The University of California Board of Regents are holding a three-day meeting at UC San Francisco this week. The meeting starts this morning, and ends on Thursday.
A preview of the meeting from the UC Berkeley Daily Californian can be found here, and another writeup with a bunch of links is here. UC Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng has put together a briefing on the meeting’s agenda, and he’ll be liveblogging the meeting starting at 10:30 am Pacific Time today. If any news breaks, I’ll of course cover it here.
One item to watch is a proposed change in professional fee policy that the San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this month — a change which would drop the word “public” from the phrase “total in-state fees charged will be at or below the total tuition and/or fees charged by comparable degree programs at other comparable public institutions.” As I wrote at the time, this is an astoundingly ill-considered idea, from any number of perspectives.
So what’s the status of that proposal? It’s not clear. According to Jesse Cheng, there’s no reference to it in any of the meeting materials distributed so far — not in the publicly available agenda, and not in the documents distributed to the student regents.
There’s a similar item is on the agenda — a statement asserting the Regents’ power to set any student fee “at any level it deems appropriate” — but what happened to the amendment the Chronicle reported on remains a mystery.
When we get more, you’ll get more.
Update | A commenter has linked to a press release about a planned protest.

3 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 23, 2010 at 11:29 am
Some additional links related to the UC Regents meeting « caledinsider.org: The Budget Literacy Project
[…] fees, The Budget, UC Regents, University Finances — Tess Townsend @ 7:29 am A blog titled Student Activism has posted a link to a briefing on the meeting put together by UC Student Regent Designate Jesse […]
March 23, 2010 at 12:48 pm
GK
For Immediate Release Contact: Gina Szeto, (415) 532-6946, mohdahmsum@gmail.com March 22, 2010 Gabi Kirk, (408) 966-3773, gabikirk@gmail.com
***Press Release***
STUDENTS AND WORKERS PROTEST UC REGENTS MEETING Students and Workers tell UC Regents not to privatize our schools and demand that the Regents keep fee levels constant and fee processes transparent
Protest and Rally Tuesday, March 23rd @ 11 am. 1675 Owens St. Community Center, UCSF Mission Bay Campus
On Tuesday, March 23, students from across the UC system will protest the UC Regents meeting and their proposal to rewrite the UC’s fee policies with little to no public input. Currently, a student can reasonably expect that the fee levels when one enters school will stay consistent throughout one’s education. However, the new policy would give the Board of Regents the right to “establish fees at any level it deems appropriate” (UC Regent Live blog, 3/20/10)
This new policy will have disastrous implications for the future accessibility of the UC system. There is no transparency for the process of raising fees, so how can one know that a level the Board “deems appropriate” is fair for a public school? Thousands of lower and middle-class students, already worried about how to pay for the UC after recent fee hikes, now have no peace of mind that they can get through years of college without mounting ever-increasing debt. In an economic recession, this new policy is not only unwise, it is downright cruel.
We join the tens of thousands of other students across the state in protesting tuition and fee hikes, campus worker furloughs and layoffs, and other indicators of our state’s abandonment of its citizens’ education and prosperity. We are distressed by what the privatization of California public education means for continued access to our schools, and other public campuses, by students from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The shell game of decreasing investment in public education to remedy other areas of budget shortfall will, for the time being, relieve some pressure from the state’s coffers. But what will happen over the course of the next decade and beyond? Are we creating a “lost generation” of would-be students who will scale back their ambitions of applying to and enrolling in a UC because of the (justifiable) perception that our leaders have turned their backs on our youth? Will we see a revival of the legal profession’s status quo—white, affluent associates—and a rapid decline in graduates going into public interest and government work, since anything less than a six-figure salary will make school debt simply unmanageable? For these reasons, we raise our voices alongside those of our fellow students across the state.
March 24, 2010 at 1:38 pm
GK
Jesse Cheng, Student Regent designate, is doing a great live blog of all UC Regents meetings yesterday today & tomorrow.
http://ucregentlive.wordpress.com/