Editorials

A professor friend called me on Thursday morning, furious. She’d just heard a radio report on a committee formed to advise the University of California Board of Regents which is recommending that seven U.C. executives, who already make more than $350,000 a year, now need to have raises funded by private donations. Why did that make her so mad? Well, she’s the chair of a science department at a state university, and with seven years experience and a four-course teaching load she has yet to take home $60,000 a year. I was already planning this editorial on the topic, because I’d seen an excellent piece by Tanya Schevitz in the Chronicle earlier in the week with all the facts and figures. An example of shocking data: one senior vice president, a committee member who is listed as making $350k, actually pays taxes on more than $450k, probably because of bonuses on top of his salary. And, if we are to believe the report, he and his cohorts want even more. That’s greed, plain and simple. Obscene greed, actually. 

The excuse the committee gives is that it’s hard to recruit competent executives because other institutions and private businesses are now paying so much more. Sorry, but I can’t believe that somewhere in the United States there’s not a competent woman or man who can handle a vice-president’s job at UC for less than half a million dollars a year. That’s what some of these compensation packages could net out at, if you add in jobs for significant others, like the one offered to the partner of the latest UC Santa Cruz chancellor.  

And we all know employees of educational institutions up and down the line who are living on wages more like $25,000 a year. It’s probably easier to get food service employees than to get executives, but is there a ten-or-fifteen-to-one value differential? I doubt it. Even if you concede that a university executive might feel entitled to a comfortable upper-middle-class standard of living, that can be achieved, even in the expensive Bay Area and even with only one breadwinner for a family, for a lot less than $350,000 and up.  

The new proposal, that the “and up” should be financed by private donations, offers extensive opportunities for corruption. Corruption doesn’t necessarily mean stealing—it can mean distortion of the university’s historic mission by entanglement with for-profit enterprise whose goal is not necessarily education. If university executives have private sponsors, divided loyalties are an ever-present temptation.  

Talking to my friend, I started riffing sarcastically on the idea of selling naming rights to university executives, along the lines of the late PacBell Park, whatever it’s called now. We could have, for example, the Bechtel President of the University of California. He could agree to wear Bechtel logo t-shirts at all university sports events, and for formal gatherings, a tasteful lapel rosette with the logo in diamonds. His official car could have a Bechtel-logo license plate. His house could sport a Bechtel billboard on the roof. The opportunities are endless. Well, as usual, reality has outstripped satire.  

My professor friend tells me that her university has already been sold off in every particular. The building she works in, like most university buildings, is named after a major local industrialist. But even worse, the classroom where she teaches about, among other things, how California’s climate has been degraded by the power industry, is named after PG&E, and has a plaque to prove it. Does this kind of corporate branding affect her teaching? No, but it undoubtedly has a subtle effect on her students’ perception of society and its goals. And Bechtel? It’s UC’s new partner in the bid for managing Los Alamos National Laboratory.  

America is being torn apart by the greed of the elite and the powerful, just as it was in the Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century. The poor of New Orleans are left to die while the rich hire mercenaries from South Africa and Israel to defend their possessions. It is wrong (how old-fashioned that word sounds) to choose leaders for educational institutions, especially public institutions, who contribute to this widening gulf by exemplifying the concept that greed is good.  

From a recent UC press release: “The University of California President’s Task Force on Faculty Diversity has formally launched its program review of faculty diversity efforts at each UC campus. The task force met Sept. 16 at the Office of the President here to begin its review. To assess the status of faculty diversity, UC President Robert C. Dynes appointed an 11-member systemwide task force to review faculty diversity.” It doesn’t take yet another task force to tell UC that women and some “minority” populations (now a majority in California) are seriously underrepresented in the UC system. The reasons for this have been exhaustively studied. Among other things, faculty women like my professor friend don’t make enough money in starter jobs to support families. 

Here’s an idea: Perhaps the seven overpaid UC executives, instead of lobbying the private sector for even more loot, could take a voluntary 25-percent salary cut, which they could contribute to a fund for recruiting more faculty members from the underrepresented groups. That’s another old-fashioned concept, what used to be called “setting an example.” But it’s not likely that the seven high-rollers are the kind of people who are motivated by the idea of public service, because people like that are cut out of the pack in today’s corporate university culture.  

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