The statement from the Berkeley Academic Senate, representing tenured and tenure-track faculty on campus, was in agreement with most of the plan that was finally adopted by the Regents. Public comments by UC professors, however, show a wide range of opinions on the plan, from calls to make it more progressive to a strongly elitist response.

Charles Schwartz, UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus of Physics and editor of the University Probe site, supports the basic idea of equity in the furlough plan, but questions whether the current plan is truly equitable. He notes that the UC is not tapping into all its unrestricted funds to cope with the budget crisis, and if it were, the salary cuts would be much more modest. He also criticizes the decision to only apply the salary cut on Base Pay, when some of the highest paid employees of the university receive more of their earnings in the form of bonuses than base pay. This is is confirmed by Jeffrey Bergamini’s very useful UC Pay website. Bergamini himself uses his impressive database of UC salaries to propose alternative cuts models that, according to his open letter, would be more progressive than Yudof’s proposal.

In the completely opposite direction, two UCLA law professors, Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin, signed an Op-Ed in the LA Times arguing that instead of across-the-board cuts, the UC should “get rid of unproductive people”. While the two did not dare to provide criteria or examples of unproductiveness, a Berkeley law professor, Kristin Luker, responds that layoffs proposal effectively targets support staff, and disproportionately affect women and racialized people.

In the same category of “spare me, cut other people”, 23 UCSD department chairs suggested that the UC was a “three-tier” system where the third tier (campuses of Santa Cruz, Riverside and Merced) had to be eliminated. Not surprisingly, they put UCSD along with Berkeley and UCLA in their self-identified “first-tier”. UC Irvine professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom has published a number of articles questioning this rationale. According to Wasserstrom, the different campuses should be seen as essential, complementary parts of a system; he also notes that the division into tiers varies was based on a set of criteria that is biased towards certain academic disciplines.

We note that excepting a few individuals such as Schwartz and Luker, no statements from the faculty have been defending support staff against layoffs or students against tuition increases.

We only reviewed a few published statements by UC professors. Soon we will report on the Berkeley Academic Division special forum, for which a recording is available here.

Last July, as the California legislature adopted a final budget with $2 billion in cuts to higher education (split between the University of California and California State University systems), the President of the University of California and the Chancellor of the Berkeley campus announced major cuts with repercussions on the affordability of education for students, the salaries of all employees, and ultimately the integrity of the UC system itself. More cuts are yet to be announced at the college and department levels.

This situation has forced students and workers on all UC campuses to organize quickly to respond to this crisis and get their voice heard at the upper levels. In its inaugural series of articles, The Berkeley Agitator will focus on the current UC financial troubles (which, we believe, is both a crisis in funding and a crisis in fund allocation), keeping track of the administration’s decisions and reporting about the student and worker initiatives that challenge the dominant administrative response.