Weaponizing student mental health

a visit from the Chancellor

Something really bizarre happened during the annual Chancellor’s and Provost’s visit to the School of Humanities. Our Chancellor became incensed at a question posed through an online platform about the expansion of administrative jobs at the UC (184%) vs. increase in TT faculty positions (18%) in the past twenty years.

Conservative outlets like Forbes put the blame on the wide availability of student loans. Student loans are effed, but one take away from the article above is shocking: the University of California San Diego has more administrators than students.

What is striking about this AAUP study analyzing UC administrator/staff/faculty ratio to UC students is that staff to student and faculty to student ratios have decreased while administrator to student ratio has increased, not to the extent that the Forbes article claims, but the AAUP defined this as an alarming trend.

Here is a UC Senate letter to Michael Drake, President of the UC from 2022 outlining the decrease in Senate (full time, TT faculty) to students at the UC. with concomitant rise in dependency on lecturers and adjuncts.

Back to the Town Hall. The Chancellor, obviously incensed that the question about administrative bloat received applause, went long winded and pseudo-impassioned speech about student mental health that was by turns melodramatic — do we really want to hurt students who are suffering, derisive — we need investigators to see if a student has legitimate needs to be allowed their cat as a comfort animal in the dorms — and finally threatening. He told us that if we knew some administrators who were not doing their jobs, or underused, we should report them directly to him and he would take action, which I assume means he would fire them based on our volunteering to be narcs.