“MIT built its own Ellen Pao before the Ivy League did: Gretchen Kalonji” covers a UC chancellor who arranged a sinecure for her lover and ran up $600,000 in renovation bills before it all ended in suicide and litigation.
Today’s nytimes has “University of California, Davis, Chancellor Is Removed From Post” about Linda Katehi and “questions about the campus’s employment and compensation of some of the chancellor’s immediate family members.”
Do they really need to have someone in this position if it is so prone to nepotism?
The position probably exists as a means to reward some player for past favors.
It didn’t start there. At Univ. of Cal. Santa Barbara, Chancellor Robert Huttenback was convicted in 1988 of embezzling more than $100,000 in university funds and of five counts of income tax evasion in connection with money that was spent on improvements to his home. (I believe he lost his tenured faculty position also, but I can’t find proof of this online.) His successor, Chancellor Barbara S. Uehling, was popped for drunk driving *on campus* in 1988.
@Jon: but her successor, Chancellor Yang, has pretty much been a rock ever since then. (I hear he’s a good teacher of engineering, to boot)
No doubt that being the chancellor of a university is a hard job. After 13 years at UCSB and 20 at UC Berkeley I’ve come to realize that most chancellors are mediocre, probably held back by the obscene amount time they have to spend listening to people who like to talk. (See Wiseman “At Berkeley” documentary for an example of what I mean.)
Even if you didn’t call the position by that name, someone ultimately has to be in charge. Even in for-profit corporations with supposedly independent boards, upper management allocates itself most of the profits in the form of stock options, etc. and they appoint boards that won’t rock the boat.
No one has ever really solved the problem of self-dealing and corruption. It just upsets people more now than in the past because the greed at the top has gotten worse and the crumbs that are tossed to ordinary middle class people keep getting more and more meager.
Universities and airports both seem to be run by a special class of spend-happy bureaucrats. The combination of a prestigious public image, monopoly on customers, and unlimited supply of other people’s money makes them go crazy.