The Regency
by zunguzungu
Most of the Regents of the University of California — whose very name gives you a good idea of the kind of power they wield over the direction and functioning of the University of California — are unelected, appointed to 12 year terms by the governor of California, and almost without exception, they have no real background or apparent interest in education. They are corporate moguls, the 1%, whatever you want to call them.
On Monday, they defied California’s open meeting laws by sort-of teleconferencing from four different campuses, voting to raise various administrative salaries by about $3.5 million, including the UC Davis chief campus counsel. Perhaps they suspected he would be busy in the near future? But as many are pointing out, at a time of across-the-board-cutbacks in the work of teaching and being a university, to find raising executive salaries to be “essential” — as UC president Mark Yudof put it, “We consider these retention efforts to be essential. I understand it’s not a great time, but we can’t really close down shop and say we’re not going to make any effort to retain our best people” — tells you a lot about their priorities.
The students still came. And this is still a temporary victory for the student protesters. The regents are trying to work towards an 81% tuition hike, but student protesters threw a sufficient scare into them that they had to make up bullshit warnings of violence and hide behind telephones and police. I predict they’ll raise tuition dramatically this summer; SOP is do the dirty stuff during summer break (though, of course, winter break is around the corner too). Anyway, here’s a column of peace police at UCLA, for example, protecting the regents from students:
As a scathing editorial in the San Jose Mercury put it:
The phone-it-in session conducted in four locations was an abuse of the spirit, if not the letter, of state open-meeting laws. And for the premier public university system of the state that leads the world in technology, it was a logistical embarrassment…Public comments were heard in rotation from each site — but heard only. There was an audio connection but no video. Students couldn’t see most of the people they were addressing — indeed, had no way of knowing if anyone outside the immediate room was seriously listening to them and not rolling their eyes, checking email or whispering among themselves. It was a recipe for frustration, and predictably, it all boiled over.
Angry students shut down the meeting. In the attempt to calm things, the regents had managed to increase the tensions.
After a break, it got worse. At three of the venues, the session was moved to smaller rooms. At UCSF, there was little room for the public beyond the press.
We cannot recall another state agency holding a public meeting by teleconference. It’s within the letter of the open-meeting law that governs the regents meetings; the Bagley-Keene Act allows for teleconferencing — but this is not how it was intended to be used. The provision was included to accommodate a board member who could not physically attend a meeting. That wasn’t the issue here.
Perhaps we’re old-fashioned, but we still believe that in adversarial situations, it’s important to be able to look people in the eye when talking with or listening to them. It shows respect and fosters better communication. And at a public meeting, all members of the public should be able to not only listen to board members but also see them. All of them. While staff can efficiently conduct business by voice and video conferences, policymakers like the regents need to meet openly in front of the people they govern.
The Monday experiment turned into a farce. Participants at the four venues could not see each other, any more than residents across the state monitoring the disembodied voices on the Internet could see any of them. It was no way to do the public’s business, and it better not happen again.
It will though. This wasn’t a blip; this is what they always do, every time. They are waging a war on their students. When students and faculty and workers try to make their voices heard, they hide behind closed doors and police. So we should now turn to look at the regents themselves. Who are these people who are entrusted with total power over the UC system?
There are 26 of them; one student is appointed to the board by the board — for a one-year term — and then there are 7 ex officio members, the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the state assembly, state superintendent of public instruction, president and vice president of the UC Alumni association, and also the president of the UC (appointed by the regents), Mark Yudof himself.
The other 18 are appointed by the governor, as I said, to 12 year terms (5 by Gray Davis, the other 13 by Schwarzenegger). The best reporting on the UC Regents is Peter Byrne’s “Investor’s Club,” from which I’ve liberally poached a lot of details. But I’ve spent some time profiling the appointed regents more briefly, just so we can get a sense for their overall makeup.
Some, like Richard Blum, are almost caricatures of everything the Occupy Wall Street movement is opposed to: a hyper-connected investment banker (founder of Blum Capital) who sits on the boards of all sorts of corporate and nonprofit firms, is married to a powerful congresswoman, and functions as a living and breathing embodiment of the phrase “conflict of interest.” Blum takes center stage in Byrne’s reporting, here, for example. Or this, from Changing Universities.
One tidbit from Byrne’s reporting, though you should read the whole thing if you’re interested; Blum oversees investment for the UC’s $63 billion portfolio, and is also the largest shareholder in two for-profit corporate-run universities, which the UC invests in. As Peter Byrne puts it,
“Marketing strategy aside, Mr. Blum has taken on two seemingly disparate roles— one as an advocate for a nonprofit university, and the other as an owner of two for-profit educational corporations. As a regent, Mr. Blum has approved cost-cutting policies for UC that appear to have enhanced the profitability of his vocational schools. And in 2007, Mr. Blum’s spouse, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), wrote federal legislation that benefited the for-profit college industry. For several years, Mr. Blum’s firm, Blum Capital Partners, has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services.”
But Blum is just one, and it’s the whole 18 that we need to look at. So the first thing you notice, is that quite a few have close Schwarzenegger connections. Most prominently, Bonnie Reiss and Paul Wachter (who both work in finance) are two of Schwarzenegger’s closest associates and advisors for decades, his “anchors, the people who were with him before politics and will be with him after.” George Kieffer was Maria Shriver’s attorney, co-chaired Schwarzenegger’s reelection committee, and recruited staff for his administration. And Charlene Zettel was a two-time member of the California state assembly, before Schwarzenegger appointed her as his Director of the Department of Consumer Affairs from 2004-2007 And it won’t surprise you to learn that most have donated to Schwarzenegger campaigns over the years; Hadi Makarechian, for example, was one of the top 50 contributors to Schwarzenegger’s reelection campaign (and was also national campaign finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential run); he’s a real estate developer (the founder, chairman, and CEO of Capital Pacific Holdings). He’s also Orange County aristocracy, his family the “closest thing Orange County has to the Rockefellers.”
Along with Reiss and Wachter, there are a lot of financiers. George M. Marcus is the founder and chairman of The Marcus & Millichap Company, whose mission “is to help our clients create and preserve wealth by providing the best real estate investment sales, financing, research and advisory services available.” Leslie Tang Schilling is an investment banker, the founder of Union Square Investments Company, and Russell Gould was a Senior VP at Wachovia and is still president of Gould Financial Consulting.
Odessa Johnson is the only regent who has anything like a real education profile, having been a community college dean for two decades. Others, like David Crane, have spent some time doing stuff that looks like education — he’s a “lecturer” at Stanford, for example — but he spent twenty four years as a partner at Babcock and Brown, an octopus of an investment firm specializing in structured finance and spends a lot of time talking about how terrible it is that public sector employees are allowed to be in unions. Or William De La Peña, whose official UC Regent bio describes him, at the very top, as a professor of ophthalmology. In reality, he the founder and director of “De La Peña Eye Clinics” while the fact that he’s the owner and CEO of WDLP Broadcasting Company, Llc. and used to own a soccer club in Los Angeles is obliquely acknowledge by the sentence: “Other business interests include the media and soccer.” As far as I can tell, the biography’s statement that he “is” a professor refers to a position he held for for six years in the 80’s, but to which he has not returned.
The chair of the board, Sherry Lansing was the CEO of Paramount Pictures, but more recently (vi ReclaimUC) she’s created a thing called the “Encore Career Institute,” which will help unemployed Baby Boomers “rewire instead of retire.” Courses will be designed by and taught through UCLA Extension — a certificate program which will cost between $5,000 and $10,000 — and will accomplish the goal of “deliver[ing] some of the fantastic intellectual property that UC has” to students in the state and the world. (Also worth noting (and noted by Byrne), she’s on the board of directors of Qualcomm Inc– annual director’s fee of $135,000, plus stock options, of which she owns “more than $1 million” and which came to a direct payment of $485,252 in 2009 — and after Ms. Lansing joined the Qualcomm board, UC quadrupled its investment in Qualcomm).
And then there’s your general captains of industry. Eddie Island was a vice president at McDonnell-Douglas, which used to be a gigantic defense contractor until it merged with Boeing in 1997, and became a behemoth defense contractor. Norman Pattiz was the founder and Chairman of Westwood One, “America’s largest radio network and one of the world’s leading media companies.” Monica Lozano is the publisher and CEO of La Opinión Newspaper, which she inherited from her father (and which he inherited from his father), and she makes almost a half million a year for sitting on the boards of directors at Bank of America and Walt Disney. And Frederick Ruiz is retired from being the CEO and founder of Ruiz Foods, “America’s top frozen Mexican food manufacturer.”
Finally, there’s prominent lawyer Bruce Varner. When he was appointed to the regency, UC Riverside’s Chancellor said that “He will be an excellent ambassador to the Regents about the growth, vitality, and promise of the Inland Empire,” which is a quote I can’t particularly make sense of.
The most important thing is just to recognize that these are the (mostly) men who are entrusted with almost complete power over one of the most important and valuable public resources the state of California has, an institution of higher learning that was built by the state of California for the good of the state of California. But one particular reason all of this matters so much is that the greatest loss of revenue to the UC was not, in fact, from state budget cuts, but from investment losses (though the privatization of the university was well on its way even before the financial crisis). And as Peter Byrne shows in his massive series, the UC investment strategy was radically shifted in the early 2000’s away from safe and reliable (and more modest) methods of investing into (ultimately disastrous) modes of investing that caused the UC’s finances to drop like a stone when the bubble burst:
“[After 2003] regents Gerald Parsky, Richard C. Blum, and Paul Wachter—all financiers by trade—took control of UC’s investment strategy. Sitting on the board’s investment committee, the three men steered away from investing in more traditional instruments, such as blue-chip stocks and bonds, toward largely unregulated “alternative” investments, such as private equity and private real estate deals. According to UC internal reports, the dramatic investment change has led to an “overweighting” of investments in private equity. One concerned regent has likened the change to “gambling in Las Vegas.” [that’s George Marcus, by the way, who objected to investing pension fund money in that way, to his credit (and to the discredit of the other regents who disagreed)]
This is important, because — as Bob Samuels pointed out a year ago, the UC’s funding shortfalls owe much more to investment losses than to state cutbacks:
…UC administration has argued that since the state reduced university funding by a combined $600 million in 2008 and 2009 (after we account for $718 million in federal recovery money), the system had to raise fees 41%, furlough employees, and layoff teachers. However, during this same time period, the UC lost over $23 billion in its investments.
This means that the investment losses were more than forty times greater than the state reductions, but the university administrators never talk about these huge investment losses. In fact, at the last UC Regents meeting, after I brought up the lack of discussion concerning the UC’s investment losses, the head regent, Russell Gould, exclaimed that, “Our investments have outperformed our peers in the last twenty years.” Not only was this statement incorrect, but it shows how the people overseeing the university do not want to deal with the real issues. Rather than looking at their own internal problems, the UC administration’s central strategy is to blame all problems on the state.
[…] * zunguzungu vs. the Regents. […]
This is just a stream of consciousness of thoughts here. I wanted to share because of the contents you wrote on the Regents and elsewhere.
I’m a graduate student on indefinite leave of absence from UCBS. Leave of absence was a matter of personal protest as well as mental health. I had to get away from the scene–the corporate invasion of the university and my department, and the authoritative, balkanized protocols of knowledge generation, the divorce of knowledge and action (science and policy)–it affected and still affects my psychology tremendously to a point of severe panic attacks and melt downs. I’ve been a hermit crab the past year. It is very hard to attend a school system in which professors, staff, and students continue to allow corporate educated idiots to govern their lives and minds…. It’s against fundamental principles of human existence… so much for doing research and teaching… What’s the point of preaching the goods of education when one cannot even apply his or her knowledge and education to act and behave appropriately… what is good for one’s self, one’s family, neighbor, community, organization, society, environment…. etc… all at once, all at the same time?
Conflict of interest is a default of human nature, not just exclusive to the UC Regents. The question is when do people feel like using the “conflict of interest” claus in order to fulfill their intentions and motivations.
I suppose the tuition hike is not a matter of “if” but more so a “when.”
Whether now or later, I recommend some form of coordinated acts of dissent. I suggest two possibilites: (1) students choreograph a collective “no pay” chain of events–students arrange their activities such that they continue to go to school (go to class) but do not pay their tuition, and make sure that there are no default student loan payments of tuition… basically, the goal is a collective effort to starve the UC Bureaucratic Beast of funds until all resources are drained from the Kraken’s end. Perhaps a collective document can be created… students can use financial starving of the UC as a means of getting what they want–because after all, why should students pay for a bad, poorly priced product called “university education” that won’t guarantee any form of prosperity and success on the other end? This document would detail what the students (maybe faculty and staff?) want and that no one will pay their tuition until they get what they want. For example, what some people may want (1) clean house of current UC Regents (2) UC Regents should largely consist of voted in faculty/staff from different campuses (rather than be appointed) (3) Jerry Brown and CA Legislature should get their shxt together in terms of (a) considering priorities in education relative to other facets of the CA state budget and (b) allowing the PEOPLE to vote on what they want their taxpayer dollars to be spent on… hopefully Californians value education at all levels… (c) which can potentially stabilize and/or lower tuition for students, but at best… have a meaningful education that won’t have them in debt for the rest of their lives.
If money is the power that runs the operations of this system and corrupts the behaviors of the people on top, then I highly suggest that UC students use money as a power they can harness as well–vote with your dollars–in this case, financially starve the obese UC beast, and see where this can go! I suggest to start “biting the hands that feeds the bs.”
The other thought I had was just a simple electronic sabotage of electronic payment systems of the UC…. I wish I were a computer programmer
I do not reject the PISA reuslt you mention, but put it in context as I do Lynn’s reuslts. The PISA reuslts you emphasize are reuslts released for the very first and only administration of an entirely new math exam testing specific math concepts requiring particular training. Lynn also has to rely on sparse and sometimes suspect data to fill in gaps, but both have value in beginning to quantitatively answer difficult questions with real world consequences.I’m willing to follow wherever the data leads. Most data and empirical evidence I’ve seen suggests (NE) Asians have a slightly higher average IQ but smaller SD than (N. European) Caucasians. Large differences in educational motivation and focus cloud the issue of average Asian reuslts as some have mentioned (although I was explicit in focusing on SD ). Any evidence that Caucasians outscore Asians on the SAT in CA is the best apples-to-apples comparisons between these two groups I’ve seen (CA has the largest legacy Asian pop more representative of norms than federal data it seems). If true and consistent, this info would seriously challenge the conventional wisdom.Again, my focus is on the exceptional individuals that advance society individually or in teams. These are not 1SD college students or 2SD doctors or even further out run of the mill researchers or academics. Sixty-one percent of the world lives in Asia vs 12% in Europe (20% in China, 1.2% in Germany, 0.92% in UK). Most people in Asia with the ability so far in the right tail as I’m speaking about would probably come from at least middle-class or better backgrounds given the genetics involved, get recognized for such exceptional talent and have the ability to work at nearly any of the world’s top research institutions most in the US or Europe. Thus, many of the top Asian-America researchers are drawing from 62% of the world’s population, not <5% of America's Asian-American population as is a popular misconception. This is easily verified by looking at the birth places of the handful of only the very top Asian academics and researchers in the US.A minimal level of social complexity and stability is required before civilization creates the environment for these individuals to reach their potential to contribute and advance their societies. One meaningful watershed is the establishment of universities or academies which coincidentally marks the intellectual ascent of Europe. Before such state supported institutionalized learning, such exceptional individuals would find fitting in and possibly even survival a struggle. This is why thousands years of (pre-)Germanic barbarians wandering in the forests does not suggest a thin-tail IQ distribution nearly as much as those same years where the Chinese lived in a civilization that had many more opportunities for intellectually exceptional individuals to advance and prosper.While no expert on the Greek vs Indian vs Chinese disputes over intellectual ownership of profound breakthroughs of the ancient world, it does seem China is at best playing the defensive role in vis-e0-vis India. I've seen Indian academics identified in Chinese sources associated with breakthroughs in areas like religion and astrology. I've never read about Chinese missions sending information to India. I also sense that Western historians have a strong bias towards China and Chinese sources over Indian ones both modern and ancient given the relative proportions of East Asian studies and research papers as well as paucity of historic Indian sources. I'm curious to learn more and will take a look at Needham as you suggest.
It’s great to find an expert who can explain things so well
This is FANTASTIC, truly truly. It scratches all the itch. It’s so useful to see Byrne’s massive editorials whittled down to essentials and put in context. Thanks for your work, A!
You must disseminate this widely. We can twitter the heck out of it, but I say print it out and just toilet-paper California Hall with it! The strike that took place yesterday in England gives us some clue, but the other thing to do now, perhaps, is to put the Calif. initiative system to some good use for a change and write up a petition on its way to becoming a referendum. Your article could ground the proposition to include faculty presence and voting power (that actually count! not just symbolic presence of one representative from the fac senate) as part of the regency. That can’t be the end, but it has to start somewhere.
It’s objectively astounding, and logically warped, that big-money donors and partisan policy makers have a twelve year-long say in UC governance, while the faculty, the heart and blood of the university, have none. But perhaps it’s just another tell-tale sign that “education” means radically different things to those who are actually involved in doing it as a part of the machinery, and those who simply reap the benefits of its institutional character…
It really does feel like the Roman republic before it throws off Sextus and his clan (would this make us, the students, Lucrece being raped as we speak?)
Español .info
Good to see this info getting out – however, article doesn’t mention that the candidate Regents must be approved by the CA state senate, and they have open meetings where anyone can go comment about whether a particular Regent is suitable or not … I don’t recall meeting any students who have gone. I think we are a bit culpable on that point, and it’s worth shuffling up/over to Sacramento to, ah-em, occupy those meetings.
yes because if students don’t inform themselves of the intricacies of senate procedures and meetings, learn about proposed members of The UC Regency, avail themselves of the means of traversing the state, inform their teachers of impending absences, and intervene in comment period in a state senate meeting, all of which is certain to be a effective and consequential set of actions…then they really have nothing to be complaining about.
A history of efforts to restructure the UC Board of Regents:
http://www.ucdemocracy.org
Also worth noting that the California Constitution requires that the composition of the Board of Regents reflects the population of the state of CA.
Forgot about this: Yudof on democratizing the regents.
link didn’t work. here it is:
http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-dont-like-it-much-personally-speaking.html
fascinating. and, sadly, also, at the same time, why nothing will change. they are *way* ahead on strategy planning, control tactics. at this point, change can only come by radical means, a nasty mess. ie, too late. but, still, impressive research. now you know, know we know. take the blue pill.
Let me guess – did the UC investment strategy shift to more risky options after it out-sourced it’s Retirement & investments plans to Fidelity?
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[…] The students still came . And this is still a temporary victory for the student protesters. The regents are trying to work towards an 81% tuition hike, but student protesters threw a sufficient scare into them that they had to make up bullshit warnings of violence and hide behind telephones and police. I predict they’ll raise tuition dramatically this summer; SOP is do the dirty stuff during summer break (though, of course, winter break is around the corner too). The Regency « zunguzungu […]
University of California was the top contributor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign with $1,648,685, even more than GOLDMAN SACKS-USA who gave him $1,013,091 and Harvard U who gave $878,164.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638
[…] example is not hypothetical but endemic, even routine. The UC Regents are all too often appointed in exchange for political patronage. Their individual investments directly benefit from the university’s investment structures. […]
[…] of administrative-heavy colleges is everywhere, be it the monetary cost of administrative bloat, the disasters of appointed governing boards, or the erosion of faculty governance. And South Harmon soundly rejects its very […]
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