After protesters disrupted Monday’s University of California Regents meeting, regents reconvened in a smaller room. Before leaving the first room, regents voted to ask the state to raise the university’s funding from $2.3 to $2.7 billion for the 2012-13 fiscal year.
In the smaller room, the regents approved raising the salaries of around a dozen university administrators and attorneys by as much as 21.9 percent.
Regents voted to raise salaries for 10 administrators and managers, including a 9.9 percent increase to UC Irvine’s Vice Chancellor of Planning and Budget Meredith Michaels. Her yearly pay will increase from $225,000 to $247,275.
Six campus lawyers also received salary raises. Steven A. Brown, chief campus counsel and associate general counsel at UC Davis, received the largest raise from $205,045 to $250,000 annually.
UC President Mark G. Yudof said the pay increases were necessary to attract and retain talented employees.
Are you kidding me? How tone deaf can these people be? I am so tired of the ridiculous idea that talented people won’t come to work a UC campus if their pay is not astronomically and obscenely high. What does that say about those of us willing to work for lower than market wages, that we’re not talented or assets to the university? It seems that’s what Yudof and the Regents think about us.
Did the closed door meeting conform to California’s open meeting law (i.e., the Bagley Keene Act)? If not, that may void the administrative salary increase. It seems worth looking into.
Can someone answer two questions for me?
1. Why does it seem that students face repeated tuition hikes?
2. Why does it seem that UC administration receives repeated pay hikes?
This is shameful.
Actually this is really insulting when you consider that students have been protesting against the raise of tuition fees. Basically the students are going to pay for the hobbies of some greedy administrators.
The argument of attracting talented employees does not work. There is a lot of examples of companies hiring overpaid executives but which failed anyway. The financial crisis of 2008 is the best example. Top bankers have indecent salaries but it did not prevent banks to go bankrupt or to be bailed out by the taxpayers.
Shame on Yudof and shame on the regents. This is unacceptable. You are not going to get away with it.
We do not need an army of overpaid and greedy administrators, just a couple of smart ones with decent salaries, comparable to salaries of tenure professors.
The administration system of UC is not democratic. This is an oligarchy where a minority of greedy persons takes over the power and the resources, with no intention to share.
This must change.