Robert Dynes is resigning as president of the University of California, and we can thank him, previous leaders, and much of the UC's bureaucracy for making it OK to embrace the practice of freely pimping our state's research to corporate interests. Dynes, a former researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories with a $405,000 salary, will be remembered for lavishing top-paid UC officials with outrageous, back-door perks and fattened paychecks -- in a system that keeps raising student fees. Dynes also had many unnervingly close relationships with crooked politicians and private sector power-players, as detailed in this exhaustive San Diego Reader cover from last year. Pulling a cliche a Rove would love, the physicist said he needed to spend more time with his family.
Here is the coverage in the L.A. Times, the Mercury News, the Daily Cal and its Daily Clog, and the Daily Bruin (both papers updating over the summer break). The San Francisco Chronicle had a main bar, a timeline, and an analysis by Charles Burress on Dynes' tenure. The story re-focuses attention on California's most precious brain trust, the 10-campus, 200,000-student university, an invaluable engine of economic, intellectual, scientific and social progress. Reminds me that I once profiled John Douglass of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, on his book "The California Idea and American Higher Education," about how once upon a time the university nobly guarded its mission, and how the California model came to influence the rest of the country. The university press at Stanford published it.
* SFChron photo by Lacy Atkins.
** DATA UPDATE: UCOP tells me the UC system budget is $16 billion, $3 billion of which comes from the state. This means that more than 3/4 of California's premier public university's budget is private. Which begs the question, why even call it a state institution anymore?