As part of the government’s 2017 audit of the University of
California’s president’s office, California’s auditor, Elaine Howle, sent
surveys to administrators at the university’s 10 campuses. The president’s
staff directed administrators at the Santa Cruz, San Diego, and Irvine campuses
to remove criticism of the office and give higher performance ratings in key
areas. The interference was blatant, as it included even a systemwide
conference call. As a result, Howle disregarded all of the results as tainted. The
audit also uncovered $175 million in undisclosed reserves being held by the
president’s office. Janet Napolitano, the U.C. president and former head of the
U.S. Homeland Security Department, had betrayed the trust vested in her. The
ineptitude likely ran higher, and lower. That is to say, the university’s governance
itself was culpable.
For an office with a $686 million budget (the entire
university’s budget being $31.5 billion in 2017) and nearly 1,700 employees to
betray the trust of the university’s board of regents, the Government of
California, and the general public is, as Assemblyman Phil Ting said, “outrageous
and unbelievable.”[1]
Ting compared the interference to a student who is failing “and magically the
professor changes the grade and passes the student.”[2]
In fact, the duplicity went beyond Napolitano’s office, for Howle had directed
the administrators at the campuses to keep the surveys confidential and yet one
UCSF administrator felt entitled to inform Napolitano’s staffers, who in turn
began directing administrators on how to respond to the surveys. George
Blumenthal, chancellor of the Santa Cruz campus, sent an email to his staff
noting that the president’s office was not happy with a long paragraph, so he
added, “I suggest you remove the paragraph and submit it.”[3]
That a spokeswoman for the president noted that the chancellors had “not been
shy in offering opposing views” to that of the president can thus be taken as
yet another attempt to mislead.[4]
The irony is that California’s tax-payers had been funding “profligate”
salaries of university administrators even as funding cuts mandated by the
legislature had hit other areas of the university.[5]
For their part, faculty members were not surprised—faculty leaders noted that
cynicism had crept in for years as the university governance had increasingly
sidelined their voices.[6]
Considering both the healthy slush fund and the efforts to manipulate the audit’s
survey, as well as the sordid reputation of the university’s administration
among the ranks of faculty, the conclusion may be that the university’s board
of regents had failed to provide adequate oversight. In other words, the weak
link may actually run higher than into the president’s office.
1. Nanette Asimov, “3
UC Campuses Change Responses in State Auditor’s Survey,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 10, 2017.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Mike McPhate, “California
Today: A Cloud Over the University of California,” The New York Times, May 11, 2017.
5.
Ibid.
6.
Ibid.
