I hate even to link to this, because it’s so embarrassing, just a national shanda. But there it is: the president of the University of California willingly trivialized by Deborah Solomon when his press is uniformly terrible and he (and we) are teetering on a cliff.
It’s not like Solomon snuck up on him: her whole schtick is to diminish interviewees with deeply silly, smirking, ignorant questions and then edit the responses to sound flip. Reasonable people sit still for something like that when they’ve just achieved something big, not when their reputation and institution are hanging by a thread and all trends are down. Does Yudof just have a completely tin ear? Rod Blagojevich would do some insouciant thing like this. I want to think our president has better judgment than Rod Blagojevich.
Maybe someone set him up; is the UCOP flack office harboring vengeful malcontents, or is it some sort of remedial PR training program? Are any grownups watching these people? Should we expect to see Yudof eviscerated by Letterman next, or …or…Heaven help us, don’t let Tina Fey smell this blood in the water.
Da Ali G Show – except that’s meant as comedy.
Having worked at the U of Minnesota when Yudof was president, yes his ear is that tinny. He seems to work hard at the folksy approachable image instead of the imperial one his predecessor at U of Minn. had. However, I don’t think he’s anywhere near as dim as that interview made him sound. For what it’s worth, Yudof reportedly makes a really good pancake.
I don’t think he is in need of your defense. He’s a big boy with a comfortable set of compensation garnered on the expectation that he’d be smart enough to defend himself from such an allegedly scurrilous attack. If he’s not capable of defending himself and the UC’s governance policies, maybe he’s not so worthy of that compensation package he’s got.
Color me jaded. I don’t give the U.C. system or it’s executives much slack in this sort of thing after the years of experience I’ve had as a student and an employee at a U.C. campus. Personally, I’d love to see this overstuffed suit twist a little more in some uncomfortable and unflattering interviews. But in reality, I’d rather see him not waste his expensive man hours sitting through such tripe. He’s got better things to be doing right now.
Those were some stupid questions, but he seems to have prepped.
She asks a stupid question:
The word “furlough,” I recently read, comes from the Dutch word “verlof,” which means permission, as in soldiers’ getting permission to take a few days off. How has it come to be a euphemism for salary cuts?
He replies:
Look, I’m from West Philadelphia. My dad was an electrician. We didn’t look up stuff like this. It wasn’t part of what we did. When I was growing up we didn’t debate the finer points of what the word “furlough” meant.
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