* Faculty Letter to Senate Executive Committee concerning the planned Silicon Valley campus

What follows is a letter from UCSC Senate faculty to the Senate Executive Committee on the topic of the administration's plan to allocate 14 FTE to a Silicon Valley campus. If you would like to add your signature, please do so in the form that follows. We would like to send the letter to the Senate Executive Committee by March 13, 2015.

As your colleagues in the Academic Senate, we write to you of our concern regarding the administration’s stated intention to divert 14 FTE to a planned Silicon Valley campus which, we fear, will erode UCSC’s ability to fulfill its core mission and will have negative implications for both undergraduate and graduate education at UCSC.

* Continuing deterioration of compensation and benefits

A year ago Colleen Lye and James Vernon, co-chairs of the Berkeley Faculty Association, drew the attention of faculty across the ten campuses of the University of California to the continuing degradation of their pensions, benefits and salaries. This analysis has recently been confirmed by UCOP’s own study of total remuneration. The executive summary of this document contains the following depressing bullet points:

* SCFA 2013-14 Annual Report

The SCFA’s work in the past year has, as in recent years, been largely conditioned by the ongoing funding crisis in public education in California, and its ongoing consequences for faculty research, teaching, and welfare. Online education, which was once…