Right man at a bad time

Mark Yudof, the newly hired president of the University of California, will have to use all of his vaunted lobbying talent to bring in better state funding as budget shortages chip away at the university system’s prestige. He will have to run the university with a trimmer and more open central bureaucracy, proposed by UC after revelations about secretly opulent compensation packages. He’ll need to find new sources of public and private money, especially for graduate fellowships. In other words, it’s just another day at the University of California.

Yudof steps into UC history at a time when the state’s premier system of higher education is being slowly but steadily eroded. Budget cuts, understandable as they are, have impaired the universities’ ability to attract leading scholars; at the same time, tuition hikes are putting UC out of the reach of more Californians.

As much as anything, the new president’s job will entail convincing Sacramento that preserving UC as a top-flight academic institution should be one of its paramount investments, as vital to the state’s future as it has been throughout its history. Without the combined academic clout of UC Berkeley and Stanford University, there would be no Silicon Valley. Research at UC San Diego gave rise to this state’s eminence in biotech.

The nation has two regional hubs for great research universities: the Northeast, with the Ivy League, and California, with the best public university system in the nation, bolstered by private schools such as Stanford and Caltech. Diminishing the UC system would undercut everything these highly ranked schools bring to the state.

Retiring UC President Robert Dynes undermined his own ability to lobby for funding by treating the university’s budget as a sort of slush fund for administrators’ perks and resisting public disclosure. If UC had millions to burn on bonuses, some lawmakers asked, why did it need a bigger budget? In contrast, Yudof, most recently chancellor at the University of Texas, has made a point of stressing the importance of transparency. He has walked into state budget crises, like the one California faces, and walked out with more funding than anyone expected. He actively sought and won significantly more federal research money for UT. He is a respected legal scholar who keeps a hand in teaching.

We would like to see Yudof make academic and research excellence his highest priorities, while keeping tuition increases reasonable. (His tenure at Texas included some major hikes in fees.) He’s already agreed to a slightly lower salary, at nearly $600,000 plus benefits. With that kind of commitment and expertise, Yudof appears to be a leader whose strengths are a match for UC’s pressing challenges.