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UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau will pay a consulting firm $3 million to tell the university how to save money. 

Bain & Co., a Boston-based consulting firm whose alumni include former GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and current California GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, will conduct a study similar to those commissioned by the University of North Carolina (UNC), Cornell University and the city of Atlanta. 

Business clients range from Yahoo.com to Getty Images. 

The study comprises a key element of a campaign Birgeneau has dubbed “Operational Excellence.” 

“I will be leading this effort together with Vice Chancellor Frank Yeary,” Birgeneau said in announcing the program to the campus. “We will be conducting a comprehensive study of our costs—what we spend on our various operational and administrative activities—and developing concrete options that improve operations while reducing our costs.” 

Fortune magazine ranks Bain & Co. at the 296th place on its list of the nation’s largest privately held companies, and chair Orit Gadiesh has repeatedly appeared on the magazine’s lists of the country’s most powerful women. 

A former Israeli Army military intelligence specialist who worked in the office of the vice chief of staff, she has a degree in psychology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and went on to graduate with highest honors from the Harvard MBA program. 

She succeeded Mitt Romney as chair, and gave $2,300 to her predecessor’s presidential campaign in early 2007, contributing an equal amount to John McCain. 

Under her 22-year tenure, Bain has risen to become one of the nation’s leading management consulting firms,and has expanded its reach globally, most recently with a new office in Dubai. 

Jack Trout, an associate with the Blake Project, a consultant group that specializes in creating marketing brands, said Bain & Co. consultants “are so secretive they don’t carry business cards. And it has been reported that when discussing clients on airplanes, they use code words instead of names.” http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2009/09/management-consulting-help-or-hazard.html 

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin praised the company’s role in helping that city develop “a comprehensive turnaround plan...it included 29 specific strategies for reinventing city government.”  

The decision to hire the consultant drew mixed reviews from the activists who helped organize the Sept. 23–24 campus teach-in and rally. 

Lyn Hejinian, the poet and English professor who chairs the Solidarity Alliance, which coordinated the September events, said she is concerned about any study that uses efficiency as an overarching standard to judge a public institution. 

“It seems to me that the outcome is highly predictable, given the end results of their other consultancy projects,” she said. 

But Richard Walker, a geography professor and member of the staff of UCB’s Institute for Urban and Regional Development, said the study has a potential for a positive effect on the campus, not least because it would demonstrate “that our administration is willing to do a study that could lead to cuts in administrative fat.”  

Both faculty members said the university could make strong improvements in its purchasing system, which restricts buys to a fixed list of suppliers. 

Hejinian said one department had found furniture for a new office at one-third the price from the approved supplier, but had been forced to pay the much higher price. 

Both also agreed that travel arrangements could often be made more cheaply if individuals and departments were allowed to choose their own supplier, a complaint made by other faculty as well. 

Walker’s endorsement of the survey was also qualified by what he sees as a need for greater involvement by faculty and staff in the conduct of the review. 

“They’ve put a couple more faces on the steering committee, and they have promised to interview any and all faculty, including Charlie Schwartz,” he said. “We proposed a number of other faculty who should go along with them, but getting the administration to actually put them on has been” less successful.  

Schwartz, an emeritus physics professor, has been conducting his own detailed study of university finances since his retirement in 1993.  

Hejinian said that while an examination of fiscal issues and the university’s management of finances is clearly needed, “I don’t think a business model of efficiency is what the university needs, because the university is not so much about efficiency as about creativity and prolonged discussions,” realities outside the traditional parameters of the corporate model of the efficient business institution. 

Walker, an activist with the SAVE faculty alliance, said that two other central issues with the study will be transparency—how much actually gets reported back to the university community—and the role of shared governance, in which critical decisions about the university are made in consultation with the Academic Senate. 

But for Tanya Smith, president of Local 1 of the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) at UCB, the decision to hire Bain & Co. is simply “outrageous. It’s absurd. Bain is supposed to be for corporations.” 

Her union, which is working without a contract, is now in bargaining with the university, “but we’re making no progress at all. I think we’re actually slipping backwards at the bargaining table, and the administration came to the table today with new marching orders we’re still learning about.” 

With furloughs for faculty already in place, Smith said she wondered when professors would be able to find time to work on the survey.  

Ongoing action 

Campus activists are continuing the efforts to organize and mobilize the university community. 

Another general assembly of the university community was scheduled for Wednesday evening, the fourth in a series that began with a Sept. 16 session to collect issues to be raised during the following week’s rally and teach-in. 

A 24-hour “study-in” will begin at 4 p.m. Friday in the Anthropology Library in Kroeber Hall. The entrance is across from Cafe Strada. Besides affording an oportunity for studying for finals, the event will include a discussion on “Confronting issues of privilege and inequality within our struggle.” 

The major event to arise out of the Sept. 24 assembly was a call for a statewide conference on public education, which has now been scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Oct. 24 in the Pauley Ballroom and run through 5 p.m. 

The meeting will examine the needs of all public education in the state, from pre-school through postgraduate, in the light of California’s budget crisis, with the goal of adopting a plan of action to mobilize public support for the state’s schools.