UCI Puts Unlucky Faculty on Hold

I almost missed the item buried in the back pages of UC Irvine’s student newspaper.

Vice Chancellor Horace Mitchell was giving student leaders a sketch of the state fiscal crisis’ impact on the $50-million student affairs budget: a hiring freeze, reduced paper quality in campus publications, a halt to travel and a reduction in office expenses.

Nothing new there. Nearly every department in Orange County’s colleges is grappling with the same options.

Then came the part about things being bad all over. So bad, in fact, that “the humanities faculty no longer have phones,” Mitchell was quoted as saying in the New University.

No phones? Finally, a way to humanize budget troubles in higher education for the average reader, I thought. But wait. Could things be that bad?

I tried to imagine life as a reporter without a telephone:

At a recent UCI conference on nuclear issues and the environment, the Soviet Union’s environmental protection chief said that his country wants to prohibit all nuclear weapons and that the holdup is the United States. Without a telephone, I could not have verified his remarks with the Soviet Embassy in Washington.

When a lawsuit was filed against UCI recently in Orange County Superior Court, I would have had to drive to the Irvine campus and to the Santa Monica office of the attorney representing the former employee to get reactions from the parties involved.

Another budget story on “Freeway Flyers,” college lecturers who may not have a job next fall, would have been impossible to report without a telephone.

It was hard enough even with one. By definition, these lecturers are either teaching a class or in their cars headed to one at the next campus. (If they could, they would add here that they are paid too little to afford a car phone.)

But if faculty at UCI didn’t have telephones, how could I--or any student, for that matter--reach them? Ah, a possible conflict.

Humanities School Dean Terence D. Parsons explained that department office phones would still be available. So faculty could: a) get messages from students, research colleagues and me; and b) wouldn’t have to stand in line at the nearest pay-to-dial.

Nor was this policy being imposed unilaterally throughout the 10 or so departments within Humanities, he said. They have the option of cutting 25% elsewhere in their expenses.

But even where professors choose not to pay a $27 monthly fee out of their own wallets, you had to wonder about the long-run savings in yanking out telephones.

It takes a onetime fee of $30 to take out each unit. Add another $70 to reinstall it in better times, said Michael P. Johnson, chairman of the history department, which will slice its phone budget. Then there is a $6 monthly charge to hold each extension for future use.

“There’s even more irrationality,” Johnson said. “You might think any sane person could call GTE and say ‘Good grief, put in my telephone.’ But the university telephone system is private. We’d have to string lines across the campus and through the windows.”

Whether such cuts are penny-wise and pound-foolish is irrelevant to university administrators, who have about 80% of their budgets tied up in virtually untouchable personnel costs. That only leaves operating funds, which are used for part-time help, pens, paper clips and postage needed to carry on the daily activities of a research university.

Students will feel the impact when they find more classmates competing for a professor’s attention and fewer courses from which to choose. But that won’t be until next fall. By then, the die will be cast, and many faculty phones will be disconnected.

Parsons insists that this is not a Draconian measure, nor is it a device to grab the attention of UCI leaders or the public.

But one faculty member who asked not to be identified said that if they can shut down even the departmental phones, maybe UCI Chancellor Jack W. Peltason, top UC officials, legislators and Gov. Pete Wilson would realize just how close to the bone they are cutting.