Berkeley is an extreme case, but it is not alone. Major universities are caught in a vise now: facing dreadful financial pressures and supporting aging faculties that no longer must retire at 65. Two years ago richly endowed Yale and prestigious Columbia shocked the academic community by threatening to chop outmoded departments and shrink their faculties. As they feel the pinch, administrators and trustees across the country have begun asking bottom-line questions, holding campuses to the standards of lean-and-mean private industry. Can they afford to maintain all their departments? Can they merge programs with neighboring schools? Can productivity be increased – can full professors begin carrying full teaching loads and even, on occasion, encounter an undergraduate?
Personnel accounts for much of the campus costs, roughly 80 percent in the Cal system. But with state support dropping by 20 percent over the last four years, says UC vice president Bill Baker, ““you simply have to downsize.’’ Berkeley has lopped $70 million off its budget over the last three years by using a variety of techniques, including a 3.5 percent cut in salaries.
Administrators insist that there would have been ““far, far deeper’’ layoffs and cuts without an extremely generous early-retirement incentive plan. For law professor Jerome Skolnick, it was an offer that he couldn’t refuse: a retirement package that pays him 92 percent of his former salary for life and the option, which he took, to earn pay as a part-time teacher on campus. This double-dipping is possible because the retirement money comes out of the University of California system’s still-bountiful pension fund.
Administrators say that the departures will give them more flexibility. Berkeley’s renowned physics department has lost 40 percent of its professors. The department will use some of its budget lines to recruit physicists who work in frontier fields like theoretical particle physics, astrophysics and nanostructures. And at a school where 58 percent of its 22,000 undergraduate students are minorities, administrators intend to diversify the largely white male faculty.
For now though, the anthropology department has lost its China and Southeast Asia experts; the history department its American West specialists. Can Berkeley maintain its greatness? ““We will go after the best in the world, and if we can’t get the best in the world we will wait,’’ says Baker. He can wait. Can Berkeley’s students?
