Students shut down UC regents meeting
Dozens of University of California students and workers briefly shut down a meeting of the UC regents Wednesday to protest revelations that the president’s office kept $175 million in secret funds and paid fat salaries to staff while raising student tuition.
Calling the regents “hypocrites” and “greedy,” the audience of students and workers stood en masse at the UCSF Mission Bay campus and refused to leave. Police declared them an unlawful assembly and ordered protesters from the room.
“Shame on you, (President) Janet Napolitano! Shame on the Office of the President for padding your own pockets!” Hannah Kagan-Moore, a graduate student instructor at UC Santa Barbara, told the regents during the public comment period just before the protest.
In her recent probe of the finances of Napol--
itano’s $686 million office, California Auditor Elaine Howle found that the president’s office had secret reserve funds of $175 million. Subsequently, the regents — following the president’s recommendation — raised tuition and fees for next fall and said they were forced to do so because of insufficient funding from the state.
The higher tuition and fees are expected to raise $143 million in the next year, less than the amount of reserves. The base price of a year at UC for California students will be $12,630, nearly 3 percent higher than the current $12,294. With additional campus fees averaging $1,257 a year, plus the cost of room, board and books, the total annual cost will top $34,000 for students living on campus.
The audit also found that the president’s office spent thousands on retirement, staff appreciation and holiday parties, and it determined that Napolitano pays her central office staff higher salaries than their counterparts in state government earn.
“I see these administrators making millions of dollars. I see Janet Napolitano making more money than the president,” Taylor Chanes, 21, a student at UC Irvine, told the regents during the public comment period. “Stop raising our tuition when you claim that state disinvestment is the reason — and then we find out that we have $175 million in hidden reserves.”
Chanes, one of several students and workers who criticized the president for the audit findings, went on to describe how campuses have too little money to provide adequate mental-health services and academic support for all the students who need the help.
The regents meeting was shut down for less than 10 minutes. After it resumed, Napolitano reminded the remaining audience that her office will implement all 33 of the auditor’s recommendations for improving transparency and budget clarity.
“We’ve created a website where the regents, legislators and the public can track our progress,” she said. “We have important work ahead of us as we implement the changes in response to the audit.”
The regents have already authorized their chair, Monica Lozano, to hire an independent expert to monitor compliance. Lozano said Wednesday that a progress report will be presented in November.
Gov. Jerry Brown is also withholding $50 million from UC’s 2017-18 allocation of state funding until at least May 1 of next year, when the university will be asked to show that it has made progress in untangling the finances of the president’s office.
The audit also found that Napolitano’s office, which performs many of the administrative functions for UC’s 10 campuses, interfered in a campus survey from the auditor designed to learn how effective the office’s assistance to campuses has been. Because of that interference — in which Napolitano’s staff viewed confidential survey answers and required some campuses to change responses so that they reflected better on her office — the survey was rendered useless, Howle said.
Howle will present her audit findings to the regents Thursday, the final day of the regents’ three-day meeting, and the regents plan to discuss them in detail.
Napolitano’s office will also offer its 2017-18 budget to the regents for approval, and one difference from last year’s budget is already obvious.
Last year’s budget was seven pages long. The new one is 30 pages, packed with details about spending and expected fund balances that were previously absent. Napolitano’s staff says many of those programs were not secret and were presented to the regents and the public at other times.
Another difference: The new budget, $813.5 million, is 19 percent higher than this year’s $686 million.
The president’s two-part budget document for programs and administration says the budget grew because of the rising cost of the university’s education abroad system, patent management and other programs. In addition, the president’s office has been gradually taking over payroll functions for the university system.
The president’s office raises money in part by charging a fee to campuses. In her audit, Howle criticized the president’s office for repeatedly increasing the fee even as it squirreled away millions of dollars in reserves it didn’t report to the regents. Many of Howle’s recommendations call for the president’s office to consider returning money to campuses.
In her new budget, Napolitano offers for the first time a chart showing details of the campus assessment.
It shows that her office raised the campus fee by 7 percent last year and 3 percent the year before, but that it had reduced it by nearly 1 percent the year before that. In the new budget, the campus fee remains at $312 million from all campuses. That’s an average of $31.2 million for each campus, although the amount varies depending on the number of students, employees and expenditures.
But another campus charge for the payroll service had not been previously included in the budget. The new presentation shows that the fee will rise to $52 million per campus, up from $20 million last year.
The meeting resumes on Thursday at 8:30 a.m. at 1675 Owens Street in San Francisco.