Berkeley is in a very deep hole in terms of its budget, and here is one of the reasons why:
A growing chorus of voices is calling for the firing of a UC Berkeley administrator who helped triple her secret sex partner’s pay over five years. Calling Diane Leite’s punishment “an affront” to the university, several UC Berkeley professors have asked the school’s provost to investigate how the matter was handled. They are aghast that, instead of firing her, the university reassigned Leite from her assistant vice chancellor post and will still pay her $175,000 a year.
The scandal was revealed Monday when this newspaper reported that Leite, 47, had given five raises in two years to Caniezo, 30, a subordinate employee with whom she had a sexual relationship. Caniezo made less than $41,000 in 2005, but his pay jumped to $120,000 in 2010.
From $41,000 to $120,000 in just two years. College administrators get very shameless because all of the unearned money they are getting perverts them. Here is a useless administrator who goes and buys herself a sex toy that costs the university $120K per year. And the really scary thing is that this woman’s superiors are not even trying to punish her for wasting the university’s money to mitigate her huge sexual problems. There is no doubt in my mind that the rest of the administrators at Berkeley have no problems with Leite’s stealing from the university because they also get humongous salaries for doing nothing and promote all kinds of nasty nepotism.
I have got to wonder how much Berkeley pays it growing pool of exploited adjuncts.
Shame on you, Berkeley!
What I find even more bizarre than this entire situation, though, is the way the very dense author of the article that describes this situation at Berkeley concludes the piece:
“If (Leite’s violation) doesn’t rise to the level of significant punishment, what do you have to do to get fired?” Nadler said. “At a corporation, I think it’s pretty clear this wouldn’t be tolerated.”
Erm, really? Wouldn’t be tolerated by whom, exactly? When a Vice-President of Finance, for example, decides to buy some fresh young meat on the company dime, the rest of the employees sit there very quietly, not daring to make a peep. At a university where there is still some academic freedom, people protest and make their opinions known.
It is egregious that anybody would try to use this situation to suggest that a university should be turned into a corporation.
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