By Vic Cox

When Mark G. Yudof officially assumes his duties as president of the University of California on June 16 he will focus on completing the reorganization and streamlining of the Office of the President, he told campus news media during an April 29 telephone news conference.

“I’m not (currently) planning any new, major initiatives,” said Yudof, who was visiting Oakland from the University of Texas-Austin where he is the system’s chancellor and top administrator. But he added, “We’re overstaffed (at OP). We need to fix the budget; get the trains running on time.”

At present, UCOP has taken initial steps (the Regents will vote on the plan this month) in an aggressive restructuring to cut at least $52 million from its 2008-09 budget, partly by eliminating 404 full-time-equivalent positions. Some programs and positions are expected to be moved to certain campuses, where housing them would be “more appropriate.”

Asked about the planned changes, which were first brought to the UC Regents in March by Provost and Executive Vice President Wyatt R. Hume, Yudof responded: “There are no silver bullets and none (of the changes) are painless.” If there are any savings, he continued, “we need to invest them in the campuses.”

He said that when it comes to bringing UT staff with him to Oakland, “Texans are funny creatures—they like living in Texas.” He added that “maybe a couple” of people would make the move, “but I doubt it. That’s a prediction, not a promise.”

When asked to compare major differences between UT and UC, Yudof noted that UC is part of California’s Master Plan for higher education and far more centralized than the Texas system. He said that some features of the Master Plan were no longer applicable, but did not detail which ones.

He did say he felt UC campuses should have more decision-making authority. “I don’t think the UC president should be approving things on a case-by-case basis,” he said, adding that it should not take three months for OP to sign off on a vice chancellor appointment.

Yudof, who headed the University of Minnesota for five years before taking the helm at UT in 2002, cheerfully dodged a question about which UC campus he would consider a “flagship” campus. The Philadelphia native and legal scholar half-joked that he was “a Philadelphia lawyer” and preferred to “take the Fifth Amendment.” But he added that, unlike UT, “I don’t think of (the campuses) that way (at UC).”

Regarding future trends in public funding of higher education in general and UC in particular, the incoming president was not sanguine. His initial meeting with Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger was amiable—they smoked cigars together in the governor’s capitol cigar tent—and it convinced him the governor understands the essential value of higher education. But Yudof looks to students and private interests rather than the public coffer to bear much of the mounting costs.

He first laid out his views on what he called “the hybrid university”—one that depended on a mix of more private money and less public support—in a 2002 essay on the future of the public research university. “The challenge for these hybrid institutions will be to retain the best of their public traditions while adapting to a more privatized model,” he wrote.

Yudof told the UC editors and writers that his perception of the challenge to public universities has not changed in the intervening six years. “I’m very worried about (the trend), but don’t know where it will end up.”