What do you get when you violate University of California conflict of interest laws by giving your partner a well-paid university job and failing to reveal your business interests in a required statement?

Most people would get fired. However former UC Provost M.R.C. Greenwood got a 15-month sabbatical collecting $300,000 per year plus a $100,000 research grant when she moves into her tenured professorship at UC Davis (which will pay another $163,800). As the Los Angeles Times which covered this in an editorial on the problems at UC, “we should all screw up [like this].”

Why is the UC system so afraid to fire her and why be so loose with public money? Unfortunately it’s because the UC system has the transparency of the United Nations and resists outside oversight so there is no reason to expect that this will be the last such instance of extremely poor and expensive judgement.

It will be interesting to see if this comes up the next time protesters march against cuts at one of the universities or when the system tells us why they need to raise tuition costs yet again. Unfortunately we think not.

technorati: university of california

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 10:19 pm by Insider and is filed under (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.