UC 101: Educating Our New President - Lesson #4 Lesson #4 - Overgrown Administrative Bureaucracies

Professor Emeritus Charles:

This lesson will, incidentally, showcase two classical Methods of Inquiry that are ingrained in the academic world: the Scientific Method, involving the collection and analysis of empirical data; the Socratic Method, involving a series of questions put forward to stimulate critical thinking about some puzzle.


The particular objective here is to understand what appears to be long-term cancerous growth of the managerial sector in the University of California. The following graph shows the latest data; and the text after that conveys a sad story of official responses.

The University of California provides a regular tally of its employees, going back over many years, posted at http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/uwnews/stat/ Here one can see twice-yearly statistics of FTE (Full Time Equivalent) counts in three major categories, with two dozen subcategories:

• Management (Senior Management Group - SMG, Management & Senior Professionals - MSP)
• Academic Staff (Faculty, Researchers, Librarians, Student Assistants, etc.)
• Professional and Support Staff - PSS (Clerical, Fiscal, Health Care, Technical, Craft, etc.)

I have written up several studies starting with this data, and they are posted at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz under the series heading, "Financing the University."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 27, 2013 4:50 AM
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