Cost of UCLA Convocation

The actions of University of California regents Ward Connerly and Howard Leach in criticizing UCLA Chancellor Charles Young for spending $560,000 on UCLA’s 75th anniversary are both childish and shortsighted (July 12).

Any intelligent person would realize that the ceremony signified a historic achievement in the development of UCLA as one of the nation’s elite universities. President Clinton’s attendance is a source of pride for all UCLA alumni and students. Both the event and the President’s visit obviously required money; but the amount spent was well within what is appropriate for an event of such magnitude.

Chancellor Young has proven to be a spectacular manager of funds at UCLA during the course of his 25-year tenure. Perhaps Connerly and Leach are so singed from the regents’ horrible fiscal management (i.e., David Gardner’s retirement), that they are a bit gun shy about any expenditure.

GREGORY E. BAKER

Fresno

Chancellor Young thinks he is going to encourage us to donate $100 million over the next five years to the UC system by exciting us with how he just spent a half-million dollars on UCLA’s 75th anniversary spectacle?

I quit giving money to the UC system awhile back when I noticed that royalty had taken over the leadership roles. If I ever consider giving money to them again, it’s not going to be because of one of these dramatizations of their warped sense of grandeur and their lack of economic awareness. I know it’s easy to criticize. But why make it so easy?

KAREN ROBINS SODIKOFF

Del Mar

The most telling aspect of the criticism is that Leach was not in attendance and, therefore, unaware of the event’s impact on President Clinton. As Leach is aware, the regents were represented at the event by the regents’ Vice Chair S. Sue Johnson, who spoke at the event. Leach should know that having the ear of the President of the United States with regard to issues impacting higher education will pay dividends to UCLA and the entire UC system far in excess of the cost for the event.

STEVEN HALPERN

Beverly Hills

Your article states the Chancellor Young justified the $561,524 expenditure because it boosted morale on campus. The cynicism embodied in that comment cannot go unchallenged. If Young cares to gauge morale on campus, he might speak with the inordinately large number of employees who are being laid off because of how he chooses to spend his discretionary funds. The morale of these employees, as well as that of the faculty who depend on them, was not improved by a half-million-dollar, as Young put it, “extravaganza.”

The number of layoffs is unprecedented in UCLA history. For example, in the School of Public Health alone, 30 of 49 nonfaculty positions (about 60%) will disappear. Layoffs of similar magnitude are occurring in Nursing, Social Welfare and Urban Planning. Damaging layoffs of lesser magnitude are occurring in many other units on campus. These employees are the working people who do the mundane tasks that are required to make UCLA run. Without them, surely, the quality of education at UCLA will decline.

Over the past decade, among other things, Young has chosen to spend his discretionary funds on a faulty real estate development into which faculty could not afford to buy; the Wadsworth, Westwood and Doolittle theaters, and the Armand Hammer Museum. Had his priorities been different, substantially fewer UCLA employees would be losing their jobs.

EMIL BERKANOVIC Ph.D.

Professor Community Health Sciences

UCLA