Free Republic

The University of California has issued thousands of low-interest home loans to executives, faculty members and other selected employees but has refused to reveal who received the money. That includes an unidentified UC Berkeley professor who received a $250,000 home loan at one-half of 1 percent interest a year -- far less interest than any bank would demand. ... --snip-- The university provided data showing there are nearly 2,000 active loans totaling $702 million but cited employee confidentiality in refusing to identify the recipients. In dozens of cases, UC wouldn't even reveal the titles of people who received the loans....

With all the talk about the former red state, Republican state, California, becoming a blue state -- which is not quite as true as some think -- there is someone talking about it becoming a purple state. That is California Republican Party chairman Duf Sundheim, who talked about his hopes for California during last week’s bus tour kicking off Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign against Democratic challenger Phil Angelides. The Silicon Valley lawyer came on a few years ago to put a moderate face on the party, whose apparatus was traditionally viewed as right wing and increasingly out of step...

University of California officials have formed search committees for three new administrative posts to help improve fiscal oversight and management following a compensation controversy. The new positions are a chief operating officer and a chief financial officer who will oversee non-academic functions within the UC Office of the President and a compliance officer who will ensure that university practices and policies are followed. A number of reviews into UC pay practices found that administrators routinely circumvented or ignored policies in order to secure better salary deals for top executives. Salary ranges for the jobs are still being finalized, a university...

'The Parsky team" is now famous -- as well as infamous -- in Rancho Santa Fe. There is another "Parsky team" in the secrecy- shrouded Caribbean tax haven of the Cayman Islands, but that's barely known at all, just as its creators intended. Until recently, multimillionaire Gerald "Gerry" Parsky -- chairman of the University of California board of regents and George W. Bush's main advisor in California -- was better known in the state than he was in Rancho Santa Fe, where he has occupied a horsy estate for 16 years. He takes his own jet in the morning to...

Getting fired for incompetence from the University of California system is apparently harder than it looks. How else to explain how UC President Robert Dynes kept his job? But if the UC Board of Regents wishes to stick with the current administration, the board had better explain how it plans to forestall further UC compensation abuses. The regents on Thursday supported Dynes despite his presiding over hundreds of secret executive pay deals totaling tens of millions of dollars. Over the past five years, three under Dynes' watch, the president's office approved more than 700 "separation agreements" -- a euphemism for...

SAN FRANCISCO – University of California President Robert C. Dynes, under fire over millions of dollars in bonuses and other perks secretly paid to top executives, got the support of his board Thursday. “He is the appropriate leader to resolve these issues and guide the university through this difficult chapter in its history,” UC Board of Regents Chairman Gerald Parsky said. Smiles and applause greeted the statement, read as the board held its regular meeting in San Francisco. Still, the regents had some stern words for their president, saying they “hold him accountable for the university's compensation problems and he...

University of California President Robert C. Dynes said Wednesday "overactive secrecy," helped create a situation where millions in perks were quietly doled out to top executives. Fallout over the extra compensation intensified with some calling for Dynes to resign. But it was unclear whether he had lost the confidence of UC's governing Board of Regents the only people with the authority to fire him. Regents met behind closed doors Wednesday to discuss Dynes' role in approving violations of UC pay policies and board Chairman Gerald Parsky said he would have no comment on UC leadership until Thursday. Concerns about how...

Robert C. Dynes, the president of the University of California, holds one of the most influential and visible positions in American higher education – and he faces the possibility of losing it. For months, Dynes, a physicist and former chancellor at UC San Diego, has struggled to emerge from a controversy over undisclosed pay and perks for UC executives and faculty. To some, Dynes is a victim, someone who inherited a culture that defied university rules and has simply followed the practices of his predecessor. To others, Dynes is an ineffective administrator who, despite assurances, cannot be trusted to make...

The Chronicle has notified the University of California that it will ask an Alameda County judge today to order a UC Board of Regents committee to meet in public next week when it votes on pay proposals for high-ranking officials, according to the newspaper's lawyers. In a suit to be filed in Superior Court, The Chronicle argues that a closed-door committee meeting scheduled next Wednesday violates the state's open-meeting laws. The newspaper's lawyers plan to ask for a court order at a hearing today to require a public session. --snip-- In response, the university's general counsel, James Holst, said the...

Three state senators called Wednesday for the ouster of University of California President Robert Dynes over a pay-perk controversy that has roiled the prestigious public research institution. Sens. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, and Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, called on Dynes to resign at a news conference in Sacramento. In a related move, Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, called UC Regents Chairman Gerald Parsky and asked him to fire Dynes. ``Dynes still doesn't get it,'' Denham said in a statement. ``While at times, he has been a good cheerleader for the UC, he has been a horrible manager. He seems to think...

The state Legislature's legal adviser says the University of California regents have violated state open-meeting laws by voting behind closed doors on executive pay packages. In a 12-page opinion, the Office of Legislative Counsel wrote that the state Education Code requires regents' committees to meet in public whenever they take action on compensation proposals involving the president, chancellors and certain other top executives. The regents have held at least a dozen such meetings in private during the past five years, UC records show. --snip-- "It is our opinion that a standing committee of the Board of Regents of the University...

It took all of 48 hours for University of California President Robert Dynes' vow to begin a new era of honesty and transparency on compensation issues to be undercut by fresh examples of institutional arrogance and secrecy. Last Wednesday, Dynes appeared before a state Senate committee to take questions after a series of newspaper reports detailed how UC officials had hidden millions of dollars in compensation for top executives and given sweetheart deals to departing officials. Many of these deals were cut without the required approval of UC regents. Many blatantly violated policies the UC system adopted in the early...

The University of California's procedures for reporting executive pay are "wholly unacceptable" and must be overhauled, a task force said Thursday. More financial oversight and public accountability is needed after reports showed UC gave executives millions in bonuses and other perks while student fees were raised to offset funding cutbacks, according to findings presented to UC's governing Board of Regents. The report pointed to a university culture of secrecy, further complicated by vague policies and lack of oversight. The report blamed President Robert C. Dynes and other leaders for failing repeatedly to fully disclose executive packages to regents and said...

SAN JOSE — Four years ago, in the month before Election Day, representatives of Republican statewide candidates met with Gerald Parsky, President Bush's state campaign chief and the designated custodian of the party's checkbook, to learn what resources would be coming their way. One of the political strategists who was there recalls being startled by Parsky's decision: Dollars for everyone else, but pennies for Sen. Tom McClintock, the GOP candidate for controller. When challenged on that decision, said the strategist, who asked not to be identified, Parsky held firm: For McClintock, there would be only crumbs. In the end, McClintock...

Pro-Arnold forces in the California Republican Party (Sundheim, Kingsley, Parsky) took a few more big steps toward tamping down the rebellion on the right this afternoon at the party’s state convention in San Jose. First, state Senator Tom McClintock, the party’s conservative favorite, delivered a very well-received luncheon address in which he extolled the virtues of his “running mate,” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. McClintock, who ran a respectably distant third in the 2003 recall election, is running for lieutenant governor. Then conservative leaders found most of their resolutions criticizing Arnold’s policy positions shot down in the party resolutions committee. The rightists...

Facing widespread criticism over secret and lucrative executive payouts, University of California President Robert Dynes is considering a reorganization plan that would hand over day-to-day administrative operations of the 10-campus system to someone else. He and UC Regent Chairman Gerry Parsky are in the early stages of crafting a proposal for restructuring the Office of the President, one that would augment Dynes' academic background with a chief operating officer's administrative skills. The chief operating officer could operate “not quite parallel” with Dynes, Parsky said yesterday. “Let's leave open the possibility that someone could be in charge of administrative matters and...

The chairman of the University of California's board of regents wants to limit the number of corporate boards university leaders can sit on, a step that could directly affect UCSD's chancellor, Marye Anne Fox. UC Regent Chairman Gerry Parsky said the system needs to ensure chancellors keep the university as their top priority and that any benefits board memberships may bring to the university aren't outweighed by excessive demands on their time. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported last month that Fox sits on 10 corporate and nonprofit boards, more than any other chancellor in the 10-campus system. Fox has said...

In their most sweeping salary proposal in recent memory, University of California officials want to tap private donors to boost the salaries of their highest-paid executives -- who already make more than $350,000 a year. Under a new pay increase plan for all of UC's 160,000 employees, 42 executive positions from the UC president to campus chancellors and deans of the business, law and engineering schools could be eligible for support from private donations to cover the cost of any salary above $350,000. (snip) The practice of using private money to augment the salaries of top public university officials is...

Why Does Karl Rove Want to Lose California? Jack Wheeler Saturday, Mar. 27, 2004 Why does Karl Rove want to lose California? That’s the question conservative California Republicans are angrily demanding an answer to. Because there is no doubt in their minds that Karl Rove, the guy who runs GW’s election campaigns, is behaving as if he intentionally wants his boss to lose the Golden State in November. Rove seems determined to keep repeating the pattern of Republican presidential defeats since 1992. In that year, Bush 41 abandoned California, giving up on a state Ronald Reagan carried overwhelmingly twice and...

President Bush's point man in California, Rancho Santa Fe investor Gerald Parsky, yesterday shot down his own trial balloon that he might run for governor next year if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't. "I have no intention to run for any public office, even if Schwarzenegger doesn't run for re-election," Parsky, chairman of the University of California Board of Regents, said in an interview yesterday. Last week, California Republican Party activist Dora Kingley made a scouting trip to Washington to talk up a Parsky candidacy as a fallback position. Schwarzenegger, who was elected governor in the 2003 recall election of Democrat...