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UC corruption in context
Health Care Renewal offers some provocative context for the scandal involving recently-resigned UC provost M.R.C. Greenwood. Roy Poses, a physician at Brown University School of Medicine and an author of the HCR blog, writes to direct our attention to two detailed posts there.
The first covers the question of UC adminstrators' exorbitant salaries, paying due attention to the argument commonly levelled in defense of those salaries: that they are comparatively low, and that the University of California is actually struggling to attract the very best administrators because it cannot compete with peer institutions that pay quite a bit more. This post also documents the typical--and compelling--counterargument: that UC administrators get enormous perks in the form of housing allowances, incentive payments, relocation benefits, bonuses, and so on, that are not part of their official salary but that do absolutely increase the total "worth" of a given job. This post concludes with a damning indictment of administrative lavishness in an era of budget constraints and skyrocketing costs: "During a time when the UC system sustained a 15% cut in state funding, increased student fees by 79% ($3429 to $6141) in the last four years, and froze salaries of lower level employees, these increasingly lavish salaries, other financial compensation, and perks suggest an organization more attuned to benefiting its top leaders than maintaining the morale of its other employees, and fulfilling its mission to its students and other stake-holders (including patients of its teaching hospitals and clinics). Furthermore, leaders splendidly isolated in their fully-staffed dachas may rapidly forget what the interests of ordinary students, patients, faculty, and employees might be."
The second post focusses on the failures of the very administrators whose extravagant compensation is justified by their allegedly extraordinary competence, paying particular attention to problems that have arisen lately at the UC Irvine campus. The story involves a failing liver transplant program at the UCI medical center, a hospital CEO who has been put on (paid) administrative leave after failing to address the program's problems, negligence lawsuits, and a chancellor who was caught unawares by the whole thing long after it had become a massive and possibly irreparable problem. The post notes that the transplant program's scandalous failure is only the most recent of a long list of scandals at UCI's medical school. The post also notes that both the hospital CEO and the chancellor make upwards of half a million dollars a year.
The Health Care Renewal blog makes it clear that lavish overspending on luxurious administrative lifestyles is only part of the problem at the University of California. The other part of the problem is that this spending cannot reliably be proven to buy the capability and competence that it claims to. Calls for greater transparency and greater accountability in the UC system have been made, and they are all very well. So are the promises on the part of UC president Robert Dynes and others that greater efforts along these lines will be made. But words are cheap and--as is well known by now--the salaries justified by them are not.
Posted by acta online at November 28, 2005 12:14 PM
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