UC Regents

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Listen to the University of California Regents, Afternoon, 9-18-2013, 2nd Part

Byuclafaculty

The audio for the Regents session of the afternoon of 9-18-13 through the meeting of the Committee on Finance has previously been posted.  The primary remaining business was discussion of selection of an outside auditor that turned out to be KPMG.  Beyond that, recommendations of the various committees were ratified by the full board.    Since the Thursday Regents schedule was in fact a tour of the Lawrence Livermore Lab, there is no audio for that date. A link to the audio described above can be found below:

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Now Some Students Can Be His Guest at a Brown Bag Lunch

Byuclafaculty

Be my guest! Or is it a Brown (pause) bag-lunch? In an earlier post on the Regents meeting, we mentioned the new “crowdsourcing” UC fundraising effort.  Now some students can be guests of the governor: University of California regents spent much of Wednesday morning cheering a new fundraising initiative to encourage faculty, students and other people to raise money through their social networks for students who demonstrate financial need.  Gov. Jerry Brown, who sits on the UC board and is attending its meeting in San Francisco, pledged to raise $10,000.  If successful, the Democratic governor promises to “host a ‘brown…

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Listen to First Segment of Afternoon Session of UC Regents: 9-18-2013

Byuclafaculty

Summary: The afternoon session began with a presentation by the new president of the UC Students Assn.  He described a program to find jobs for graduate students whose careers are currently limited by the loose labor market.  He described a program focused on prisons vs. UC, the details of which were not clear.  He favored an oil severance tax and also divestment from fossil fuels.  (Some listeners might find those causes somewhat in conflict; depends on how you look at them.)    Much of the afternoon was then spent on budgetary issues.  Charts were shown indicating the volatility in tuition…

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Listen to the Morning Session of the Regents: 9-18-2013

Byuclafaculty

Summary: After a series of closed meetings, the Regents – including Gov. Jerry Brown – had a public comment session.  A rep from a union of residents complained that UC-irvine was not recognizing their organization.  A student suggested that the Regents should have a Facebook page.  Concerns were expressed about tuition increases.  There were complaints about high out-of-state tuition.  The students who complained the day before that they could not get an appointment with incoming UC president Napolitano reported that they now had an appointment.   There were requests for the Regents to meet in southern California.  A group of students…

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Listen to the Second Half of the Regents Meeting of 9-17-2013

Byuclafaculty

Our earlier post had the Regents audio for the first part of the meeting of 9-17-13.  There was then a closed session.  The audio link below picks up the meeting again when the public component resumed.  We also noted in the previous post that there was a inadvertent hot mike at the beginning of the meeting in a supposedly closed session which transmitted sensitive material online.  We have not archived that portion.  However, when the meeting reopened in a public session, apparently some Regents were not sensitive to what was going out.  The audio begins with one Regent telling another…

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Listen to the First Part of the Regents Meeting of 9-17-2013

Byuclafaculty

But before you listen, note that we have been archiving Regents audios because of regental policy not to archive them for more than one year.  Today, there was a bit of a mishap in the handling of the Regents live stream.  As a result, yours truly sent the email below to an official in the Regents’ office: As you may know, the UCLA Faculty Assn. posts the audios of regents meetings online since it is apparently regents policy not to archive the recordings for more than one year online.  As a result, I turned on my recorder at 1 pm…

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Department of Bad Timing

Byuclafaculty

On Thursday, the Regents meeting seems to consist of a PR tour of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab as part of a more general review of the different Dept. of Energy labs that continues from the last meeting [http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/jul13/o1.pdf]. As the screenshot above suggests, however, the timing is not so good for discussing the labs, at least for cousin lab, Lawrence Berkeley. [Three labs are managed by UC as descendants of the World War II Manhattan Project.]  From the website yesterday of the San Francisco Chronicle: After years of planning, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has just lost out on a…

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Mansion Awaits

Byuclafaculty

From the LA Times:Blake House, the Northern California mansion that is intended to be the official residence of the UC system president, may be coming back to life. Because of its rundown condition, UC executives in 2008 stopped living in the Mediterranean-style mansion in the unincorporated Contra Costa County neighborhood of Kensington. With a financial crisis for the university at the time, nothing much was done to fix up the 13,200-square-foot house, which is surrounded by 10 acres of gardens. Next week, however, the UC regents are expected to consider a plan that could start the ball rolling for a major…

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The Regents are Coming! The Regents are Coming! (Next week to UC-SF)

Byuclafaculty

The Regents are meeting next week: Sept. 17-19.  The basic agenda is below.  The major capital project this time from UCLA is a $70 million “Phase 2” engineering building opposite the now-under-construction Grand Hotel.  It appears that one thing leads to another.  From the online documentation for Sept. 17, we learn that “Phase 1 is already under construction; without Phase 2, the site would be underutilized.”   Source: http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/sept13/gb5.pdf.  As we have noted many times before, the Regents never, in the end, turn down a campus capital project.  And the Regents have no independent capacity to examine the case for the…

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Five Seats in Search of a Regent

Byuclafaculty

The LA Times is carrying a story about Governor Brown’s seeming reluctance to fill five empty seats on the UC Board of Regents.  Speculation appears in the article about the motive.  A gubernatorial spokesperson says there is no motive.  But there could be an agenda.  The governor has been attending Regents meetings as an ex officio Regent and has noted that he is technically the president of the Board.  He has been pushing for online ed and performance standards.  (He line-item vetoed a mandate for UC he himself had inserted in the latest state budget on the promise that UC…