SANTA CRUZ — Employees at UC Santa Cruz are worried.

Yolanda Lopez, a custodian, worries that janitors will be stretched thinner as more new buildings go up.

Linda Rosewood, a network analyst, worries her job could be eliminated as part of a cost-cutting reorganization.

Becky Klein, a financial assistant, worries small businesses may lose campus customers once an electronic buying system is instituted.

So employees have united with students to demand administrators look at how they spend their shrinking pot of state money.

Custodians plan a march to the chancellor’s office at noon May 20. Actions in the discussion stage range from blanketing the Sentinel with letters via e-mail to shutting down the campus and busing employees to protest in Sacramento.

"We have to stop spending on the wrong priorities," said Mike Rotkin, a longtime UCSC lecturer, union negotiator and city councilman. "The money they throw at top administrators would be shameful in a normal year. In a budget crisis, it’s a scandal."

Six-figure pay hikes were doled out to M.R.C. Greenwood, the former UCSC chancellor promoted to vice provost of the UC system, and the new UC San Diego chancellor, Marye Anne Fox.

UC officials defend the pay hikes as necessary to attract the best people, but union workers don’t buy that argument. And they are bitter about the efficiency expert hired by UCSC who has yet to share details of the upcoming reorganization.

While administrators get pay raises, lecturers are being laid off or their hours reduced, according to Chuck Atkinson, a lecturer in literature and a prize-winning poet.

At least four lecturers with more than six years of experience have lost positions, he said, and 19 will have hours cut. Cutbacks affect science, arts, humanities and social science.

"Some of the most cost-effective programs are being eliminated," Atkinson said, citing journalism, the rhetoric and communications minor and a program that sent university students to teach creative writing to 600 high school students.

He fears the science illustration program will die if it is moved to UCSC Extension and the fees more than double.

"We’re going to have a blow to democracy," said journalism lecturer Conn Hallinan, a 22-year campus veteran. "Voices all over the university will be silenced."

Students say the cutbacks affect the quality of education.

Tamara Belknap, a graduate student in history, said she took a position as a teaching assistant with the understanding that she would have no more than 25 students at once.

This quarter, she is one of three teaching assistants for "Spies and Espionage," which has 194 students.

"You’re supposed to work 20 hours a week, but with 65 students, that’s impossible," Belknap said.