10-year strategic plan started by Chancellor May currently being drafted

UC Davis Chancellor Gary May recently announced the creation of his “To Boldly Go” campaign, a 10-year strategic plan for the university. The specific details included in the plan are currently being drafted and discussed.

“The strategic planning initiative started in October with the retreat of about 90 or so faculty, staff, students and alums,” May said. “It is now at the stage where we defined the steering committee to gather input of the community and to distill it into some actionable tasks for the plan, and will be drafted and ready for review sometime in April or so.”

The namesake for the strategic plan has its roots in one of May’s most noted passions.

“We thought the title, ‘To Boldly Go,’ [would] be appropriate, because number one, I am a Star Trek aficionado,” May said. “Davis has historically been a place that has been very good in many areas, great at some areas but overall a pretty humble place.”

In regard to the drafting of the plan, May said “a lot of it still has to be determined.”

“The general objective is to raise the profile of the university,” May said. “Some of the early things that I am sure will be part of the plan […include] stronger engagement [with] the city of Sacramento around innovation.”

A stronger partnership between UC Davis and Sacramento is at the forefront of the concept of Aggie Square.

“This idea of Aggie Square will certainly have some appearance in the plan in some form,” May said. “The idea there is for the university to partner with the City [of Sacramento] to engage with the business community and do a better job of taking the many wonderful ideas that come out of the laboratory and get it to the marketplace. One of the main motivations for doing [this] is economic development and job creation. I always thought that innovation [was] one of the most important and sustainable ways to create new industries, new jobs and new opportunities for not only our students but the region and the community.”

Professor Ken Burtis, a faculty advisor to the chancellor and provost and a co-chair of the campaign discussed the purpose and aims of the “To Boldly Go” campaign.

“What this process is about is, ‘Where does the university need to be in 10 years?’” Burtis asked. “We are seeking input to develop a plan. What goal do you have in mind for the university that is a 10-year goal? Having named that goal, what strategies do you think the university should be engaging in in order to achieve that goal? At the level of the whole university, what should we be thinking about? What is out there? What is changing?”

Regarding the timeframe of the campaign, May said there are short-term plans in process at the moment.

“The short-term object is more or less to align all of the stakeholders in the UC Davis environment and get them rolling in the right direction,” May said. “We will probably come up with a small handful — five or six — broad objectives which all aspects of the campus can and should buy into and help them to steer in that direction.”  

May also discussed the diversity of students and faculty members which comprise the steering committee.

“The steering committee has faculty and staff from across the university, and there are also […] graduate and undergraduate student representatives as well,” May said. “We expect everyone [to have] an opportunity to be heard — [that] is the real goal. In addition to the committee, there is the website and the email address where people can send in their ideas.”

Roy Taggueg, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology, the president of the Graduate Student Association and a member of the steering committee, offered a particular appreciation for the inclusiveness of the campaign.

“One thing that I particularly like as a student is that it is pretty comprehensive,” Taggueg said. “[Chancellor May] has somebody in every corner of UC Davis and beyond to basically do all the survey to get all of the information.”

Anthony Bulaclac, an MBA student in the Graduate School of Management and another member of the steering committee, expressed his excitement to be able to contribute to the campaign.

“It is great to be able to play my part in making sure that the leaders [who work] with the chancellor […] make the right decision that will have a positive impact in allowing UC Davis to reach [its] potential for the next 10 years,” Bulaclac said.

Burtis discussed the activities of the steering committee in the upcoming months.

“We figure we are going to collect input over a couple of months, then the committees are going to work for a month to assimilate that input and see if we find some themes,” Burtis said. “And then we will produce a kind of a summary that summarizes what we have come up with […] and [we will] be sending that around for feedback. By April or May, we begin to have […] a finished document that the chancellor will have received.”

May also emphasized the impact strategic planning can have on a university.

“I [have] been involved in strategic planning at various levels for long time, and I always thought it was a good mechanism for not only setting a direction for whatever the organization is, in this case, the University of California, Davis, but also as a way for building the community,” May said. “Bringing people together and helping them drive the same direction. And in many cases, you find that the process of doing that is as valuable and sometimes more valuable than the final product.”

Written by: George Liao — campus@theaggie.org

UC Office of the President’s most recent salary proposal effective wage reduction

This article is the first in a three-part series examining issues that counseling psychologists in the UC system are currently facing, including under-market wages, understaffing and high demand leading to systemwide recruitment and retention issues.

Bargaining negotiations are currently taking place between the UC Office of the President (UCOP) and University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) over terms relating to employment under the job titles Counseling Psychologist 2 and 3 in the UC system, including and perhaps most notably relating to the under-market pay scale these employees receive at the UC.

When asked why several, if not all, UC campuses are severely understaffed in terms of counseling psychologists, Aron Katz, a psychologist at UC Davis’ Student Health and Counseling Services said “it comes down to money.”

“I love my work, I love being here, but you can go ten miles down the road in either direction and make 20 to 50 percent more,” Katz said. “It’s a tough sell.”

According to Jamie McDole, the vice president of UPTE, the below-market salaries counseling psychologists currently receive, in addition to heavy workloads, are the main factor behind the retention and recruitment issues UC campuses struggle with. McDole said counselors are “stressed, overworked and overburdened.”

“The only way to achieve adequate staffing is to have adequate salary to recruit competent therapists and then retain them,” McDole said.

_______________________________________________

In January, UPTE successfully petitioned the Public Employment Relations Board, a state agency, to add the job titles Counseling Psychologist (CP) 2 and 3 into union membership. Previously, counseling psychologists were not unionized. According to Katz, the distinction between CP2s and CP3s is not “meaningful” — currently, the title of CP3 is used to denote “semi-management positions.”

Two separate processes between UPTE and UCOP are now occurring. Accretion is the process of adding counseling psychologists to the pre-existing healthcare contract (Hx). Since accretion negotiations began, the pre-existing Hx contract counseling psychologists are being added to expired on Oct. 31.

“Accretion negotiation began in January,” said Katz, who is also the UC Davis counseling psychologist representative for bargaining in the accretion process. “In the time it’s taken to negotiate this, the Hx contract has expired, so that also needs to be negotiated. We are fighting to keep those two negotiations separate, because if they were combined, counseling psychologist staff would have next to no influence on our terms because we would make up such a small proportion of Hx members.”

According to Katz, salary negotiations are the “major sticking point to resolving accretion.” The current pay range for CP2s is $66,214 to $119,186 — “but no one is at either end” of the scale, Katz said, “so it’s terribly misleading.” Using the list of counselors posted on the SHCS website, The Sacramento Bee’s 2016 state worker salary database shows most of these full-time counselors received salaries in a range between $86,000 to $98,000.

At a local healthcare provider such as Kaiser, the job title “psychologist” has a pay range of $119,955 to $155,764. UPTE has presented UCOP with a step scale structure of pay ranges for counseling psychologists reflective of local markets. Each UC campus has a different salary structure it is presenting.

“The current step that has been presented to represent UCR is pretty much indicative of other community colleges [and] it also […] takes all those different local pieces into consideration,” said a source from UC Riverside who wished to remain anonymous. “I think the biggest issue that UCOP has with the step salary is that it requires them to pay us more, basically comparable to what people are leaving the UC system for — people are leaving the UC system for higher paying jobs. The only argument is that they have no money or that there’s no funding for it, that it would require too much stretching of the budget to give us comparable pay.”

During negotiations, UCOP presented UPTE with three offers. UCOP has proposed a step 1 entry pay of $72,850.32, according to a source who wished to remain anonymous; for comparison, the UC Davis Medical Center’s entry pay for the job title “Psychologist 2” is $96,653.52 and the entry pay at Kaiser for the job title “Psychologist” is $119,955.60. Both UPTE and UCOP are proposing a step scale for salaries — UCOP’s salary proposition would place existing counseling psychologists on a salary step corresponding with the salary range they currently receive.

According to Katz, UCOP’s salary proposals are effective wage reductions. Although counseling psychologists could potentially receive a small raise, when union dues and an increased contribution to the UC Retirement Plan are taken into account, there is “a reduction in the take home pay.”

According to UC spokesperson Stephanie Beechem in an email interview, the UC has, since March, “offered multiple fair and reasonable proposals on wages, benefits and other employment matters in order to reach a settlement.”

In 2016, the UC Office of the President publicized and promoted a mandate which stated that, by 2018-19, an additional $18 million would be allocated to the mental health budget to “support hiring 85 mental health clinicians” UC-wide. Counseling psychologists in the UC system are funded by student fees. The additional $18 million allocated to the UC’s student mental health budget is comprised of “an increase in the annual student services fees,” according to the UCOP website.

“UC states that salary funding is limited to student fees (which students recently voted to increase for additional availability of services),” McDole said via email. “That limit is set by the university and there is no reason, other than an arbitrary university decision, that mandates the limited funding source. We have brought this up many times in bargaining, but the University continues to limit funding.”

Beechem did not respond specifically to the question: “If there is an additional $18 million in the mental health budget, why is UCOP’s most recent salary proposal for counseling psychologists unreflective of local markets?” Beechem did say that the UC “continues to negotiate in good faith.”

McDole and Rodolfo Victoria, a senior staff psychologist and the bargaining representative from UC Irvine, however, both allege that UCOP has engaged in bad faith bargaining.

“We thought, coming into this, that we would be negotiating in good faith and that has not been the case,” Victoria said. “There seems to be a very strong reluctance to negotiate with us in any kind of meaningful way. They initially had offered to lower our salary and then now they’re at a place where they’re trying to present themselves as very generous and offering to give us a raise that we would have been entitled to under the […] system that we were under. They’re trying to say that we are a valuable resource on campus, but yet, when we ask them to […] at least give us fair and competitive market wages, they have been incredibly reluctant to do so.”

In a memo from June 1, composed and sent by Dwaine Duckett, the vice president of human resources for UCOP, he claimed “UPTE has presented a wage demand UC believes is unrealistic that would almost double costs for our Counseling and Psychology Services and Student Health Centers.”

“That is false,” McDole said about Duckett’s claim. “I think if we did all the full calculations of what we are proposing, [it] is overall approximately a 30 percent increase in total costs. We did the math, they didn’t.”

Duckett was unavailable for comment.

An online petition titled “Petition for Good Faith Bargaining With Campus Counseling Psychologists” states that the “UC has lost staff due to the lack of competitive campus wages, which has substantially decreased the availability of mental health staff for students. The intensity of student needs is increasing to the point that we, the staff, fear for our safety and that of the students and campus community.”

A counseling psychologist from UCLA, who wished to remain anonymous, said they signed the online petition, which has over 200 signatures, because, after working “at a number of different counseling centers, […] there’s something about the fear and dispirited, disjunctive culture that is palpable here.”

Several counselors at multiple UC campuses said both they and their colleagues feel that the UCOP sees counseling psychologists as replaceable. Victoria said, at UC Irvine, “there’s already a huge morale burnout issue on our campus.”

According to Katz, a UC employee asked UCOP’s Chief Negotiator Patty Donnelly at a meeting during negotiations “if recruitment and retention of counseling psychologists is a bargaining interest of UCOP” and Donnelly said “no.”

Donnelly was not available for comment. Beechem did not respond to the specific question: “Is the recruitment and retention of counseling psychologists a bargaining interest of UCOP?”

“We get the message that we should be grateful to work for UC and that if we’re not happy here for any reason, that we should just consider leaving,” said a counseling psychologist from UC San Diego who wished to remain anonymous.

The same UCSD counseling psychologist said, as negotiations drag, there is the risk of losing more staff — “I’ve already heard murmurings about people looking elsewhere and feeling frustrated.”

Another meeting for accretion negotiations is pending scheduling for Jan. 12. Asked how hopeful he was that negotiations would be completed within the next month or two, Victoria said “not very.” McDole said, most recently, “the university has proposed scant increases that in no way moves therapists toward market wages.”

At this point, there has been informal discussion of a strike among several individual campuses.

“I can say that […] we are quite frustrated with how things are going and the lack of progress on UCOP’s end,” Victoria said. “There has been talk about [striking]. We obviously would like to avoid that at all costs — we don’t want the students and the campus community to be impacted by this. But at some point, if this continues like it has been, that’s obviously an option we’ll have to consider.”

Written by: Hannah Holzer — campus@theaggie.org