Guardian: What were you two involved in, as far as the
search for the new UC president was concerned?

Lynda Brewer: I was, I was an advisory member to the special
committee to select the president — that’s what it’s technically called — and
unfortunately there’s not a lot I can talk about because he hasn’t been
confirmed yet by the regents and so I’m still kind of under my cloak of silence
from the search committee.

Guardian: Can you talk about about the process?

LB: I think that we need to wait until he’s confirmed by the
board until we talk much about the process, but the process included from the
very beginning an alumni and a student regent as well as a faculty
representative to the regent and a staff adviser to the regents.

Guardian: Do you feel Mark Yudof will benefit from his
experience at the University of Texas
system?

LB: I think that’s a huge advantage. He also has medical
centers, or academic health science campuses, that report to him as well as a
Department of Energy lab, so those all have unique issues related to them and I
think his background will be very helpful to help him acclimate to the University
of California quickly. He was a top
candidate from the very beginning because he has these unique similarities to
our system.

Guardian: So you expect those things to make an easier
transition?

LB: I think so, I think coming from a single campus rather
than a system would have been a huge learning curve.

Guardian: What kind of hurdles are applied to a multiple
university system as opposed to a single university system, is it just a larger
scope to manage?

LB: Well, no, it’s actually more complex because you want
each campus to have a certain amount of autonomy, yet there are certain
strengths that you can harness among the campuses to excel the system forward.

Guardian: How do you feel it’s been managed so far?

LB: I think that we have extremely qualified and exemplary
chancellors at all of our campuses. So I think they have all done an excellent
job at moving all their individual campuses forward I think that there are a
number of things as we discussed at the regents meeting about the office of the
president that need to be restructured. I don’t think that’s necessarily the
fault of any president or administrative staff.

I just think its kind of kind of a natural evolution, things
require oversight and reevaluation as they grow. I think this is a time when we’re taking a
real critical look at the organization. Especially if you’ve got an
organization that’s very dynamic and you’re trying to move it forward and
there’s a lot of growth and a lot of fingers in the pie, then it’s easy for
things to grow and expand to a point that they may need to be looked at or
moved off to somewhere else and I think that’s what’s going to happen in the
administrative restructuring of the office of the president. It will be
interesting to see with the new president coming in. You have to leave enough
flexibility for that person to make some critical decisions too and to allow
them to tailor the organization to a model that they have found to be
successful with their style in the past.

Guardian: What do you find are the most pressing problems
right now to the common staff member?

LB: I think that we’d be trying to avoid talking about the
elephant in the room if we didn’t say compensation. People are concerned and
especially it’s a tight budget year, so people are nervous about whether there
will be salary increases, they’re worried about whether we’ll have to restart
contributions to retirement, they’re worried about doing more with less in a
tough budget year.

Bill Johansen: There’s a lot of uncertainty, including the restructuring
of the Office of the President, it’s going to have impact potentially on
campuses if programs are shifted from the Office of the President to campuses
and likewise in some respects it will be a preview of some restructuring
efforts that may take place at some of the campuses to, so that’s the biggest
thing there are just a lot of unknowns right now.

You know this budget is not going to be easy because you
have faculty and staff salaries, you have student fees and then you have some
programs that actually need to get an influx of money. So any one of those is
going to cause a lot of heartache to make a decision and some of the budget is
so bad that everything is going to be hit.

Lynda Brewer and Bill Johansen represent staff interests and
perspectives to several UC regental committees.