In 2007 Michael Drake, the Chancellor of the University of California at Irvine, rescinded an offer he had made to Erwin Chemerinsky to be the founding Dean of the UCI Law School, a move that attracted the attention of the national press.
While Drake told the faculty what his decision was not based on (namely, donor pressure, political pressure, Chemerinsky's political views, or anything ideological, political, or personal), he was vague about what it was based on.
This led to a sense of outrage among the UCI faculty, the likes of which I haven't seen before or since. The Academic Senate called emergency meetings amid concerns about academic freedom and Drake's leadership.
At one such meeting, Drake said that if the media weren't in the room, he could tell the faculty his reasons for rescinding the offer. Some faculty suggested that Drake tell his reasons to a small elite group of important faculty who would keep it secret.
When I was hired at the Ohio State University a common refrain of the Dean was, "We are responsible to the taxpayers of the state of Ohio." Some of my colleagues scoffed at the thought, but the idea made sense to me.
Naively assuming that UCI had a similar philosophy, at one of the meetings I reminded the faculty that since UCI is a state university, its administrators are accountable to the taxpayers of the state of California. I assumed that California had "sunshine laws" to promote transparency at state universities. Wasn't the Chancellor obliged to justify to the taxpayers the rationale for his major decisions, and wasn't the media there to convey his words to those taxpayers?
I thought that I was saying the obvious. I didn't realize it would be received as a revelation.
Though I spoke for only a few seconds and was one of many speakers, faculty came up to me to thank me (I was disconcerted when they told me I was brave to speak up), and reporters asked me my name (which I refused to give, suddenly fearing blowback from the university; I was aghast when a friend told me she heard me the next day on a southern California radio station).
The good that came from it is that I met nice colleagues I might otherwise never have met (at one of the least friendly and least welcoming universities I've seen). In an email discussion with one of them afterwards, I wrote:
A little more sunshine in the UC system, and fewer secret meetings in "smoke-filled rooms", would do a lot of good, and might have avoided some of the trouble that comes from doing what's in one's own best interest, rather than doing what's right (the controversy about keeping salaries secret, and the liver transplant scandal, come to mind).