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Former UC Regent criticizes handling of Greenwood case
In response to the San Francisco Chronicle's November 11 piece on the ethically questionable $125,000 paid to recently-resigned UC provost M.R.C. Greenwood, former UC regent Velma Montoya wrote:
Your article reports UC President Robert Dynes says when the Board of Regents voted on his recommendation that M.R.C. Greenwood be appointed the UC provost at a salary almost $100,000 greater than the former UC provost, Dynes informed the regents in closed session that he also was providing Greenwood a $125,000 relocation payment. That statement is false.My notes from the UC Regents' Feb. 23, 2004, phone conference meeting show that one of the regents (not myself) questioned why Greenwood's proposed $380,000 salary constituted almost $100,000 over the salary of the previous UC provost. Dynes' answer was that the additional salary constituted a form of housing compensation because the UC provost is not provided with a house. One of the regents (not myself) advised Dynes that the amounts for salary and housing compensation should have been presented separately.
My notes show there were two votes, with 3 out of 9 regents in the combined Educational Policy and Finance committees voting no on the proposed salary, and then 4 out of 12 regents voting no in the full board meeting on the proposed salary.
Given the regents' close votes over Greenwood's proposed salary, any discussion of an additional $125,000 relocation payment surely would have killed her appointment. In his current distortion of the facts in an attempt to avoid responsibility for this unwise appointment, President Dynes has exposed his even more serious misrepresentation of the facts to the UC Board of Regents at the time of the Greenwood appointment.
Dynes has a lot to answer for. He has thus announced his intention to regain the public trust by promising to make the terms of administrative salaries and bonuses more publicly available. Meanwhile, in a feat of bad fiscal timing, the UC Board of Regents voted this week to give top UC administrators a raise. Dynes' salary will rise from $395,000 to $405,000, and an additional raise for UC administrators will be proposed at the Regents' January meeting. Transparency like this, it need hardly be said, is not going to do for the public trust what Dynes wants it to do.
On Thursday, hundreds marched outside the Board of Regents meeting held at the Berkeley campus, protesting the Regents' Wednesday decision to raise undergraduate student fees by 8% and graduate student fees by 10%. The fees are projected to bring in nearly $149 million -- which ought to cover those proposed administrative raises, and then some.
Posted by acta online on November 19, 2005 at November 19, 2005 08:45 PM
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