October 11, 2012
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Visual Minutes:
Visual minutes of this event were taken and are available:
– agenda
– Chris Newfield’s presentation
– concerns and interventions part 1
– concerns and interventions part 2
– concerns and interventions part 3
– next steps.
September 25, 2012
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September 25, 2012 by admin
Please join us for a conversation and organizing meeting among faculty from the Northern California UC campuses to discuss faculty visions for the UC system over the next year and beyond. In recent years, the campuses have confronted a seemingly endless string of state, UCOP and campus administration generated atrocities and bad ideas. All too often our energies are depleted in responding to the latest local fiasco or outrage. In this gathering, we hope to do something different and less reactive: to meet colleagues at other campuses concerned with these issues and continue to build cross-campus contacts, discussions and community; to further define a set of specifically faculty perspectives on the project of the public university and our role within it; and to begin to hammer out multiple possible interventions in the current morass. Chris Newfield, author of Unmaking the Public University, will be joining us and will start with some brief thoughts on the current situation, and then we will open to a broader discussion.
Sponsored by the Berkeley Faculty Association and FOG (Faculty Organizing Group, UCSC). Sunday September 30, 12:00-3:00. Wheeler 330, UC Berkeley.
July 19, 2012
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Wendy Brown
Outgoing Co-Chair, Berkeley Faculty Association
On July 16thand 17th, The New York Times featured stories on the launching of Coursera, a blockbuster online higher education project emerging from a spectacularly successful Stanford experiment two years ago.
Still in the early stages of development but already reaching hundreds of thousands of learners, Coursera promises to disseminate academic knowledge for free to anyone with access to a computer. The courses are not offered for credit although certification of completion is available. This “impediment” (which reminds us that online learning is not a direct substitute for classroom learning) does not seem to be one. Millions around the world are registering for fall 2012 Coursera courses.
Many elite universities have signed on to Coursera, including Princeton, Stanford, Penn, Duke, Hopkins and a range of publics, among them Illinois, Michigan and Virginia. The University of California (with the exception of UCSF) is notably missing from the list of participating universities.
Where is UC? As you will recall, last year Berkeley Law School Dean Edley borrowed $7 million from UCOP to launch a UC for-profit online higher ed project, one that he promised would lead the way in the elite higher ed market, reap hundreds of millions of dollars for the university AND produce social justice as it extended a UC education to those who could not afford to leave home. Many of us were skeptical at the time, though our concerns were largely brushed aside. Edley also promised to raise private funds for the pilot exploration of this project. When this fundraising effort failed, he turned to the depleted coffers of UCOP to finance the pilot, claiming that it was a loan which would easily and quickly be repaid. (Why, one might ask, would UCOP fund something that major foundations, with their fingers on the pulse of online higher ed, would not?)
As Coursera and other elite online endeavors sailed the winds of open sourcing and brought ever more universities and constituencies on board, the UC online project kept shifting course. Would it provide a wholly online UC degree as Edley initially hoped? Or would it provide UC lower division courses to UC students so the University could enroll more students without expanding physical campuses or hiring more faculty? Or would it sell UC-branded courses to non-UC students (as the pilot project has done)? Would it be a substitute for, a supplement to, or a commercialized knock-off of a UC on-campus education? Would it sell the courses at the price of on-campus tuition or at a substantial discount? If the former, how would it compete with cheaper or free courses and if the latter, how would it make money? The question of when and how campus Senate committees would be involved in authorizing courses and credits was also constantly shifting and deferred.
Fast forward to the present. Dean Edley is not out front on this project any more. In fact, his leadership role appears nowhere on the UCOP website devoted to the project; he is listed only as a member of a faculty oversight committee. And UCOP Vice Provost Daniel Greenstein, Dean Edley’s partner in developing and promoting the project, has left UC for a position at the Gates Foundation.
Now in charge of UC Online is Keith Williams, a lecturer in Physical Education and Biology at UC Davis whose office is at the Hickey Gym.
So, who is responsible for repaying the $7 million loan that Edley and Greenstein got from UCOP to fund the pilot? When students renege on their loan payments, the Federal government garnishes their wages, should they be lucky enough to have any. When a department overspends its annual budget, available funds for the following year are reduced, and heads may also roll. But when an online pilot project doesn’t make its payments, what happens? Who is responsible? Who or what pays?
Shouldn’t we be able to see the loan repayment schedule for UC Online? And is it possible that we should stop throwing good money after bad, fold UC Online, sign on to Coursera, and get back to the important business of protecting what remains of UC on-campus instruction?
July 9, 2012
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By Bob Meister,President of CUCFA (Professor of Political and Social Thought, UCSC)
On June 27, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed language inserted by both houses of the legislature that would have tied UC funding to admitting a minimum number of students (the same enrollment target as in previous budgets). His veto message says as follows:
“Deletes provision 15 of item 6440-001-0001 from AB 1497, because the requirement contained in this provision that the University achieve an enrollment target of 209,977 resident full-time equivalent students creates unnecessary cost pressures on this item and is unnecessarily restrictive.”
Is such language no longer necessary? In the Schwarzenegger years the state budget set an enrollment target for UC and required that funds be “reverted” to the state if UC did not meet that target. Jerry Brown’s first budget maintained the goal of a minimum expected enrollment but explicitly rejected the reversion penalty. This year, the enrollment target itself was missing from the Governor’s January budget and from the May revise. After the LAO noticed its absence, the state legislature put it back.
Governor Brown’s veto means that, although Master Plan eligibility still exists on paper, the state will no longer monitor UC’s compliance with Master Plan expectations. The Governor’s veto should thus be read as a symbolic repudiation of the Master Plan’s link between UC’s state funding and its commitment to admit all eligible Californians. Maybe UC will keep its in-state enrollments constant for next year. But if you want a sense of where things are headed, just listen to President Yudof crow: “[The] bill included California resident enrollment target language that is not consistent with funding levels provided from the State… In accordance with my request the Governor vetoed the budget provisions on the enrollment target ….” (Yudof to Regents, June 29, 2012)
On Friday, June 30, Eric Hays (The Council of UC Faculty Association’s Executive Director) and Joe Kiskis (CUCFA’s VP for External Relations) attended a meeting at UCOP in which the likely outlines of the Governor’s compact with Yudof were revealed. Joe reports as follows:
In the event that Brown’s ballot initiative does pass, the governor has promised to dust off the multi-year (4-year? 5-year?) UC funding agreement that was apparently worked out between OP and the Governor during the spring and has since been on hold. The present version of this has a 6%/yr increase in state support for UC. That is the 4% previously rumored plus 2% for UCRP. In that eventuality, OP would likely ask the Regents for a 6%/yr tuition increase. (You read that right.) In the event that the ballot initiative does not pass, OP will probably ask the Regents for a tuition increase sufficient to make up for the $250M trigger, the lost $125M tuition buy out, and some other increasing fixed costs for a total increase of 20.3% to be effective Jan. 1, 2013. Yes, mid-year.
So here’s the deal. Jerry Brown will allow UC’s in-state tuition to compound, even in his best-case scenario, and has agreed with Yudof that UC will no longer be accountable for replacing California students with non-residents, each of whom yields a surplus revenue of c.$22,000. The UC campuses that displace California students, moreover, will be allowed to keep all the extra money this brings in, thereby increasing their budgetary advantage over campuses that meet what were once regarded as Master Plan expectations. (See http://cucfa.org/news/2012_jun24.php) But from now on there will be no Master Plan targets stated in the budget, and thus no official reason for the Governor or his Department of Finance to keep track of whether the UC system and its individual campuses are complying with the Master Plan’s commitment to find a place for all eligible Californians. If they don’t, who will? The California Post-Secondary Education Commission, which was created for this purpose, was abolished in last year’s budget. When the Legislature tried to fulfill this Master Plan role, the Governor used his line-item to block this at Yudof’s request.
Eric Hays has kept track of how far the Governor Brown has moved away from Master Plan language in the Schwarzenegger budgets:
May 22, 2011
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Comments Off on Operational Excellence Pre-Award Plan Survey
The UCSF Faculty Association delivered a letter to Chancellor Sue Desmond-Hellmann containing the results of the UCSF FA survey of faculty about the Operational Excellence pre-award plans. The letter below with the detailed survey results is available as a PDF.
May 20, 2011
Sue Desmond-Hellmann, MD MPH
Chancellor
University of California, San Francisco
Dear Sue,
The UCSF Faculty Association was contacted by several faculty who were concerned that the Operational Excellence Pre-Award plan was being pushed through without serious consideration of faculty concerns that the plan would make it more difficult for faculty to do their jobs.
To assess whether such views were widely held, the Faculty Association conducted an internet survey of the UCSF faculty from May 8-18. The detailed results are attached. We particularly call your attention to the text comments, which have been organized into categories to facilitate considering them.
Two hundred eighty of UCSF’s faculty responded (12%), including 18% of ladder/FTE faculty, 16% of in residence, and 10% of adjunct, the groups most likely to be affected by the proposed changes. The response was highest among full and associate professors, probably reflecting the fact that the list of faculty available to the Faculty Association is several years old. We attempted to compensate for this fact by encouraging faculty to have colleagues who did not receive our email invitations contact us to receive the survey. We only permitted one response per UCSF email address.
The survey itself was initially drafted by the Faculty Association Board, then circulated to several UCSF faculty with expertise in survey design for review for substance and tone. All changes that these reviewers suggested were incorporated. We took care, for example, to vary the order of response options (some supportive to unsupportive and some unsupportive to supportive) to avoid biasing responses. Professor Stanton Glantz, who teaches statistics, oversaw the project.
The results show that the faculty recognizes that there is room for improvement in pre-award management. When offered a non-exclusive list of options for “most likely to reduce costs of managing pre-award administration while at the same time maximizing support for your ability to compete successfully for grants,” only 13% selected “maintain the current system.”
At the same time, only 4% selected “implement the current OE centralized plan.”
The survey exposed a serious lack of confidence in the current plan and process:
* Faculty overwhelmingly believe that the changes will make their jobs harder. In response to the question, “What effect do you think this new system will have on the ease with which you can submit grants?” 62% believed it would make their job somewhat or much harder compared to 10% who though it would make their job somewhat or much easier.
* Seventy percent of faculty believed it would make them personally less productive compared to 8% who thought it would make them more productive.
* Sixty-nine percent thought it would reduce departmental productivity and morale compared to 8% who thought it would improve morale and productivity.
* Forty-four percent of respondents believed that campus leadership has been not very open or closed to faculty ideas and concerns about how to improve pre-award management, compared to only 19% who believed leadership had been somewhat or open to faculty ideas and concerns. There were similar numbers for openness to staff ideas and concerns.
* Forty-nine percent of respondents said that the process of developing the new pre-award system has somewhat or substantially decreased confidence in campus leadership compared to 14% who said it somewhat or substantially increased confidence in campus leadership.
There is serious concern about the decision to select iMedRIS software to manage the new system. Fifty-one percent of faculty respondents reported that iMedRIS required somewhat or much more time for them to prepare Committee on Human Research applications, compared to 29% who said somewhat or much less time. When asked, “Based on your experience with the CHR system, would you recommend that the campus purchase software to manage pre-award grants management from iMedRiS?” 51% said “no” compared to 14% who said “yes.”
As noted above, faculty do believe that improvement in current processes and procedures is possible and do support positive change. Of the nonexclusive choices offered moving forward, the most selected one was “Maintain a department/ORU-centered delivery of services with increased training so that signature authority can be delegated to departments, reducing the role of central contracts and grants to training and oversight, thereby reducing costs at that level,” which was selected by 46% of respondents, followed by “implement the current OE centralized plan in a few departments and ORU for a reasonable time, then compare its actual performance with existing high performing units in terms of faculty satisfaction and costs before deciding whether and how to proceed,” with 42% (The next highest choice had 29%.) These selections far exceed both maintaining the status quo (13%) and implementing the current plan (4%).
In the comments, one respondent succinctly summed up concerns that appeared in many of the comments:
Unlike the other elements of Operational Excellence, this pre-award function is about REVENUE, not cost management if anything, pre-award should be DE CENTRALIZED so that we can all be more responsive to the unique issues around RFPs. I have a personal relationship with my pre-award analyst who often works flexibly with my needs. I do not have any such relationship with anyone who provides a shared/centralized service. I’m all for centralizing cost and other administrative centers, not revenue.
The Faculty Association agrees with this point and supports the recommended path of seeking to strengthen the current distributed system and reduce costs by delegating authority to departments and ORUs with appropriate training and oversight. A concurrent voluntary test of the currently planned arrangement would also be acceptable, although running two parallel systems would probably be more expensive. We also support ongoing monitoring of how well a modernized decentralized system works so that appropriate adjustments, including moving toward or to the proposed centralized system should the modernized decentralized system fail to meet expectations.
We would be happy to meet and discuss these results with you or anyone else who is interested to move this issue forward, In these challenging times, it is important that we make the best possible decisions for UCSF, its faculty, students and staff.
Thank you for your consideration.
Warren M. Gold, MD
Chairman UCSF Faculty Association
Professor of Medicine
cc: EVCP Jeff Bluestone
VC Keith Yarnarnoto
Dean Sam Hawgood
Dean Mary Anne KodaKimbie
Dean John Featherstone
Dean David Viahov
Senate Chair Elena Fuentes-Afflick
Senate Vice Chair Robert Netorner
The full survey results are available as a PDF.
The letter below with the detailed survey results is available...with the link
February 15, 2010
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Audio, and slides from the January 25 “Defending the University: A Teach-In on the Current Crisis” are now available.
January 18, 2010
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The University of California, San Francisco
HSW-300
Monday, January 25, 2010
4:30 pm
This “teach-in” explores the origins and character of the current crisis at the University of California. It is both an educational and political event, designed to provide a progressive, alternative analysis of the budget crisis and a positive road forward for California, the UC system, and education at all levels in our state. We defend public higher education in the Golden State. We do not favor privatization of the University, austerity for the public schools, or furloughs, wage freezes, and fee hikes for staff, faculty, and students. We hope that the information and analysis generated by this teach-in will provide students, staff, faculty, and administrators with the weapons necessary to defend our university as it faces unprecedented attack.
Speakers:
Stan Glantz, Professor of Medicine, UCSF, past chair of UC Committee on Planning and Budget: “UC’s Budget Mess: How We Got Here and How Little It Would Cost to Get Out”
Robert Meister, Professor of Political Science, UC Santa Cruz, President, UC Faculty Associations: “Who Pays and Who Benefits? Higher Education and Taxation as Engines of Equality and Growth”
George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, Author of California Democracy Act Ballot Initiative: “Privatization and Democracy: How We Can Change Our Future”
Moderated by Warren Gold, Chair UCSF Faculty Association
For more information, contact Rena Frantz, ucsf_fa@earthlink.net