Watch the Regents Afternoon Meetings of May 17, 2023

We continue our review of last week's Regents meetings, this time with the afternoon of May 17. The open Governance Committee meeting for this afternoon segment was postponed until the next day.

At Finance and Capital Strategies, preliminary plan funding was approved for a lab/research facility at UC-Santa Cruz. The facility it will replace was said to fall short in its seismic rating but will continue to be used in the transition. Faculty housing was approved for UC-Irvine.

The UCOP budget for 2023-24, a total of $1.2 billion, was discussed along with the overall UC budget in the governor's May Revise. As some blog readers will recall, there was a period in which the legislature separately appropriated for UCOP. But currently, the UCOP budget is part of the overall appropriation and then worked out with the campuses regarding systemwide services. UCOP's budget is proposed to increase by 3.9% including (nonunion) staff pay increases of 4.6%. A $10 million increase is designated for "pension administration," said to be for a combination of computer-related costs and staffing. There were concerns expressed by Regent Chu about cybersecurity. On the more general UC budget, Regent Leib and others indicated a wish to be able to have involvement in budget priorities before this late date. It was noted that there may be some marginal additions to the budget from the legislature. The fact that some projects are to be debt-funded with debt service financed by the state was said to benefit UC because the debt service will be rolled into the core funding to which the governor's 5%/year is applied. Finally, Regent Cohen indicated that the issue of increased funding for disabled students - the subject of earlier public comments - will be taken up in July.

At Academic and Students Affairs, tuition, etc., reviews of various graduate programs were taken up with representatives of various programs. Berkeley Engineering was grilled about low female and underrepresented enrollments. Various outreach plans were put forward. On the other hand, Berkeley got approval of its new College of Data Science without controversy.

The process of transfers from community colleges to UC was discussed. As noted in a prior post, the governor's specific targeting of UCLA remains as part of the May Revise. Also discussed was a UC Extension program whereby college dropouts - now termed "stop-outs" - were enabled to complete the credits needed for their BA degrees. Finally, information was presented on the UC abroad programs which essentially died during the peak of the pandemic but have now recovered.

The overall link to the afternoon of May 17 can be found at:

https://archive.org/details/academic-and-student-affairs-committee-5-17-23-pm.

Finance and Capital Strategies is at:

https://ia802601.us.archive.org/8/items/academic-and-student-affairs-committee-5-17-23-pm/Finance%20and%20Capital%20Strategies%20Committee%205-17-23PM.mp4.

Academic and Student Affairs is at:

https://ia902601.us.archive.org/8/items/academic-and-student-affairs-committee-5-17-23-pm/Academic%20and%20Student%20Affairs%20Committee%205-17-23PM.mp4.