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Opening Arguments

Nice work if you can get it

You've heard the old expression "You have to spend money to make money." One public university is taking it a little too literally:

UC Berkeley has agreed to pay a consultant $3 million to help the school find new ways to save money - an agreement that has irritated some faculty members whose pay is being cut this year.

[. . .]

"It absolutely sickens me that the majority of my 8 percent pay cut is going - not to protect the core teaching and research mission of the university- but rather to compensate overpaid business consultants and their multimonth hotel stays and weekly flights home," an angry employee told The Chronicle. She declined to be named, saying she feared retribution.

She and other employees have raised several additional issues, including the idea that UC Berkeley should take advantage of in-house experts at, say, its own Haas School of Business, to do the work.

Posted in: Current Affairs

Comments

tim zank
Tue, 10/06/2009 - 11:16am

Unfortunately, Academia tends to think the same way government does. Common sense is not an option.

Bob G.
Tue, 10/06/2009 - 1:29pm

ROFLMAO, Leo...
When it comes to spending, the government is ALWAYS at the front of THAT line!

littlejohn
Tue, 10/06/2009 - 4:55pm

Some years back, I was working for a West Virginia paper which shall remain unnamed. They paid a consultant $50K to hang around the newsroom for a couple of weeks. He recommended promoting two overbearing, incompetent jerks to management, and set up a complex bulletin board whose function was never clear to anyone. Within 6 months the new managing editor had been fired and the new news editor demoted. I had moved on about then, but I assume the mystery bulletin board has come down. I could have screwed up the newsroom for half that much!

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