University of California President Janet Napolitano is under fire, facing new questions over a brutal indictment of her office delivered by the state auditor last month.
The audit, released on April 25, is considered to be unusually scathing for such a report. Among many troubling findings, it contends that Napolitano’s office planned to increase tuition while concealing $175 million from the public and then “intentionally interfered” with the auditors’ investigation.
According to the report, “Correspondence between the Office of the President and the campuses shows that the Office of the President inappropriately reviewed campuses’ survey responses, which resulted in campuses making changes to those responses prior to submitting them to us.
“Campus statements that were critical of the Office of the President had been removed or substantially revised, and negative ratings had been changed to be more positive,” it continued.
At a legislative hearing on Tuesday, Napolitano said she was “sorry” for handling the surveys in such a way and agreed to implement all of the audit’s 33 recommendations. She also argued that only $38 million of the $175 million is actually in reserve.
Nevertheless, a Sacramento Bee article on the hearing quoted several lawmakers of both parties hammering mistakes made under Napolitano’s leadership. “To say that this is a black eye on UC is an understatement,” one Democratic assemblyman said. Influential California Democrats, including Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, are calling for Napolitano to cancel the tuition hike set to effect next fall in light of the audit’s findings.
Compound this with the national outcry over the University of California, Berkeley’s cancellation of a scheduled Ann Coulter lecture over security concerns, and Napolitano is having a bad month.
Not only is Napolitano bungling the system’s financial matters, but for its inability to protect free speech, the University of California’s flagship university was at the center of one of the year’s biggest non-political stories to date. High-profile liberals from Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt, to Bill Maher, to Joan Baez voiced support for Coulter’s right to speak on the campus. Napolitano is named as a defendant in a high-profile lawsuit challenging Berkeley over its treatment of the lecture as well.
Notably, both blunders elicited bipartisan backlash in California and elsewhere.
Napolitano, who stepped down as the head of President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security in 2013 to assume her current role, should now face serious questions about her ability to preside over the state’s ten University of California campuses.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
