UCLA Faculty Association: Watch the Third-Day Regents Meeting of January 19, 2023

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Watch the Third-Day Regents Meeting of January 19, 2023

We conclude our series on the Regents meetings of last week with a review of the concluding Thursday sessions. Links to the videos are provided below. As always, we preserve the recordings indefinitely since the Regents - for no apparent reason - delete them after one year.

The full Board met twice on Thursday. Its morning session began with public comments covering the Hawaiian telescope, DACA and undocumented student hiring by UC, treatment of rape test kits, retention pay, military divestment, Blackrock (as opposed to Blackstone), climate change, the governor's proposed delay of the Berkeley clean energy project, voter turnout, and abortion. In subsequent comments, the graduate student representative took note of concerns expressed in an earlier meeting by the faculty representative on the model for funding PhD students, given the cost increases in the student-worker strike settlement. Concerns were also expressed about the requirement that student workers attest to having worked, or not, during the strike. (The university's payroll system apparently paid most of the workers during the strike; attesting to having struck and not worked would presumably lead to a requirement to pay back such compensation.)

The Finance and Capital Strategies committee discussed the backlog of building maintenance including seismic upgrades. Regent Leib suggested that when donors give money for new buildings, the donations should include funds for maintenance. However, the chancellor of UC-San Diego commented that donors often don't pay the full cost of construction to get their names on buildings. They might pay, say, $50 million of a $200 million building. So saying they should add more funds for maintenance is not practical.

Nathan Brostrom noted that with more employees working from home for some of the workweek, less office space was needed. Campuses are not renewing some off-campus leases on office space. He also noted that the governor's January budget proposal delayed some capital projects including the above-mentioned Berkeley clean energy facility and certain student housing. There will be advocacy in the legislature about UC capital projects, perhaps connected to bond financing.

At the Academic and Student Affairs committee, various professional school programs were discussed including journalism and public health. Increases in professional school tuition were approved. There was discussion of student-athletes as an aftermath of the UCLA-Big Ten move. Regent Park noted that at the March meetings Regent Leib would be officially announcing creation of the subcommittee on student-athletes.

It was also reported that campus centers for students with disabilities were having a hard time recruiting sufficient staff. The pandemic delayed progress on a planned report on disability accommodation. Various Regents complained that the report they were given for this meeting was superficial. Finally, there was discussion of transfers from community colleges. In particular, there were concerns about community colleges with poor records of sending transfers to UC and outreach to those colleges. Regent Cohen indicated that CSU has a better system for transfers than UC and expressed the view that UC had dragged its feet in setting up a system. He advocated using the CSU system and didn't accept the view that transfers to UC were more complicated than to CSU.

The full Board came back into session and accepted the reports and recommendations of the various committees. It then went into closed session and dismissed a tenured faculty member for what news reports described as sexual misconduct.

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