One of those stranger things about faculty pay

For those who don't know, "Stranger Things" is a Netflix series
about an upside-down world that parallels the world we see
but produces odd and disturbing effects.

One of the stranger things about the UC system - including UCLA - is its civil service-like faculty pay system with grades and steps. Most research universities - with which UC competes for faculty - do not have comparable systems. A more typical system involves department chairs who - within some form of budget constraint - hire and retain the faculty they want by paying what the market requires. 

For many years, the UC system co-existed with the market. But when official pay began to fall behind, especially during periodic budget crises, the system adapted through such mechanisms as paying "off-scale" salaries (pay above the official rate within certain constraints) and by adding steps at the top and such odd-sounding steps-above-the-top-steps such as "above scale" and "further above scale." 

Yours truly, who served on CAP and chaired CAP back in the day, saw many promotions and hires from many departments. In such cases, outside letters from other universities are included as evidence and documentation. It was evident from these letters that the outside academic world found the UC system to be strange. Why were letters being required for clearly prominent faculty who already were full professors? Why were there promotions within a rank which other universities regard as being the final rank?

UC, in short, has made the old civil service grades and steps system "work" the way the ancients made an Earth-centered solar system work; it added epicycles. The obvious solution would be to go to the kind of system that other research universities use and drop the civil service approach. But for political reasons and path-dependent historical reasons, UC continues to stick with its ad hoc arrangements.

From time to time, there are attempts somehow to revive the old system of just grades and steps or at least make the epicycles less prominent. The problem with such an effort is that unless you substantially pushed up the official grades and steps, faculty pay would be uncompetitive. And given the variations in market conditions across departments, having the same pay rates for all wouldn't work in today's academic market. Nonetheless, there seems to be one of those periodic efforts underway at UCLA, to the dismay of many department chairs. This time, it takes the form of a strange effort to express the epicycles as absolute dollar premiums rather than percentages above official scales.

You can read about the latest effort in the form of a 7-page letter from Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs (VCAP) Michael Levine from last November at the link below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NH-9WuKwoqGquxnQt240zohJY6DCezqB/view?usp=sharing

Below is the reaction to that letter by 17 department chairs:

NOTE: Clicking on the images above will clarify them.

It is unclear at this point whether the percent-vs-absolute epicycle proposal is coming from UCOP (because UCLA has somewhat different epicycles than other campuses) or whether it is something from Murphy Hall linked to the current budgetary strains at the campus level.