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The president and chair of the Board of Regents of the University of California publicly disputed several findings of a harshly critical draft audit released Tuesday by the California State Auditor.
The audit of the university president's office, which is equivalent to the system office in many states, asserted that it "failed to disclose tens of millions in surplus funds" -- much of which the auditor said had been derived from campuses that might have spent the money on students -- and engaged in "misleading" budget practices. (The issue of public university reserves has been raised frequently in recent years.) The auditor also sharply criticized the California system's spending on administrative salaries and benefits and said the university president's office "intentionally interfered" with the auditor's work.
"The rising cost of higher education in the state and nationwide places an important responsibility on public universities to make fiscally prudent decisions that best serve the financially burdened students and families who help to provide for their support," the audit stated. "Nonetheless, over the past five years, the University of California Office of the President has made decisions that redirected funds away from the university’s fulfillment of its role as the state’s primary academic research institution and toward other priorities."
In letters to the auditor, UC's president, Janet Napolitano, and leaders of the UC board took issue with the findings. "The report fundamentally and unfairly mischaracterizes [the university's] budget processes and practices in a way that does not accurately capture our current operations nor our efforts and plans for continued improvement," Napolitano wrote. She specifically complained that the auditor greatly inflated the size of the system's reserves and rejected suggestions that the Board of Regents was not sufficiently overseeing the president's office.
