Berkeley Hires Costly Budget Consultant

Faced with a $150 million budget deficit, administrators at UC Berkeley have gone to extreme measures to save money. Some of their strategies have included cutting faculty pay, laying off employees, and imposing mandatory unpaid furloughs. In addition, less classes are offered to students while their tuition and fees continue to sky-rocket.

Berkeley has also decided to hire a budget consultant, which may seem like a great idea. The only problem is that this move will cost the university a whopping $3 million. As anyone could imagine, educators at Berkeley are livid.

“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.” an anonymous employee told The San Francisco Chronicle.

However, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau does not feel the move is counterproductive. He is arguing that the University needs to learn to budget its money without becoming dependent on “volatile state funding.”

The consultants come from Bani & Co., which is a Massachusetts-based company with offices in San Francisco. The company is also working with the University of North Carolina and Cornell University to reduce costs there.

Professor emeritus of physics, Charles Schwartz, has expressed pessimism regarding the potential benefits of hiring the consultants. He says the same consulting firm crunched numbers for the University of California system back in 1997 and concluded that a merger between UCSF and Stanford University hospitals was a good idea. Unfortunately, the merger turned into a financial disaster and lasted just two years.

What are your thoughts? Is it a smart idea to invest $3 million in a consulting firm when the university is losing employees and funding?