“The University of California is eyeing a looming budget gap of half a billion dollars next year,” reports CalMatters, and to fill the gap the university is “relying in part on its out-of-state undergraduates,” whose costs will be increased. In their quest for a balanced budget, UC bosses might cut back on overhead. A good place to start would be the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, which never should have been established in the first place.

In 1996, state voters passed Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which banned racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. As Thomas Sowell noted in Intellectuals and Race, the predicted disaster never occurred and the number of African-American and Hispanic students graduating from the UC system went up, including a 55 percent increase in those graduating in four years with a GPA of 3.5 or higher.

State politicians and “educrats” maintained that the measure somehow harmed “diversity” and in due course set up a professional caste of DEI bureaucrats to impose the same kind of preferences CCRI banned. For the DEI officials, it was highly profitable. Consider, for example, Dania Matos, UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for the Division of Equity and Inclusion. She bags $364,446 in total pay and benefits, and UC Berkeley alone employs 150 professionals and 250 additional students to fight “systemic inequities.”

All 10 University of California campuses deploy DEI officers, who cost big dollars but add no educational value. Eliminating them all would help balance the budget, and the system might take a look at salaries in general. Consider UC Berkeley Chancellor Richard Lyons, who pulls down a whopping $946,450. In September, the University of California Board of Regents approved salary boosts, in the neighborhood of 30 percent across the board, jacking up the salary range for the 10 campus chancellors to between $785,000 and $1.2 million.

The countless vice chancellors, provosts, deans, and such could doubtless use some cutting in salary and numbers. UC budget balancers might also track down pots of money that have escaped scrutiny. Consider former University of California President Janet Napolitano, also the former Arizona governor and Department of Homeland Security director, who came on board in 2013.

In 2017, California State Auditor Elaine Howle discovered that Napolitano, while raising tuition and fees, was hiding a slush fund of $175 million that she used to shower perks on staff. Napolitano’s office “intentionally interfered with investigators” but the UC president faced no criminal charges and stayed in office until 2020.

So far nothing like that from current UC President Michael V. Drake, who got a $300,000 raise in September, bringing his base pay to $1.3 million. The former UC Irvine chancellor and UC vice president for health affairs is a “strong advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion.” So on Drake’s watch, cuts in the DEI overhead or executive salaries are unlikely, and that places UC plans in jeopardy.

As CalMatters notes, with the $500 million budget gap looming, the University of California system has been pouring “tens of billions of dollars” into seismic retrofitting, new classrooms, and medical centers, without “the funding to build or renovate most of what it needs.” The bill for the system’s construction projects comes to $53 billion, and hiking tuition for out-of-state undergrads to $52,536 won’t get it done.

“California’s public university system is a bloated jobs program,” contends Katy Grimes of the California Globe. “The students are clearly secondary.” As students, parents, and taxpayers might recall, in 2020, California voters rejected Proposition 16, which would have overturned Proposition 209. Contrary to popular belief, CCRI did not eliminate “affirmative action.” The UC can still lend a hand on an economic basis but cannot reject or accept students on the basis of race or ethnicity.

Meanwhile, Janet Napolitano, the UC president who stashed away $175 million, recently served on a panel to investigate the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Californians can be forgiven for questioning her qualifications for the task.