Sandra Smith, UC's assistant vice-president for planning, notes that at the moment UC is involved in discussing how these compacts will be drawn up. One of the accountability measures called for by UCOP has caused a fair amount of controversy on the campuses. It is that each campus meet or exceed a specified universitywide teaching load. The state has insisted that ladder-rank UC faculty teach an average of 4.8 quarter courses per year. UC currently meets this expectation, but only by averaging teaching loads across all its campuses.
Some campuses are above the average while others are below it.
Under the new accountability compacts, every campus will be expected eventually to meet the 4.8 minimum. The change to a new budgeting system at UC came about in part because of the wretched budget years of the early 1990s. Thus, one campus took more from maintenance, while another took more from administration. This effectively gutted the fixed budget categories that supposedly were balanced both within campuses and across the system. One appealing solution was to provide campuses with dollars, not dollars in categories.