Watch the Regents Meeting of 7-20-2023

We are jumping ahead in our coverage of the Regents meetings of Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday. We previously covered Tuesday.* Yesterday, we posted a brief excerpt of yours truly during the Thursday meeting phoning in a public comment regarding improper cancellation of UC retiree-survivor health insurance.** We will cover the morning and afternoon sessions of the Wednesday meetings in a later post. 

There was something of a mystery at the beginning of the Thursday session. It was supposed to start with a closed full board session and then open up for public comments around 10 am. But in fact, the Regents stayed closed until around 11:30 am, apparently leaving those folks who wanted to comment in-person out in the hot sun, When the meeting finally opened, chair Leib apologized profusely for the delay saying some kind of "emergency" caused the delay. There was no hint as to the nature of the emergency. The Regents then passed a resolution saying that in the future when meetings began with a closed session, public comments would always be taken first.

Because of the delay, significant business was postponed to the next regular Regents meetings in September. (There will be an off-cycle meeting of the Health Services committee in August.) Apart from the public comments, the remainder of the session was largely devoted to ceremonial purposes such as handing out award and rubber-stamping the recommendations passed by the various committees that had met earlier on Wednesday. 

Public comments dealt with the hotel strike in which UC has indirect investment via the ever-controversial Blackstone, the hiring of UC of undocumented students (under study), affordable housing for students, the Hawaiian telescope, the Phillipines and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and - of course - yours truly on improper survivor cancellations.

One of the student speakers during the ceremonial portion referred to the aftermath of the UC-San Diego student-worker strike in which arrests were made. (See earlier posts on this blog.) We noted in a prior post that some kind of search warrant appeared to have been issued.*** It was said that laptops had been confiscated. Details were not provided. 

As always, we preserve recordings of Regents meetings since the Regents have no specific policy on length of retention. You can find the Thursday meeting recording at:

https://archive.org/details/regents-board-governance-7-20-2023/Regents+Comment+-+stop+survivor+health+cancellation+7-20-2023.mp4.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/watch-regents-committee-on-innovation.html.

**https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/ucop-needs-to-make-call-to-protect_20.html. 

***https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/problematic-search.html.