- With all the talk of “sustainability,” how congruent is it to have a major campus contract with the largest junk food company in the world—Pepsi?
- What’s puzzling about the Pepsi contract is that UCOP just approved a magisterially-complex sustainability policy that requires us to inspect whether our vending machines have healthy snacks at eye level, among other things. What is the point of such a burdensome, accounting-based policy when our procurement decision making nevertheless results in partnerships in tension with sustainability?
- Could you please share if the administrative division employs any strategies to assess transaction costs within its processes? For example, do different departments take into account factors like faculty time or the need for additional staff for tasks such as handling reimbursements?
- (At the law school for instance, we have at least a dozen staff whose responsibilities include doing reimbursements, so we hire staff to deal with procedures created by other staff.)
- Relatedly, I’m interested in understanding how the administrative division manages to align its compliance requirements with our strategic priorities. An interesting point noted in the bureaucracy report mentioned the significant amount of staff time, approximately $2 million, dedicated to tracking insurance certificates. Could you please explain how this process is structured? In many private sector scenarios, such decisions often lead to serious reconsiderations.
- Read: someone should have been fired.
- I believe the People’s Park project is in your bailiwick—is that the case? If so, could you explain how campus failed to secure it during the tree removal process? I was present for the operation and observed a tremendous, yet ineffectual police force. Given the history of PP, it would seem foreseeable that a small group would use violence to stop the operation, but our countermeasures, as I observed them in real time, showed it to be a (expensive) paper tiger
- Post script: I hear that decisionmakers relied upon a representation by the fence maker that the fence was impenetrable. Caveat emptor…
- I’ve observed some challenges in how HR’s initiatives align with our broader strategic goals. For example, the ‘Grow Together’ training program, while comprehensive, seems not entirely suited for the specific needs of an academic institution. Similarly, the ‘Achieve Together’ review process appears to be quite time-consuming and perhaps not ideally structured for our professional environment. Additionally, our hiring processes seem somewhat slower than desirable, affecting our competitive edge. I believe HR focuses significantly on policy issues, which is important, but I wonder if there’s a way to better balance these efforts with our strategic objectives. Could we explore ways to enhance HR’s alignment with our institutional goals?
- Would you consider refactoring your mission statement, and each department’s mission statement, so that teaching and research is the terminal goal?