San Diego fat cats want UCSD's Pradeep Khosla to stay – why?

Pradeep’s rise

A shadowy network of unidentified fat cats has come up with $13 million to fund the $500,000-a-year raise awarded to UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla by the University of California’s regents on April 6, bringing his base salary to $1.14 million, which makes him the nation’s fifth highest-paid university chief, per an April 11 dispatch by the Union-Tribune. Regent Richard Leib of Solana Beach “would not identify who donated the $13 million, but said the money was raised quickly out of concern that UCSD would lose Khosla, who oversaw a record $3.05 billion campus fund-raising campaign that ended last year,” per the account.

“There was a very, very strong commitment from the community to get this done because of what Pradeep has meant to San Diego, including helping to bring the Blue Line trolley to campus and building lots of housing.” The only donor identified was Qualcomm co-founder and La Jolla billionaire Irwin Jacobs, who leveraged the intellectual property developed at UCSD and UCLA into a personal cell phone fortune and is widely recognized to have enjoyed an outsized say on UCSD policy. “He has done a wonderful job for the campus, for the city, for the region, and internationally,” said the octogenarian billionaire, who declined to tell the paper the amount of his contribution.

Nor did the paper report the specifics of other perks approved by the regents for Khosla, including “continuation of an administrative fund established for official entertainment and other purposes permitted by University policy. Adjustments may occur annually as allowed by policy.” Official partying has long been part of Khosla’s job.

Last month, the university’s website advertised sign-ups for a free March 21 bash in LA. “We’re taking the celebration to Los Angeles! Join Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, influential local alumni, and esteemed campus leaders for a celebration like none other at the Grammy Museum Los Angeles. Enjoy an evening of interactive surprises, heavy hors d’oeuvres, refreshing beverages, and plenty of stimulating conversation. Suggested attire: business casual/formal.” Other Khosla benefits approved during this month’s regents meeting included “continuation of an annual automobile allowance of $8,916.”

Khosla is pushing big housing developments for the La Jolla campus, a field in which Leib has some experience lobbying. The current chairman of the UC regents. Leib got a paycheck protection loan of $20,800 for his Dunleer Strategies to retain one job during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the website federalpay.org.

The company was listed as being in the business of providing Environmental Consulting Services. But Leib is reported as a local influence peddler on a list of those registered to lobby the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. Another county filing shows he gave fallen Democrat Nathan Fletcher’s now-abandoned state senate campaign $2500 during the final quarter of 2022. As of this April 6, according to a county filing, Leib was lobbying county supervisors on behalf of America First Multifamily Investors, L.P., also known as Greystone Housing Impact Investors, which has been out drumming up low-income housing business.

Last year, for instance, the firm “provided $153,637,000 in tax-exempt and taxable construction loans for a new 387-unit affordable housing community in Elk Grove, California,” according to November 22, 2022 news release. Wrote Khosla last July 13 in the U-T: “UC San Diego is also investing in off-campus housing for staff and faculty, expanding our inventory of at- or below-market rentals. Our Hillcrest campus redevelopment plan includes 1000 new apartments, and plans are underway to build staff and faculty housing on the east side of our La Jolla campus.” On March 22, Leib told the U-T: “We’re very committed to expanding student housing. Studies have shown that students do better when they live close together. And the housing we’re talking about generally has rents that are 20 to 30 percent below market prices.”

Cop shops chopped

A newly unveiled policy at San Diego State University’s KPBS public broadcasting operation has run afoul of an unnamed local police department, according to an April 7 account by the station’s news director Terence W. Shepherd on the website Current.org.

The San Diego area police department “feared that our reporting would be biased because we would seek outside perspectives besides the police reports and narratives,” the item quotes KPBS deputy investigations editor Claire Trageser as saying. “That department said that if we enacted the policy, they would be less likely to grant us interviews in the future. But we decided to publish the policy anyway.”

The backstage clash between KPBS and cops over crime and reporting centers around an online declaration by KPBS that “historically, media coverage of these topics has tilted too much toward the perspectives of public safety agencies.” To remedy the problem, the stations vow no longer to relay information on “Police shootings or in-custody deaths with only the police narrative on what happened,” “crime that paints a narrow picture of a community,” and “single crime statistics shared by police without verifying and contextualizing.”

Who makes the decision whether to air non-compliant cop coverage is not entirely clear. “Any coverage that falls outside of the scenarios listed above will be reviewed by the newsroom’s editorial team to decide if the newsroom should dedicate time and resources to it.” Adds the statement, “Sharpening the coverage and communicating what we will and will not cover gives our audiences a clearer picture of who we are as a news organization and internally allows us to focus resources in more impactful ways.”

— Matt Potter

(@sdmattpotter)

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