What UC Means About Business

When UC lobbyists and fundraisers hit the pavement earlier this year, they sported fancy buttons with the university’s new public relations slogan, “UC Means Business.” The slogan was in pointed contrast with the university’s official motto, the lofty if not particularly value conscious “Let There Be Light.” In the argot of advertising, the new slogan tried to indicate to politicians, corporations and wealthy benefactors that the sprawling university system was no profligate, pie-in-sky social benefit agency, but an enterprise that both served the business community and acted like a responsible part of it.

Indeed, the buttons reflected a remarkable transformation of an institution that once proudly called itself a public university. Taking cues from Gov. Pete Wilson, UC administrators have been refashioning the university into a quasi-private enterprise that no longer seeks state funding to accomplish its historic missions--or considers those missions, such as offering tuition-free education to every qualified California youngster, sacrosanct. Instead, administrators see the university’s future as a free market player that can wheel and deal with the leanest and meanest corporate powers.

To executives at Kaiser Center, the glass and concrete Oakland skyscraper that houses the UC administration, privatization was, as they say in business productivity manuals, a “win-win scenario.” UC could market itself to private interests willing to pay. This phenomenon can be seen at UC’s medical centers. Hundreds of nurses and other low-level employees have been laid off at the UC Irvine and UC San Diego medical centers, which are being shopped around to for-profit HMO chains. Earlier this month, the Board of Regents voted to transfer the UC San Francisco Medical Center to a new private, nonprofit corporation in which UC will hold a minority stake. A major benefit of the proposal, administrators explained, was that the new corporation’s governing board would not be subject to open records laws.

And, by the way, if UC operates like a business, shouldn’t its executives be paid accordingly? The same administrators who proposed a 10% fee increase this fall--and total increases of nearly 50% in the past four years--also persuaded the regents to raise salaries of UC’s highest officials: the 68 administrators who already earn an average of $173,000 and as much as $394,800 per year took raises averaging $9,400 and ranging up to $52,000.

Unfortunately, UC administrators have overlooked the new obligations that come with joining the marketplace. At graduate professional schools, where fees have quadrupled in recent years to approach those at private institutions, students are demanding better and more services. Long lines and inadequate facilities, which were accepted as part of attending a public school, no longer seem quaint. Students will not pay Nordstrom prices for DMV service.

Even more telling is the strike called last week by the lowest paid and most vulnerable of UC’s academic employees. Demanding collective bargaining rights, graduate students who work as teaching assistants at UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego walked off the job in a symbolic rolling strike, supported by students at other UC campuses and by the United Auto Workers.

UC’s graduate students teach most discussion sections for 160,000 undergraduates, grade papers and conduct basic research, freeing tenured professors from such unpopular chores. These men and women, many of whom are starting families of their own, make about $12,000 per year, carry substantial educational debt and face a withering job market upon completing their degrees. Under the fiction that graduate students are employees for “educational benefit,” UC has refused to grant them collective bargaining rights. In September, UCLA graduate students won a state ruling requiring the university to recognize their union or to hold an organizing election. Administrators refused; the same week they extracted their raise from the regents, administrators began a campaign to reverse that small victory for teaching assistants. According to an administration statement, “collective bargaining would strain academic relationships” between graduate students and the faculty members who are their mentors. Informally, administrators accuse graduate students of being ungrateful troublemakers who fail to understand that poverty and job insecurity are essential parts of their apprenticeship for the selfless life of academe.

The university can’t have it both ways. If UC intends to stake its future on the corporate model--and, accordingly, pay its executives 10 or 20 times the salary of its front-line teachers--it is going to have to accept responsibility when those on the bottom react like their counterparts in the private sector. If UC means business, it had better understand what that means for its academic environment.