[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.