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Transparencies
There is transparency--and there is obfuscation dressed up to look like transparency. At the University of California, recent events provide an instructive opportunity to differentiate between the two.
The first is the UC Regents' decision to restructure the salary schedules of highly paid administrators so that there is both continuity across appointments and campuses, and greater accountability to the California taxpayers who pay those salaries. The second is the launching of UCLAProfs.com, a brainchild of the Bruin Alumni Association that purports to expose the extreme radicalism of UCLA faculty members.
Responding to intense public scrutiny and criticism, the UC Regents voted this week to approve a new pay structure that would divide jobs paying more than $168,000 per year into sixteen ranges. The pegging of individual jobs to set salary ranges is intended to clarify what kinds of raises are sensible as well as to enable the president of the UC system a greater degree of discretion over those raises. The new plan will stay in place until a systemwide audit of payment practices--including bonuses and perks--conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers can be completed. The new plan is not perfect, but represents the best effort the UC system can make at the moment to ensure fairness, accountability, and transparency in practices that have by all accounts been wildly idiosyncratic and abusable.
Meanwhile, Andrew Jones' UCLAProfs.com has not had quite the impact Jones clearly hoped it would. Jones has made national news with his creation of a "Dirty Thirty" list of UCLA's most politically extreme professors and his offer to pay UCLA students for helping document "abusive, one-sided, or off-topic classroom behavior." He has also, along the way, come in for quite a drubbing.
The criticisms of UCLAProfs.com range widely--from the observation that paying students to spy on their professors is not only unethical but possibly illegal to the argument that Jones' site not only overstates the putative "radicalism" of UCLA professors, but also makes a damning mistake in its apparent assumption that liberal and leftist professors should be hounded for their politics alone. Most interesting of all, to those who follow the ongoing vicissitudes of the academic culture wars, is the manner in which David Horowitz has distanced himself from Jones' work and has even threatened to sue him for stealing his donor list.
Temperate critics of the academy's strong leftward tilt are careful to distinguish between professors' personal politics and their behavior in the classroom; the one is not the same as the other, and politically engaged professors who do not use their classrooms as personal ideological soapboxes should not be tarnished with the same brush as those who do. Jones' site makes no such distinction, providing profile after profile of professors whose politics he finds objectionable but doing little if anything to show that these professors are using their classrooms to try to indoctrinate rather than to educate. As such, it is a prime example of obfuscatory and distorting political tactics dressed up to look like a noble push for a necessary transparency.
Good for UC Regents--and good for those who saw UCLAProfs.com for what it is and said so before that site could get any ideological traction.
Posted by acta online on January 21, 2006 at January 21, 2006 09:24 AM
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