Over the past few months, the University of California has raised undergraduate tuition by 18 percent, awarded raises of as much as 23 percent to a dozen high-ranking administrators and announced a possible 81 percent tuition increase over the next three years.

Students haven’t taken the news well.

At campus rallies across the state, thousands of students and their faculty supporters have decried the actions, staging raucous rallies and “Occupy”-style sit-ins that in some cases have ended in clashes with law enforcement. They’ve also descended en masse on UC regents’ meetings, disrupting proceedings and even forcing officials to retreat to a private room.

Behind the angry chanting and acts of civil disobedience is a growing sense that the 10-campus UC system is no longer a public institution accessible to the middle class, but rather a sprawling bureaucracy of hospitals and auxiliary research institutions buffeted by an ever-expanding roster of administrators.

The problem, as the student activists see it, is that none of these functions translates directly into expanded course offerings or improved student-to-faculty ratios, even as their tuition dollars help sustain the system.

“The university is now being run in the interest of the administration,” said UC Irvine student activist Anne Kelly, a Ph.D. candidate in earth system science. “They’re promoting their own internal growth, asking us to sacrifice with higher tuition – but administrators have had raises.”

Database: Click here to review UC salaries for all employees earning $25,000 or higher from 2006 through 2010.

Photos: Click here to review our slideshow of the 30 top-paid administrators at UC Irvine.

University officials have acknowledged the system is trying to be competitive with private universities, and must offer competitive salaries, but UC adamantly denies that student tuition is going to fund its myriad non-instructional programs. Rather, officials say, state budget cuts are behind the dramatic tuition increases of recent years.

“It’s not as simple as saying, ‘They’re raising my tuition and therefore I’m funding UC health care,'” said UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein. “It doesn’t work that way. Student fees go toward educating students – period.”

‘NON-ACADEMIC PERSONNEL’

The students’ growing frustration is fueled by UC employment data that show that almost three-fourths of UC’s 152,500 employees last year were designated “non-academic personnel,” according to an annual UC employment report.

In the report, UC characterizes the growth in its non-academic staff as the inevitable byproduct of “an increasingly complex university system” that “requires greater professionalization of its staff, who must meet higher technical and competency standards.” Non-academic personnel includes everyone from custodians and food-service workers to accountants and plant operators.

UC Davis horticulture researcher Richard Evans, who has independently analyzed UC personnel data, offered a different take on the data, publishing a tongue-in-cheek piece for UC faculty in 2010 entitled “Soon every faculty member will have a personal senior manager: Is this a good way to spend money?”

“Data available from the UC Office of the President shows that there were 2.5 faculty members for each senior manager in the UC system in 1993,” Evans wrote in his piece. “Now there are as many senior managers as faculty. Just think: Each professor could have his or her personal senior manager.”

In his analysis, Evans compared the number of UC employees classified as either “senior management” or “managers and senior professionals” with the number of tenure-track UC faculty members.

As of spring 2011, UC employed 8,144 senior managers, managers and senior professionals, and 8,521 tenure-track faculty members, according to the latest available UC data. (However, when counting all UC “academic staff” – from non-tenure-track faculty members and lecturers to student assistants and academic administrators – the academic personnel figure swells to 29,419.)

Evans also suggested that public support for UC system funding might improve if, for example, the president of the UC system did not earn more than the president of the United States. UC President Mark Yudof grossed $560,594 in 2010; President Obama’s salary in 2010 was $395,188.

“Our effort to solve the budget problems has a greater chance for success if we first aim at something we have direct control over,” Evans wrote. “… I suggest that we – administrators, faculty, staff and students – review the justification, costs, and benefits related to the explosive growth in senior management.”

UC officials insist the administrative staff is growing proportionately based on the size and needs of the university, and that to single out administrators is inappropriate and unwarranted.

“They are paid far less than what they could earn in the private sector,” said Klein of the UC Office of the President. “They choose to work for the university for other reasons than salary. Does that mean they should work for free? Does that mean a faculty member should be paid the same as a public high school teacher?”

PRIVATIZATION

The salaries and size of UC’s administrative staff, in particular, have fueled conspiracy theories among students and faculty that the system has deliberately sought to “privatize” itself – in other words, to compete with private universities on all fronts, from the scope of its non-instructional programs to executive compensation to the amount of tuition that students pay.

Three years ago, the head of a UC faculty group advanced the privatization theory in a multi-part series called “They Pledged Your Tuition.”

“UC has made no secret of its desire to raise tuition,” Bob Meister, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations and a UC Santa Cruz professor, wrote in 2009. “Under (former Gov.) Gray Davis, however, UC was still concerned that continued state funding depended on its visible reluctance to raise tuition too fast (and) that eagerness to charge what the market allowed would provoke state cuts.

“UC’s long-term strategy was thus to raise tuition – which was too low anyway – in response to state cuts, so as to avoid retaliation,” Meister continued, “and to do this regardless of whether higher tuition would be used to restore the losses in instruction that seemed to necessitate it.”

At a campus rally in November, UC Irvine Professor Rei Terada echoed those sentiments, telling demonstrators that even before the recent economic downturn, the regents seemed intent on privatization.

“The regents claim that this is an intolerable, involuntary reality, but this is not true,” said Terada, a professor of comparative literature. “… Student protest has slowed down the process of privatization, and furthermore, it is the only thing that has had an impact on privatization.”

For its part, UC denies all such allegations, saying that while the university has arguably become privatized, outside influences beyond its control are entirely to blame.

“It is not something we advocate, not something we want,” Klein said. But, she added, “times have changed; the economic model has changed.”

Contact the writer: 949-454-7394 or smartindale@ocregister.com