Berkeleyan

Letter to the Editor

15 April 2004

Editor:

Your interview with Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Gray (“The 2004-05 budget: a work in process,” April 1) highlighted the continuing fiscal challenges faced by UC Berkeley’s administration. What wasn’t mentioned, however, was a major expense area still not targeted for any cuts: senior administration positions.

Provost Gray’s direct reports —six vice chancellors, three vice provosts, one associate chancellor, one associate vice chancellor, one assistant chancellor, one assistant vice chancellor, and one associate provost —cost Berkeley more than $2 million a year, according to the 2003 UC Personnel Listing. The 21 deans who also report to him cost Berkeley more than $3.5 million a year. This doesn’t even begin to tally the cost of the dozens of assistant vice chancellors, associate vice chancellors, assistant deans, associate deans, and other senior executive staff underneath these direct reports.

While the UC Office of the President has written that maintaining educational and research excellence is the university’s top priority, spending cuts contradict this claim. The fact that student enrollments, financial aid, department budgets, faculty hiring, library acquisitions, GSI positions, support staff, maintenance, and many other related categories have been and are being cut, while not a single senior administrative position has been eliminated, shows that pain can evidently be shared by all except those who are doling it out.

If we look at the UC Office of the President, of course, the pork grows even more excessive. It’s time that President Dynes and the campus chancellors took a knife to their own budgets.

Robert Schechtman
Curatorial Assistant, Doe Library