CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : UC Can Learn to Do More With Less : Early retirements coupled with a call-back plan, privatizing sports programs are among longer-term solutions.

The deep recession in California has precipitated another budget crisis that for the third year in a row challenges the University of California to do more with less. The university’s proposed budget for 1993-94 will be slightly under what we received in 1986-87; a $138-million or 7.3% cut from last year.

Regents, administrators and faculty might want to remember that a crisis like this also presents an opportunity for constructive reform. It is possible to convert our budget difficulties into an occasion for strengthening rather than weakening the country’s most distinguished public university.

One proposal calls for an across-the-board salary cut of 5%. UCLA Chancellor Charles Young strongly opposes the idea, predicting that it will drive some faculty away and make it difficult to recruit others. He’s right. UC faculty and staff have already been cut: No raises for the last two years, as well as next, and a one-year moratorium on merit increases add up to at least an 8% or 9% loss.

The chancellor has a better idea. It’s voluntary early retirement for faculty 55 and older. It could save the university millions of dollars and would cause little erosion in the quality of the institution. Voodoo economics, some will say. But not really, if we couple retirements with the excellent call-back plan Young has suggested. Distinguished retiring faculty would be designated chancellor’s professors and would be recalled for five years to teach three or four courses a year for a modest fee. The retirement system with a $4-billion surplus can readily pick up the bulk of retirees’ salaries and the rest can come out of the operating budget. With the savings on some of the best-paid faculty, the university can even hire some junior faculty, who will more than take up the slack.

There are other ways to increase the number of class offerings, particularly in core courses that are so oversubscribed. Significant numbers of professors teach fewer courses in exchange for time to perform administrative tasks. Some of this work is unavoidable and faculty are entitled to time to do it. But there can be significant changes here that would put professors back in the classroom.

The university also needs to make wiser use of its resources. In the last 10 or 15 years there has been a much-needed diversification of the faculty with a shift in focus to subjects previously ignored--the study of women and minorities has enriched the curriculum. But it is now time to take stock and see what makes sense for the future. The history department at UCLA, for example, has several people capable of teaching women’s and minority history but no one with a principal focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction or legal/constitutional history. The department needs to ensure that it doesn’t turn diversification into the abandonment of core materials, especially when many minority students are as eager for courses on the Constitution, foreign affairs and the presidency as they are for more minority studies.

Additional money can be gained through student-fee increases. Some fear that higher costs of attending the university will put a UC education out of reach for many of the state’s least affluent youngsters. But fee increases need not become a retrograde bar to educational opportunity for the offspring of working-class families. It is time to tie university fees to ability to pay. Qualified low-income students should pay significantly less than the most affluent ones. Most students at the university come from middle-income families who can afford more than the $3,000 a year currently charged. Compared with the $17,000-18,000 annual tuitions at private colleges and universities, UC remains a real bargain.

The current difficulties should also trigger some longer-term thinking about the university’s financial health. A plan to privatize the football and basketball programs could be a superb moneymaker. College programs in these sports have become feeders to the pros.

Over the years, football and basketball have made money for many universities, though they are now less profitable and in some instances eat into university budgets for support. Why not let business franchises buy the rights to these teams? Alumni and students could still root for the UCLA Bruins or the Cal Bears, but the scandals and pretense to student status for athletes who never graduate would be eliminated.

UC would undoubtedly net millions of dollars from such an arrangement. Moreover, those athletes who could handle their school work at the same time they played--and there are a number who can--would continue to have a chance for an education.

Others at the university will have plenty of ideas about how to cut administrative costs and streamline the bureaucracy. They should also be heard from, but everyone proposing cuts should remember Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn’s homily: “Any jackass can kick a barn down but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”