“We’re fighting for our lives.”

That’s what CSU Chancellor Charles Reed said last week in a Capitol hallway while waiting for lawmakers to convene the Joint Legislative Audit Committee.

Reed was waiting to be grilled for the second time by legislators about the CSU Common Management System, a $660 million computer system that state auditors blasted last month as an unjustified, unmonitored boondoggle that is siphoning money from the entire California State University system in the midst of the biggest budget crisis in California history.

“We’re fighting for our lives,” could have been uttered by Reed’s predecessor, W. Ann Reynolds, CSU Chancellor from 1982 to 1991, herself caught in a boondoggle of her own design. In April, 1991, Reynolds stalked the halls of the Capitol when the Senate budget subcommittee held a hearing to grill her over a $60,000 pay raise she gave herself – from $136,244 to $195,000 per year – without any public hearings or a vote of the trustees.

They also wanted to know just how she justified lavishing another $554,000 in annual salary hikes to 26 top CSU administrators when faculty and staff were seeing 3 percent raises.

When the meeting started, Reynolds spent her time before the subcommittee describing how the CSU system was “in the most dire funding predicament we have faced.”

But when the committee chairman, Nicholas Petris (D-Oakland) began asking about the salary hikes, Reynolds quickly stood up to take a seat in the audience. She directed her second-in-command, Herbert Carter, to answer the questions.

Members of the subcommittee took turns complaining that even if the $614,000 in yearly salary increases were necessary (Gotta stay competitive with other schools for the best and brightest, said Carter), they were implemented behind a veil.

“It may well be that you need an increase,” said Petris. “But we don’t like the way you went about it.”

While Reed has not been accused of personally profiting from CMS, Reynold’s story echoes his own in many ways.

State lawmakers are scrutinizing not only CMS, but the process that Reed used to kick start the project outside of public and legislative scrutiny.

They don’t like the way he ordered each campus to fund the project from existing budgets. They don’t like the way Reed failed to keep track of what programs and services were cut or eliminated to fund CMS.

“Nobody questions the need for a good I.T. (Information Technology) system,” said Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-San Fernando Valley), sounding eerily like Petris a decade ago. “But we question the way you did it.”

The chancellor told the audit committee that he made did things this way to force “fiscal responsibility” on the presidents. The truth is that by doing so, he kept the public out of how public money was being spent, just like W. Ann Reynolds.

It doesn’t look like the in-house political battle is going well, either.

During the Reynold’s scandal, the CSU Board of Trustees said little publicly until it came time to swing the ax. Within days of the Senate hearing, the board rescinded the raises, a clear signal that they had lost all trust in Reynolds.

The board, which counts Gov. Gray Davis as an ex officio member, and has not uttered a peep about CMS or Reed since State Auditor Elaine Howle’s audit blasted everything about the project, from its cost, to its lack of information security, to the university’s failure to prove its need.

With no public support from the board, Reed is trying to rally without them. Even lame-duck Sacramento State President Donald Gerth wrote a letter to the Sacramento Bee supporting CMS last month. Incoming Sac State and current San Marcos President Alexander Gonzalez wrote a much more detailed justification to the Escondido’s North County Times earlier this month. Presidents Al Karnig (San Bernardino), Norma Rees (Hayward) and Robert Caret (San Jose) have all jumped in the foxhole with Reed by writing similar letters to their local papers. All read like they had been dictated by Reed’s public relations machine.

And even if Reed survives the current JLAC drubbing, he’ll still have to talk to the Fair Political Practices Commission and the Attorney General’s office to address allegations that some of his CMS lieutenants used their positions to personally profit from CMS decisions.

The hearing on that April day 12 years ago wasn’t the end of Reynold’s travails, either. A few weeks later, the Assembly budget subcommittee on education ordered an audit of CSU administrative practices, including taxpayers footing the bill for $240,000 in maintenance costs on Reynold’s state-owned Bel Air Estates home.

Of course, by then, Reynolds had resigned.She moved to New York to become the chancellor of the City University of New York at a salary of $160,000, $24,000 more than she made at the CSU.

Perhaps Charles Reed should take a note from the Reynolds’ play book and start looking in the academic want ads. And he better hurry before the Legislature and the rest of the state bureaucracy triggers a well-deserved avalanche that might even wake up the sleeping CSU Board of Trustees.

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