Editorial: State funds at root of donation controversy

The UCLA School of Dentistry’s orthodontics program has embarrassed itself and the university in its misguided attempt to secure more funding by admitting subpar students for six-figure donations.

And this act of desperation is only part of a wider funding problem that most public schools face.

This practice is tantamount to bribery, and its repercussions could permanently damage the program and UCLA as a whole unless corrective action is taken.

No-Hee Park, the dean of the UCLA School of Dentistry, is at the very least extremely negligent in this incident by not recognizing and addressing the problem and should be dismissed from his post immediately.

But the worst part of this incident is that UCLA is denying it happened and hiding behind a sham investigation that ““ looking over overwhelming evidence to the contrary ““ found “no credible and convincing evidence” that it was happening.

UCLA should own up to its actions and mistakes in a public and apologetic manner. However, the incident should serve as a lesson to the world that there is a much bigger underlying reason for these unethical practices and that it is certainly not an isolated incident in California.

The state legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been asking much of the UC and not following those demands for excellence with sufficient funding to fulfill them.

Over the past 40 years, the UC budget has undergone a dramatic change.

The percentage of the budget that is funded by the state has declined 25 percent, whereas the portion of the budget coming from private funding and student fees has increased substantially.

And since the UC’s heyday in the ’70s, the system has faced expansion, increased competition, increased state-mandated enrollment, and a smaller and smaller share of the state general fund.

The UC has been experiencing a funding crisis for years, and the state continually turns its back on higher education, forcing the UC to charge more student fees, pay faculty and staff 20 percent below market value, and find private sources of revenue.

The orthodontics program could not escape this, and, facing dwindling state support and the persistent need to maintain excellence, it made a decision that secured millions of dollars in donations.

The program was forced to make a heavy decision: It could either do what it could to get more money and violate ethical standards to do so or it could lose relevance as a top-ranked program.

The program made the wrong decision.

Selling valuable seats in a top-ranked program is not going to increase the prestige of that program, and, though this probably never would have happened if the program had been receiving adequate funding, there is no excuse for unethical behavior.

In a time when schools feel the pressure to compromise ethical standards for the sake of securing adequate resources, Californians need to take a critical look at higher-education funding and work to reverse the trend toward less state support for universities.

In the meantime, prestigious schools feeling pressure to accept private funds must maintain strict ethical standards, and violations of those standards must be met with retribution.