Tensions high at regents meeting
Board voices support for Napolitano; critics call response out of touch
SAN FRANCISCO — University of California regents vigorously defended UC President Janet Napolitano during their first public meeting following a scathing state audit that showed that the Office of the President stashed away millions of dollars in an undisclosed fund even as it proposed a tuition increase.
Regent Norman Pattiz said he was “still delighted” with Napolitano’s leadership during the meeting Thursday morning at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. His comments echoed those of other regents, who spent a good portion of their time expressing frustration about what one called “salacious” media coverage of the audit.
But some UC students at the meeting thought the regents were blaming the messenger. “I’d rather they focus on their own accountability,” said Danielle Bermudez, a graduate student at UC Merced who, along with others, said the regents seemed out of touch with the students they are supposed to serve.
The audit, released in late April, found that the Office of the President hid $175 million and suggested alterations to campus survey responses that were intended to be confidential, a move that sparked outrage from lawmakers and the state auditor’s office, which threw out the responses as tainted.
The revelation has sparked an outcry among both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento, and Gov. Jerry Brown said he would withhold $50 million from UC officials until they implemented the auditor’s recommendations as a way to hold their “feet to the fire.”
When Napolitano took the job in 2013, she was heralded as someone who could build bridges with lawmakers, but the audit has complicated that task.
“The frustration is with the dismissiveness and the lack of candor, and I think we saw
that from the UC Office of the President during the audit and during the (recent legislative oversight) hearing and even today,” Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, who has called for more transparency, said during a phone interview after the meeting.
Regent Eloy Oakley, who leads California’s community college system, acknowledged that tension during the meeting. “There seems to be a disconnect between the ... conversation happening in Sacramento and the response that’s coming out of Oakland,” he said.
California’s State Auditor Elaine Howle said during Thursday’s meeting that “this is not an audit of the president. This is an audit of the process.” But she didn’t mince words in suggesting that her staffers received “pushback” from the central office and said it had failed to be transparent about where and how it spends its money. “It was very frustrating for us,” she said.
In laying out recommendations for how the University of California should move forward after the audit, Howle did not dispute that UC should have a discretionary spending fund, but she said UC had failed to lay out what it considers reasonable. She also criticized the central office for not monitoring spending often enough.
Howle had particularly harsh words about the way the campus survey was handled. Emails obtained by the Bay Area News Group and other news outlets suggest the central office was deeply involved with the surveys.
The survey responses some campuses submitted to the auditor after interacting with the central office offered far more posi- tive characterizations of the president’s office than the initial drafts.
“We certainly had concerns based on the evidence that we had,” Howle said. She also balked at the central office’s initial desire to push back some of the deadlines for meeting her proposal to address the issues within three years. “We felt we came up with a very reasonable, flexible schedule,” she said.
Napolitano, who spoke briefly during the meeting, reiterated her commitment to following the recommendations, including disclosing how discretionary funds are spent. And Nathan Brostrom, UC’s chief financial officer, said, “We do agree that we need to provide more guidance and tracking of these initiatives.”
In an interview after the meeting, Howle promised her office would “stay on top of it,”
Despite Napolitano’s commitment to following the recommendations, several regents expressed reservations about them. “I think, frankly, you lucked out that the president agreed to all of them,” Pattiz told Howle.
Thursday’s meeting presented the first opportunity to hear from a number of regents who had remained largely quiet on the issue.
Parshan Khosravi, a UCLA graduate student chosen as a student advocate by UC’s student association to attend the meeting, didn’t like all of what he heard. The central office should do more to be accessible to students, he said, and the regents should do more to oversee the system. “I think the regents have to be more involved in that,” he said. “They are often very removed from our campuses.”
Bermudez, the UC Merced grad student, said: “As much as they talk about deep dives, I don’t feel like they’re reflecting on the public’s reaction.”
Her classmate, Violet Barton, agreed. She came from Merced with lots of questions about how regents interact with students and choose which initiatives to support. “They’re not satisfactorily answered,” she said.
While the audit was the most heated topic of the meeting, the board also approved an 18 percent cap on out-of-state enrollment for campuses not yet above that level. Schools who already enroll more out-ofstate students, including Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego and Irvine, will be allowed to keep but not grow their 2017-18 levels of nonresident enrollment. A similar proposal was pulled in March amid pushback from some regents who said outof-state students bring in badly needed revenue.
“There is no perfect solution,” said John A. Pérez, one of the regents, “but this is a very good compromise.”
A budget proposal that increases funding for the central office also came under fire from some regents. The UC system is set to raise tuition for the first time in six years, and students and activists have protested in light of the audit’s findings.
After a tense few minutes in which several regents expressed confusion about the budget in front of them, the board authorized the budget, but said it would reconsider it in July after the finance committee had a chance to look at it more closely.
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, also a regent, said he was “uncomfortable” approving a budget that appeared to prefer the expansion of the central office “at the sake of student affordability.” He declined to approve it.