Under Fire, UC Chief Sticks to His Guns

Two prominent lawmakers want him to resign over an executive pay scandal that has shaken the state’s top public university system. A third legislator demands his firing. And he has been criticized in newspaper editorials up and down the state.

But just days before a make-or-break appearance before his governing board, University of California President Robert C. Dynes said he had no plans to step down.

“In my guts, sure, to some extent it would be easier to go back to my laboratory,” Dynes, an experimental physicist, said in a telephone interview. “But I’m not going to. It would be less stressful, frankly, but this university is worth the effort.”

For months, UC and its president have struggled to emerge from the controversy over executive salaries and benefits that erupted after media reports in the fall that the university had spent millions on questionable or undisclosed compensation, even as it raised student fees. Two recent audits have found that UC leaders systematically violated or circumvented policies in order to give extra money or perks to top administrators and faculty. A third, covering an even broader group of managers, is expected to be released this week.

In a two-day session in San Francisco that begins Wednesday, the regents are expected to consider corrective steps, including possible disciplinary action against Dynes and others. His future as president, many at the university have said in recent days, may hinge on how he handles the crucial presentations he will make this week, including his first detailed public accounting of a series of controversial decisions.

In the nearly hourlong interview, Dynes gave a glimpse of what he will tell the regents, while noting that some of his comments will be in closed session. He took responsibility for many decisions and mistakes, but also pointed out that many of the problems identified in the recent audits predated his arrival as president in October 2003.

“I came here 2 1/2 years ago and walked into the practices and the culture of the University of California,” said Dynes, who served as chancellor of UC San Diego for seven years before his promotion. “These were pretty much practices that had been going on for one to two decades at least.”

Asked to what extent he felt he was responsible for the mistakes that occurred on his watch, Dynes said: “As president, I’m responsible for them. Personally, I walked into a set of practices and lack of knowledge of the policies and as such, I feel that I got some bad advice. And I will fix it.”

Sens. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) and Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) have called on Dynes to resign and are expected to attend this week’s regents meeting to press their point. The senators say they have lost confidence in his ability to lead the university system. Sen. Jeff Denham (R-Salinas) has gone further, urging the regents to fire the UC president without delay.

But Dynes also has received some solid and some qualified support from leaders inside and outside the university. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), both of whom are regents by virtue of their state positions, have said the UC president should be allowed time to remedy the problems.

George Blumenthal, a UC Santa Cruz astronomy professor and the former head of UC’s systemwide Academic Senate, said he believes that Dynes, in every area other than compensation, has been a very good president, and he said he still supported him.

“I think the university would be far better to keep Bob Dynes as president and let him lead us in correcting these compensation problems and into the future,” Blumenthal said. “He wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to the compensation issue, but I think we should now give him a chance to do so.”

Michael Brown, vice chairman of the Academic Senate, said he hoped that Dynes would be able to overcome his difficulties.

“I find him an engaging and brilliant guy who is really in a very tough situation right now,” said Brown, an education professor at UC Santa Barbara.

“There are serious flaws in the compensation practices, and they’re cultural in nature. It’s going to take vision and tremendous skill to resolve those issues, and I hope he’s able to do it. I truly do, because a lot rides on it.”

The UC president also received a strong vote of confidence last week from the Daily Bruin, the student newspaper at UCLA: “Dynes isn’t the problem, he’s the solution,” read the headline over a May 10 editorial.

Dynes became UC president as the university grappled with deep cuts in state funding and just before the newly elected Schwarzenegger called upon it to slash enrollment by 10%, turning away academically qualified students for the first time. In New Mexico, the UC-run Los Alamos National Laboratory had suffered a string of security and safety problems, resulting in the U.S. government’s decision to require the university to compete for the lab contract it had held for six decades.

Dynes said he was preoccupied with such troubles, as well as a new long-term planning effort for UC, and now believes that he leaned too heavily on subordinates to work out the details of compensation packages for recruited chancellors and other executives, many of which were later shown to have violated policies.

Dynes acknowledged that until recently neither he nor others involved in many key recruitments had ever read a set of key policies intended to govern such pay packages and the required disclosure to the regents. Those policies were put in place by the regents after a similar controversy in 1993, when UC was criticized for excessive compensation for departing executives.

“No, I had not read them. The person below me and the person below him had not read them,” he said of the 1993 policies. “That’s sort of how it evolved into this.”

Dynes and other UC leaders have said they believe strongly that they must compete vigorously with private and other public universities in order to attract and keep the best administrators, and say that on average, UC’s top executives make less than their counterparts at comparable institutions.

In the interview, Dynes said the intense competition for talent created an atmosphere of secrecy in his office that may have contributed to the problems.

“There was a real paranoia about leaks, about people learning who the candidates were,” which kept many of the pay and benefits packages from being vetted by UC attorneys or others, he said.

Asked whether he regretted his decisions in specific compensation cases, Dynes said he preferred to hold off on such details until he speaks to the board. In retrospect, however, he said, “there are certainly ... cases where I wish I’d called up the various regents and said, ‘What do you think?’ And I will do that in the future.”

In the public regents meeting this week, Dynes said he planned to try to “put in context all the mistakes and exceptions that were made,” at the same time outlining what occurred in certain high-profile cases.

When he meets with the board in closed session, “I will look straight in the regents’ eyes and talk about specific cases, what I was thinking, why I did what I did,” Dynes said. “We have to have a cleansing of communications between me and the regents, and I will tell them how I propose to go forward in a more open way -- now that we’ve sort of had this epiphany.”

He said the university, which has instituted certain reforms in response to the controversy -- and is likely to enact more -- must change its culture to ensure that the problems do not arise again. And he clearly sees a continuing role for himself in those efforts.

Dynes said he had no doubt that he could lead the university effectively, even in the budget negotiations with legislators, many of whom have been critical of his performance.

“Yes, I can,” he said. “You bet I can.”