Watch the Regents Meeting of Sept. 9, 2021

The Regents had an off-cycle meeting yesterday. Usually, such meeting are those of particular committees, often Health Services. In pre-pandemic times, however, the Regents used to go on a retreat to discuss Big Issues. Given the pandemic and the Zoom format, the September 9th meeting was essentially a retreat, and the main discussion was closed to the public.

What was public? There were public comments, as always. Most of those comments related to labor relations issues, both for union and nonunion employees. There was also a comment about the attempt by a community group to purchase the Crenshaw Mall in LA. (Exactly, what role the Regents or UC had in that matter was unclear.)

Thereafter, Regent Chair Estolano reviewed various contributions to UC on such issues as health, wildfires, etc. Her remarks were followed by UC President Drake who touched on such issues as the impact of the pandemic on UC Health, online education, admissions, diversity, etc. He also mentioned the data breach, cohort tuition, student aid, and climate change. UC would be expanding by 2030 by the equivalent of a new campus (as opposed to an actual new campus). 

There was no discussion of either presentation by the other regents in the open portion of the meeting.

As always, we preserve the recording of the meeting indefinitely since the Regents preserve it for only one year. You can see the open portion at https://archive.org/details/regents-board-9-2-21.