Regents Go Off UCOP Script

Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 16, 2011

San Francisco — The University of California regents dodged a controversy Thursday by ignoring a proposal from UC President Mark Yudof that would have mandated annual tuition increases of 8 to 16 percent for the next four years. Instead, the regents turned their meeting at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus into a therapy session of sorts, gnashing their teeth about the steep drop in state funding – nearly $1 billion in the last two years – and debating whether they could get California corporations to kick in millions of dollars to UC. The regents also approved raises and incentive plans for 18 executives, with funding for all but one coming from private sources, such as hospital revenue.

…Negotiating with Sacramento is “a waste of our time,” said Regent Dick Blum. Instead, the regents should approach people “who actually can write a check,” he said. “Chevron, Apple, Cisco and Google – all these companies sitting on money they don’t know what to do with.” Regent David Crane picked up on the theme, urging colleagues to “start acting like you’re a private university. Get real – and don’t fool yourselves and think the Legislature will turn around, or you’ll be waiting for Godot,” he said, referring to the Samuel Beckett play in which the protagonists wait in vain.

…Chairwoman Sherry Lansing suggested they form subcommittees to tackle each approach. The bottom line, she said, is, “I don’t want to bring this (proposal) forward in November.” Later, UC Executive Vice President Nathan Brostrom, who helped craft the plan, said the idea (of tuition increases) was not quite dead…

Full article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2011/09/16/MNGI1L4J52.DTL

We will eventually have an audio of this meeting posted. We do have a recording of the script that was supposed to have been followed: