New UC president faces daunting challenges
The University of California regents will name a new president on Tuesday to take on the $37 billion system at perhaps the most challenging moment in its 150year history.
In the best of times, leading UC — with its 10 campuses, five medical centers and three national laboratories — is like running a small nation. The university has more than 280,000 students and 227,000 employees.
But in the era of COVID19, with $1 billion in state cuts, campus budgets in free fall, and academics in disarray because students and professors can’t safely gather together, the university may need less of a politician at the helm than a magician.
“I don’t envy the task,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, who added that the campus closed a massive $150 million budget shortfall last year, which took at least three years.
“The new president faces this for the whole university,” Chemerinsky said.
Yet despite the unprecedented financial challenges — and the transition to largely online instruction that has prompted lawsuits over whether it’s fair for UC to still charge the same tuition — faculty, students, staff and administrators said Monday that they want the new presi
dent not only to manage the crisis that is crippling the university but to think well beyond it, into the future.
They want someone at the helm who will maintain the university’s reputation for quality, as many say UC’s outgoing President Janet Napolitano did, and who will find ways to be creative about raising revenue — a challenge even in better times.
Workers who are tired of labor battles say they want a president who they feel respects the staff who keep the university running.
Students and faculty alike say they want a leader to participate in urgent national discussions on equity and racial justice, as well as make those a reality across the university.
“It would be historic” if the new president were a person of color, said Varsha Sarveshwar, president of the UC Student Association. “That would be incredible.”
Sarveshwar, who just graduated from UC Berkeley with a political science degree, cochaired the student advisory committee on selecting the new president, though she didn’t know Monday who was selected.
“Our No. 1 thing was that we wanted a president who is generally aware of what marginalized students are going through — and what is needed to support those students,” she said.
John powell agreed. The director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, who uses lowercase letters to alter the name imposed on his enslaved ancestors, said that the new president has an opportunity to go “beyond equity” for students and employees of color, “and go to belonging.
“The president sets the tone. Sets the values,” powell said, noting that the regents have agreed to ask voters in November to repeal Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure that outlawed affirmative action in public hiring and university admissions.
Under Napolitano — and under Prop. 209 — Black students have remained about 4% of those admitted, while the proportion of Latino students grew to 34% from 29% of those admitted.
Sarveshwar said students told the regents last fall that “we want an ‘activist’ president. We are not just a nonpartisan, apolitical institution. UC has a role to play in national conversation.”
The new president, she said, should go beyond even Napolitano, who as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, authored DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — which shields from deportation students who arrived in this country illegally as children. Napolitano sued the Trump administration for its effort to repeal the federal protection from deportation, and in June won a firstround court victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump had failed to make a case for repealing the law.
Napolitano, who has led the university since 2013 and was paid $654,889 last year, announced in September that she would step down this year. A twotime survivor of breast cancer, Napolitano said then that her health was good. But she said the average tenure of a university president was about six years, and “it seemed a good time to have some fresh blood.”
Napolitano took over UC when battles over rising tuition and police treatment of peaceful protesters were among the largest issues facing the campuses. She has launched a global food initiative and divested the university of its fossil fuel investments.
“Students would like to see more of that,” Sarveshwar said. But given the university’s challenges right now, she echoed Chemerinsky’s words: “I don’t envy whoever it is.”
Kathryn Lybarger, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 3299, which represents thousands of UC workers, said the new president should reach into UC’S $10 billion unrestricted reserves and use them to help the university’s janitors, foodservice employees, gardeners and health care workers, among others.
During the pandemic, “UC workers have risen to meet the moment — on campus, in hospitals and in our communities,” she said. “And we expect the next president to match our commitment with full transparency, an agenda of reform that uplifts vulnerable communities and leads California’s recovery.”
Lybarger said UC has laid off more than 200 employees in San Diego and Riverside.
Richard Lyons, the new chief innovation officer at UC Berkeley who oversees patents and looks for ways to increase entrepreneurship, said the new president has an opportunity to be creative in raising revenue at a time when UC especially needs it.
One idea would be to allow campuses to take more equity in their own startups, something they are largely restricted from doing today, he said.
“Yes,” he said. “We have to get through the next year. It has all kinds of uncertainties. But the job of the president is to look beyond that.
“The job is bigger than that.”