Dear Editor,
I’m writing to address a document titled, ‘The UC Budget: Myths ‘amp; Facts,’ recently posted on the UC Office of the President’s Web site.
Many of the misstatements in that document are things that I have pointed out before in my writing and speaking to top officials of this university, though my critiques have been ignored. Here are the worst examples:
The fact sheet said, ‘UC’s budget is made up of many different fund sources, but most of them are restricted to specific uses and cannot be used for other purposes.’
In the latest budget, one reads of $5.4 billion in ‘core funds,’ which are defined as general funds plus student fees. But we see that this accounts for only 39 percent of all unrestricted funds spent by the university last year!
It also said, ‘A payment for a surgery in a UC hospital can’t be redirected to fund graduate students.’ That is a half-truth. There is a surplus income from the UC medical enterprises, amounting to around $1 billion a year, which is distributed to faculty in the medical schools as ‘bonus pay.’ A portion of that money could be redirected to other pressing academic needs in these times of budget stringency: That would be called shared sacrifice. Mark G. Yudof and the regents have authority to implement such a strategy.
The sheet also denied that salaries being given to UC senior managers affected the increase in student fees, because management salaries represent less than 1 percent of the total payroll at the UC system.
In previous papers, I have demonstrated that there is a much larger constellation of management bureaucracy throughout the UC system, which has grown over the past decade and is now estimated to waste some $600 million per year. The Senior Management Group, which is discussed here, is just the tip of that iceberg.
They said the primary reason student fees rise is related to the decline in the state’s funding for per-student education at the UC system.
What the university calls the ‘funding for per-student education at UC’ is a piece of accounting fraud. The numbers used to calculate that actually cover all of the costs for faculty research work throughout the academic year as well as undergraduate plus graduate educational programs.
When I disaggregate that bundle of expenses, it turns out that undergraduate student fees now cover the full per-student cost for the UC system to provide undergraduate education. So the reduction in state funding is really a cutback in the faculty’s research program. That is a lamentable loss, but it is totally unjustified to dump that cost onto undergraduate students. These same facts also eradicate the justification for Yudof’s claim that the state has failed to provide funds for ‘enrollment growth,’ since the student fees cover all of that cost.
This letter is an excerpt of one that I sent to Yudof. To view the full version, visit UniversityProbe.org.