Watch the Regents Meeting of Nov. 16, 2021

The Regents met yesterday, the first day of their November meetings, in hybrid format at UC-San Francisco. Some were in-person; others were on Zoom. Those who were in-person were largely unmasked despite the fact that the meeting was indoors. Staff people in the background were masked. Although public commenters could have appeared in person, in fact they used the phone option.

In the public comments period, there were statements on nonunion staff pay, nurse staffing, labor relations, contracting out, and the Hawaiian telescope.

The Investments Committee reviewed returns for the various university funds, including the pension. Basically, markets were flat in the third quarter of 2022 after large increases in the prior three quarters. CIO Jagdeep Baccher questioned the current strategy of picking real estate investments noting that an index fund would have produced better results. He toyed with the idea of focusing on real estate in the vicinity of UC campuses to aid in providing student housing and lab space. (It was not clear how this idea would work in practice.)

The National Labs committee looked at the Southern California Hub, an initiative to involve the campuses in southern California with the three Dept. of Energy labs. UC-Irvine was chosen to the be the center of the Hub.

As always, we preserve the recording of the meeting indefinitely since the Regents delete their recordings after one year, for no obvious reason. You can watch the meetings described above at:

https://archive.org/details/regents-board-investments-national-laboratories-11-16-21.