A survey of 2,800 U.S. colleges prepared by the Institute of International Education and the U.S. State Department underscores once again how much the budget of the University of California relies on high tuition and fees paid by foreign students.

The survey showed California had far and away the most international students with 161,693. Some 42 percent of the students are from China and 13 percent are from India. Five UC campuses had at least 8,000 international students: UCLA (11,942), UC San Diego (10,652), UC Berkeley (10,063), UC Irvine (8,064) and UC Davis (8,048).

The numbers illustrate that for all the criticism leveled at UC President Janet Napolitano in a 2016 report by state Auditor Elaine Howle, the UC system’s most important fiscal strategy relies on attracting foreign students. They pay about $44,000 annually, triple what in-state students pay.

The audit showed that in 2008 – at the beginning of the Great Recession – about 5 percent of students in the UC system were international students or from other U.S. states. By 2016, the number was 15.3 percent. The large increase was linked by UC leaders to the sharp long-term decline in state financial support. Critics, however, said UC had refused to do any of the belt-tightening done in the rest of the state government in response to a 20 percent decline in state revenue a decade ago.

Howle’s most explosive allegation was that standards had been lowered so much for non-California applicants that qualified in-state students couldn’t get into to any UC. 

Napolitano rejected nearly all of Howle’s allegations but didn’t challenge her point that a huge change in UC admissions policies had been made with scant explanation to the public or to then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature. Under heavy pressure, she agreed to major increases in California student admissions – but not to stop relying on foreign students as cash cows. The main concession on that front from UC regents who strongly backed Napolitano: a 2017 decision to have a maximum of 18 percent of non-California students in the UC system. This has had little if any effect on how many are admitted because UC now enrolls far more total students – about 280,000 – then it did four years ago (248,000).

Californians enrolled in UC system set record this year

In June, UC announced that new records had been set in the number of Californians admitted as freshmen (71,655) and transfer students (28,752) at the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.

Meanwhile, it appears that tension related to the U.S.-China trade war has ended the years of annual increases in Chinese students at UC. According to recent reports, their enrollment is flat or slightly down at several campuses. UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla lamented the development in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last month – not on fiscal grounds but because of the quality of the students, especially those in science majors.

But another factor besides tension between Washington and Beijing could be that colleges across the United States have reached the same conclusion that UC leaders did in 2008 and are now going after the same pool of high-paying international students as UC.

In August, USA Today reported that its analysis of federal data showed that “more than 240 public universities across the country admitted fewer in-state students in 2017 than they did five years earlier, and for 46 of those, the share of in-state students is down by at least 10 percent.”

University of California President Janet Napolitano and other top UC officials have proposed a new plan to manage tuition increases. But their plan runs the risk of backfiring because it depends heavily on consistent future support from the state Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Under what’s known as cohort-based tuition, incoming students would be guaranteed that their tuition wouldn’t change for their first six years at a UC campus. This would help students and their families avoid the big tuition hikes that led to protests a decade ago during the recession. But it would also offer UC leaders the flexibility to increase tuition for incoming classes.

A staff report argued that this policy “could provide greater financial predictability for students, families and UC campuses while also improving UC affordability.” At the regents’ recent meeting in San Francisco, Nathan Brostrom, the UC system’s chief financial officer, called the concept “very, very promising,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Can Legislature’s support be counted on?

But as some regents pointed out, “cohort tuition” only works if state funding is stable or increasing. And while overall state revenue has increased eight straight years, that is a historical anomaly. Over a normal decade, revenue typically either declines or is flat for at least three years, due largely to the state’s reliance on volatile capital gains.

Unless UC can rely on Newsom and the Legislature to not lower funding under any circumstances, “this all falls apart,” said Cecilia Estolano, the Los Angeles lawyer and urban planner who is vice chair of the Board of Regents, according to the Times. 

While the University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champaign campus has had cohort-based tuition since 2004, public universities in Georgia, Kansas and Oregon decided to end their programs in recent years after state funding cuts.

But regents have more to be nervous over than the chance a recession would cause budget headaches. While the Napolitano-Newsom relationship has no known tension, the UC president has many critics in the Legislature because of harsh audits since she took over in 2013. One issued in 2016 faulted UC for dealing with tight budgets by choosing to sharply increase higher tuition-paying foreign and out-of-students by lowering admission standards – instead of undertaking any belt-tightening. Another published in 2017 detailed how Napolitano’s office had hidden $175 million from the Legislature while requesting tuition hikes and showed that Napolitano’s top aides had interfered with UC campuses’ evaluations of the performance of her office.

State law was rebuke aimed at Napolitano

That audit led to one of the Legislature’s harshest rebukes of a top state official in decades: the unanimous passage in late 2017 of a law that makes it a crime punishable with a fine up to $5,000 for a state agency to interfere with, impede or obstruct an audit formally requested by state lawmakers. The audit also led the Bay Area News Group to call for Napolitano’s firing.

For the coming school year, UC will continue to charge in-state undergraduates $11,502 in annual tuition. Since Napolitano became UC president, undergraduate tuition has only gone up once. In 2017, regents approved a $282 increase, or 2.5 percent.

Regents are expected to have further discussions about cohort tuition at their Sept. 18-19 meeting at UCLA.

California doctors’ long-held opposition to nurse practitioners expanding their scope of practice into areas now reserved exclusively for doctors has become even more intense with the growing evidence that medical technology enhanced by artificial intelligence can play a much bigger role in health care. Nurse practitioners with such powerful tools could conceivably supplant doctors in many areas of medicine.

But state lawmakers — concerned about California’s increasingly severe physician shortage — seem ready for big changes. Last month, the Assembly Business and Professions Committee voted 16-0 for Assembly Bill 890, by Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg. It would allow properly certified nurse practitioners to order and interpret diagnostic procedures and to prescribe some drugs, among other duties, without supervision by a medical doctor.

In 2013 and 2015, bills expanding nurse practitioners’ scope of duties passed the Senate before dying in the Assembly. That makes the unanimous Assembly committee vote look even more significant.

The committee first heard testimony about the findings of the California Future Health Workforce Commission, which warns the state faces a shortage of 4,100 doctors in coming years. In February, the commission — chaired by University of California President Janet Napolitano — urged California to join the 22 states which already allow nurse practitioners to work without a doctor’s supervision in some areas of health care.

CMA: Change would lead to lower quality of care

That prompted criticism from the California Medical Association: “We continue to oppose efforts to lower standards of care to expand access. Nurse practitioners, while hugely important to the health care delivery system and an integral part of medicine, do not have the same level of training and expertise, and we should be wary of creating a system that only allows those patients who can pay top dollar access to a fully trained and licensed physician.”

But a March report by the Brookings Institution pointed to a future in which such physicians are much less important. It noted research that showed an artificial intelligence system “was equal or better than radiologists” at evaluating mammograms; that computers are as competent as ophthalmologists in examining some retinal images; and that robots which performed intestinal surgery on a pig did much better than humans with the sutures used to close up surgical incisions.

Bay Area physician Rahul Parikh, writing in October in the MIT Technology Review, thinks specialists may be in trouble — but not family doctors, who can use artificial intelligence to improve their care. And he argues that any transition to a health care system reliant on AI will face profound questions.

“Are patients willing to share more of their personal data with us? If the AI shows your care is better one way, but you or your doctor feel differently, will an insurance company accept it?” he wrote. “What if the algorithm misses something or is applied incorrectly? Who is liable, the doctor or the machine’s maker?”

Assembly Bill 890 will be heard next by the Assembly Appropriations Committee. No hearing date has been scheduled yet.

Last week, University of California President Janet Napolitano (pictured) and UC regents generated positive headlines with their decision to reduce tuition for in-state students – the first cut since 1999-2000 – as well as their success in getting a 4 percent funding hike from the state Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown.

The announcement that total annual in-state charges would drop from $12,630 to $12,370 – a 0.5 percent reduction – was framed as reflecting both UC’s relative fiscal health and a truce between UC leaders and UC student activists.

Nevertheless, the UC system continues to have a murky financial future, with billions in unmet infrastructure needs and underfunded pension liabilities. And while some past UC presidents worked hard to establish strong relationships with other state leaders, Napolitano appears to have relatively few allies in the state Capitol, with many lawmakers still upset with the former Arizona governor over her office’s interference with an audit the Legislature had ordered. As for the governor, he has complained for years that UC is too quick to seek higher state aid or higher tuition and has never engaged in meaningful belt-tightening.

Against this backdrop, chances for a major increase in state funding seems a long shot – though that may change with a new governor in January.

Yet the need for such increased aid – or the billions that could be raised with future tuition hikes – is plain, many UC leaders believe.

In January, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ made a presentation to regents that amounted to a plea for much more funding. Christ said her campus had a $700 million backlog of needed maintenance alone. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that every campus except for recently opened UC Merced had at least $100 million in maintenance needs, topped by Berkeley, followed by UCLA at $677 million.

20 years of not funding pensions backfires

But Christ and other UC leaders face an even more daunting challenge in paying for pensions, especially given the coming wave of retirements in UC’s aging workforce. That’s because UC’s estimated $15 billion in unfunded pension liabilities is far bigger than it would have been were it not for the decision of UC officials to contribute nothing to the pension fund from 1990 to 2010.

UC’s pension system has more than 80 percent in projected funding for its long-term liabilities and is in significantly better shape than CalPERS or CalSTRS. Nonetheless, a September analysis by the Los Angeles Times noted how the 20-year pension payment holiday had backfired on UC. The analysis detailed how the steadily growing cost of retirement benefits was reducing funds available for “core fund” basic expenses. As of 2016, more than 5,400 retirees from the UC system made pensions of $100,000 or more.

Under pressure from the Brown administration, Napolitano’s office has taken some actions to rein in pension costs. UC employees hired beginning in July 2016 have a cap on how much of their final pay can be used to determine pensions. Earlier this year, regents also approved a plan to allow new hires to choose between having a defined-benefit pension or a 401(k)-style account.

But the plan’s fate is unclear after it faced strong objections from Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, and government unions.

University of California Regents have bought UC President Janet Napolitano’s story about how her office came to interfere with an audit of its performance ordered by the state Legislature, with regents saying they were disappointed by the scandal but prepared to move on after reprimanding Napolitano.

But there could be more fallout on two fronts: in the Legislature and in the governor’s race, where the frontrunner, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, is an ex-officio UC regent.

That’s because Napolitano’s story seems so implausible. According to an independent report prepared at regents’ behest by former California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno and the Hueston Henningan law firm, after state Auditor Elaine Howle sent surveys to UC campuses in October 2016 asking for their assessment of UC’s Office of the President, Seth Grossman, Napolitano’s chief of staff, and Bernie Jones, her deputy chief of staff, put out the word that they needed to review the responses. This was done even though Howle had emphasized the responses were supposed to be confidential. Subsequently, three campuses – UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC San Diego – revised their responses to make them more favorable to Napolitano’s office.

But Napolitano told the Legislature in May, and Moreno’s investigators more recently, that while she approved the plan to have her office review the responses, she did so because she wanted to ensure the responses were correct – not because she wanted to protect her image. She also said campuses had requested help.

Moreno’s report did not suggest the UC president was lying. But it found no evidence that campuses sought help with their responses. And it noted that UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal said that he was chewed out by Napolitano for his campus sending in a response to Howle without running it by her staff. UC Santa Cruz’s response was the harshest of any campus, giving Napolitano’s office one “poor” and three “fair” ratings out of the 10 categories in the survey questions. After Blumenthal’s telephone conversation with what he described as a “furious” Napolitano, UC Santa Cruz changed the “poor” and “fair” ratings to good and upgraded three “good” ratings to “exceptional.”

Napolitano said she remembers her conversation with Blumenthal as being routine, not angry. But Blumenthal’s account is consistent with other findings in the Moreno report, such as Napolitano’s declaration in a text message that Howle was on a “witch hunt.”

The two aides cited in the Moreno report resigned a week before the report’s release and declined substantive comment on the allegations against them.

Lawmakers unlikely to be satisfied with handling of scandal

The Legislature, which passed a bill last session subsequently signed by Gov. Jerry Brown making it a crime for a state agency to interfere with a state audit, could consider follow-up legislation. There’s considerable residual anger over Napolitano’s May testimony to a joint legislative hearing in which she repeatedly denied personal wrongdoing of any kind. Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, vice chair of the Higher Education Committee, cited that testimony last week in calling for Napolitano to be fired.

In the gubernatorial race, UC-related sparks seem just as likely to fly. While Newsom told the Los Angeles Times that he considered regents’ decision to reprimand Napolitano “insignificant” – suggesting he wanted stronger punishment – he joined the unanimous vote to retain her as UC president.

This is tough to square with Newsom’s reported comments about how he would deal with corruption and ethical issues in state government: “I will not be known for being timid about this or anything else. Gov. Brown says reform is overrated; I say it’s underrated.”

As for Howle’s part, she wants regents to take additional actions beyond reprimanding Napolitano, according to a letter she sent to regents and an internal report by her office that were obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Howle asked regents to “consider disciplining university employees who repeatedly interfered with a state audit, tried to hide their actions, misled investigators and withheld requested information until threatened with court action,” the Times reported.

At the regents’ Nov. 17 meeting in San Francisco, they began consideration of measures meant to “clarify and strengthen” how UC officials who report both to the regents and to Napolitano must deal with state audits.

Is University of California President Janet Napolitano attempting to scapegoat two of her top aides for a scandal that enraged the California Legislature? Or were the aides’ abrupt resignations last week a Napolitano message to regents and lawmakers that she realizes the gravity of the mistakes made by the UC Office of the President in interfering with an audit ordered by the Legislature?

This was the speculation touched off by Wednesday’s UC announcement that Seth Grossman, Napolitano’s chief of staff, and Bernie Jones, his deputy, had “resigned to pursue other opportunities.” Neither offered substantive comments to the media on their decisions.

Jones played a central role last year in getting three UC campuses to change their responses to state Auditor Elaine Howle, who had been asked by the Legislature to examine campuses’ relationships with Napolitano’s office – the latest of several attempts in recent years by the Legislature to get a better understanding of UC’s murky finances.

The responses were supposed to be confidential so Howle could get an unfiltered assessment of UC’s Office of the President. But at Jones’ direction, officials at UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego and UC Irvine either dropped criticism or offered more positive descriptions.

The San Francisco Chronicle, which in May broke the story that emails confirmed interference with the audit, reported that Jones’ boss – Grossman – was CC’d on emails about responses to the audit and that Napolitano’s involvement in the attempt to protect her office’s reputation was direct and indisputable.

UC Santa Cruz’s initial response to Howle’s inquiry was perhaps the harshest of any campus. It rated the help from Napolitano’s office in four categories as either “poor” or “fair.” All were later changed to “good.” Ratings for three other services were changed from “good” to “exceptional.”

Santa Cruz response changed after Napolitano spoke with chancellor

The changes were undertaken in November 2016 – after Napolitano spoke with UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal.

“Per your conversation with Chancellor earlier today, we have already started the recall process of the State Audit Survey,” Ashish Sahni, Blumenthal’s top aide, told Napolitano in an email obtained by the Chronicle.

The resignations of Grossman and Jones were only the latest fallout from the spring scandal. After Howle told legislators she’d never seen such improper behavior from a state agency in her 17 years as auditor, they passed a bill making it a crime subject to a $5,000 fine to interfere with a formally requested state audit. Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law last month.

Meanwhile, at the behest of UC regents, former California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno continues to conduct an independent investigation into the scandal. There is no indication when he will submit his report; it is not on the agenda for the regents’ meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday and Thursday.

Moreno’s inquiry has so far seemed a low-profile, leak-free effort. But at the very least, it has the potential to embarrass Napolitano again over her handling of the scandal.

Howle – who discarded the campuses’ responses as worthless because of the interference – released the audit on April 25. The finding that initially spurred the most headlines was Howle’s assertion that the UC Office of the President hid $175 million in funds from regents and the public.

Napolitano was able to lessen the fallout from that finding by arguing that far from being hidden, the funds were dedicated to important programs.

But her assertion that audit responses were changed after individual campuses’ asked for help from her office were immediately challenged by state lawmakers at a contentious May 2 hearing. Less than 30 hours later, the Chronicle posted its story showing the changes had been orchestrated by Napolitano’s office – not initiated by the campuses.

University of California President Janet Napolitano has been under siege since March 2016, when state Auditor Elaine Howle released a

At least initially, Napolitano and some regents dismissed the criticism before finally giving in and capping nonresident admissions last week. But the Golden State’s other giant higher education system – California State University – got the message loud and clear: In-state students must be the highest priority. Last week, CSU formally guaranteed that a qualified California high school graduate will be offered admission to at least one of CSU’s 23 campuses.

The policy change was part of negotiations by CSU leaders, the Brown administration and state lawmakers over CSU’s 2017-18 budget. The $5.4 billion allocated is up $344 million over the previous budget, with the state general fund paying for $3.2 billion and student tuition and fees expected to generate $2.2 billion.

The admissions guarantee comes after many years of CSU denying admission to tens of thousands of qualified California high school graduates – most recently, 31,000 in fall 2016. CSU officials previously said they didn’t have the space.

But last week in a prepared statement, CSU Chancellor Timothy White said the policy change will “better serve Californians.”

The decision was lauded by one of Napolitano’s and UC’s harshest critics – Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco. “The most important thing is this gives California’s students more options,”  the Assembly budget chairman told the Bay Area News Group.

Student trustee worries about adequate funding

But the 2017-18 president for the California State Student Association – CSU student trustee Maggie White – had a more mixed reaction. While she welcomed the new policy, she told the Southern California News Group that CSU needed more funding. The $344 million budget hike represents a nearly 7 percent increase, but CSU’s executive budget summary suggests much of that amount will be eaten up by higher salary and benefit costs and some new mandatory expenditures.

The CSU policy is modeled on one adopted by UC in which students who graduate in the top 9 percent of their class are supposed to gain admission to a UC campus.

The CSU guarantee will take effect for spring 2018 California high school graduates. The final details will be worked out, but the minimum standard for admission is likely to be similar to CSU’s present requirement that in-state college applicants have at least a 3.0. Students who have stronger SAT and ACT scores can win admission with GPAs less than 3.0.

The policy change will be a relief to many students and parents, but there’s frustration still ahead for high school graduates in parts of the state where CSU campuses are much more selective than the systemwide norm. According to a website which tracks the most recent college admissions statistic at every U.S. degree-granting institution, seven CSU campuses reject more than half of all applicants. The acceptance rate was lowest at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (31 percent), followed by San Diego State and Long Beach State (both 34 percent), Cal Poly Pomona (39 percent), Cal State Fullerton (42 percent), Cal State Northridge (46 percent) and CSU Monterey (49 percent).

Pressure is building on University of California President Janet Napolitano after the San Francisco Chronicle obtained two batches of official documents that appeared to show Napolitano was untruthful in her testimony at a joint legislative oversight hearing May 2 at the Capitol.

The focus of the hearing was a scathing audit prepared at the Legislature’s request and released by State Auditor Elaine Howle on April 25. It alleged Napolitano’s office had hid $175 million in reserve funds from the regents and the public while the UC president successfully orchestrated approval of a tuition hike. In her testimony, Napolitano succeeded in raising questions about the fairness of that allegation by asserting that most of the reserve dollars had been committed to worthwhile programs.

But Napolitano’s attempt to explain away Howle’s second most serious allegation – that her aides had interfered with the audit by rewriting comments from individual UC campuses to make them more favorable to Napolitano’s office – has backfired. She denied that there was any attempt to make her office look good and asserted that the remarks were revised to make them accurate and that campuses had sought guidance on how to respond.

The claim seemed shaky to some lawmakers, based on their subsequent questions. Napolitano’s office wasn’t even supposed to have seen the responses – audit officials specifically told UC campus authorities that their responses would be confidential.

But two Chronicle articles in the past week have made Napolitano’s remarks seem not just misleading but deceptive. They laid out how documents and emails from Napolitano’s aides to individual campuses didn’t reflect attempts to correct errors or give guidance. Instead, they sought for the responses to be rewritten to offer more praise for Napolitano’s office – just as Howle’s audit alleged.

7 UC Santa Cruz ratings of Napolitano office upgraded

The first article’s most telling detail was how UC Santa Cruz withdrew its official response after a conversation between Napolitano and Chancellor George Blumenthal.

The second article was based on official emails and documents that laid out Napolitano’s seeming determination to prevent individual campuses from giving Howle any ammunition with which to criticize UC and her office. Last year, Napolitano authorized the release of an unusual 31-page report denouncing a previous Howle audit that criticized UC’s system-wide decision to deny admission over the previous decade to more than 4,000 qualified in-state students in favor of admitting out-of-state and foreign students who pay far higher tuition – thus enabling UC to balance its budget without any belt-tightening.

“The surveys and previously unreleased emails show that administrators at UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego and UC Irvine removed criticism of Napolitano’s office or upgraded performance ratings in key areas at the direction of Napolitano’s staff,” wrote Chronicle reporter Nanette Asimov. “The interference – including a system-wide conference call conducted by the president’s office to coordinate responses among all campuses – prompted Howle to discard all the results as tainted.”

The second batch of documents indicated why Napolitano may have been particularly perturbed with the responses of UC Santa Cruz officials and why she personally spoke with Blumenthal, the campus’ chancellor, about them.

The Chronicle article noted that after the Office of the President’s intervention, Santa Cruz officials upgraded the ratings they had given Napolitano’s office in seven categories. One “poor” rating was changed to “good.” Three “fair” ratings were changed to “good.” And three “good” ratings were changed to “excellent.”

On Wednesday, Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva called for Napolitano to resign. While several other state lawmakers have been harshly critical of the UC president, the Los Angeles Times reported that Quirk-Silva is the first to specifically say Napolitano must go.

University of California President Janet Napolitano could face her roughest week in nearly four years as leader of the state’s flagship college system as lawmakers react sharply to a

Legislative oversight hearings could be held as soon as Tuesday, according to the San Jose Mercury-News, after state Auditor Elaine Howle’s second damning report in 13 months. Napolitano’s and UC regents’ reaction is far different to the second report than the first, suggesting new dynamics that could put Napolitano’s job at peril or lead to the revival of a 2014 proposal that would ask voters to strip UC of the independent autonomy it enjoys under the California Constitution.

UC regents had backed Napolitano in 2016 in her dismissive response to Howle’s complaint that UC had admitted out-of-state students who paid much more in tuition than nearly 4,300 California students “whose academic scores met or exceeded all of the median scores of nonresidents whom the university admitted to the campus of their choice.” Howle said UC officials did this for nearly a decade in response to the state’s reducing funding during the revenue recession and in lieu of even basic attempts to control costs.

Napolitano could have blamed policies she inherited. Instead, she blasted Howle’s report as inaccurate. Though Napolitano’s defense lacked exculpatory evidence, UC regents largely dismissed Howle’s findings, with Regent John Perez even saying the report reflected an unseemly bias again out-of-state students.

Napolitano, regents change tone from last harsh audit

Napolitano’s reaction to the new Howle report, however, is conciliatory. Her office challenges the assertion that $175 million in reserves was hidden, saying that the funds were committed to various tasks and couldn’t have been used to head off tuition hikes. Otherwise, its official response to the audit thanked Howle for her work and said her recommendations would be implemented.

Some regents and lawmakers expressed disbelief that they as well as the general public weren’t told of the reserves even as Napolitano was lobbying hard for tuition hikes.

“Unbelievable,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to the Bay Area News Group. Newsom, a regent and an early front-runner in the 2018 governor’s race, said the era in which regents served as “lap dogs” for the Office of the President had to end and that regents should look hard at rescinding the tuition hike.

Perez declined comment.

The University of California enjoys a unique status among state agencies that goes beyond its constitutionally guaranteed autonomy. Taxpayers only directly pay for a little more than one-tenth – about $3.6 billion – of UC’s $32 billion budget. The rest largely comes from tuition, federal grants and reimbursement for services UC does for the federal government, including operating and managing three national scientific laboratories.

But Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders still see UC as an agency using public dollars that needs to be fully accountable. This has led to eight recent audits, many of which – including the latest – depict UC as having few basic financial controls and as being unable to document how and why it divvies up the various funds it receives. Howle’s analyses have consistently shown a UC system with no interest in belt-tightening.

Bad blood remains from 2014 tuition hardball

Where the contretemps goes this week is anyone’s guess. Some coverage has suggested that Howle’s critique goes overboard. But Napolitano doesn’t have a history of strong relationships with state lawmakers, some of whom see her as behaving in imperious fashion, and that could be a stealth factor in how the Legislature responds to Howle’s latest audit.

In late 2014, when the UC president got UC regents to endorse a five-year, 28 percent tuition hike that would go into effect unless the Legislature increased UC funding, Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, introduced a Senate constitutional amendment that they hoped would go before voters in 2016. It would have limited UC’s independence by giving the Legislature a veto on tuition hikes and pay raises for top UC executives, among other provisions.

The bill was shelved in 2015 after Brown and Napolitano reached a compromise on state funding. But resentment of Napolitano’s belief that she could push the Legislature around and try to embarrass it to get her way endures.

The Costa Mesa Republican denounced a recent announcement from UC that campus police would not be cooperating with federal officials in deportation efforts of undocumented immigrants.

“Your commitment to spending scarce resources to finance people illegally present in the United States is unacceptable and a flagrant misuse of taxpayer money,” Rohrabacher wrote. “This is an insult to Americans and legal immigrants who pay your salary.”

While sanctuary policies align with the state’s liberal lean, one of the main policy reasons supporters turn to is that by creating a space where deportation is off the table, undocumented immigrants are more likely to cooperate with police in other investigations. 

“It is in the best interest of all members of the UC community to encourage cooperation with the investigation of criminal activity,” according to the UC statement. “To encourage such cooperation, all individuals, regardless of their immigration status, must feel secure that contacting or being addressed by UC police officers will not automatically lead to an immigration inquiry and/or a risk of removal.”

The UC system gets more than half of its research funding from the federal government, which Rohrabacher claimed is jeopardized by resistance to the upcoming administration. 

“I assure you that, in the next session of Congress, those who receive and spend federal dollars in a manner that includes people illegally present in our country will find it difficult to obtain those funds,” Rohrabacher wrote. 

The issue of sanctuary campuses is a small part of a bigger showdown between California and President-elect Donald Trump. While Trump campaigned heavily on a tough stance on immigration — which included mass deportation and the construction of a wall along the country’s southern border — California Democrats have since announced their intention to fight those efforts at every turn. 

Though Rohrabacher initially supported a different candidate in the Republican primary, he eventually came around to Trump with a full-throated endorsement, even going so far as to call other Republicans “gutless” who backed away from Trump at times of turmoil. His name was even floated as a potential candidate for secretary of state, although he was not chosen.