Comments on the Proposed Presidential Policy on Sustainable Practices
Thank you for inviting comment on the Proposed Presidential Policy on Sustainable Practices (“Policy”). While well-intended, the Policy creates numerous requirements untethered from our terminal goals of excellence in research and teaching. The Policy will require effort from many staff and consultants while not improving teaching or research. The Policy represents should not be implemented until reevaluated using cost, benefit, and efficacy analysis methods. I requested such an analysis from the Policy’s proponent’s office in early December 2022, but have not received a response.
Regulatory Context
The UCPB Report on Faculty Hiring (September 2022) found that, “the most rapid growth over our period of observation [Oct 2011 to Oct 2021] was among the non-academic Management and Senior professionals (MSPs) group which increased by 164 percent.” (This may reflect a classification change, but the report separately finds that managers and professional and support staff grew by more than 20%.) The Report further found that in the last decade, Berkeley’s student to senate faculty ratio increased by 15%.
These are grave findings for an institution with terminal goals of promoting research and teaching. There will be long-term effects on Berkley’s competitiveness, most centrally on the practical ability to mentor promising students into graduate programs.
The Drivers of Staff and Consultant Bloat
What are the drivers of increasing hiring of non-teaching or research staff and consultants (NTRSC)? One significant factor is the increasing policy requirements that are not directly connected to our research and teaching mission. The Policy considered here is an exemplar of the dynamic. The Policy contributes to NTRSC bloat with no consideration of costs or benefits.
There are direct costs in actually implementing a regulatory requirement. But in addition those costs, institutions spend enormous energy in verification and documentation of compliance. Thus, regulatory commands have a double cost in direct expenses.
This dynamic is not obvious and even counter-intuitive, because apparently simple commands such as verifying the content of our vending machines are not simple. These commands require the development of a verification method. Thought has to be put into whether such methods already exist, whether they are fit for purpose, and so on. We need a map of our vending machines—where are they? Wild complexities emerge—are there vending machines in the NAF? Does our vending machine inspection staff have training to enter BSL facilities so they can safely do their job? Then someone actually has to go on an odyssey to find all these vending machines and describe their contents.
The Policy Lacks Priorities
Here is a thought exercise: suppose that UC’s President said: we cannot do everything proposed, but I can commit to implementing N number of interventions. What would the Policy proponents choose as the most important N number of interventions? It is impossible to answer this question because there is no efficacy analysis in the policy.
Reporting and Other Obligations
This Policy requires volumes of reporting[FN1] instead of direct interventions that might promote sustainability. Reporting creates many kinds of costs, yet the Policy does not specify how these reports will be used or the decision points that flow from them.
Consider this: instead of spending money hiring NTRSC to write reports that will be reviewed and read by other NTRSC, how about instead we spend money implementing infrastructure that will reduce our consumption, such as low-flow toilets and sinks?
Instead of mandating reports on all the vending machines on all the campuses, how about we do what startup businesses do and just buy fruit and healthy food delivery services for our offices? Wouldn’t providing free food in departmental offices/break rooms be a better use of our funds?
[FN1] Reports required include: annual reports on sustainable practices (for each area of the policy), energy use intensity, clean electricity, GHG emissions, emissions inventory, waste reporting, purchasing reporting, plant-based food reporting, AASHE STARS report, healthy vending guidelines strategy report, sustainable transportation, waste reporting, percent of green level spend, and sustainable water.
Procurement Mediocrity Risks
As institutions tie more requirements to the approval and favoring of vendors, procurement policy begins to choose winners and losers based on procedures rather than substantive excellence[FN2]. The risk here is that businesses learn how to act out the dramaturgy our policy endorses. Businesses are very good at using vague terms like sustainability and wellness to spin a yarn that is the opposite of their reality.
[FN2] Our process to choose a campus soda vendor settled on PepsiCo, a company that has a slick sustainability report but that also makes Cheetos, Mountain Dew, Gatorade (34g of sugar) and Doritos: https://www.pepsico.com/our-impact/sustainability/2021-esg-summary.
The Policy plays into this dynamic, by requiring some vendors to extensively report about the “sustainable business operations” at the SKU-level. Furthermore the Policy allocates “a minimum of 15% of the points utilized” in solicitation evaluations on sustainability criteria. The criteria are vague as the word “sustainability”—“supplier diversity” and “contributions to health and wellbeing” are included.
Rather than promote the vendors with the best products and most fit-for-purpose products, the Policy rewards large businesses that can afford a public relations program.
In practice, procurement NTRSC will implement the Policy by reading words written by employees/consultants of the vendor. The exercise becomes: does the vendor have feel-good marketing material touting CSR, ESG, or the like?
The Political Costs of MNCs
Consider the strategic costs of uniting Berkeley with multinationals that have slick sustainability language. Procurement complexity tilts Berkeley toward companies like Sysco, which assures readers of its ESG report that it is sustainable to fly fish in from Peru. Local/regional vendors may in fact be more sustainable but not able to explain why.
A Berkeley campus that partners with MNCs like Sysco and Pepsi may erode its community base by not partnering with scores of local, perhaps more sustainable, businesses.
Prescription and Principle
The detail of the Policy is puzzling at times. We ought to pan out and provide principle-level command to campuses rather than prescriptive detail. Among the issues the Policy commands campuses to pay attention to include:
- Whether healthy snacks in vending machines are at eye level
- How much money is spent on “Healthy Spend” in vending machines
- The provision of training materials—to adults—about “their food choices.”
Are these the tasks that we are best placed to do? Ought we spend our resources on these activities instead of research and teaching?
Conclusion and Two Paths Forward
No faculty member, no matter how committed to sustainability, is going to do the various tasks commanded by the Policy. Thus, we either burden existing staff or hire new NTRSC to develop policy, implement it, document it, and write reports.
These staff are not inexpensive. I searched the Transparent California database for 2021 salaries that include sustain*. There are 52 employees with sustainability in their title, with an average salary of ~$110k, about the same as a full professor at step 2. To make explicit a point from above: $110,000 buys a lot of healthy food, or it can fund reports about healthy food.
Alternative 1: Instead of all the accounting, what if we did this? Suppose this policy will cost $30mm to implement. What if we just spent that money directly on infrastructure improvements (rather than measurements), programs that provide (rather than measure) healthy food, and so on. We could actually live a sustainable policy instead of reporting on it.
Alternative 2: We keep on measuring. But let’s do it smarter.
The Policy fails to specify basics that would enable policy evaluation or policy prioritization. To do this smarter, the policy should specify:
- Whether each command requires action or forbearance of faculty and/or staff. That action could be implementation or verification of compliance.
- The time required to implement/verify each command should be estimated.
- The opportunity costs of each command should be estimated. When commands come at the opportunity cost of research or teaching, these commands should receive extra scrutiny.
- The accounting costs of all commands should be calculated. We should strive to avoid policies that impose large but disaggregated accounting costs. For instance, at the Berkeley campus, we recently adopted a plan that would tax air travel to support sustainability efforts. The tax requires an accounting of each individual airfare, it creates a complex flight-by-flight, and unit-by-unit accounting process, and so on. A much more efficient approach would be to estimate the total number of flights taken by campus employees and make a bulk payment to the sustainability program.
- Each command’s time requirements should be evaluated against a faculty hourly rate of $300/hour, or a staff rate.
- If a command requires the hiring of NTRSC, that should be identified and accounted for
- Finally, each policy command should explicitly discuss efficacy. This will allow us to choose among the highest-efficacy commands instead of choosing all of them.
In conclusion, the Policy as drafted will not only create NTRSC, it will create NTRSC that require even more NTRSC. Many staff on campus do support research and teaching, sometime directly. However, the roles required by the Policy will not support teaching or research at all.
Respectfully submitted, Chris Hoofnagle (elected DIVCO Berkeley member)