The Undercover Chancellor

By Pat Morton, UC Riverside

Timothy White, Chancellor of UC Riverside, announced yesterday that he will become Chancellor of the California State University system at the end of this year.  The surprise announcement was greeted with unalloyed delight by activists on campus.  This response might seem strange to those who know little about Tim White, whose public persona is relatively untarnished by scandal or controversy.  He has never been publicly vilified like UCD’s Chancellor Katehi, nor has he ever faced calls for his resignation or a vote of no confidence from the Academic Senate. In fact, White’s positive public image is probably one of the chief reasons he was chosen by CSU.  By carefully managing this image as an affable, nice guy despite presiding over a period of budget cuts, student protests and declining educational quality at UCR, Tim White has been able to keep his real agenda undercover.

In spring 2011, Tim White disguised himself as “Pete” and posed as an assistant chemistry professor, a track coach, a library worker and a campus tour guide for the reality TV show “Undercover Boss.”  The stunt attracted enormous press attention for White and UCR, and prompted an outpouring of uncritical affection for this Chancellor who proved he was capable of being just like us.  To see the episode in this light, however, you had to ignore the condescension that permeated his interactions with staff and students, and the fundamentally corrupt premise of the show, which allowed White to dole out money and special favors to his unsuspecting interlocutors.  Leaving aside the propriety of a Chancellor appearing on a reality show in the first place, the display of his selective largesse was particularly distasteful at a moment when UCR faced a $50 million budget gap resulting in staff layoffs, work time reductions, huge class size increases, decreases in student and academic support, reductions in faculty by attrition, mergers of academic units, and other draconian measures that eroded educational quality.  

The bread-and-circuses approach worked to distract attention from White’s policy decisions, such as the pursuit of a new Medical School that has taken millions of dollars and more than a dozen FTE out of the campus budget.
 The Medical School was not White’s initiative, however; it was the pet project of previous Chancellors Ray Orbach and France Cordova, who left him with the unlucky task of starting the School during the collapse of state funding.  The Legislature has never committed a steady stream of funding for the Medical School, on the advice of the Legislative Analyst.  After a humiliating rejection by the national accreditation committee, which last year refused to grant a temporary accreditation without a clear and permanent funding stream, White and his team did manage to cobble together private donations, grants from local government, and other funds sufficient to get preliminary accreditation right before he announced his departure.  While the Medical School should be a positive benefit to the Inland region, the price paid, measured in opportunity cost and the ongoing drain on UCR’s budget, raises questions about its sustainability and its negative effect on instruction and research elsewhere on campus.

White touts the diversity of UCR at every opportunity, and his ability to “reach out to minority and low-income students” was cited as one reason for his appointment at CSU, yet the paucity of ethnic and gender diversity among UCR’s upper administrators reveals a different agenda.  Under his leadership, almost all upper administrative positions have been given to white men, with the exception of one woman of color.  Under former Chancellor Cordova, women held the majority of upper administrative posts, including EVC/Provost.  She also created programs that made diversity a genuine priority in faculty and staff hiring.  White has gutted those programs, failed to replace a diversity officer who left UCR, and created a singularly male and pale administration.  The search for a new EVC/Provost revealed the hollowness of this administration’s commitment to diversity when Republican politician Tom Campbell became a candidate for the position in 2009.  Campbell is a public supporter of AB 1070, Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant legislation, and has taken several anti-immigrant positions, such as proposing, while a US Congressman, legislation to make English the official language of the US.  Campbell’s brief candidacy provoked an enormous outcry, including a petition that gained coverage in the local press, and he withdrew from consideration.  White’s administration seemed oblivious to the hypocrisy of hyping UCR as a Hispanic-Serving institution while proposing Campbell as a candidate for its second most powerful administrative position.

The most embarrassing publicity disaster of White’s time at UCR occurred last December when his administration attempted to regulate dissent on campus by issuing the notorious “Protest Guidelines.”  A laughable list of paternalistic rules that included a checklist of approvals required for protests and prohibitions against signs with rigid sticks, camping or the disruption of normal activity on campus, the Guidelines prompted a petition that was signed by close to thousand people and attracted national press coverage.  White’s initial response was to establish a Task Force on free speech and assembly, rather than remove the Guidelines as the petition demanded, but continued negative publicity forced him to remove them from the campus web site.

White proved himself an adept master of spin, however, in the aftermath of the January 19, 2012 Regents’ meeting at UCR and the police violence, which he authorized, against peaceful protestors.  On January 19, hundreds of students, faculty and community members gathered at UCR to demonstrate against further tuition increases and to demand a more transparent form of decision-making by the Regents.  In response, UC Police and Riverside County Sheriffs in full riot gear marched provocatively through the protesters, taunted and made sexually suggestive noises at them.  The police shot pepper-spray paint bullets at peaceful protesters, hit them with batons, shoved them to the ground and dragged them across pavement, tore their clothing and used other forms of excessive force.  In the following days, a petition expressing outrage at these events was signed by over 400 members of UCR’s community, and White launched a public relations campaign that demonized the protestors as violent agitators who had no agenda except disrupting the Regents’ business. He justified his authorization of police violence by claiming it was provoked by the protestors (claims that have been refuted by eyewitnesses and by video footage from that day). At a Town Hall meeting in March, he displayed photographs which he claimed showed the protestors attacking the police and dismissed those who questioned his decision to authorize force.  While the repercussions from January 19 continue to resonate on campus, White has been able to leave this shameful incident behind.  To demonstrate how successful he has been at the spin game, the LA Times article on his appointment as CSU Chancellor describes White handing out bottles of water to student protestors on January 19 and telling “campus police not to take any measures that would turn into a confrontation.”  The stunning unreality of this account makes me wonder if that might have been “Pete” with the water bottles, playing the scripted role of Chancellor White.