Dynes responsible for fiscal woes

Over 208,000 students just got screwed over all at once. And they probably didn’t even realize it.

At the UC Board of Regents’ May 18 meeting, which addressed the recent compensation scandal and the possible culpability of University of California President Robert Dynes, the regents decided to give Dynes their support. In a press release, the regents acknowledged that they hold Dynes accountable, but are convinced that he can correct the problem.

But “accountability” apparently means nothing, because while all sides agree that there have been large monetary transgressions, the man responsible is keeping his post without so much as a pay dock or an ultimatum. The regents are not acting as though they answer to the students and taxpayers of California, making this just the most recent example of how, in the UC system, the students lose.

This “compensation scandal” started in November when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that 8,500 UC employees received at least $20,000 over their regular salaries last fiscal year.

What’s more, many of these bonuses – which totaled $334 million last year – were never disclosed to the public, and were explicitly against the UC’s own financial policies.

By way of explanation, Dynes says that over the past years, private universities have gotten richer and public universities have experienced cuts in funding. Thus, he reasons, there exists fierce competition for “top talent,” so the UC system has been forced to attract and retain qualified candidates with covert incentives.

While his point is not completely without merit, at what cost has this been allowed to happen? Our own outgoing chancellor, Albert Carnesale, for instance, was able to charge the school $11,000 for season tickets to the Hollywood Bowl, and on May 18th, the regents publicly agreed to give him one full year of salary – $323,600 – while he is on sabbatical.

Just to be clear, the UC is paying Carnesale more than $300,000 to take a year off.

It’s not as if the UC held a bake sale. This money comes from us students, and now would be a good time to remember that student fees have gone up 79 percent in the last four years.

When fees were raised in late 2004, the only dissonant voice on the regents’ vote was Jodi Anderson, who wanted a guarantee that 33 percent of the fees would be used for financial aid as opposed to the agreed upon 25 percent. In finding that this guarantee would only cost six million dollars, Regent Norm Pattiz incredulously asked his peers, “There isn’t any place within the University of California system where we can find $6 million?”

As the mandatory audits of the UC compensation scandal are made public, students are starting to realize that the money could have been found in the pockets of high-level administrators.

When he took the position of UC president, Dynes said that he was committed to what he calls the UC’s core principles, “education, research and public service.” Shortly after he took office, he also said in a Daily Bruin interview that one of his top priorities is to maintain the prestige and reputation of UCLA.

The outlandish compensation and incentive packages, then, can be seen as an expression of the latter.

The mission statement of the UC focuses on “discovering and advancing knowledge.” Nowhere in that mission is “getting a top-10 spot on the US News & World Report’s university rankings.” And while we all benefit from UCLA being as prestigious as it is, I doubt that students who cannot pay the tuition will be comforted by the fact that they had to drop out of one of the best public schools in the country.

Dynes is not a bad man; he clearly did not have insidious motives, and he has kept what he believed to be the best interests of the university in mind. But policies were violated and the transgressions were concealed. Dynes himself admitted to “overactive secrecy” leading to a culture “of trying to get away with as much as possible and disclose as little as possible.”

As a public university, the UC is funded by students and taxpayers, and is therefore responsible to them.

The students are the reason this school even exists – we pay these salaries, we enable these gifts, and the regents should answer to those they claim to represent.

This failure of the presidency has yielded a failure of the regents, because no one is being held accountable. Dynes has “acknowledged his responsibility” and I suppose the regents think an apology is good enough.

But he is not being held accountable, and not holding anyone accountable is what allowed this to happen in the first place. State Sen. Abel Maldonado, after the regents’ statement of support, said that the regents “are thumbing their nose at taxpayers and students of California.”

The regents give lip-service to responsibility, but forget that it goes hand-in-hand with accountability and consequences.

And when the regents stop answering to the public – those who create their jobs and pay them – the students of the UC system come last. All 208,000 of them.