Creating $192,000 job for UC chancellor's partner stirs critics

By: MICHELLE LOCKE - Associated Press | Thursday, January 20, 2005 9:43 PM PST ∞

SAN FRANCISCO -- The University of California created a $192,000-a-year job for the partner of the new UC Santa Cruz chancellor, a move that is being criticized by an employee union.

Union officials representing staff at the 10-campus system say the move is a mistake at a time when the university is cutting budgets and raising fees.

UC officials defended the hiring of Gretchen Kalonji, the longtime partner of incoming Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Dee Denton. They described Kalonji as a highly qualified professor who will be an asset in her new job as director of international strategy development.

Kalonji, a professor of materials science at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in international education, also is getting a tenured professorship.

"This is one of the most talented women engineers in the country who has turned her skills to developing international strategies, something which the University of California doesn't really have right now," said M.R.C. Greenwood, UC provost.

A call to UC Santa Cruz by The Associated Press seeking comment from Denton was not returned Thursday.

Mary Higgins, president of the Coalition of University Employees, which represents 16,000 clerical employees, said she was concerned that UC would make such a hire at a time of cutbacks.

"If you're sitting there at the regents' meeting and you're hearing the students talk about how difficult it is to make ends meet and then they turn around and do something like this, it's just so arrogant. It's so unethical," Higgins said.

The state's ongoing budget crisis has prompted fee increases throughout California's higher education system. In the 10-campus UC system, student fees rose 29 percent in the last year -- from about $5,200 (including miscellaneous campus fees) in 2002-03 to the present total of about $6,700 for a student with a full-time class load.

Greenwood said UC officials already were talking about creating a strategy position when Kalonji became available. Regents approved her hiring in closed session.

"There's no doubt in my mind that if I had done the search for this position, she would have been one of the top candidates," Greenwood said.

UC has found work for the spouses of top hires in the past. For example, when Marye Anne Fox was hired last April to head the San Diego campus, her husband, a chemistry professor, also got a job.

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