Cal Sports Return!!
February 11, 2011
Newest Development in Ongoing Cal Sports Debacle: Three of
Five Eliminated Teams Saved
Chancellor Robert Birgeneau announced today that Men’s Rugby, Women’s Gymnastics and Women’s Lacrosse will be preserved as varsity sports at UC Berkeley.
Donors will support the teams’ expenses while long-term plans are being implemented enabling programs to survive on their own in the future. According to Birgeneau, the $12-$13 million raised by donors not only allows these sports to continue at the varsity level, but complies with the campus’ goal to reduce annual support to Intercollegiate Athletics to $5 million or less by 2014.
However, a comprehensive, sport-by-sport review of the philanthropic commitments determined that the pledges for baseball and Men’s Gymnastics fell short of sufficient funding needed to cover team expenses for the next seven to 10 years, in addition to a plan for sustained financial independence.
“Sadly, the efforts did not meet these criteria insofar as baseball and men’s gymnastics are concerned,” said Vice Chancellor Frank Yeary. “Although the amount of money raised for these two programs is meaningful, the teams’ costs are also significant. Both programs would have needed to raise multiples of what they actually did raise to meet our criteria. In the context of both current and forecasted economic and financial conditions, we simply could not agree to short-term, stopgap measures.”
Excess funds raised to support rugby or the two women’s sports would have, if possible, covered the projected funding shortfall of men’s gymnastics and baseball for approximately two years.
Originally, initial criteria provided to donors last fall asked for up to $100 million to fund all five teams. Due to abundant enthusiasm from community and team supporters, the funding criteria changed in November to require $25 million in interim funding to cover all five teams’ expenses while working to create plans for long-term sustainable funding.
$ for consultants but no $ for student sports. When UC Berkeley announced its elimination of student sports including baseball, men’s, and women’s gymnastics, women’s lacrosse teams and its defunding of the national-champion men’s rugby team, the chancellor sighed, “Sorry, but this was necessary!”
But was it? Yes, the university is in dire financial straits. Yet $7.2 million was somehow found by Chancellor Robert J Birgeneau ($500,000 salary) to pay the consulting firm to uncover waste, inefficiencies in UC Berkeley (Cal), despite the fact that a prominent East Coast university was accomplishing the same thing without expensive consultants.
Essentially, the process requires collecting, analyzing information from faculty, staff. Apparently, Cal senior management believe that the faculty, staff of their world-class university lacks the cognitive ability, integrity, energy to identify millions in savings. If consultants are necessary, the reason is clear: the chancellor has lost credibility with the people who provided the information to the consultants. Chancellor Robert J Birgeneau has reigned for eight years, during which time the inefficiencies proliferated to $150 million. Even as Bain’s recommendations are implemented (‘They told me to do it’, Birgeneau), credibility, trust, problems remain.
Bain is interviewing faculty, staff, senior management and academic senate leaders to identify $150 million in inefficiencies, most of which could have been found internally. One easy-to-identify problem, for example, was wasteful procurement practices such as failing to secure bulk discounts on printers. But Birgeneau apparently has no concept of savings: even in procuring a consulting firm he failed to receive proposals from other firms.
Students, staff, faculty, California Legislators are the victims of his incompetent decisions. Now that sports teams are feeling the pinch, perhaps the California Alumni, benefactors, donors, will demand to know why Birgeneau is raking in $500,000 a year while abdicating his work responsibilities.
UC Berkeley reprimand, censure: NCAA places Chancellor Birgeneau’s men’s basketball program on two years probation.
Let there be light for transparency to UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s leadership
The author, who has 35 years’ consulting experience, has taught at University of California Berkeley, where he was able to observe the culture and the way the senior management operates.
World class preeminent public research and teaching University of California Berkeley (Cal) ranking drops. In 2004 the London-based Times Higher Education ranked Cal the 2nd leading research university in the world, just behind Harvard; in 2009 that ranking tumbled to 39th. By 2011 Cal had not returned to 2nd place.