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  • Dynes Dines

    By UD August 15, 2007 10:37 am

    When universities, and university systems, become very rich and very byzantine, it's both hard to run them and easy to fleece them. "Spending 17 years in a laboratory doesn't exactly set you up for running what is in effect a multibillion-dollar corporation," sniffed one California state official when asked to comment on the dismissal of Robert Dynes, president of the University of California system, who was fired over dinner the other day at Trader Vic's.

    Dynes was also UC San Diego's chancellor, so the official isn't being fair. But his comment points us toward the future of some major American universities: They will be run by CEO's who find having seventy lawyers on staff, as the California system does, a source of joy rather than despair.

    There's so much money around! And universities - even public ones - operate with little scrutiny. Look at the two campus scandals in the news lately -- the loan industry thing, and now the study abroad thing. They're about what happens when you figure no one's looking, and no one's going to look. Similarly, the scandal that brought down Dynes -- he oversaw an elaborate procedure rewarding high-level administrators with all sorts of monetary goodies -- was about practices that evolve when you figure no one's looking.

    The next president is "certain to face endless scrutiny and a lot less autonomy," notes the San Francisco Chronicle, which broke not only the goodies story, but the related, equally damaging, UC Santa Cruz's chancellor Denice Denton's story, in which the UC system paid her $30,000 so that she could have a dog run at her residence. Denton's dramatic suicide from the roof of San Francisco's Paramount building, mysterious as such events usually are, but no doubt in part motivated by the ugly protracted attention which that absurdity drew, added a sense of symbolic disaster to Dyne's fiscal disaster.

    Note in particular: a lot less autonomy. Public universities compromise their autonomy in all sorts of idiotic ways, and students considering attending heavily compromised universities should be aware that whether they lose their independence from state control via financial scandal or via athletic scandal (a current athletic case in point is the University of Minnesota), these schools suffer serious academic harm when legislators -- who can be both know-nothing and hostile -- get a foot in the lecture hall doorway.

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Comments on Dynes Dines

  • Right-To-Know
  • Posted by veblen on August 15, 2007 at 12:20pm EDT

  • This story points to the need to make the records of public universities public. It is my understanding that salaries at the University of California are exempt from the state's Right-To-Know law. This may or may have already changed in part. In May legislation was introduced to extend the law to the Trustees.
    A senate bill requiring California State University and University of California trustees to disclose raises, perks and benefits passed with a unanimous vote in the state Senate and will be making its way to the state Assembly mid-May.
    Sen. Leland Yee's Senate Bill 190 will require the CSU and UC systems to fully disclose trustee compensation packages in public meetings. The bill passed 39-0 in the state Senate on April 26.

    Extending Right-To-Know and Sunshine laws to public universities is a good way to assure accountability without encroaching on academic freedom.

  • Central Administrations should be a thing of the past
  • Posted by R.J. O'Hara at The Collegiate Way on August 15, 2007 at 1:45pm EDT

  • Central Administrations of entire state university systems (staffed by people who perform no educational functions and who, except for the coaches, are the most highly paid "educators" in the state) are products of the mid-twentieth-century industrial age of education. The Soviet Union is no more, and it's time for Central Administrations to pass into history as well. Zero them out. Give each individual public campus autonomy, and let them compete and differentiate themselves as needed. Bureaucrats will suffer (and so will oppose it), and legislators will have a harder time dispensing patronage (and so will oppose it), but it would do wonders for the quality of education.

    Even the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is decentralizing its higher education system:

    http://collegiateway.org/news/2006-vietnam-university-reform

    Isn't it time the United States (plural) did the same?

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