LA Times Editorial: Tone-deaf at UC (excerpt)UC is rightly balking at granting additional retirement perks to about 200 highly paid administrators.
A group of highly paid executives at the University of California has adopted an unseemly attitude best described as "gimme, gimme." Although each of them already earns at least $245,000 a year, along with generous pension benefits, they're threatening to sue if the university, which has imposed hefty tuition increases on its students over the past two years, doesn't give them more.
...Legislation has been introduced to take away some of UC's historic independence from state government. Those bills have been driven in part by concerns about excessive executive compensation, and the letter writers are providing the bills' sponsors with ample ammunition.
All around these executives, public employees are being laid off, furloughed or otherwise expected to get more done with less compensation; UC's students increasingly come from households in which one or both parents have lost a job. The letter writers are not the heads of profit-oriented corporations but of a public institution with a noble mission. Their tone-deafness shows that when it comes to doing the right thing, it's not the regents who are lacking.
Full article at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-uc-20110107,0,4211590.story
UPDATE: UC-Davis Chancellor has now opposed lifting the pension cap. See http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/08/3308441/assembly-bill-would-limit-pension.html
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