Watch the Regents Full Board Meeting of Feb. 14

Initially, a meeting of the Health Services Committee was scheduled for Feb. 14. But that meeting split into two: Health Services in the morning and a full board meeting in the afternoon, the latter to deal with an issue left over from January, a ban on fully-online undergraduate degree programs that had been proposed by the Academic Senate. Here we deal with the Board meeting. We will take up Health Services in a later post.

Essentially, with the push to create online courses, it became - or might become - possible for an undergraduate to enroll only in online courses and get a degree. The Senate viewed this development as a kind of accidental online program that hadn't been reviewed as such. It thus tried to implement a ban (with some wriggle room for deliberate creation of online programs.) The Regents - who had a more favorable view of potential online degree programs - intervened and put the item on its agenda.

The position of the Senate - expressed by faculty rep Steintrager - was that purely online education had drawbacks such as lower completion rates and accreditation issues. Students fully online would not benefit from such on-campus athletics, research opportunities, etc.

But sitting in the background is a task force of the UC president which is exploring the matter further. So, that opened the door to the argument for waiting for the task force report instead of an immediate ban.

Regent Pérez moved to approve the Senate's position but no Regent would second the motion so it died. Pérez's fear, expressed later, was that online ed would become the poor students' track, since not living on campus would likely reduce cost and debt. Lieutenant Governor Kounalakis tended to echo the concerns about a poor students' track. Provost Newman, in contrast, pushed the let's-wait-for-the-task-force approach. UC president Drake did not make detailed remarks but he clearly opposed the ban. Irvine chancellor Gillman said his business school faculty wanted to develop an online program but the proposed Senate ban halted the effort. Regent Park said a total ban was extreme and would limit innovation. In the end, the ban was rejected.

In addition, the Regents approved tuition increases for several professional programs.

As always, we preserve recording of Regents meetings since the Regents have no policy on duration of preservation. You can see the board session at:

https://ia601308.us.archive.org/9/items/health-services-committee_202402/Board.mp4.