Opening up would help regents shut down critics

University officials have probably been more than a little
uncomfortable this week leading up to today’s Board of
Regents meeting.

The meeting ““ which takes place in San Francisco and runs
until Thursday ““ is the fourth since news broke in the fall
of the university’s questionable compensation practices for
officials, professors and top executives.

But it is also the first regents meeting since outrage over
those practices seems to have hit a boiling point. About a week and
a half ago, three state senators called for University of
California President Robert Dynes to either step down or be fired,
alleging he was no longer responsible enough to oversee the UC.

And less than a week ago, the San Francisco Chronicle sued the
regents to make this week’s meetings on compensation open to
the public (they are currently closed).

Add all that up and throw in the generally bad press the UC has
endured for the past several months after a flurry of reports about
the university’s financial mismanagement, and you would
probably be timid, too.

The Chronicle lawsuit has the right principle ““ namely,
transparency ““ at heart, but to establish legal precedent
might be going too far. There is value in the regents having closed
meetings, especially when dealing with issues of employee
privacy.

It would be exceptionally difficult for the regents to
objectively censure an employee or official, or even for them to
accurately calculate compensation for someone, when every move they
make is watched by anyone and everyone who sits in the public
viewing area. (The public is granted access to all parts of the
regents meetings except for those scheduled to appear in closed
session.)

But that said, this is not your average regents meeting. Seven
of the items on the regents’ agenda are scheduled to be in
closed session, and of those, three have to deal with compensation,
including setting the salary for our own Chancellor Albert
Carnesale when he returns to UCLA as a professor in a year or
two.

It would be a sign of good faith for the regents to voluntarily
make these sessions open to the public, even if it’s just for
one of those closed sessions and even if it’s just for this
one meeting. That would at least give the public a better idea of
what thought process goes on behind setting salary levels.

Such a move would not be without precedent: Two years ago, when
UC Berkeley was under fire for admitting students with low SAT
scores while denying others who had perfect scores, reporters were
allowed to sit in with admissions officers as they perused
applications. And the public relations crisis the UC is facing
today is worse than the one it faced then.

Dynes and the regents have promised reforms ““ such as the
creation of a committee to oversee its pay practices and a more
tiered structure for regents to approve executive salaries ““
that they say will make the university’s compensation system
more transparent.

Those reforms may be good, but they’re also abstract and
could come off as unsatisfying to the public. The regents meeting
today and tomorrow is the best chance UC officials will have to
show ““ rather than just tell ““ that they are serious
about transparency and accountability.

The bottom line is that people are going to show up at the
meeting today looking for tangible signs of change in the UC
system. It wouldn’t hurt the Board of Regents to deliver.