The Integrity of UC

June 13, 2018 | Janelle Spark | UC San Diego

What does the word “integrity” mean in the context of today’s world? One usually thinks of someone or something trustworthy, that can be depended on, something that is true and whole. I personally believe that integrity means doing no harm and being transparent in one’s intentions. Much of our modern culture has been nursed by a healthy faith in integrity: one should be able to trust integral persons and institutions that society was built on to work as they say they will. And yet it feels like more and more public institutions knowingly run on corrupt ideas and practices. The idea of integrity no longer seems to matter like it once did. Not even the world of academia is safe from this trend.

Members of California’s academic leadership are beginning to show that their true motivations lie not in advancing the frontier of education, but of advancing the depth of their pockets and social influence. The University of California college system claims to value everyone in its community equally – from its workers, to its students, to its faculty and administrators. But in reality, it is failing students of color, women, and those found in the lowest-paid positions in the system; because of this, UC and the state’s economy are hurting. The career workers and undergraduate student workers of UC who grind to keep the lights on deserve to see truly affordable and accessible education. Instead, financial aid is dissipating, access is becoming constrained, and the “quality education” advertised is quickly becoming defunct. In the interest of supporting their students and administrations alike, the UC Regents and the leadership across UC need to make some empathetic and imperative changes.

All ten UC campuses in the statewide university system are guided by the UC Office of the President (UCOP) who works with the state governor’s office to establish an annual UC budget. (Although, the governor’s office has also proven hostile to the UC budget, dropping per-student spending by nearly 40% since 1990.) Each UC campus is then run by a chancellor, who oversees the responsible distribution of funds from this budget on each of their campuses. Initially, the UC budget was designed to work by the guidance of the “Master Plan for Higher Education” of 1960, but Kelly Morris talks about how the institution, its leaders, and the state’s economic policies have pushed the university away from the Plan’s affordable origins.

In 1978, the passage of California State Proposition 13 in particular redirected the Master Plan’s new functionality in California communities. The original language of the proposition aimed at capping taxes on properties for commercial and private use at 2% growth per year, while the properties’ actual values have grown much more steeply than that over time- there is now a 450% difference between the 1978 home values and today’s prices. Almost 90% of funds for communities used to come from these property taxes. Now, that number is under two thirds the total amount, with taxes on hotels, utilities, and other fees faltering to pick up the slack. Prop 13 is one of the reasons why California is undergoing a strain on in-state student enrollment numbers, as well as extreme gentrification. Masses of community members and local UC constituents have been forced out of their homes and away from their schools and places of work. Future UC students, workers, and Californian communities like the ones I grew up in deserve a commercial reform of Prop 13. At the most basic level, the UC regents and leaders of the university can begin solving this issue by listening to their neighboring communities and their lowest-paid workers in order to understand how the largest contributions to the university are spent.

UC also hasn’t matched their hourly rates for career workers’ labor to the rate necessary to uphold local standards of living since Prop 13’s passage, triggering a decline in quality of life for most career workers. According to a report put out by AFSCME Local 3299 in April 2018, the custodians, groundskeepers, food service workers, security guards, and parking attendants at UC are largely outsourced contracted workers from non-UC companies; those who have been outsourced by UC earn far less than the minimum wage without any of the direct UC-employment benefits. These workers are the lowest-paid in the whole of the UC system, though they are charged with keeping UC liveable, healthy, and beautiful. On top of this, half of all UC campuses are located in the most expensive housing markets in California, with rent prices continuing to rise across the state. Career workers are being pushed further and further away from where they work as a result. The UC Regents can broach this issue by taking into account what AFSCME Local 3299 has been bargaining for relentlessly: a raise in minimum wage for workers so that they can at the very least, pay local rent, and insourcing of those workers who have been operating as outsourced subcontractors, so that they may access the higher minimum wage and other UC benefits. Then, the UC might be able to approach the decades of community stagnation and stalled socio-economic growth brought on by worker exploitation and community under-funding.

Student workers also fall prey to the conflict of ‘wage gap vs. living standard’ among the growing economies found at UC. Seven of ten students work to support themselves while enrolled, yet are taken advantage of based on the amount of hours they are limited to working. The “UC Fair Wage/Fair Work” plan suggests that students at UC are ahead of the California economic curve with a new minimum wage of $15 per hour, pending they work twenty-hours a week; the truth is that UC does not even follow the standard which it has set for itself. Non-academic student workers are actually exempt from this clause, barring them from worker benefits and creating greater vulnerability to workplace violations because student worker hours are actually capped at 19.5 per week – just shy of the “Fair Work/Fair Wage” cut. So in total, a majority of UC student workers find themselves in undervalued and underrepresented positions. This happened to me, and many of my friends and classmates, forcing us to seek employment off campus, and re-configure our finances in extreme ways.

For many career and student workers, this corrupt economic entrapment is nothing new, but the love for and belief in education as a vehicle for socio-economic mobility compels us all to continue supporting the institution. In all reality, student workers and career workers endure similar struggles, which often times brings them together as they strive for positive change. In an exemplary 2012 graduate student thesis entitled “What Keeps Us Here is the Love We Have for Our Students: Solidarity Among Low Wage Immigrant Workers and Students at the University of California, San Diego,” Nancy Madrid delineates these similarities, and pays particular attention to the largely Latina workforce’s struggles and contributions at UC San Diego through 2012. A widely-condemning example of the kind of labor oversights rampant throughout UC, Madrid breaks down the daily tasks of the workers, what kind of toll it took on their lives, and how they were managed under Mark Cunningham, the former director of the Housing Dining & Hospitality Administration of UCSD. She reveals in her thesis work that the workers were not just paid less, but that they were knowingly exploited because of their working class and Latina status, via the English/Spanish language barrier. Despite Cunningham’s reputation of being a “good guy,” his workers lived in fear of discussing working conditions on campus because they believed that they would lose their jobs when they revealed how bad it was. This thesis exposes a level of disdain for the lives and safety of the UCSD workers, highlighting ingrained classism, racism, and sexism that has plagued career workers for some time. Quoting the thesis, the National Economic Development and Law Center stated that “‘UC San Diego career worker wages fell significantly under the poverty level [during the years of research], in which roughly 96% of workers were eligible for state assistance [food stamps and SSI benefits] while employed at UCSD[.]’” Madrid helped to expose the truth about Cunningham’s administrative policies, which later helped to expose his contempt for students too. Unfortunately, this kind of leadership is only one example of how institutionalized racism, classism, and sexism continue to uphold social and economic stratification at UC and throughout the state. But because of Madrid, and the brave workers and students who continue to speak up in defiance of the unfair workplaces, workers’ struggles are beginning to gain exposure.

In a broader exhibition of institutional bias at UC, CSU, and California community colleges, The Campaign for College Opportunity researched and published a collection of demographic data by college campus. The work, titled “Left Out,” outlines the relationship between current university leadership, and what it has the potential to become, based on comparative student and worker populations. Its synopsis states that “69% of students enrolled in college in California are ethnically or racially diverse, yet over 60% of college faculty and senior leadership on California’s campuses, [and 74% of Academic Senators,] are white [and male]” noting the obvious discrepancy of population representation in UC leadership. Statistics from the California Department of Education corroborate these numbers, citing more definitively that Latinx students at UC are now the “most densely-present population” at 54%, ahead of white students at 24%, and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, & Pacific Islander (AANHPI) students at 6%, in a 2018 executive summary. Based on these numbers, one might think that it could only be a matter of time before seeing a more diverse representation in top leadership positions. Yet the fundamental biases of incumbent leadership and other powerful offices within the college system continue to prevent this from happening.

The Public Policy Institute forecasts that California will have a need for 1.1 million more bachelor degree-holders in 2030 than will be produced in-state. Due to the unchecked functions of racism, classism, and sexism in the state’s institutions like those exhibited by UCSD’s administrators, the path that potential university leaders are on may be more convoluted than expected. As stated in the “Master Plan” article, there is a ‘pipeline’ disconnect. Especially for Latinx students and workers, their efforts towards upward mobility in the world of academia are especially halted by what little representation in tenured faculty and leadership positions there are to guide them. Only 6% of tenured faculty at UC are Latinx, as opposed to 72% tenured faculty who were white, and 15% who were AANHPI. Because of these optics, students and workers are barred from envisioning themselves as leaders, hindering UC’s overall prestige as a university system, and hurting California’s chances at intellectual excellence.

It’s clear to see that UC has some operational problems on its hands. From UCSD’s Cunningham referring to students as “customers,” to Gov. Jerry Brown wanting all of UC to be run like a Chipotle, problems seem to blossom out of trying to run vital institutions like businesses. But we know now that this kind of strategy just does not work, and too often is tied to other outdated and biased forms of thinking. The University of California has an irrefutable stake in investing in its students and its career workers first, and in building legislation that protects them. Doing so would yield seven times the monetary returns, bolster the UC’s impact on the world of research and discovery, and lend further prestige to the state’s economy. It would bridge the chasm between unions and administrators, and create transparency for those that have lost faith in higher education. It would open the door to more opportunities for anyone willing to work for it. I believe that the UC is capable of leading the world into the future by listening to and working with its people together, because that’s what any institution of genuine integrity should do.