 "Photo: File Photo, Daily Texan Staff")
Outgoing UT Chancellor Mark Yudof spoke with The Daily Texan Thursday about his tenure at UT and his new job as president of the 10-campus University of California system.
Friday will be the last day of a tenure that began in 2002. Yudof will move to California over the weekend where he will take up his new post July 16.
Q: How does the UC bureaucracy compare to UT?
There are some similarities and there are some differences. The state government is proposing a $2- to $3 million dollar cut in appropriations. They have a large multi-billion dollar budget shortfall.
Over the last decade, it's been tough to keep appropriations flowing from the state Legislature to keep up with inflation, to keep up with enrollment increases and, of course, to make the universities more competitive. That's the main issue here in Texas, as in California, as in most states.
If you look at the University of Texas system, we're really proud of UT-Austin. It does roughly $500 million worth of research. It has extremely able students and highly ranked departments, but we only have one elite university. We have four emerging institutions in Dallas, Arlington, El Paso and San Antonio, but they're not there yet. They're not really comparable to UC-Santa Barbara, UC-San Diego, UC-Davis and so on down the line.
I would say in qualitative terms there are more tier-one universities in the California system than in Texas.
I would say California historically has been more centralized than the University of Texas from a system level. That is a cultural difference, and that is a legal difference.
Even with the cuts, UC institutions are significantly better-supported than UT systems. UT-Austin has been undernourished by the Legislature, in my estimation.
Q: How does the legislative climate compare?
No legislative process is easy. When you have a shortfall, higher education is one of the first places you look, and that's as true in California as it in Texas.
There is a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress in California, but higher education tends to be a less partisan issue.
Q: What is your proudest achievement at UT?
There are a number of things that I'm proud of. My theme here has been, how does the system office add value to the work of the campuses?
We put substantial money in faculty start-up packages so campuses would be better able to recruit top faculty. We put $2.5 billion in a competitiveness agenda to make sure that we could turn out more students in engineering and other vital areas.
We've reformed the way the campuses keep the reserves. Each campus previously had a savings account that was paying very low interest. We aggregated the accounts and put them in an intermediate fund with a higher rate of return. We went from 5 percent return to 9 percent return.
Q: What do you regret or wish you had done differently?
I'm still regretful that we were not able to achieve a higher level of funding for higher education in general, but, particularly, I think our flagship institution at UT-Austin has been shortchanged. I think it is unsound public policy not to enable a public campus, which over 100 years has proven itself to be outstanding.
We need some relief from the top 10 percent rule. Eventually, it will drive the size of the entering class.
California has a top 4.5 percent rule, but you don't get to pick your campus.
Q: UC and UT had separate controversies in the last year related to conflicts of interest for a financial aid officer and undisclosed compensations by the president of the California system. How do both institutions maintain oversight and integrity going forward?
I don't know about [Lawrence Burt] and what's true and not true. I do know that the president has made it very clear that he expects and will achieve compliance with all of the rules and regulations.
If you're big enough, anything that can happen eventually will happen.
Very few of those dollars were improperly spent, but you always make a mistake when you do not disclose to the board, the media or the public what exactly you're paying someone.
My job there is to make sure this never happens again. My job is to slim down the system office, to make it more functional, to make sure it's adding value to campuses.
Q: Did tuition de-regulation play out the way you expected it to?
In a sense it did. In 2000, universities were being hit very hard with budget cuts. I thought we would lose some of our very best professors.
We've been able to avoid a significant amount of that because of tuition revenue. The actual rate of revenue has also been lower than it was during the previous five years under the control of the legislature.
What I would say to the students is that UT institutions are still among the best buys in the nation. We would be incapable of providing the level of education today if tuition had remained flat.
