In Case You Were Curious (Or Maybe More Than You Needed to Know)

When former Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez takes his seat at the University of California Board of Regents meeting Wednesday, the newly-appointed regent will – for a couple of weeks until his legislative term expires – sit both as a lawmaker and a member of the UC board. The legality of the arrangement is counter intuitive. The state Constitution prohibits lawmakers from holding other non-elective state offices. But the University of California is a special entity, identified in the Constitution as a public trust. It is administered by a “corporation known as ‘The Regents of the University of California,’” and the UC system is largely insulated from legislative oversight. This degree of separation both allows Pérez to serve – courts going back more than 100 years have found regents are not public officers...

Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article4003502.html

As a prior blog post noted, we already know that Pérez - newly appointed by Gov. Brown - opposes the tuition/budget plan before the Regents.  To reinforce that opposition, he has a co-written op ed in the LA Times:

UC leaders tone-deaf in their reliance on tuition hikes

After years of cuts to higher education, recent state budgets have included a substantial reinvestment in public universities. But that increased funding has done little to cure the tone-deafness of the University of California's leaders. Their proposal for new tuition hikes would put the state's public universities, which have been a crucial steppingstone to higher earnings and fulfilling careers for millions of Californians, out of reach for too many families...

Full op ed at http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-perez-uc-tuition-20141119-story.html

Yours truly has to remark that the above op ed says essentially nothing.  Whatever you can say about the Regents, the "tone deaf" thing is totally absurd.  You would have to have an IQ less than 10 to not know that raising tuition will be unpopular and that the legislature and governor would be unhappy about the tuition-or-more-UC-funding-from-the-state plan.