Schrag: New University of California President is First Outsider to Get Job Since 19th Century

Most university officials may be making too much in an academic world increasingly infused with the larger corporate culture.

That's particularly true for the hundreds of second- and third-tier university managers and executives – deputy vice chancellors, provosts, vice provosts, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, executive directors, directors, coordinators, auditors, managers – who, it's been said, will flee to more lucrative positions if they're not paid competitive salaries.

At the same time, it's probably also true that the fattening endowments of the private universities UC hopes to continue to compete with and its own shrinking state revenues will make it harder to maintain access and quality without raising tuition.

Like many others, Yudof worries that "in the U.S. education is treated as a private good" when it should be treated as a public good. If he can begin to change that assumption, not just about UC, but about all education, he'll be worth a hundred times his salary.

But probably the most encouraging thing about this appointment – maybe also the most surprising – is that UC got Yudof at all. It indicates that the system's well-advertised troubles – the uproar resulting from the cozy under-the-table pay deals that UC officials arranged to augment its low salary packages, the state's ongoing budget deficits, the ban on race preferences in admission and hiring imposed by Proposition 209 – haven't changed its standing as the nation's premier public university.

Yudof made it quite clear that he wouldn't have supported Proposition 209, but of course will have to live with it. The University of Texas restored affirmative action after the Supreme Court in 2003 effectively mooted a lower court ruling that had declared it unconstitutional.

In the long run, he'll almost certainly be on the losing side of that one. Ward Connerly, the chief backer of Proposition 209 and similar initiatives in Washington and Michigan, is taking his cause to five more states – Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma. If he makes the ballot in those states, chances are he'll win there as well.

And with the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the key U.S. Supreme Court vote in other affirmative action cases, it's probably only a matter of time before the court reverses itself. More important, in a majority-minority state such as California, with its increasingly mixed-race population, the old ethnic categories become ever more meaningless.

In any case, the biggest barriers to access at UC, as in most other selective institutions, are inferior academic preparation and the increasing financial squeeze on the university and on both low- and middle-income students. Neither is entirely within the university's control. Yudof will thus be increasingly constrained to maintain quality and access against mounting fiscal and political pressures of an intensity that even he, with his experience in Texas, has never faced before. He'll earn his salary.

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.