By Nanette Asimov

The University of California, forced to lay off instructors and pack its classrooms because of reduced state funding, is also wealthy enough from other pools of money to pay some employees significantly higher salaries and overtime to hundreds more people. The university also added four new million-dollar earners to its payroll last year.

New salary data from calendar year 2010 show that employees earning at least $218,000 — high enough to require approval from the Board of Regents — rose over the prior year by 12 percent, or 374 more people. In all, 3,390 employees earned that much, up from 3,016 in 2009.

UC officials say these new high earners were not paid from state sources, which declined by almost $174 million in 2010, but from hospital and research revenue, which grew by about the same amount. Those non-state funds cannot be used for classroom purposes, they said.

Among those in UC’s top income brackets are doctors, nurses and professors in the medical school who draw their pay largely, but not entirely, from non-state funding. Some are athletic coaches, funded by private sources.

Others are business or law school professors, deans, vice chancellors and others, paid mainly from state funds.

More overtime paid

UC also spent $8 million more on overtime in 2010 than in 2009, even as it added nearly 2,300 employees to its $10 billion payroll. The payroll itself grew by nearly $108 million, about 1 percent, during a period when the university imposed a yearlong furlough program on its workforce that ended last August, reducing individual salaries by 4 to 10 percent.

UC President Mark Yudof, for example, took home $561,000, 5 percent less than his $591,000 base salary, on top of a 5 percent cut the prior year. He is listed as the 152nd highest paid employee of 252,540 on the payroll and is paid from state funds.

By contrast, top earner Jeff Tedford, UC Berkeley’s head football coach, took home $2.3 million — more than 10 times his base salary of $225,000. He is paid from private sources.

The new data showed 14 UC employees earning at least $1 million in 2010, up from 10 in 2009.
During this period, university officials also raised student tuition by 32 percent, eliminated courses and cut back on library hours and student counseling during a period of austerity on undergraduate campuses that continues today.

In releasing the latest payroll data, university officials said that except for most medical center employees, UC pays less than its competition for faculty, executives, managers and even staff doctors.

Stiff competition

As a major research university, UC competes for employees not only against other public universities, but against Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale and similarly stellar private schools that have no difficulty luring faculty and executives with yacht-quality paychecks.

“As stewards of a vast, complex system that benefits Californians in every part of the state, we have to invest in our faculty and staff to ensure excellence in all we do,” said Nathan Brostrom, an executive vice president for the UC system.

“We run multiple operations with multiple sources of revenue — not only undergraduate and graduate education, but also world-class research facilities, national laboratories, some of the nation’s best hospitals and agricultural enterprises that affect food production across the world. We’re dealing with the realities of a $22 billion-a-year operation that requires sustained investment in people.”

Of that, about 11 percent is paid by the state.

Yet Brostrom’s explanation failed to impress lower-paid clerical workers and others represented by the Coalition of University Employees, UC’s largest labor union of 14,000 people, who have worked without a contract for nearly four years.

“The university plays sleight of hand” with such reasoning, said Amatullah Alaji-Sabrie, an assistant in the UC Berkeley School of Law and the union’s chief negotiator. “When it comes to paying lower-paid workers, they say they can’t because the state didn’t give them enough money.”

Her colleague in the law school, Toni Mendicino, was equally unimpressed by UC’s need to compete with private universities.

“I think the priority should be on giving the students of California a world-class education,” she said. “I feel like those salaries are just exorbitant. If people want to work at a public school, serving a public mission, I don’t see why they need million-dollar salaries.”

‘It just looks terrible’

Geography Professor Richard Walker, active in Save the University, a group of faculty who oppose the increasing shift away from public funding, said that paying more to highly compensated employees at a time of deep cuts could jeopardize UC’s efforts in Sacramento.

“It just looks terrible (when) we’re trying to win back state funding,” Walker said. “The Wall Street game of upper professionals overpaying themselves is a very bad precedent.”

— Reach Nanette Asimov at [email protected]

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