Having spent a term on DIVCO, I feel qualified to diagnose what I think is a major challenge for Berkeley: administrative misalignment.
There’s something truly special about the faculty at Cal – our shared dedication to the mission of public education sets us apart. I’m constantly inspired by the hard work and creativity displayed by faculty members across all levels and positions. It’s remarkable to witness everyone working tirelessly to uphold this mission, even in the face of challenges that public education has encountered.
Some have raised concerns about the size of our staff, particularly about those in higher-paying management and professional roles. I view this from a slightly different perspective: the field of education is a service-oriented profession that necessitates a significant number of individuals to care for our students, programs, and systems.
Reflecting on my time spent on DIVCO, I’ve come to think we need to renew efforts to harmonize staff leadership with Berkeley’s overarching strategic mission of research and teaching excellence. That is, the issue is not staff size, it is leadership goals alignment and oversight.
Berkeley’s faculty members are working tirelessly to excel in their core responsibilities. Through my involvement with DIVCO, I’ve observed that well-intentioned policy initiatives (often staff-driven), while seemingly in the public interest, inadvertently place additional burdens on our primary mission. These initiatives may appear unquestionably good from a normative standpoint, yet proponents of them often omit or dismiss downsides, such as consuming valuable time and generating paperwork. Furthermore, they can impact other values like institutional flexibility, freedom, and diversity of choice.
Allow me to illustrate this with two examples: sustainability and HR policies – both conducted with the best intentions, yet requiring closer alignment with our core goals. Interestingly, the mission statements of these programs lack explicit mentions of “teaching” and “research.”
Sustainability, undoubtedly a noble objective, encompasses a wide range of potential actions. During our discussions on DIVCO, we reviewed an updated sustainability policy that leaned heavily towards accounting-based actions. This policy required at least 13 types of reports, some of which involved detailed analyses of individual buildings. One mandate required staff to inspect all the vending machines on campus to ensure that “healthy” snacks were stocked at eye level. Sustainability “points” could be earned by many activities that really have little to do with the environment. For instance, posting signs that brag about sustainability activities earns a point. Having a “sustainability tour” earns one points as well. So, sustainability seems to promote all sorts of activity that has little to do with our mission, yet requires staff time to comply.
Some university leaders govern deontologically rather than pragmatically. This drives staff bloat and mission misalignment.
Drawing from my background as a corporate lawyer, I seen companies allocate significant resources to comply with rules and then expend further effort documenting their compliance. This creates a double financial impact, because complying isn’t enough; institutions are obsessed with documenting compliance.
Moreover, these rules can lead to lots expense surrounding interpretation – I can envision scenarios where we hire consultants to define terms like “healthy” and “eye level.” Although the staff advocating for the sustainability plan have the best intentions, the policy itself fails to acknowledge potential downsides or costs. In my diligence, I sought a cost estimate from the responsible UCOP official, but received no response.
One downside of this policy approach is the requirement for more staff or consultants to manage tasks peripheral to our research and teaching pursuits. Across UC, 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. Think about that next time we cap a major.
Another downside surrounds introducing new factors unrelated to vendor performance into procurement decisions. The accumulation of requirements for every facet of our operations is rendering certain activities nearly impossible – construction being a prime example. According to CAPRA, our price per square foot of construction is nearly $2,000. This is much more expensive than even the construction of top-secret secure facilities known as SCIFs.
Requiring our vendors to have “sustainability programs” virtually ensures that we will forgo local small businesses in favor of large ones, like Pepsi and Sysco. These large companies may or may not be more sustainable, but they have staff who can create reports that our staff read. Thus, they are “sustainable” vendors.
HR, too, is guided by good intentions, but there’s room for aligning their objectives more closely with our teaching and research goals. HR places significant emphasis on mandatory training, to the extent that they proposed a 16-hour online training called “grow together” for faculty members. In the spirit of collaboration, I completed this training, which was clearly licensed from some corporate environment. It concludes with a one-hour online test!
While “grow together” and other HR programs offer valuable insights, we need to consider the cumulative impact of these trainings on 1,600 regular faculty, 1,000 lecturers, postdocs, GSRs, and GSIs. When I raised concerns about the costs of these programs with HR officials, they seemed indifferent to the strain on time. Formal cost assessment was not on their radar.
“The eternal mistake is to conflate liberalism, a set of specific beliefs, involving trade-offs and hard choices, with what we might call liberality: an openness of spirit, a generalised niceness. You can only build a society on the first of these things.” Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times.
Much of faculty governance is based on liberality—we endorse expensive programs that compete with mission, often with no discussion at all about costs or downsides.
What I uncovered was that HR pursues certain staff management objectives that aren’t tied to our teaching and research mission. Despite this misalignment, they consider these objectives significant enough to warrant taxing everyone’s time. HR is in an echo chamber where no one seems to be asking whether their ideas are reasonable. I pushed really hard to get an explanation of why one of their programs was justified (Achieve Together), and the answer was a small, but “statistically significant” improvement in how employees viewed the performance review process! Of course, this reflects a fundamental confusion about statistics—the question is not whether a statistically significant difference exists, but whether the intervention is clinically significant. That is, is the intervention significant enough to justify the treatment?
As faculty members, our governance authority over operational activities is limited. Yet, campus and UCOP operational priorities affect teaching and research. There is also a growing, direct strategic risk from massive operational projects that, if they fail, might be remedied by the cutting of mission-related programs. The obvious risk is the Stadium debt, but I highlight two others: do any of you know how much we’re spending (and how) on the power plant? And the Gateway building has a large gap between fundraising promises and reality. CAPRA signaled a $200 million shortfall. Does anyone know who or what is covering that gap?
These questions concern operational matters, outside our governance mandate. But increasingly, I think faculty governance has to expand oversight of operations. Because there is a fundamental alignment issue afoot. The people who build those projects will get to pose in photographs with golden shovels, receive awards for “sustainability,” and move on to other jobs. But the academic mission inherits the risk.
Part of gaining control over operations requires greater understanding of staff. I see a “two cultures” situation. For instance, within the staff community, having a larger staff is often seen as a mark of prestige.
It’s possible that staff leadership are pursuing goals intrinsic to their profession, such as achieving “platinum sustainability” certifications. Personal rewards, like potential future positions at large companies, could drive some individuals to champion campus-wide goals in these areas without regard to knock-on effects to strategic mission.
Staff also may be hired based on their qualifications as compliance actors rather than thought leaders. Many staff roles are in effect compliance-first, with mentalities that compliance is the most important issue in any operation rather than strategic goals. These actors may be providing services with the purpose of capturing more compliance opportunities and power. For instance, in IT, the creation of various technology platforms allows compliance-mindset actors to force faculty to follow the rules they choose.
The arc of the university is long, but it bends towards compliance—as staff VCs hire more staff who have confused compliance with grand strategy.
As faculty, it’s only natural for us to feel concerned about the dynamics arising from these two cultures. While we witness our fellow faculty members grappling to fulfill their roles, I see staff hiring additional personnel to manage their responsibilities. In some cases, staff members can outsource their tasks to contractors or consultants, or they may delegate cumbersome paperwork to other staff members. This creates a meta-issue where staff, especially those in senior or managerial roles, remain largely unaffected by the administrative requirements they impose, as they can simply delegate the work.
To be clear, if you find yourself handling your own reimbursements, know that some staff members might not be doing the same – even individuals with “assistant” in their titles might delegate these tasks to work-study students.
I’ve formulated a variety of strategies that we can pursue to foster better alignment of staff leadership with our mission, and to enhance our understanding of how well-intentioned initiatives, though admirable, can accumulate in ways that strain or even jeopardize our core objectives. Through the senate and in collaboration with our next Chancellor, we could take the following steps:
- Faculty do perform reviews of operational auxiliary services, but in my opinion, these reviews reflect what we’ve come to expect. We could start benchmarking services’ performance against other institutions and objective measures. We could request these units to provide time-to-completion metrics for various tasks, such as job listings, hiring processes, reimbursement processing, proposal submission timelines to SPO, and building costs per square foot.
- There are objective measures we could use to judge the performance of support here. One measure we could develop is the number of faculty who are using “shadow” IT or shadow OPS. That is, how many faculty are using their private companies or just their own personal money to get their regular job done? One trick I’ve learned is to partner with a private institution with good services, and just rely on them to get everything done.
- Prioritizing mission metrics would enable us to place subsidiary staff objectives in a secondary role, particularly if they hinder our primary mission. We might suggest that the Vice Chancellor for Administration (VCA) redirect resources from subsidiary goals toward primary mission, and once mission services operate efficiently, allocate resources to secondary activities.
- As part of this effort, we could encourage auxiliaries to reframe their mission statements using the language of teaching and research. Consider our VCA’s mission statement: https://vca.berkeley.edu/about/mission-vision-values
- My experience on DIVCO has allowed me to emphasize the importance of cost-benefit analysis, which has yielded some positive outcomes. However, we still lack a means of evaluating how initiatives and regulations impact faculty time and lead to increased staffing. Rather than relying on intuition of what is “too much,” we could consider accounting for entire staff positions as the price of overly cautious policy development.
- Lastly, I believe it’s crucial to limit policy intervention through procurement. Procurement complexity breeds a special kind of “competition” where the best lose out to those most familiar with the system. To give examples here would step on a lot of egos, but as you return to campus this fall, note the homogeny (and expense) of food choices on campus. The accretion of procurement rules—from massive insurance requirements to zero waste policies—does have effects.