Schrag: New University of California President is First Outsider to Get Job Since 19th Century

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

Probably the most noteworthy thing about last week's appointment of Mark Yudof as the next president of the University of California is not his impressive record as chancellor of the University of Texas system or his $828,000 compensation package.

It's the fact that he comes from outside the system, the first outsider to get the job since the 19th century. And that, as UC Regents Chairman Dick Blum implicitly acknowledged, is an unmistakable sign of a new era at UC – not quite a revolution but close to it.

And as Blum also acknowledged, an outsider is what the board was looking for. Effecting institutional change, Blum said, "is very difficult to do from within."

Blum, who'd spent more than a year wrestling with UC's administrative mess, described the meeting at which Yudof was named as "the best Board of Regents meeting of my life."

Mostly he sounded like the relieved father in an Italian opera who'd just married off his ugliest daughter.

David Gardner, who got the president's job 25 years ago, came from the presidency of the University of Utah, but he'd spent many years before that as a senior UC administrator. Before Yudof, who was a law professor and president of the University of Minnesota system before going to Texas, no real outsider had become UC president since 1899.

As expected, Yudof's sizable compensation package, coming at yet another time of budget cuts, retrenchment and almost certain fee increases, is generating unhappiness among some employees and students.

But in the context of the Regents' determination to reduce the size of UC's central administration and, more important, to shake the system out of its cozy administrative insularity, Yudof may well be worth every cent.

"If you can't add value (to the product)," Yudof said, "you should get out of the way."

The regents propose to cut central administration funding by some $56 million in the 2008-09 budget year. Against that, Yudof's salary, slightly more than he was making in Austin, is barely a blip. It will keep him among the nation's better paid public university presidents. Given the assignment, it's also likely to inflict more than a few bruises.