Listen to the Morning Session of the Regents: July 29, 2020

I won't bother you with the technical problems that can arise in downloading Regents sessions, except to remind you that it takes time. Because of the way they are placed on YouTube, sometimes it involves real-time recording, i.e., each one hour of meeting time involves one hour of recording time. Sometimes it is possible to download directly and convert to audio.

In any case, we'll try to catch up with the Regents as best we can. And we note for the umpteenth time that if the Regents preserved their recordings indefinitely rather than only for one year, it would not be necessary to separately archive them.

The session on the morning of July 29th involved first the full board and then meetings of the Health Services Committee and the National Labs Committee. Public comments at the full board mirrored those of the day before in large part. They included labor relations issues, the UC Police Department, undocumented immigrant services, disabled student services, outsourcing, layoffs, intellectual property related to the coronavirus, abortion issues, nurse staffing, and the Hawaiian telescope.

The full board meeting itself featured remarks by board chair Pérez, UC prez Napolitano (giving her last report as prez), and the UC undergrad representative. Today (which was tomorrow then), there is due to be full board discussion of the Hawaiian telescope project. Pérez's remarks singled that item out and suggested that he favored cancelling the project. (That is, however, just the reading of yours truly; he didn't quite say so - and we will see today.)

At Health Services, Dr. Carrie Byington, Executive VP and head of UC Health, reported that UCLA and UC-San Diego would be involved in trials of the coronavirus vaccine being developed by the Moderna firm. However, she also said that she expected the virus problem to be with us until 2022 and suggested that plans for UC campus operations after this fall should be built on that expectation. She suggested in response to a question that winter in particular would be much the same as fall.

At National Labs, Regent Michael Cohen - who was budget director under Jerry Brown - expressed the view that fees for managing the labs received by UC should not be assumed to be available only for spending on the labs. Given the current distressed UC budget, Cohen indicated that the use of the fees should be part of general UC budget allocation discussions. He dissented, therefore, from the Committee's recommendation on the use of the fees.

You can hear the morning meeting at the link below:

or direct to:
https://archive.org/details/regents-7-29-20am.
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Note: A summary of the full day, not just the morning, is available from the Daily Cal at:
https://www.dailycal.org/2020/07/29/uc-board-of-regents-discusses-ucpd-chancellor-selection-process/. One thing to note is that the meeting ran overtime and two committee meetings were delayed until today. So today's session will be a lengthy meeting.