The University of California, like many so institutions these days, has hit upon financial hard times, and so has started implementing lay-offs. Still, every cloud has a silver lining if you know the right people.
Linda Williams, employee of UC, took up a new position and a different office at the Berkeley campus. For her trouble, she was given a severance pay of $100,202, thanks to the incoming president and the board of regents. She was never “severed”, and did not spend one day out of employment.
There has been a considerable brouhaha about the whole thing, so to pour cold water on the issue, Williams issued a public statement, explaining that she took the severance deal then just happened to find a new job with the same employer. The chancellor backed her up, stating that WIlliams “applied for the severance program before the Associate Chancellor position became available and before I offered her the position.”
Well, it turns out they were both telling porkies. The campus newspaper reported her appointment to the new position the day before she applied for the severance payment.
Two newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Daily Californian are all over this. To save their hides, the chancellor has decided to play the race card:
Birgeneau’s next move was exceptionally sordid. He wrote an op-ed for the Daily Californian touting his dedication to equity and inclusion, then complained of lingering racism on campus: “Most recently, there have been scurrilous attacks with outright misrepresentation of facts by print media, bloggers and even some of our own faculty and staff against Associate Chancellor Linda Williams, the first African-American woman to serve on the Chancellor’s Cabinet in Berkeley’s 141-year history…. Many members of our African-American community are rightly outraged by the media harassment of a successful and accomplished black woman and see these actions as creating a chilling climate for all African-Americans on campus.” No details of the alleged “misrepresentations” were given and an email asking for examples was not answered.
So what’s the moral to the story?
Universities are vast, expensive enterprises that are not sufficiently scrutinised.
They do not have the reporting requirements of public companies, do not feel the political pressure of government departments, and are directly answerable to nobody. They are a multi-billion dollar industry with no tangible, easily measurable outcomes.
Not surprisingly, they are often nests of corruption.
This story has come to light not because the people behaved corruptly, but because in the corruption game, they were amateurs.
(via American Thinker)