UC spending: the other side of the coin

Re “Message to UC Execs: If It Won’t Look Good in the Newspaper, Don’t Do It,” column, Feb. 16

I’m glad to see George Skelton exposing the corporate-style excess of UC’s top administrators. I’m less happy that all his examples are women -- who are a small minority in that mainly male stratosphere.

Please keep digging, and shine the same light on men at the top who are doing the same or worse. Let’s not set women up to take the fall for what is really a systemic pattern that comes from universities modeling themselves after corporations.

KAREN BRODKIN

UCLA Professor of Anthropology

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Skelton argues that “this is more about an unacceptable principle -- drunken sailor-like spending without disclosure to the governing UC regents -- than it is the squandered money.” As an administrator -- and not one who earns a salary even approximating those under attack -- at a UC campus, I would ask detractors to first spend a few minutes with anyone involved in hiring able bodies at a university. Not only is the applicant pool usually discouraging, and hiring promising candidates challenging because of the UC pay scale, but the bureaucracy, even behind closed doors, doesn’t allow for anything remotely like “drunken sailor-like” spending.

But that aside, isn’t it odd that there is such an uproar over what amounts to several million dollars, when the U.S. is currently spending $6 billion per month on operations in Iraq? Why isn’t the national press complaining about this? Because latching on to excess in higher education is much easier and satisfies the anti-elitism inherent in those who obsess about this issue. Wake up.

CAROLYN KEEN

San Diego