Shrinkage at UC-Berkeley

UC Berkeley plans to cut another 200 jobs (excerpt)

Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 23, 2010

UC Berkeley, pegged by efficiency experts as bloated with too many managers, will eliminate about 200 jobs early next year to save $20 million, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has announced.

"We cannot continue with our current administrative structures and operations and be the best run public university in the country," Birgeneau said in a letter to employees Tuesday.

The job elimination will be achieved through "a combination of attrition, retirements, voluntary separations and layoffs" after January, the chancellor said.

That's on top of 600 positions already eliminated since last year.

It's not yet clear how many employees will be laid off in this round, said Claire Holmes, a university spokeswoman.

But 27 departments - from the Haas School of Business and the College of Chemistry, for example, to the chancellor's office itself - have been instructed to cast a critical eye over their management structure and see where positions can be reduced and combined, Holmes said...

The job elimination is part of a campuswide effort at efficiency begun last year when UC Berkeley hired Bain & Co., a Massachusetts consulting firm, to identify waste...

Full article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/22/BAHP1FI898.DTL