Dynes takes partial blame
By Richard Clough
May 17, 2006 9:00 p.m.
SAN FRANCISCO “”mdash; In one of the most significant meetings
the UC Board of Regents has held in recent years, the
university’s governing body on Wednesday conducted its most
complete and direct discussion on record of the compensation
scandal that has weighed on the University of California since last
fall.
In the first day of the two-day meeting, UC President Robert
Dynes accepted blame for allowing “an atmosphere of
secrecy” to permeate UC compensation deals, and the regents
approved a laundry list of 23 specific reforms to UC compensation
policies as the board tried to address the issues of accountability
at the heart of the scandal.
The UC has taken considerable criticism since a series of
newspaper reports beginning in November revealed pay for top
officials was excessive and often given without the knowledge of
the regents or the public.
The regents plan to announce today whether they will take any
disciplinary action against Dynes, up to and including his
firing.
Dynes, who has been on the hot seat recently for his role as
leader of the university while many of the compensation policy
violations occurred, stayed firmly in that seat as he faced
criticism for his performance and heard calls for his removal.
Dynes remained stone-faced as several legislators sat across the
table and asked that he resign from his post or be removed.
“You have had sufficient opportunity to implement the
healthy reforms and clear up compensation abuses in the University
of California,” Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero said to
Dynes. “Indeed, it seems the problems have flourished under
your watch.
“I ask you to resign and I call upon this board to act
decisively,” she said.
Dynes has taken criticism from newspapers, lawmakers, students,
educators and others in recent weeks, but he has remained resolute
in his determination to fix his own problems.
He made a presentation to the regents in which he accepted some
blame for the compensation scandal and alluded to the steps he will
take to correct the problems.
He said many of the policy violations stem from the fact that
private universities have in recent years gotten richer while
public universities have seen their funding slashed.
As a result, he said, the intense competition for top talent
forced the UC into a state of extreme secrecy, where compensation
packages were laden with incentives ““ sometimes without
approval ““ to lure qualified candidates to the UC.
“There was a paranoia about leaking who the candidates
were before we were prepared,” he said. “It’s a
climate of exceptions and it’s a climate of trying to get
away with as much as possible and disclose as little as
possible.”
Dynes also said he was unaware of some of the policies created
in the 1993 Principles for Review of Executive Compensation
governing the university’s payment practices.
“There are a variety of reasons we did not comply with the
1993 principles. Most of them were ignorance,” he said.
In a meeting with the press after the meeting, Regent Chairman
Gerald Parsky said it was unacceptable for the UC president to be
unaware of any pay policies.
“I think that any chief executive should either know or
have been informed about the policies he is responsible for,”
he said.
Though Dynes said he would give a more detailed explanation to
the regents in a closed session, he alluded to the reasons for some
of his own failures.
“I missed some of the flags I should have seen,” he
said.
But Dynes found support from some of his fellow regents for
accepting blame.
Regent and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los
Angeles, who was present at the meeting, released a statement
afterward, saying, “I applaud President Dynes for admitting
to the regents that there is a culture of secrecy about
compensation in the UC system.”
The regents met in closed session in the afternoon, where they
were set to discuss specific personnel actions with Dynes and try
to determine whether disciplinary action would be taken against
Dynes.
After the two-hour closed session, Parsky met briefly with
reporters but declined to say whether any action would be taken
against Dynes. Parsky said Dynes’ responses to the regents
“were very forthcoming and sincere” and the regents
would announce today what, if any, action they will take.
Last week the San Francisco Chronicle filed a lawsuit to prevent
the regents from meeting in closed session when they discussed
compensation issues, arguing it violated the state’s
open-meeting laws. Though the suit was rejected, Parsky started the
meeting by addressing the issue.
He said the regents will continue with their policy of
discussing private personnel matters in closed session and then
immediately make public the action that the board decides to
take.
The regents also received the results of an internal audit of
senior managers of the UC during the calendar years 2003-2005.
This audit, the third and final, follows on the heels of an
audit released April 21 conducted by independent accounting firm
PricewaterhouseCoopers. This third report covers the 299 senior
managers not covered in the April 21 audit.
Like the previous audits, this one found “a number of
elements of compensation paid or committed that have not been
approved by the regents.”
Additionally, the report found 143 instances in which university
policy was violated without regent approval.
With all the audits available, the regents voted on a number of
reforms that the university would take to correct the problems that
led to the scandal. They approved all 23 actions, which were
decided upon in response to the first audit from the Task Force on
UC Compensation, Accountability and Transparency.
The reforms, all of which have begun to be implemented or will
be by the end of 2006, range from the creation of an information
human resources system to revising annual compensation reports.
In an attempt to address the systemic problems that led to the
compensation scandal, the regents discussed restructuring the
management of the UC Office of the President.
“It is clear that management business practices need to be
adopted in this university,” Parsky said. “I think that
it’s long overdue to look at this.”
