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US: California vetoes university transparency bill

Roisin Joyce and Ramin Namvari

17 October 2010

Issue: 143


California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed a bill that would have required foundations and other auxiliary groups tied to California's main universities, California State University and the University of California, to open their list of donors to the public, Inside Higher Education reported on 1 October.

Schwarzenegger said the bill would not "provide sufficient protection for many who rightfully deserve a level of privacy as part of their giving". The University of California and California State University claimed that the bill would have a "chilling effect" on private donations.

The bill had been proposed by Senator Leland Yee, a frequent critic of university governance and spending practices, amid a controversy relating to the refusal of a foundation tied to California State University to reveal the amount it had spent to bring Sarah Palin to campus to speak.

The bill would have made the institutions' subsidiary organisations subject to public oversight by the California Public Records Act. Yee claims that that these subsidiaries allow state universities to hide billions of dollars.

He said that "for a governor who wanted to blow up the boxes and whose rhetoric is filled with platitudes of open government, it is a disgrace and completely hypocritical to then veto legislation to bring real transparency and accountability to our public universities".

http://www.universityworldnews.com/a...01015200409520