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Friday, October 31, 1997

Spreading the wealth

SALARIES: It may look like a university, but UCLA is also a giant corporation - with

some slippery pay scales.

By Mason Stockstill

and George Sweeney

Daily Bruin Contributors

Last week, UCLA basketball head coach Steve Lavin signed a five-year, $2.38 million contract with UCLA.

It will take Chancellor Albert Carnesale 11 years to make that much with his current salary.

Joseph Mandel, vice chancellor of legal affairs, will earn that kind of money after 16 years.

Henry Hespenheide, a biology professor, will have to work 39 years to get up to Lavin's five-year earnings.

And Luiz Mendes, a library assistant at the University Research Library, won't see that kind of money on his current salary for another 72 years.

What does this mean? Only that UCLA hires an immense number of people who run the gamut in terms of responsibilities and compensation.

The people behind the desks and food counters could be preparing your degree progress reports, grilling your hamburgers, teaching your classes or assessing your library fines - in short, anything and everything that needs to keep UCLA operating smoothly.

UCLA, the university, is home to roughly 35,000 undergraduate and graduate students. UCLA, the corporation, employs over 20,000 people on a budget of close to $2 billion.

Over one-third of all the people on campus at any given time are employees of the university, from the food-service employees and the janitors to the chancellor and the head basketball coach.

Like any huge corporation, the people needed to maintain and coordinate UCLA are assorted. But the university is a special case; it is a full living environment, so there are literally hundreds of different services and jobs that a person can do on campus.

The university itself has three different types of job categories: academic personnel, administrative personnel and staff personnel.

The administration is composed mainly of suits, who sit in offices and control UCLA's business-like side: budgeting, legal affairs, fund-raising and the like.

There is no private-sector model that can fairly be compared to UCLA's administrative branch. Comparing UCLA to a private corporation is often like comparing apples to oranges.

A better model for comparison is the executive branch of the U.S. government. The chancellor is like the president, and all the vice chancellors are members of his cabinet, each with a distinct and separate field of expertise and knowledge.

A vice chancellor at UCLA makes between $140,000 and $170,000. The exception is the executive vice chancellor, Charles Kennel, whose salary is higher than the standard vice chancellor's base salary.

Measured against comparable institutions, UCLA administrators are underpaid.

"I hear that my counterpart at USC makes twice as much as I do," said Vice Chancellor of Legal Affairs Joseph Mandel, whose base salary is near $150,000.

Mandel also said the position of vice chancellor has no likeness in the private sector, partly because similar positions in the private sector pay much higher.

"I did have to take a pay cut to work here," Mandel said, "but money is not the sole criterion for deciding what job a person wants."

The big boss at UCLA, Chancellor Albert Carnesale, is currently being paid $227,000 a year for his duties at UCLA. Along with the salary comes the chancellor's residence, an on-campus home in which to live and entertain.

The employees that students run into most often are faculty members, such as lecturers, assistant professors and teaching assistants.

Pay for faculty at UCLA is officially based on a tiered system that ranks teachers all the way from junior lecturer to full professor. These classifications are outlined in guidelines set by the UC Board of Regents.

The average salaries for assistant professors, associate professors and professors in the UC system are $51,075; $61,056; and $92,310, respectively.

However, UCLA has a higher average than that. Individual campuses are allowed to hire professors at off-scale, or higher, wages. UCLA and UC Berkeley each have roughly 150 professors hired at these off-scale rates, which raises their average. Professors in this category include those who are given higher pay because of "exceptional situations."

Henry Hespenheide, associate professor of biology, said there is quite a bit of disparity between professors in the medical school and those in the College of Letters and Sciences.

"A professor who teaches physiology in the medical school will get paid more than a professor who teaches physiology in the biology department," Hespenheide said.

"There are always a lot of professors who attempt to switch to the medical school because the pay scale there is so much higher," he continued.

Peter Narins, a professor of physiological science, sees things differently.

"Actual salaries are always negotiable with the dean. ... Everybody has their price," he said.

Within the levels of assistant and associate professor, there are four pay sub-levels. A professor usually moves up one sub-level every two years, with occasional accelerations.

"If an honor is bestowed upon you, or you get a fellowship or something, these can get you an acceleration," Narins said.

Lowest on the pay scale, usually, are the staff employees at UCLA. These include the clerical workers who push paper in Parking Services and the janitor who sweeps up the building after all the classes are over. They represent the largest portion of UCLA's work force.

As is often the case, higher-skilled staff positions have equivalents in the corporate sector that would pay more.

"There are similar positions, like law librarian or medical librarian, that would pay more (outside of UCLA)," said Don Spring, Career Center librarian.

Aside from the faculty, however, staff employees that students run into most often are usually food service employees. The students' association (ASUCLA), which runs the UCLA Store and Restaurants, employs the people who work for food services.

Technically, ASUCLA employees are not considered UCLA employees. The association has a certain degree of autonomy, although the university holds a vested interest in their financial position.

The association, therefore, decides the rate at which it will remunerate its employees. Unions that represent ASUCLA employees negotiate directly with ASUCLA, not with the university.

While some second-level food-services supervisors have raised complaints about fairness in ASUCLA's pay compared to market wages, lower-level employees have less complaints.

"I think it's completely fair," said Noam Pines, a second-year political science student who works in food services.

"It pays more than my last job, which was similar," he said.

Pines did admit that he would probably not have taken the job, were he not a UCLA student.

And it is in this way that ASUCLA has the advantage, because students who would otherwise find jobs elsewhere choose to work on campus because it's convenient.

Employees for UCLA also admit to taking pay cuts, and acknowledge that their private-sector counterparts earn more money.

But perhaps it's the satisfaction of working for an institute of higher education that often motivates UCLA workers to stay.

"It's like a public service," said Vice Chancellor Mandel.

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