Watch the Regents Meetings of Sept. 29, 2021

We are catching up with the Regents meetings of earlier this week. As always, this blog preserves the recordings of the Regents meetings indefinitely since the Regents - for reasons unknown - retain them for only one year. The Wednesday meetings began with the full board and public comments dealing with Peoples Park, Santa Cruz housing, child sexual abuse, undergraduate enrollment, nurse staffing, union issues, work-at-home options for staff, campus reopenings, entrepreneurship, and lecturers' contracts and negotiations. The Daily Cal summarizes the subsequent deliberations:

The UC Board of Regents’ Financial and Capital Strategies Committee recommended approval for a student housing project located on People’s Park during its meeting Wednesday. The proposed high-rise building would provide 1,100 beds for UC Berkeley students, [and] ...is proposed amid a housing crisis that made UC Berkeley deny 5,000 continuing students campus housing this fall, according to UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ... [The] campus would only proceed with construction once it has a plan to ensure access to shelter and services for the 40 to 50 homeless people residing in People’s Park, according to Christ. Though the project has been met by student and community protests for years, according to Christ, the project has the support of the site’s neighbors, a majority of UC Berkeley students and local elected officials, including Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín...

Regents in the Academic and Student Affairs Committee were then provided with updates regarding student basic needs on campus, diversity efforts across campuses and state funding allocations. Yvette Gullatt, graduate, undergraduate and equity affairs vice president for the UC Office of the President, or UCOP, noted four areas of slow growth in regard to campus diversity, including low yield rates for African American and Native American students, lower numbers of women in some STEM fields and the lack of diversity in senior management. Regent Lark Park noted the low percentage of Black students who said they felt like they belonged and were respected on campus...

The Public Engagement and Development Committee opened with Sen. Robert Hertzberg commending the UC’s employment policies during the pandemic. UC Cooperative Extension forester Ryan Tompkins added that California’s forests are denser, younger and more homogenous than in previous years, making them more vulnerable to “uncharacteristic, high-severity” wildfires. Tompkins suggested using prescribed burns to better manage fire risks around susceptible communities and introducing wildfire preparedness curriculums to residents.

During the Governance Committee meeting, an incentive award for $1,384,416 to Jagdeep Singh Baccher, UCOP chief investment officer and vice president of investments, was approved, as well as the appointment and compensation for Katherine Yelick as UC Berkeley vice chancellor for research. An item recommending an amendment to the policy on public access was also approved by the Governance Committee. The amendment suggested permanently allowing participants to call in — a measure put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic — in addition to extending the public comment time from 20 minutes to 30 minutes per day...

Full article at https://www.dailycal.org/2021/09/30/uc-regents-committee-recommends-approval-for-student-housing-on-peoples-park/.

Links to the various sessions are listed below:

Morning Sessions: Sept. 29, 2021

https://archive.org/details/regents-academic-and-student-affairs-9-29-21/Regents-Board+9-29-21.mp4

Full Board: https://archive.org/details/regents-academic-and-student-affairs-9-29-21/Regents-Board+9-29-21.mp4

Academic and Student Affairs: https://archive.org/details/regents-academic-and-student-affairs-9-29-21/Regents-Academic+and+Student+Affairs+9-29-21.mp4

Finance and Capital Strategies: https://archive.org/details/regents-academic-and-student-affairs-9-29-21/Regents-Finance+and+Capital+Strategies+9-29-21.mp4

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Afternoon Sessions: Sept. 29, 2021

https://archive.org/details/regents-public-engagement-and-development-committee-9-29-21

Public Engagement and Development: https://archive.org/details/regents-public-engagement-and-development-committee-9-29-21/Regents-Public+Engagement+and+Development+Committee+9-29-21.mp4

Governance: https://archive.org/details/regents-public-engagement-and-development-committee-9-29-21/Regents-Governance+Committee+9-29-21.mp4