This news from my alma mater brought my attention back to Santa Cruz yesterday. Denice Denton, who became chancellor in 2005, apparently jumped from a high-rise apartment in San Francisco on Saturday morning.The story was carried in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle also provides a good archive of the controversy that may have led Denton to commit suicide.

I never met Denton, since she took over after I graduated, but nothing I’ve read about her suggested she was in such a bad place, personally or professionally. According to published reports, she was involved peripherally in a growing scandal over how the University of California compensates its top talent. She took heat because UC created a $192,000 job for her partner, Gretchen Kalonji, who lived in the building from which Denton leaped, according to the Chronicle. Unions at UCSC (who at times wield enormous clout on the liberal campus) had also criticized her over renovation to the house UCSC gives its chancellors, according to the Sentinel. Remodeling costs totaled around $600,000.

Denton’s predecessor, MRC Greenwood, resigned from a UC Office of the President post last year over a compensation scandal. Greenwood allegedly helped land another close friend, Lynda Goff, a job at UCOP without disclosing that the two owned property together in Davis, Calif.

The university issued a statement on its website yesterday, calling Denton’s death a “tragic loss.”

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