No Discernable Qualifications

Our good friend, Instapundit, linked to an article by Peter Wood about Janet Napolitano being hired as the new head honcho of the University of California system, which means she's the boss at not 1, not 2, but upwards of 10 University of California campuses. Now, I suspect this is a bit like being hired as the President of the Federation of Planets: He or she is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the government, setting and coordinating foreign policy, and dealing with resource distribution issues.
The Federation President is also the commander-in-chief of all Starfleet University forces.

 That makes it sound like the role is a big deal, but in my memory of the show and movies, the President mostly spends a lot of time fretting while an intrepid, variously-rogue, group of Starfleet officers takes care of the actual problems. Which has no direct correlation but does make me wonder why the Presidents of each particular UC are paid so much.

Is this a President/Governor sort of situation? The President has a lot to do, or at least a lot he should be doing even if he spends much of his time looking annoyed and not doing things. The title of the article itself is "A Disastrous Choice." Which I don't have any quibbles with, except for the obvious hyperbole.

Napolitano is not going to cause California to break free from the continent, nor likely be the root cause for a plague of locust descending on the Central Valley. But, there's an argument for being a bad choice, probably lots of arguments.

 When Wood notes that she has "no discernible qualifications," however, I get to thinking the hyperbole is continuing.

 Now are they the best qualifications? Are they the most suitable for the present crises? Maybe not. But qualifications can in fact be discerned. She was governor of Arizona. She was in charge of Homeland Security. Two pretty big bureaucracies. Governor and Director are pretty important qualifications for managing a lot of different departments and a big budget and, possibly, the University forces. That's not why she was hired, though.

Why was she hired? What is she bringing to the table and why does it matter so much that they'd risk the clearly controversial choice (being that she has no background in Academia, and academics get feisty when someone moves in on their territory because there's a lot of jobs outside academia and only like five per year open up in academia).

I suspect there's a Federal funding interest here, but maybe the UC system is in fact planning to militarize and needed someone with civilian experience to lead the UC Junta. That may or may not be more disastrous than our present state government.