Old Job Is Hurdle for Napolitano on Campuses Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California, in November in Santa Barbara. Richard Hartog for The New York Times SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - The choice sounded ingenious: Take a high-profile political figure - a former governor and cabinet member - and have her apply her acumen to the task of rebuilding one of the great public university systems ravaged by decades of eroding state support. So when Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security and governor of Arizona, was named president of the University of California last summer, expectations soared. But her political skill was confronted almost immediately by a liability on campuses filled with foreign-born students, hundreds of whom lack legal immigration status - her role in the Obama administration's deportation of 1.9 million unauthorized immigrants. Now Ms. Napolitano faces a dual task of reviving the University of California and simultaneously overcoming the deep distrust of her within some quarters of the system. So she has relied on a time-tested political strategy: the listening tour. Ms. Napolitano has spent days at each of the 10 campuses, attending lectures, touring labs and holding meetings with students, faculty members and staff members. Any one of them can easily rattle off the problems caused by state budget cuts: tuition that has more than doubled, star faculty members who left for higher-paying private universities where their research would be fully funded, and academic counselors crushed by increasing caseloads. Students opposed to deportations demonstrated as Ms. Napolitano toured the campus there. But at nearly every stop along the tour she has also been confronted by protesters whose fury is not about the budget. As she walked into the faculty club at the University of California, Santa Barbara, one recent evening, for example, the polite chatter welcoming her fought a din of "Napolitano has got to go." When Chancellor Henry T. Yang walked over to the students mounting the objection, they asked: "How can you support her? She's hurt our families. When Ms. Napolitano appeared on a panel about Latinas in education that was sponsored by Eva Longoria, the Mexican-American actress with a master's degree in Chicano studies, the ushers" directions to the arriving audience were drowned out by shouts of "Education, not deportation!" "What this reveals is a law that doesn't match our moral standards, and that weight is falling on these students," Ms. Napolitano said after another student protester interrupted her at the panel. As she tells her critics, she has always argued that enforcement of existing laws is the only way to get lawmakers to back a comprehensive immigration overhaul. In one of her first policy changes this fall, Ms. Napolitano announced that she would set aside $5 million to assist the roughly 1,000 undocumented students in the system, spread across the campuses. The money is a tiny fraction of the $25 billion overall budget, but it won praise from Latino leaders and campus activists, who will decide whether to use the money for specialized counseling centers or direct scholarships. "The legacy of deportations is going to be with her for a long time to come, and it is something that she is going to have to live with," said Antonia Hernandez, the president of the California Community Foundation and a former chairwoman of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who spoke with Ms. Napolitano at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is acknowledging that diversity is a weakness that the system needs to address. If it is only educating the wealthy upper class, there is not going to be a lot of will to put money into that kind of public institution. Complaints about deportations are just the beginning of Ms. Napolitano's challenges. For years, the state has put less and less money into the university system, reducing the state's contribution to levels not seen since the Great Depression - forcing the system to increasingly rely on tuition, government research grants and private dollars, even as it reduced the number of courses offered and cut back on library hours. In many ways, Ms. Napolitano's primary job is convincing people who will never set foot on a University of California campus that the system deserves their tax dollars. She is not the sort of magnetic leader who wins over skeptics with charm. But what she lacks in charisma she makes up in dogged efforts, inviting some of her harshest critics to intimate meetings and quickly deciding whether their criticisms warrant action. She travels with a beefy security detail provided by the university. At 56, she has never married and is a self-described wonkish workaholic, telling audiences that she takes home budgets to read in bed. That hard-nosed demeanor could make her the perfect match for Gov. Jerry Brown, who has become deeply involved in the university over the past year and is arguably the most important figure in its future. The governor, who served on the search committee that selected Ms. Napolitano, has insisted that a $140 million increase proposed in the governor's budget this year be tied to a tuition freeze and an improving graduation rate. Even as she continues to court the public, Ms. Napolitano's most pressing long-term task is to convince the governor and state legislators that the system both needs and deserves more money to regain its luster. "We need to make it clear that when we ask for something we're not just going with our hand out to be a supplicant, but we're saying this is an investment and here are all the many ways we are going to give you a return on that investment," Ms. Napolitano said in a recent interview. The days of just getting money are over. We have to be a place - and we are - that the state can turn to help solve its problems. To bolster her case, Ms. Napolitano is encouraging more work on sustainable energy, convinced that researchers across the system can help the state cut down on fuel costs and the system's environmental impact. She is explaining how medical research affects patients all over the world. And she is constantly explaining the way the state's economic success depends on the university. With the need for more money, the university system has increasingly relied on out-of-state and foreign students, who pay a far higher tuition rate. While such students still make up less than 10 percent of the overall enrollment, the reliance has fueled the widespread notion that local high school students are being squeezed out of the system. And many state and university leaders fret that Latinos continue to lag behind the numbers of whites and Asians enrolling in the system. While blacks and Latinos make up more than half the graduating high school seniors in California, they account for less than a third of the university system's freshman class. A video by a U.C.L.A. student lamenting the low number of black males who graduate there each year has garnered attention, illustrating the need for Ms. Napolitano and other top officials to sell the system to the public. These days, Ms. Napolitano speaks about financial aid any time she has an audience. In courting Latino leaders both on and off campuses, she has implicitly acknowledged the importance of having their support and of changing the topic from deportation to education. "At some point, I hope the protesters evolve and realize that it is not going to foster immigration reform in this country," Ms. Napolitano said in an interview. But I am the one with the ability to foster a thriving education system for them, and they're not inhibiting my ability to get at it.