March 2011 UC Regents Meeting
The UC Regents will meet Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week at the Community Center, UC San Francisco Mission Bay. For directions to the meeting and a link to the meeting’s live Webcast of the meeting, go to the UC Regents Web site (or click here).
The meeting falls during the spring break of UC Berkeley, the UC campus closest to the location of the meeting other than UCSF itself. (Most other UC campuses are in session right now.) As a result, a large number of students and other members of the UC community who would otherwise attend the meeting will be out of the area. At the last meeting of the Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future, Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz questioned whether this week was the most ideal time to have a meeting. UC Student Association board member Ricardo Gomez raised the same concern in the March 18 Daily Californian article previewing the meeting.
The Daily Cal article states that the meeting will focus on promoting diversity in the UC system in light of recent controversial incidents at UC Davis and UC San Diego:
Last month, the UCSD administration faced backlash following an off-campus “Compton Cookout” party and the discovery of a noose in a campus library. At UC Davis, derogatory graffiti was sprayed on the campus Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center and cotton was placed in front of the campus’s Black Culture Center.
The meeting agenda also mentions an incident at UC Irvine, in which a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. was interrupted by students.
The Wednesday and Thursday portions of the UC Regents Meeting both start with a public comment period at 8:30 a.m. On Tuesday and Thursday, all committee meetings are open sessions, meaning the public may attend those sessions. On Wednesday, all the morning sessions are open, then about three hours worth of sessions are closed in the afternoon, and the last session of that day– a meeting of the Committee on Investments– will be open.
The topic of UC investments is very controversial, especially concerning UC pensions and the UC’s bond-selling practices. UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister (political science) wrote a paper claiming that the UC uses student fees as collateral for bonds, meaning that fee increases, which are increases in collateral, improve the bond rating of the UC. The placement of the last open session on Wednesday raises similar concerns about scheduling as having the meetings during Berkeley’s spring break does. The fact that a single open session– especially one that may be very controversial– is placed after hours of closed and Regents-only sessions makes me wonder by what method each day of the UC Regents Meeting is planned. I would think that hours of closed session would cause a lot of people to leave UCSF, at least while the closed sessions are going on. Also, since a session can start as soon as the one before it ends, this last session could start at a wide range of times. I want to emphasize though that I really don’t know how UC Regents meetings are planned and the UC Regents may well have to discuss certain content before the Committee on Investments can meet Wednesday. Still, I think the question about method of scheduling is worth posing.
I plan to go to the Wednesday portion of the meetings and will try to blog live, provided I can get onto the internet. The agenda for the meeting can be found here. Click on each committee meeting to see its action items, which can each be clicked on as well to find out more about each one.
[...] the rest here: March 2011 UC Regents Meeting « caledinsider.org: The Budget … By admin | category: Davis | tags: also-mentions, brigham, campus, Davis, [...]
[...] the UC Berkeley Daily Californian can be found here, and another writeup with a bunch of links is here. UC Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng has put together a briefing on the meeting’s agenda, [...]
RALLY TODAY 11 AM
For Immediate Release Contact: Gina Szeto, (415) 532-6946, mohdahmsum@gmail.com March 22, 2010 Gabi Kirk, (408) 966-3773, gabikirk@gmail.com
***Press Release***
STUDENTS AND WORKERS PROTEST UC REGENTS MEETING Students and Workers tell UC Regents not to privatize our schools and demand that the Regents keep fee levels constant and fee processes transparent
Protest and Rally Tuesday, March 23rd @ 11 am. 1675 Owens St. Community Center, UCSF Mission Bay Campus
On Tuesday, March 23, students from across the UC system will protest the UC Regents meeting and their proposal to rewrite the UC’s fee policies with little to no public input. Currently, a student can reasonably expect that the fee levels when one enters school will stay consistent throughout one’s education. However, the new policy would give the Board of Regents the right to “establish fees at any level it deems appropriate” (UC Regent Live blog, 3/20/10)
This new policy will have disastrous implications for the future accessibility of the UC system. There is no transparency for the process of raising fees, so how can one know that a level the Board “deems appropriate” is fair for a public school? Thousands of lower and middle-class students, already worried about how to pay for the UC after recent fee hikes, now have no peace of mind that they can get through years of college without mounting ever-increasing debt. In an economic recession, this new policy is not only unwise, it is downright cruel.
We join the tens of thousands of other students across the state in protesting tuition and fee hikes, campus worker furloughs and layoffs, and other indicators of our state’s abandonment of its citizens’ education and prosperity. We are distressed by what the privatization of California public education means for continued access to our schools, and other public campuses, by students from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The shell game of decreasing investment in public education to remedy other areas of budget shortfall will, for the time being, relieve some pressure from the state’s coffers. But what will happen over the course of the next decade and beyond? Are we creating a “lost generation” of would-be students who will scale back their ambitions of applying to and enrolling in a UC because of the (justifiable) perception that our leaders have turned their backs on our youth? Will we see a revival of the legal profession’s status quo—white, affluent associates—and a rapid decline in graduates going into public interest and government work, since anything less than a six-figure salary will make school debt simply unmanageable? For these reasons, we raise our voices alongside those of our fellow students across the state.