UCSF Faculty Association

January 26, 2017
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The $48 fix: Reclaiming California’s Master Plan for Higher Education

On Thursday, January 26, the UC Regents will consider and likely approve their budget for the University for 2017-2018. It and the Governor’s budget, to which it is closely tied, perpetuate decades of failed privatization and persistent under funding of the University and of public higher education more generally. At UC and as compared to both 1990-1991 and 2000-2001, total per student expenditures for instruction and the State general fund contribution to per student instruction are sharply down while the inflation-adjusted contributions from students through tuition and fees are 70% higher than they were in 2000-2001 and 135% higher than they were in 1990-1991. Students and their families are paying more and getting less.

It has become conventional “wisdom” that this continuing decline is inevitable and that viable alternatives do not exist.

The report The $48 fix: Reclaiming California’s MASTER PLAN for Higher Education demonstrates that there is an affordable alternative that restores public higher education in California.

“It turns out that keeping the full promise of the Master Plan-returning the state’s investment per CSU and UC student to 2000 levels (inflation-adjusted); eliminating tuition and fees for all in-state UC, CSU and CCC students; and funding seats for qualified California high-school graduates now refused access to the system-is affordable.”

“California’s two-decade experiment in privatizing higher education has failed, as it has failed in the rest of the country. Top-quality, accessible and appropriate higher education that affords opportunity to all California students has been replaced with a system that restricts access, costs students more and compromises educational quality. Exploding student debt constricts students’ futures and harms the economy as a whole. It is entirely feasible to reinstate California’s proven success in public higher education. Several reasonable funding options can be mixed and matched to make the costs remarkably low for almost all California families. Our state has the means and the opportunity. Will we recover our political will and vision?”

This report was produced by the Reclaim California Higher Education coalition, which includes the Council of University of California Faculty Associations and other organizations dedicated to affordable, accessible, and excellent public higher education in California.

December 3, 2016
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UCSF Faculty Association’s request to President Napolitano that the university reverse its decision to outsource IT jobs

Dear President Napolitano,

I write on behalf of the Board and membership of the UCSF Faculty Association to ask that the university reverse its decision to outsource IT jobs at UCSF, with the potential to outsource them at other campuses as well.

We support the rationales that many around the State of California have expressed in opposition to the decision to outsource these jobs.  The University is a recipient of a high volume of revenue from public sources, including, of course funding from the State of California (about $2billion including the basic education allocation to UC and Medicaid reimbursements), and at least $8billion in Federal funds from such sources as NIH, NSF, CDC, and DOD contracts and grants, Medicare and Medicaid payments, and  Pell grants, fellowships, scholarships, loans, and work study.  As the recipient of such State of California and federal funds, the University owes it to the taxpayers to use these sources to hire citizens and residents and to do so in its role as a model employer, providing living wages with generous benefits.  In using best hiring practices, the University contributes to the public welfare by reducing the possibility that its workers will be beneficiaries of public funding streams intended for the working poor such Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and the Earned Income Tax Credit, among others.

Beyond efforts to continue to be models for employers in the public sector and setting standards that may percolate to the private sector, however, there is one additional aspect that touches us every day as faculty members and which hasn’t been discussed much in the press coverage of the decision to outsource some IT workers.  Although the decision-makers were clearly focused only on the short-term result that costs for IT services may be lowered, they omitted the more important consideration that IT services are a crucial component of what we do in teaching, research, and clinical care realms.  As many of us have witnessed during past reorganizations that have centralized these functions, there are more numerous blockages to critical academic activities when there is not a history of on-site collaboration between the IT staff and faculty and research and clinical staff.  In the design of solutions to problems that arise, IT staff without intimate knowledge of how users interact with technology cannot provide needed services and productivity lags. Outsourcing also may increase the threat of data breaches, with implications for HIPAA and FERPA protections.  We should add that for most UCSF faculty, IT is paid for through our contracts and grants, adding to the public accountability issues.

We ask that you immediately rescind this outsourcing of IT services both because it is not appropriate  for a university operating with a majority of its funds coming from public sources to abrogate its responsibility to the public and because the quality of the IT work done will be compromised when workers are not be on-site, indeed may be outside the country.  We add that asking current workers to train their replacements using H-IB visas but being paid far less is not befitting an institution which, as a public university, must earn the trust of the public each and every day.

Sincerely,

The Board of the UCSF Faculty Association

Member, Council of UC Faculty Associations

 

CC: Chancellor Hawgood, Senators Boxer and Feinstein, Senator-Elect Harris, and Leader Pelosi

November 23, 2016
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Defense of Undocumented and other Vulnerable Categories of Students

Dear President Napolitano,

We applaud your timely declaration in the immediate aftermath of the election that the UC administration “remain[s] absolutely committed to supporting all members of our community and adhering to UC’s Principles Against Intolerance.”[1]

Like you, we are gravely concerned by the statements made by President-elect Donald Trump during the campaign, and in the aftermath of his victory, targeting particularly vulnerable communities such as undocumented Latinos and Muslim immigrants.

We support your subsequent statement to the UC Regents that “it is more important than ever that we preserve our core values, expand opportunity, and create and share knowledge in the public interest.”[2] We also support your decision to meet with representatives of undocumented students, and to institute a task force to help UC students who are in the country without legal permission and who may be at greater risk of deportation under a Trump administration.

We endorse the joint letter you wrote with CSU Chancellor Timothy White and CC Interim President Erik Skinner to the California congressional delegation asking for the restoration of year-long Pell grants.[3] CUCFA has long believed in the inextricable connection between affordable higher education and the benefits of all forms of diversity to knowledge-production, society, and democracy. We greatly appreciate the advocacy of our leaders on behalf of our students.

In short, we stand united with our administrators against any threats directed at our students and fellow employees, or any words or acts of hate that threaten our mission as a public research university committed to the betterment of our global society through teaching, learning, and the dissemination of new knowledge. We pledge to stand up for, support, and defend the most vulnerable among us, those deliberately targeted in the lead up to the election, and those who are now victims of hate in its wake – members of our community who are undocumented, people of color, LGBTQ people, Muslims (and other religious minorities), immigrants, people with disabilities, and women.

To implement these policy principles, we urge that, in collaboration with the chancellors and other appropriate authorities, you:

  • Explore all legal venues to refuse to act on behalf of federal agents, and to withhold information on the immigration status, religion, and national origin of our students, faculty, or staff;
  • Not enter into agreements with state or local law enforcement agencies, Homeland Security or any other federal department for the enforcement of federal immigration law;
  • Instruct university police not to honor immigration hold requests, and not to contact, detain, question or arrest individuals solely on the basis of being, or suspected of being, a person that lacks documentation;
  • Standardize a UC systemwide administrative office with responsibility for counseling DACA students on their educational situation;
  • Publicize that DACA student counseling services are available on a strictly confidential basis;
  • Continue to allow DACA-eligible students to pay in-state resident tuition;
  • Ensure student’s access to health care and financial aid within California law;
  • Invest in faculty and staff training for UndocuAlly modules developed by UC Davis;[4]
  • Commit to allow undocumented students to work on UC campuses in the event that the DACA provisions were repealed;
  • Take these measures before Inauguration Day so that DACA students can be assured of institutional support.

We are aware of the many calls to consider declaring all UCs “sanctuary campuses” before the inauguration of President-elect Trump.[5] While we support the spirit of this call, believing that Universities have an ethical obligation to assist undocumented students against threats of deportation, we are concerned that the idea of sanctuary campuses does not have any legal status, and agree with Cal State Chancellor White that declaring any public university a “sanctuary” may give a false sense of security “to the very people we support and serve.”[6] We urge you to study all legal and symbolic ramifications of declaring UC campuses “sanctuaries,” and to involve students, staff, and faculty in making that decision. Accordingly, we ask you to charge the announced task force on undocumented students with discussing explicitly the issue of sanctuary status and to make their findings public before January 20.

It is estimated that one third of the over 740,000 undocumented students in the US reside in California, and our state already has multiple progressive policies designed to support undocumented immigrants, including measures that help them access healthcare, driver’s licenses and student loans. We have a responsibility not only to reassure our students that we will stand by them in the face of deportation if laws were passed in that direction, but to lead the nation in rejecting policies opposed to the core values of our university.

For this reason we support your actions to date and reiterate our desire to work with you and other university leaders to advance these important goals.

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations Board,
Stanton Glantz,
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
Professor of Medicine, UCSF

[1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article113780763.html

[2] http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-ln-uc-regents-20161116-story.html

[3] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-president-joins-california-higher-education-and-uc-student-leaders-support-pell-grants

[4] http://undocumented.ucdavis.edu/education/ally.html

[5] http://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2016/11/proposal-turn-californias-massive-public-higher-ed-system-into-sanctuary-campuses-to-stop-trump-107463

[6] http://mynewsla.com/education/2016/11/17/no-sanctuary-at-cal-state-university-but-no-cooperation-with-trump-immigration/

September 30, 2016
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A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors

The Council of UC Faculty Associations has developed important criteria for Chancellor searches in light of the vacancies at the Davis and Berkeley campuses.  We welcome your feedback.

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A University of California Chancellor must be committed both to broad access to university education and to scholarly excellence, and have a proven record of support for the value of public education. A Chancellor must recognize that, despite increases in fundraising for specific projects, efforts at privatization have failed to sustain the University’s central mission of education, research, and service for the people of California. In addition to providing intellectual vision and integrity, the Chancellor should demonstrate accountability to the principles and the public mission of the university.

To be forthright and transparent in dealings with the UC community and the public, the Chancellor must show by example the values held by the UC system:

•    By focusing on education, research, and public service, not on peripheral capital projects not directly related to the university’s primary teaching and research missions that saddle the university with high levels of debt.

•    By respecting shared governance between administration and faculty as vital to insulating academic freedom from external political and financial influence.

•    By limiting the number of out-of-state undergraduate students to maximize opportunity for Californians.

•    By reducing the number of senior managers; senior management has grown by a factor of three or four over the last 20 years while the number of faculty has remained stagnant and the number of students increased by 60%.

•    By making the administrative leadership transparent and by opening the budget to meaningful faculty review and input.

•    By implementing a cap on the salary of the Chancellor and other senior administrators, limited to a given multiplier of the lowest paid workers on campus on the grounds that a corporate salary leads to corporate attitudes, whereas a more modest salary corresponds to public service and respects the financial needs of students, faculty, and the institution.

•    By pledging not to accept any paid external board service or paid consulting with for-profit entities.

•    By developing new community outreach programs, involving the teaching and research role of campus faculty and students and, more generally, elevating the contributions of UC to the people of California.

Accordingly, the process of choosing the Chancellor should be open to the university community:

•    The short list of candidates selected by the search committee and forwarded to the President should be publicly discussed. The candidates should be invited to campus for public presentations and comments from the university community should be debated by the search committee.

•    The President and Regents should make their decision after consultation with the Academic Senate to ensure a candidate the whole campus supports.

Council of University of California Faculty Associations (September 29, 2016) info@cucfa.org

September 8, 2016
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Faculty Associations’ Letter to the President of Long Island University

Dear UC Faculty,

The letter we’ve posted below shows our opposition to the actions of the administration of Long Island University which locked out faculty, arbitrarily cutting their pay and benefits and cutting off access to their email, certainly the life blood of communication among people in academic disciplines and between faculty and their students.  As the letter states, this is a dangerous precedent.  While none of us wants to believe this could happen in the UC system, it is important to remember that increasing fractions of the faculty at the UCs are not protected by tenure or even ladder rank status. 

The Board of the Faculty Association

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September 7, 2016

Dear Dr. Cline:

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations is extremely alarmed by the “lock out” action taken by your administration against the faculty of LIU-Brooklyn.

The action has no precedent in higher education in this country and constitutes a grave assault on unions, labor negotiations, and faculty themselves.

We urge you to reconsider this tactic and return to the negotiating table to bargain in good faith.

To do otherwise is to antagonize hardworking and dedicated faculty for years to come, devastate the educational aspirations and expectations of your students, many of whom have overcome tremendous obstacles to arrive at your college gates, and produce pariah status for LIU-Brooklyn in American higher education.

This path has no future for your institution and we urge you to reconsider.

Sincerely,

The Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

July 26, 2016
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Faculty Association’s reaction to CEO Laret’s membership on private board

Dear Colleagues,
The letter below expresses the opinion of the Board of the Faculty Association that service on private boards should be forbidden for senior executives at UCSF due to potential conflicts of interest or, at the very least, the appearance of conflicts of interest.
The Board

UCSF Faculty Association

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July 23, 2016

Dear Chancellor Hawgood,

We write representing the Board of the UCSF Faculty Association about the recent San Francisco Chronicle story about Mark Laret’s service on the board of two private entities. We understand that his service was in accordance with university and campus policy and was approved by your office on an annual basis.

We request that the policy be changed to forbid such service.

We make this request on the basis of a consistent body of research, much conducted here at UCSF, that documents that relationships with private entities affect behavior even when the individual says otherwise and even when the amount of the compensation is extremely small. While Mr. Laret may recuse himself from decisions affecting the specific vendors with whom he has a fiduciary relationship, the literature indicates that there are effects on one’s colleagues who may make decisions and that they may also not be aware of the effect on their behavior. The intent of this change in policy is to increase the probability that decisions about products are made on the basis of medical evidence, perhaps even evidence of cost-effectiveness.

As a result of this body of research, most clinical departments at UCSF have stopped accepting meals and other perks from drug and device manufacturers both to decrease the possibility that clinical decisions are affected by relationships with industry and to transmit an ethos of neutrality to trainees. Most professional associations have also moved to sever the most egregious aspects of industry-association relationships, for example by putting educational activities at a physical remove from industry exhibits at conferences. At the very least, these changes are designed to reduce the appearance of a conflict of interest even if it is difficult, despite the healthcare literature cited above, to prove an actual conflict in an individual case.

We ask no more than that the CEO of the Medical Center adhere to the same ethical standards as have been developed in the medical provider community to ensure that an individual patient receives care unaffected by commercial bias known and unknown and developed by the private health insurance industry and public insurance programs including Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA System to ensure that coverage for broad groups of patients be governed by the same principles.

Sincerely,
The Board of the UCSF Faculty Association
Member, Council of UC Faculty Associations

July 20, 2016
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Alarming Changes to UC Regent’s Governance Structure

A change in Regental committee structure may seem arcane, but I hope these two pieces make it clear that this change may make it harder for students, faculty, staff and public to monitor policies that affect all of us.

This issue was voted on by the Regents on July 20, 2016, and  passed unanimously.

Regents Propose Centralization Without Real Justification, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, by Michael Meranze, Remaking the University

Alarming Changes to UC Regent’s Governance Structure, July 19, 2016, Robert Meister as posted on the Council of U.C. Faculty Associations (CUCFA) website.

November 5, 2015
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UC task force considering pension cuts

If you are concerned about a further erosion of compensation at UC, we encourage you to follow the link below to read CUCFA’s (the Council of UC Faculty Associations) explanation of the proposals made by President Napolitano’s UC task force. The task force has been charged with developing a new UC Retirement Plan (UCRP) Tier 2016 for faculty and other employees hired after June 30, 2016. Under consideration  are  reduced benefits within UCRP and a full defined contribution alternative instead of the defined benefit UCRP.

The CUCFA letter details the proposed changes to the UC Retirement Plan and lays out the threat they pose to overall compensation for new faculty, as well as for the health of the pension system for all faculty. The letter includes names of the task force members and faculty representatives to whom concerns can be directed.

 

September 25, 2015
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Statement by CUCFA and AAUP on Regent Blum’s Remarks

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations and the American Association of University Professors write to protest the following remarks made by University of California Regent Richard Blum and then supported by Regent Hadi Makarechian during the discussion of a proposed Statement of Principles Against Intolerance at the Board of Regents meeting on September 17, 2015:

“I should add that over the weekend my wife, your senior Senator, and I talked about this issue at length. She wants to stay out of the conversation publicly but if we do not do the right thing she will engage publicly and is prepared to be critical of this university if we don’t have the kind of not only statement but penalties for those who commit what you can call them crimes, call them whatever you want. Students that do the things that have been cited here today probably ought to have a dismissal or a suspension from school. I don’t know how many of you feel strongly that way but my wife does and so do I.”

These remarks by Regent Blum explicitly invoke his wife, U.S. Senator from California Dianne Feinstein, and threaten negative political consequences for the University if the proposed Statement of Principles Against Intolerance is not revised so as to be agreeable to him and Senator Feinstein. As such, they violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Article IX, Section 9 of the California Constitution, which declares that “The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appointment of its regents and in the administration of its affairs.”

Whatever varied opinions we may hold on the proposed Statement of Principles or any other matter for University discussion, we should all join in rejecting any attempt by a Regent to influence University deliberations by calling on external political forces in this manner.

The complex and competing issues involved in developing a suitable Statement of Principles Against Intolerance are matters of discussion and intellectual inquiry within the University. The purpose of academic freedom is to protect such inquiry from external political interference, and it is the duty of the members of the Board of Regents to uphold academic freedom and to protect the university from external constraints on this freedom. So it is very troubling to hear a Regent make statements that directly undermine free inquiry and the independence of the University. It is particularly disconcerting in this case, because among the central issues are academic freedom and free speech.

We understand that individual Regents, in their private capacity, like many others in the community, may hold strong views on this and many other issues. However, in their official capacity, the Regents have the responsibility to uphold the rights of University administrators and faculty to determine internal University policies through established processes of shared governance free of external political pressure and threats from any source, including the Regents’ own spouses, relatives and friends. We call upon the Regents, the President, and the Provost to provide explicit assurances that they will support and protect the independence and integrity of the continuing discussions of a possible Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.

July 23, 2015
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Statement to UC Regents about new UCRS tier

Professor Celeste Langan spoke on behalf of the UC Faculty Associations at the July 22, 2015 UC Regents meeting during the public comment period. Below is a copy of her full comments:

As co-Chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association and on behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, I wish to address the Regents concerning the third discussion item of the Finance Committee agenda, item F3, “Update on Final 2015-16 Budget.”  The update, produced by the Office of the President, misleadingly claims that the final budget “incorporates the funding framework developed by UC and the Governor.” If you’ll recall, the “framework” of the May Revise proposed that the state make a contribution of $436 million toward the unfunded liability of the UC Retirement Plan.  The final budget, however, promises only a “one-time payment” of $96 million; there is nothing in the budget that commits the state to two additional payments of $170 million.  Yet even this meager one-time payment is contingent upon Regential approval of a cap on pensionable salary consistent with PEPRA (Public Employee Pension Reform Act) for employees hired after July 1, 2016.

The Council of UC Faculty Associations is opposed to the University making permanent changes in the structure of its retirement plan in exchange for a very modest one-time contribution from the State. We are especially opposed to the introduction of a full defined-contribution option.  There is absolutely no justification for the proposed introduction of a full defined-contribution option; neither the Legislature nor the Governor called for the introduction of a Defined Contributions plan in aligning the UCRP with PEPRA. Yet UCOP seems bent on introducing such an option, to the point that their statement exposes their intention as a foregone conclusion rather than a possible outcome of consultation and deliberation — those elements of what we once understood as “shared governance.”

I call your attention to the third paragraph on page 3 of the F3 agenda item.  First OP declares, “The President will convene a retirement options task force to advise on the design of new retirement options that will include the pensionable salary cap consistent with PEPRA.  The retirement options will be brought to the Regents next year for review and approval.” But apparently the “design of new retirement options” is a fait accompli, for the penultimate sentence of that paragraph declares, “new employees will have the opportunity to choose a fully defined contribution plan as a retirement option, as an alternative to the PEPRA-capped defined benefit plan.”

Since the two minutes allotted in the public comments session is the temporal equivalent of Twitter’s 140 characters, let me ask: #What’s up with UCOP?  If I had to speculate, I’d say that UCOP’s attempt to replace Defined Benefits with Defined Contributions suggests its preference for a mobile, “flexible,” precarious professoriate with a consequently short-term institutional memory — a professoriate that wouldn’t recall that only 6 years ago, the relative merits of defined contribution versus defined benefit plans were thoroughly, carefully, and widely discussed by UC constituents. Given substantial evidence that defined benefits are more cost-efficient than defined contributions in achieving the same level of benefits, it was agreed that the University of California was best served by continuing with UCRP as a defined benefit plan. Thus in 2010, when the President recommended and the Regents endorsed pension reforms, UCRP was preserved as a defined benefit plan.

Ironically, the paragraph in question concludes, “For represented groups, retirement options will be subject to collective bargaining.” Well, the UC Faculty Associations represent a good number of those faculty, members of the Academic Senate, without collective bargaining rights, and we say that UCOP has vitiated the interests of that faculty, both those vested in the current UCRP and those who will be hired after 2016.  We deplore the introduction of a different tier of faculty benefits, but we firmly oppose the attempt of UCOP to introduce a fully defined contribution plan in this untoward and unjustified manner.