provost Breslauer are firing staff, faculty and part-time lecturers through “Operation Excellence (OE)”. Yet many employees, professionals and faculty cling to old assumptions about one of the most critical relationship of all: the implied, unwritten contract between employer and employee.
Until recently, loyalty was the cornerstone of that relationship. Employers promised work security and a steady progress up the hierarchy in return for employees fitting in, accepting lower wages, performing in prescribed ways and sticking around. Longevity was a sign of employer-employee relations; turnover was a sign of dysfunction. None of these assumptions apply today. Organizations can no longer guarantee employment and lifetime careers, even if they want to. UC Berkeley senior management paralyzed themselves with an attachment to “success brings success’ rather than “success brings failure’ and are now forced to break the implied contract with employees – a contract nurtured by management that the future can be controlled.
Jettisoned Cal employees are finding that the hard won knowledge, skills and capabilities earned while being loyal are no longer valuable in the employment market place.
What kind of a contract can employers and employees make with each other? The central idea is both simple and powerful: the job or position is a shared situation. Employers and employees face market and financial conditions together, and the longevity of the partnership depends on how well the for-profit or not-for-profit continues to meet the needs of customers and constituencies. Neither employer nor employee has a future obligation to the other. Organizations train people. Employees develop the kind of security they really need – skills, knowledge and capabilities that enhance future employability.
The partnership can be dissolved without either party considering the other a traitor.