Did you know you tax dollars, are going to administrators that protected sexual harassers? It is called a golden handshake. Corruption is no longer cheap.
“Despite knowing about alleged harassment committed by a vice president he recruited to the university, Castro added to the problem by reaching a settlement with Frank Lamas, vice president of student affairs, and helping him slip away quietly. Before the controversy erupted, Castro praised Lamas in performance reviews, endorsed him for a top award and nominated him for the presidency of a CSU campus. Once the news came out about the administrator’s departure and a dozen incidents of suspected harassment — later verified by an investigator — Castro could not weather the storm, and resigned.
But in his departure, Castro was reassigned into the CSU Management Personnel Plan and classified as an adviser to the Board of Trustees. He receives an annual salary of $401,364, which will be paid by the Chancellor’s Office on behalf of the trustees through Feb. 17, 2023.
In addition, the CSU for six months will continue to pay Castro a housing allowance of $95,004 annually, or $7,917 per month, with the final payment in August.”
Government is corrupt, this is just one example. Angry yet?
After Joseph Castro, CSU trustees should end ‘golden handshake’ deals for top executives
BY THE FRESNO BEE EDITORIAL BOARD, 3/30/22
Frank Lamas, former vice president of student affairs at Fresno State, was the subject of at least 12 complaints of sexual harassment at the university between 2014 and 2019, when Joseph I. Castro, right, was the university president. Castro became chancellor of the California State University system in 2020, but resigned in February 2022 amid questions over his handling of the allegations against Lamas.
Joseph I. Castro’s enduring legacy from his time with the California State University should be a win for taxpayers. That legacy, if the CSU Board of Trustees does its job properly, should be the end — or at least scaling back — of over-the-top retirement benefits to the system’s top leaders. Castro was president of California State University, Fresno before he became the eighth chancellor of the 23-campus system. He got the top spot in January 2021, but resigned from that post, one of the leading jobs in higher education nationally, last month in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal that occurred under his watch in Fresno.
Despite knowing about alleged harassment committed by a vice president he recruited to the university, Castro added to the problem by reaching a settlement with Frank Lamas, vice president of student affairs, and helping him slip away quietly. Before the controversy erupted, Castro praised Lamas in performance reviews, endorsed him for a top award and nominated him for the presidency of a CSU campus. Once the news came out about the administrator’s departure and a dozen incidents of suspected harassment — later verified by an investigator — Castro could not weather the storm, and resigned.
But in his departure, Castro was reassigned into the CSU Management Personnel Plan and classified as an adviser to the Board of Trustees. He receives an annual salary of $401,364, which will be paid by the Chancellor’s Office on behalf of the trustees through Feb. 17, 2023.
OPINION In addition, the CSU for six months will continue to pay Castro a housing allowance of $95,004 annually, or $7,917 per month, with the final payment in August. Bee staff writer Robert Kuwada also reported that Castro gets “retreat rights” for a tenured faculty position at a CSU campus. Castro wants to go to the business college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. These cushy arrangements are known in the corporate world as “golden handshakes” due to their lucrative nature. In this case, taxpayers are paying Castro off from his job as chancellor, despite the harassment controversy that he never told the trustees about. In light of the Castro mess, the CSU trustees formed a task force to review the management transition program, and told all campuses that no retreat rights will be offered to any incoming administrator without first being examined by the Chancellor’s Office.
STOP TRANSITION PROGRAM These initial efforts are good, but don’t go nearly far enough. The trustees need to simply end the retirement transition overall. Such a program is out of touch with the reality most Californians face. Rare is the job one retires from in which the employee can enter a transition program and continue earning a high salary, medical and vacation benefits, and accruals toward pensions.
The salary level for participants is a midpoint between the executive’s salary and the top salary of faculty. Castro was paid $625,000 a year in regular salary. CSU executives who enter the transition program are supposed to “work” for an agreed amount of time, but the tasks are rarely defined, and little to no follow-up is done to ensure the administrators actually do what they are supposed to, according to a Los Angeles Times review of CSU records. The work has been defined loosely as providing “advice and counsel” to the CSU board or individual universities, the Times found. “But the program does not track what officials do while being paid,” the Times determined, despite the payout of $4 million in recent years to top officials like Castro and his predecessor, Timothy White.
NO MORE SWEETHEART DEALS The answer by college trustees for the sweetheart deals they reach with top leaders is that it is the cost of being competitive to attract top talent. It is time for the CSU to show it won’t play that game anymore. It must end such severance deals altogether. If it refuses to do that, at the least it should scale the deals back to a more common-sense level. Chancellors and university presidents have a lot of responsibility and must bear a lot of pressure, so they should be fairly compensated. But the key word is “fairly. ” It is not “fleecing.”
