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Thursday, July 3, 2014

They used to say that talk was cheap

We noted in an earlier post that UCLA paid $300,000 for a talk whereas the U of Nevada-Las Vegas paid "only" $225,000 (and there were student protests over that).*  Now the Washington Post says her "standard" fee is $200,000.  So our talk must have been 50% better than the standard.  No?  The Post mentions UCLA in the article:

...Devin Murphy, UCLA’s undergraduate student body president, said: “You can’t deny that Hillary Clinton has had vast experience in public service to our nation. But I am a bit concerned that $300,000 was spent for her to come. I am personally a low-income student of color at our university, and I recognize the importance of being fiscally responsible.”...

Full article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-time-of-austerity-eight-universities-spent-top-dollar-on-hillary-clinton-speeches/2014/07/02/cf1d1070-016a-11e4-b8ff-89afd3fad6bd_story.html

There is the old saying that all publicity is good, as long as they get your name right.  But the Post, along with many other news services, gets in wrong as the "University of California AT Los Angeles" rather than University of California, Los Angeles.  (The "at" was dropped decades ago and converted to a comma to emphasize that UCLA was no longer the "southern branch" of UC Berkeley.)

Apart from the old saying mentioned above - which clearly isn't correct - there is another saying often heard from university media relations types - that as long as money expended was not state money, it is costless and appropriate however the money was spent.
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Hard to say the talk was cheap, cheap:

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