UC takeover a bad idea

Written by CA Political News on June 02, 2009, 10:23 AM

UC takeover a bad idea
State Legislature has financial problems of its own.

Daily Breeze editorial, 5/31/09 


One Southern California university president who asked not to be named recently repeated the managers' mantra from this recession: "Don't miss the opportunities presented by these bad times."

In other words, if people have to go, what better chance to get rid of some deadwood? We're sure many public-school principals would, in the name of education, love the ability to lay off the terrible teachers rather than do it by seniority, as the union leaders demand.

These days, university presidents of institutions big and small, public and private, need to be better managers than they've ever needed to be before.

That includes presidents of University of California campuses. Not that UC, the greatest public university system in the nation, is on the verge of bankruptcy or anything. But its operating budget is certainly under attack, the same as any other public entity in the state. Even before the fiscal crisis, its leaders decided to raise tuition by a whopping 9percent this year - this on top of big annual tuition hikes for most of the decade. It's admitting fewer students, hard-pressed to keep up its facilities, worried about losing prestige - and worried most of all about losing the great faculty members who are its strongest asset.

The university is also, and understandably, under attack for having highly paid state employees milling about at its upper echelons. More than 17,000 of its employees receive total pay of more than $100,000.

In the midst of public outrage over high salaries for some of the newer chancellors at UC campuses comes a populist-sounding proposal for a constitutional amendment from state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, and Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco.

We agree with Romero that UC has operated as "an independent fiefdom." We understand what Yee means when he says the university is acts "like a private institution."

So here's their plan. Rather than allow the governor-appointed Board of Regents to run the university, as it has done since 1868, they want it to be run by the California Legislature.

Of course, Romero and Yee are proposing that a group of people who can't pass a budget, can't govern a state and who are held in lower esteem by Californians than members of Congress or even journalists be allowed to run the University of California, a 10-campus system that for all its troubles is still the envy of the world.

This proposal is just plain crazy. Californians need to know that the state kicks in just $3.2 billion of UC's annual budget of $19 billion. The rest comes from parents, students, foundations and private backers.

In the future, given the state's evidently long-term financial problems, even more of the UC budget is going to come from non-taxpayer sources. In order to compete UC needs the best university managers money can buy. Probably private fundraising efforts, such as those now under way on almost every UC campus, should pay for those salaries. There's no need for the Legislature to step in and micromanage the operation.

The separate bill Yee has authored preventing the 23-campus California State University system from giving big raises to executives in years when the state is in fiscal crisis certainly makes sense. But UC has already frozen salaries for its top execs.

More fiscal prudence can certainly be exercised at the university - especially by slashing non-teaching high salaries. But giving purview to our Legislature is hardly the way to accomplish that.