Peter Schrag, a former columnist for the Sacramento Bee, wrote an op ed about President Yudof's retirement. Excerpt:
...All told, the UC is in far better shape now than when he came. But
it's unlikely that it can ever again exercise the kind of influence,
both in this country and abroad, that it did in its glory days under
Clark Kerr in the 1950s and 1960s. It was an era when new UC
campuses and new programs were created one after another, when students
paid low "fees" and not tuition, and when California adopted a master
plan that promised every Californian who could benefit from it a place
somewhere in its three-tiered higher education system. UC was that
rarest of rare institution, a tax-supported world-class research
university that was elitist and democratic at the same time.
Ever
since he came, Yudof promised to resist privatization, but privatization
has come in any number of ways: in spiking tuition; in recruiting and
admissions policies increasing the percentage of foreign and
out-of-state students and the high tuition they pay; in the pursuit of
industry contracts. UC is still the nation's premier public
university. But in its attempt to keep pace with Harvard and Stanford,
it's becoming more like Michigan and the University of Virginia,
nominally public universities that started down the road to
privatization even before UC did.
Yudof had been thinking about
retirement well before he made his announcement last week. But it's hard
to imagine that Gov. Jerry Brown's muscle flexing at recent meetings of
the regents – even his pointed reminder that he is the legally
designated board president – did anything to encourage Yudof to stay...
Full op ed at
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/01/25/5139675/uc-president-had-unheralded-victories.html
Bottom line: We'll miss him when he's gone:
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