PERSPECTIVE ON THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA : Those Who Teach Get the Least : The fat cats’ spending on luxuries demonstrates institutional contempt for the budget burdens imposed on-campus.

It no longer comes as a surprise, but the latest news about how the University of California spends its money is still outrageous, even more so in this atmosphere of chronic fiscal crisis.

UC executives have helped themselves, at the public’s expense, to first-class air fares, limos, parties for friends and family, expensive hotel stays for meetings near their homes, under-reported pay increases for themselves and flights on university-owned planes whose intended purpose was to ferry around body organs for transplant at the UC medical school hospitals.

It may be that the total amounts involved are not something to be “overly concerned” about, as UC Regents Chairwoman Meredith J. Khachigian had the nerve to say about the state auditor general’s report. Maybe a little “tighten(ing) up” is all that’s needed, as she suggests.

But when you’re bunched up eight or nine to an office; when you’re short on computer workstations and are personally billed if you photocopy too much for class; when you’ve had parking fees increased dramatically, merit raises frozen, colleagues dismissed and positions in your program threatened with the ax--not to mention, if you’re a student, having tuition costs nearly double--and you then discover that a UC official (the budget officer, no less!) spent more than $2,600 on an in-house wedding reception, well, it’s hard to know how much concern would count as “overly.” Which is to say that things look different from the classroom than they apparently do from the boardroom. Viewed from the bottom, UC’s misplaced priorities look far from trivial.

I can speak from near the bottom, since that’s where I am in the academic hierarchy. I’m a lecturer--a full-time teacher not eligible for tenure. There are more than 2,000 lecturers in the UC system, and what sets us apart, besides the lack of amenities, is that we’re hired purely to teach.

The least-privileged faculty are those whose jobs are most closely tied to teaching, particularly teaching undergraduates. It’s almost in inverse proportion: The more you teach, the fewer perks you have a shot at. Thus, “ladder” faculty (the various ranks of professor), who are hired at least as much for research as for teaching, are more likely to have their own offices, computers and phones; mid-level administrators have their own secretaries, and top management--some of whom may not have been near a classroom in decades--got to fly around on the university’s Learjet.

UC officials have countered that some freebies were funded by endowments--privately funded investments--rather than tax accounts. That excuse makes you wonder if we’re dealing here with the fiscally illiterate. Surely, every endowment dollar frittered away on management fat cats is one dollar less that can be spent on legitimate programs.

Most parents and prospective students think of UC as world-class. It is, in certain ways--but not in those that most benefit undergraduates. Nor are most big universities. Their goal is research, and their reputations owe much more to professors’ publications and prizes than to anything done for students. Hence, the most privileged faculty are those who teach least, and the least those who teach most. Undergraduates are at the bottom of the heap. Budget constraints exaggerate the gap, as the less powerful are taken care of last. Big-ticket administrative perks just deepen the divisions.

No doubt all human institutions tend toward the top-heavy, since wealth and power flow to the already wealthy and powerful. But it’s a particular shame when universities prove no better than any others.

Maybe the ridiculous salaries paid to General Motors execs have some thin rationale based on the company’s profit performance. But a university has no profit performance. Its job is public service--and the key public servants are those who do the actual work: teaching and research. On this basic point, it seems to be our “leaders” who need more schooling.