"Please ring for service," a small sign reads.
Nosek, special assistant to the chancellor at the University of California's Davis campus, walks past the bell and points toward several cubicles that once housed employees.
"Empty," he says.
"Empty," pointing toward another.
A few strides.
"Empty."
When staff members leave Davis these days, they are seldom replaced. By merging administrative units, Davis has cut about 150 positions, largely through attrition. There are more reductions and layoffs to come, and Nosek will spend the next few months trying to figure out where those cuts can be made with the least disruption to the university.
When he retires in June, Nosek won't be replaced either.
In the final act of a long administrative career at Davis, Nosek is engaged in a task that is simultaneously tedious, rewarding and painful. He and his ever-diminishing staff are interviewing people across the campus, hoping to consolidate their decentralized duties. Davis is trying to bring an end to the days of a single employee who may spend a quarter of his time handling payroll and another three quarters juggling other duties. Far more efficient, Nosek says, is one employee with one job. Every department doesn't need its own part-time technology support employee, when one full-time tech support worker could serve multiple departments from a single "shared services center," the theory goes.
As would be expected, some of the savings from a project like this will be realized through laying off people. As Nosek and his team interview employees about their current duties, he says the interviewees are increasingly asking, "What do I have to do to be a survivor here?"
One of the beauties of higher education — its decentralized respect for the mores of varied disciplines — has also been its undoing, Nosek says. Over the last several decades, disparate departments have given ad hoc duties to multiple employees without centralized functions — creating a metastasization of obligations that the private sector long ago determined was both inefficient and expensive.
The "shared services centers" project at Davis may sound good on paper, but individual departments often like the way they do things — and there is pushback any time central administration comes down from on high and appears to be threatening the autonomy of university units. While not familiar with the specifics of the shared services project, a union leader says "what this will do is it will allow for fewer people to run around putting out fires, and it will leave more money for administrative bonuses or whatever."
Frank Pinto, an executive board member with University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE)-
