The regional approach eliminates the need for the $14 million annual President's Office at the University of Massachusetts. Perlman said that office largely serves as a vehicle to distribute funds to campuses and for fund-raising. Opponents say the plan would damage the quality of the university system.

Officials from the CSU and UC systems think the Massachusetts plan is a lousy fit for California and would not be cost effective.

"Absent a UC Office of the President during budget negotiations you would have 10 campuses in Sacramento -- and to some extent in Washington -- all competing for funds," said UC spokesman Chuck McFadden.

Colleen Bentley-Adler, a CSU spokeswoman, echoed McFadden's concerns. And, she said the plan would crumble the structure of the state's higher education system, considered a model throughout the country.

In 2002-03 UC's Office of the President spent $44.9 million and had 535 full-time positions.

The CSU Chancellor's Office spent $28 million and had 580 employees. Students, union officials and education observers interviewed agreed that while changes could -- or should -- be made at university headquarters, the state would be ill-advised to take the radical step of eliminating them altogether.

System heads look at the broader needs of students, monitor quality, help determine broad policies, and secure and distribute state funding, experts said.

"Without those heads you'd have campuses fighting each other and that would not be a good thing," said Karl Pister, interim director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education and former chancellor at UC Santa Cruz.

Even union presidents representing faculty and employees in the UC and CSU -- organizations that at times have had bitter disputes with those university systems -- said the headquarters perform valuable functions.

"I'm certainly not an apologist for the (UC) administration, but I think with a system as large as UC someone has to be in charge of administering it in its entirety," said Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers, adding that other state education agencies would not be a good substitute.

While voicing little support for the Massachusetts concept, the experts said the UC and CSU headquarters could be improved. Some thought that campuses in the UC, CSU and community colleges should work together to allow students to move more smoothly through the systems. And several said they saw the potential for trimming lots of administrative fat.

Employees from the UC and CSU systems complain that spending on administrators has climbed at a higher rate than spending on faculty. A state audit of the UC last year found between 1997 and 2001, academic salaries went up 33.7 percent while funding for management skyrocketed 77.2 percent.

And state statistics show that in the CSU between 1993 and 2002, the number of tenure-track faculty grew by 2.8 percent while the number of managers climbed 41.4 percent.

University officials say they have done everything possible to maintain academic excellence.

Steve Boilard, higher education analyst for the Legislative Analyst's Office, said his office has historically had trouble getting answers from the UC and CSU on how they spend their administrative dollars.

"It's a pretty opaque process," Boilard said. "I think the better question is not should you eliminate these offices, but what are they doing, how much does the state want to pay for those services, and how can costs be reduced?"