Of course they can, if there’s evidence that the employee did not do her job. In this case there is no such evidence, Katehi was an active and hard-working chancellor who also happened to make some awful decisions.
The salary structure for university administrators in California are subject to approval by the UC Board of Regents, who are responsible to the CA legislature. If you are a California resident and do not like the salary levels, take it up with your representatives. Meanwhile, note that Katehi’s salary was not out of line with that of other chief executives of comparable institutions, and well below that of chief executives of most other billion-dollar operations.
Drawing your pension is not “gaming the system”, the pension is part of the employment package so getting it is part of the deal. If you can get vested in the system at a high level of payout after just a few years of employment then that is certainly a problem, but it isn’t much different from the golden handshakes in the corporate world. Most of the 6-figure pensioins in California are for people who have worked in the system for 30-40 years, and 20,000 is not that large a number when compared to the 3.5 million Californians pulling a pension, and the reason that number is large is that California is a huge state offering many public services (such as schools) where people live a long time.
