The Language Program at UCSC may lose forty courses in the coming two years, and several Language Lecturers their jobs. Retiring faculty in the Humanities won’t be replaced for at least two years. Staff will continue to be under tremendous pressure to work more and get paid less (and get fired). Salary reductions may stay in effect. Students’ tuition is dramatically up. Is this the only way to make up for the loss of state support at UCSC?

One area that could be cut is top administration, or at least that is what numbers suggest. If one tabulates the number of students (student headcount) at UCSC year by year from 1993 to 2008, and divides it by the number of executives (SMG and MSP) during the same years, one finds that while there were 134 students per executive in 1993, there were only 51 (50.8) students per executive in 2008. In 1993, there was a total of 76 (75.88) FTEs in the executive ranks, for a population of 10,173 students, but the number had jumped to 327 in 2008, for a population of 16,615 students. There may have been a number of reclassifications—especially of senior professional management—in the process. Still. The same kind of tabulation shows that the ratios for other categories of personnel have remained flat during the same period.

If UCSC in Fall 2008 had the same ratio of students per executive it had in 1993, it would have 124 executives, which is 203 fewer than it did have. Two hundred and three executives at, say, 125,000 dollars for salary and benefits represent an investment of 25 million dollars per year. Real money. How good is the investment? That is something worthy of analysis, and a question deserving of some good answers. One percent of this investment, about 250,000 dollars per year, that is near the cost of the number of language courses mentioned above.

This dramatic increase in senior management has been going on throughout UC, but the increase at UCSC is particularly steep. See the numbers, based on UCOP statistics.