Speaking of appropriate people, how many top vacancies do you still have to fill? How is your search progressing?
Oh, boy. I have to fill three chancellors because of the tragedy at Santa Cruz. We are going through ... I am going through with the Regents ... just exactly what the structure of the organization here in the Office of the President should look like so that we can get on with recruiting. I'm a little frustrated that we haven't gotten there faster than that. So I'll be looking for, I anticipate, a chief financial officer for the whole system, something way overdue. We haven't had a chief financial officer, actually.

How about a financial system that is trans-parent and reliably tracks transactions?
Well, that has to follow the chief financial officer, right? Somebody has to be driving that system. But you're asking about people. So I have to find a chief financial officer. I have to find a business operations person, a chief business operations person who runs the business part of the university.

The engine.
The support, the business support, for our main mission. I and we -- because it's a dual reporting -- have to find a chief counsel, a general counsel, for the university.

In another appearance in Sacramento on February 22, you cited the difficulty the university faces in maintaining its level of excellence and warned of a failure to compete for the best people. But is financial compensation the only way to compete?
No, of course it's not solely financial. If finance were the only issue, we would have failed. [laughter] We'd be second or third rank at this point. If you sit down with the administration or the faculty, and you ask: "What are the reasons that people come to the University of California and what are the reasons they stay here?" You get a variety of reasons. The premier reason is to be surrounded by other really bright, creative, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, intelligent people. That's number one.

The second is they come here because it's California. And California attracts a particular kind of person, those people who are willing to take risks and are willing to try new things, people who are a little restless. And the third is compensation. Now, we lose people, of course. But I would like to believe -- and do believe -- that the people that we attract and the people that we retain are just exactly those we want.

We just lost a sociology professor -- I think it was sociology -- to another institution in the Midwest for a salary of $425,000 a year. There's no way on God's earth we can offer that. And so people have to make their choices as to whether they want to be that big fish in a small bowl or be a swimming, interactive fish in a big bowl. We're really the public university that competes with the privates. If you look at the ten campuses together, there's nothing like it in the world. If you take UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Lab, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis -- if you put all that together, within 50 to 75 miles -- it's the largest collection of intellect that can bring together the life sciences and the physical sciences -- which is the future: physics, chemistry, biology, neurosciences, medical sciences, computational sciences.

	page 2	|	3