Monday, November 25, 1996
PROFESSORS:
Benefits, salary prompt move to private universitiesBy Hannah Miller
Daily Bruin Contributor
Jeffrey Frieden could not resist the sirens of Harvard.
Frieden, a tenured political science professor, left UCLA in 1995 after 12 years for the greener pastures of the Ivy League. Although he reports his "principal reason was personal," the other reasons he gives are symptomatic of a larger, university-wide faculty exodus from UCLA. An exodus that could be prevented, according to some professors.
Frieden's story is typical. Although UCLA's political science department is, like Harvard University's, one of the top 10 in the nation, Frieden found that Harvard's financial resources made a significant difference to the teaching environment.
"UCLA and Harvard are comparable on intellectual grounds," he reflects. "But it's just nice not having to confront salary cuts."
He's now teaching the same classes he taught at UCLA, but to lecture halls of 45 rather than 150 or 200. With housing support, he's been able to find a home close to campus, rather than competing in L.A.'s Westside housing market with "doctors, lawyers, and stockbrokers who make two or three times what faculty does," Frieden remarked.
UCLA's ability to attract and keep professors like Frieden is directly linked to its financial situation. But with state funding cuts of 15 to 20 percent over the last five years, this situation is changing.
The American Association of University Professors reports that the relative salaries and benefits at public institutions have fallen 15 percent over the past 20 years compared to pay at private institutions.
"If Harvard wants to throw a $5 million chair at somebody," admits Ned Pinger, Vice Provost of the College of Letters and Sciences, "we can't compete with that."
Jun Li tells a different story. When the tenured UCLA mathematics professor left for Stanford University in 1995, he was thinking of his 2-year-old daughter.
Although the San Francisco Bay Area has a higher cost of living, Li found the local Palo Alto schools to be an improvement over the Los Angeles public schools, a common concern amongst UCLA faculty.
Not only can he expect to send his daughter to a top-rated Palo Alto elementary school for free, but he can also count on Stanford to subsidize two-thirds of his daughter's college education, a faculty benefit offered by many private universities.
Li's family also worried about Southern California's crime and uncertain economic future. For Li, who had finished his doctorate at Stanford University, the environment was the deciding factor.
"They are two very fine institutions. I just chose the one that has a slight edge," said Li.
UCLA, unlike most of the private institutions with which it competes, does not offer any education subsidy to children of faculty, nor does it offer them admissions preference, another common perk.
For professors with children, this can be worth a cross-country move. George Stiny, professor of architecture, left for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after 16 years at UCLA. Although Stiny's new salary is equivalent to what he received at UCLA, his two daughters, 2 and 5, will have their college educations subsidized at 50 percent of the MIT tuition, for any university they wish to attend.
Stiny, a native Californian, admits, "I'll tell you what I miss most swimming outdoors."
Housing is another overriding problem for UCLA professors. Faculty typically have to choose between university apartments a tight squeeze for a family or a two-hour daily commute from the San Fernando Valley.
"If faculty are offered the same amount in Ann Arbor, they can buy a big old frame house," said history department chair Ronald Mellor. As Frieden suggests, this pressure could be eased with more university support for housing.
For instance, take the case of Michael Wallerstein, a political science professor who migrated to Northwestern University in 1994.
"For me, it was a quality of life issue," Wallerstein reflected. "For those of us with kids, it's harder, especially with the housing prices."
Faculty moves, in general, have less to do with the academic quality of UCLA and more with simple practicalities.
"I don't feel I've moved to an intellectually inferior department," comments Wallerstein. "I really liked UCLA, but I do appreciate a smaller university with less bureaucracy."
With his move to the northern Chicago suburbs, Wallerstein saves $20,000 per year in the private school fees he was paying for his two children in Los Angeles. Although Wallerstein feels that UCLA did "as much as can be expected" to keep him, he does admit that an offer of an adequate raise might have made up the difference.
"When I left, my salary was in the low 50s. You can't raise a family on that," testifies Robert Gregor, a physiological science professor who left for the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1994, after 18 years at UCLA. Since his move, his flat salary rate has risen by 60 percent.
"The most difficult point for us," says Mellor, "is that for the last few years, we haven't gotten the cost-of-living increase."
UCLA departments face a Catch-22. While successful in hiring new talent, a few years later many are tempted away by other universities.
"Many of our younger professors have gotten offers from very good universities in the last five years, from Dartmouth, Stanford, Chicago, Michigan," said Mellor. "These are extremely difficult to fight off. But on the whole, we've been quite successful."
"The top 10 departments raid each other all the time for really good people," said UCLA Political Science Professor Victor Wolfenstein. "But who knows what 'really good' means anyway."
Although Jeffrey Frieden guesses that he probably would have left UCLA eventually to return to his native Northeast, he feels the school could be doing much more.
"UCLA's retention problems stem from two things," he said. "Not moving first when it comes to getting good people, and moving too slowly when current faculty get other offers."
When disgruntled faculty want to change their working circumstances, the process is akin to hearing bids at an auction. Faculty will solicit offers from other schools, then ask UCLA to make a counteroffer of a pay or benefits increase. The university often takes as long as a year to respond, simply because administrative bureaucracy is so slow. By then, the professor might have already made up his or her mind to leave.
Constantly being on the defensive does not leave the departments much money or time to lure desirable faculty to L.A.
"There are incentives to come here, such as the emphasis put on research," said Vice Provost Ned Pinger. "A lot of private (universities) stress teaching."
It is in this environment that UCLA has begun to rebuild after the huge losses sustained with the implementation of three Voluntary Early Retirement Programs (VERIPs), in 1991, 1992 and 1993. The College of Letters and Sciences alone lost 10 percent of its faculty in VERIP III, almost all at the top levels of expertise and experience.
However the UCLA history department has managed to hold its own. Since 1982, it has risen in the Conference Board's faculty rankings from 11th to sixth place. Mellor attributes the improvement to an influx of private donations during the 1980s, which allowed the history department to attract internationally renowned scholars.
Particular success, Mellor notes, has come in the areas of ethnic history, where UCLA has had a "very, very strong record in hiring," according to Mellor. Because of a scarcity of specialists in those fields, those who work at UCLA face regular offers to go elsewhere.
Varying UCLA salaries might be a solution to the current faculty exodus, but the practice presents a moral dilemma. Private universities are not shy about giving "royal treatment to faculty superstars, but UCLA has a commitment to equitable pay scales. Treating faculty unequally is politically risky, but something of an industry standard.
Faculty quality is a litmus test of the famed Californian commitment to higher education. Sacramento has a great deal of power to affect how the UC schools are maintained.
"Until now, we have been primarily funded from state sources and research," said Pinger. As a percentage of the state budget, higher education has fallen from 18 percent in the 1960's to 11 percent during Pete Wilson's years as governor.
As UC Berkeley has recently done, UCLA will likely turn to private donations in the years ahead to make up the public funding cuts. Thus far, these 'gift funds' have provided the extra monies for perks. "We try to respond when people get offers," admitted Mellor. "But I do feel we're a great deal behind (comparable) universities."