How to Contact the Regents by Email

From Charlie Schwartz's University Probe, an email thread on bureaucratic impunity and the UC regents:

On the official web site of the Regents of the University of California it says, “If you would like to email the Regents, please address your comments to Regents Office (regentsoffice@ucop.edu).” Alternatively, you can find that Marsha Kelman is the Secretary and Chief of Staff to The Regents and her email address is marsha.kelman@ucop.edu.

Here is my recent experience with that channel of communication.

- - - - - - - - - -
9/16/2011
Marsha Kelman
Secretary and Chief of Staff to The Regents

Dear Marsha;

Please forward the attached letter (via email, so as to retain
electronic links therein) to each member of the Board of Regents.

Thank you,
Charlie

- - - - - - - - - -
11/3/11
Marsha Kelman
Secretary and Chief of Staff to The Regents
UC Office of the President

Dear Marsha;

... On September 16 I sent you some material... which I asked to be distributed to the regents. Was that distribution carried out? And if so, in what manner?

Thank you,
Charles Schwartz

Professor Emeritus
UC Berkeley

- - - - - - - - - -
11/9/11

Professor Schwartz,

... We have not located the email you sent on September 16. If you will send it again, I’m happy to make it available to the Regents through our normal correspondence process.

Marsha

- - - - - - - - - -
11/9/11

Marsha;

Here is the email I sent you on September 16. Please acknowledge immediately that you have received this.

I cannot imagine how the original email did not reach you.

Charlie

- - - - - - - - - -
11/9/11
Charlie,

I have received your email with the attachment.

Marsha

- - - - - - - - - -
11/10/11

Marsha;

My original request was that you forward my letter (which was the attachment) to each regent by email. Will this be done? When?

Charlie

- - - - - - - - - -
11/10/11

Charlie,

Our process is the same one we’ve had in place for many years. We list the
correspondence we have received and ask the Regents what they would like copies of for review...

Marsha

- - - - - - - - - -
11/10/11

Marsha;

Thank you for FINALLY acknowledging what I had feared: That it is almost impossible for an ordinary person to communicate with members of the Board!

Charlie

Keep Calm and Study On

If Yudof thinks of us as corpses, Katehi wants to see us as cows. "Keep calm and study on."

(via fb)

From "Pepper spray nation"

Original post by Paul Rosenberg here.

"Behind the headline-grabbing brutality of the pepper-spray video lies a decades-long story of the gradual privatisation of California's public college and university system - even as resources shifted to building a massive prison system instead. On the one hand, students face skyrocketing tuition costs - up more than 1,000 per cent in just over two decades, if current plans go forward - while tax increases on the wealthy are anathema.

[...]

Exhibit A on the latter point is UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, on whose orders the riot police were deployed. Katehi is both a member of the 1% and an overt supporter of police repression on campus. Although she has tried to disavow any responsibility for the pepper spraying of students, it has quickly emerged that she was a co-author of a report used to justify the recent repeal of a 1974 law, banning the police from Greek universities. That law was passed following the overthrow of a military junta. The repeal came just in time, earlier this year, to help suppress Greek protests against the imposition of harsh austerity measures.

As for her economic status, Katehi was hired in 2009 at $400,000 per year plus substantial benefits. That's the same base pay as the American President, and well more than double the pay of California's governor, who makes less than $175,000. Katehi holds numerous patents and her husband also teaches at UC Davis - more than enough to place her solidly in the 1%. Her salary represented a massive 27 per cent increase over the pay for the previous chancellor - the very same year that student fees were being hiked by 32 per cent, while classes were being cut. The reasoning was... well, it's not reasoning, really. It's just how things are done within the 1% - a procedure based on comparing pay for the heads of various different colleges, public and private, including Johns Hopkins, Yale and the University of Chicago.

[...]

Now UC Davis is a very good school, but even UC Berkeley isn't Yale. It's not so much a question of educational quality - it's a question of founding mission and purpose... which are not very well served by the sorts of people sitting on the Board of Regents, none of whom has a distinctive educational background. The UC system is part of a three-tiered college system - universities, state colleges and community colleges - that according to California's 1960 Education Master Plan is supposed to provide affordable higher education to every high school graduate in the state who wants a public college education. Indeed, technically, it's supposed to be tuition-free. But student "fees" now make a mockery of that. The 32 per cent fee increase mentioned above was just a tiny fraction of the enormous fee increases since 1992 - roughly 1/16 of the 534 per cent total increase in dollars through 2009 - or 1/10 of the total when adjusted for inflation. It's now even higher, and current plans would jack that increase up to more than 1,200 per cent over 1992 levels in just the next few years.

Fee hikes haven't been smooth. They've skyrocketed in stages as public funding from California's state budget has plunged in a series of successive budget crises. But the dynamics are more complicated than first meets the eye, as UC Santa Cruz politics professor Bob Meister explained back in 2009. There are actually incentives for university officials to welcome state budget cuts, explained Meister, President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations. State budget money comes with strings attached, prioritising education. But money from student, ironically, has no such restrictions, and hence is perfect for empire-building, he explained.

"How does UC sell $1.3bn in construction bonds immediately after declaring an 'extreme financial emergency,' slashing funds for teaching and research and cutting staff and faculty pay? By using your tuition as collateral," Meister wrote online at KeepCaliforniasPromise.org. "Higher tuition lets UC borrow more for construction even while it cuts instruction and research." And this is only the beginning, he explained.

"UC's most recent (post-"emergency") construction bonds are just the beginning of a long-term (10-15 year) plan to borrow very much more against very much higher tuition in order to fund individual projects that no longer have to be approved by the state or paid for out of each project's own revenue."

In short, rather than the university existing to serve the students, it's the other way round. From the Board of Regents' point of view, the students are - above all else - a revenue stream to secure Wall Street funding. Hardly a surprise, really, when you consider the makeup of the Board."

This is What the Privatization of Education Looks Like

Santiago, Chile -- A riot cop punches a student protester in the face on September 29, 2011.

New Protest Guidelines From UCR

["This sign is larger than 30" x 30," you're under arrest"]

New UC Riverside Protest Guidelines:

- Protest must be planned a month+ ahead, and communicated to admin
- An admin representative must be present
- Admin must approve march routes, chalking messages
- All protest must be sponsored by a department or registered organization
- No signs on sticks

Just in time for a Regents meeting at UCR on January 18.

Meet the Snakes

Calls for the resignation of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi have come from the Occupy Davis GA, the online petition which currently has over 110,000 signatures, and numerous academic departments on campus. The English Department has called for not only Katehi's resignation but also, in the interest of student health and safety, the disbanding of UCPD. But some faculty, it seems, are privileged enough to feel differently. They signed a nauseatingly disingenuous letter of support for Chancellor Katehi:

We, the undersigned UC Davis faculty, support the free exchange of ideas on campus and students’ right to peaceful protests. We are appalled by the events of Friday, Nov. 18, on the Quad, but heartened by the chancellor’s apology and her commitment to listen to and work on the students’ concerns.

We strongly believe that Linda Katehi is well-qualified to lead our university through this difficult healing process and oppose the premature calls for her resignation; this is not in the best interest of our university.

Who are these people? How could they be so ignorant about the history of police violence at UC Davis and across the UC system? A quick glance is all it takes to see that they overwhelmingly represent professional schools and the hard sciences, departments which tend to benefit most from the UC administration's privatization agenda. But a compañero went even further and compiled the following list: "Meet the Snakes: Salaries of Faculty who Support Katehi."

It's a long list so we're putting it below the fold, but we recommend taking a look. The bottom line, however, is this: the average salary of the signatories is $151,111.50.

Live blog of People's Police Review Board at UC Berkeley

Please join us at 60 Barrows Hall....

7:28: We're working on starting the meeting now.

7:32: Meeting has been convened, someone from copwatch is giving us a history of the police review board. "...in 1980s, ASUC voted for independent police review board, modeled on the former city of berkeley police review board. now, the copley decision limits the power of these boards. but because the chief of police sits on this board, it's not independent. this board only meets once a year -- it's not anything like the berkeley police review board. here is the process of the ucpd and the uc police review board: it takes months to get anything back...."

7:37: "...the UCB review board can't initiate investigations. they can't review UCPD polices. but there are a lot of policies and procedures that the UCPD uses that are seriously problematic, they can use choke holds (this hasn't been allowed at the city of berkeley for some time)..."

7:38: The student rep on the PRB, laying it down about the PRB (off record).

7:42: Voting on whether to stay in 60 Barrows.... Vote passes. We're staying.

7:50: Proposal for three investigations: of pepper spray use, november 9th, ucpd shooting on November 15.

7:52: Next proposal: we know that the police shouldn't investigate themselves. we need a separate process to investigate police. also, this PRB isn't effective. we should be making a board to look into PRB, and start investigating police policies.

7:54: Next proposal: investigate the investigation company (Kroll) charged (by Yudof) with investigating the police violence at ucd and ucb. william bratton, from the kroll security group, is the one charged with the investigation.

7:57: UCPD rep is telling us there will be a cop in the doorway till we're done.

8:01: Cop's here, being goofy. This is odd. Anyway.... getting back to the agenda.

8:02: Next proposal: Can we give concrete proposals for how cops should act, how they should be evaluated; would we recommend a 360 degree review process.

8:03: Next proposal: This body should put out reports regularly. There should be a way to hear complaints, and we should ask for complaints about recent months.

8:04: We should try to get similar boards going at other campuses, other places.

8:04: Proposal: That we investigate other events as well as Nov. 9.

8:05: Proposal: I think it would be awesome to actually gather the testimony and the evidence. That's easy. Also, I think we should draw up a list of folks who are credible and who have experience, professors and community-based people, students, etc. Also, the ASUC should make a way and a place for this independent body. If we do this, ppl would be amazed and shocked.

8:07: Proposal: I think we should also review the police review board.

8:09: Discussion of the PRB standards for Nov. 9 review: board will determine whether the violence exceeded campus norms, but we have to determine what those norms are... PRB can't accuse officers, just make recommendations to the admin about how the police can become more efficient. Please discuss what the standards of the PRB should be for this investigation.

8:16: The PRB is split. Most of them are for the police. The minority isn't listened to when we raise criticisms.

8:19: Proposal: Talk about how people who testify can be protected, especially journalists. Also, we should request that procedures of PRB and their investigation be open to the public.

8:20: Proposal: Approach CRP and Uncivil Procedure about how to coordinate the investigation.

8:22: We're moving toward self-organized committees: A group to constitute a space where people can bring complaints; a group to organize investigations...

8:24: Talking about proposals for how to create investigative bodies that are accountable to the general, people's police review board / general assembly

8:36: Proposal that we have stable standards and practices for the investigations.

8:40: Discussing when and where we'll have our next meeting.... Wednesday at 6pm, Sproul steps. Facilitation committee is at 5pm on Sproul steps.

9:05: We just decided to break into working groups (one for collecting testimony; one for organizing investigations)....

9:10: Gonna sign off for now. Come by next Wednesday, 6pm at Sproul if you want to get involved in the People's Police Review Board!

The Regency

Reposted from Zunguzungu.

Most of the Regents of the University of California — whose very name gives you a good idea of the kind of power they wield over the direction and functioning of the University of California – are unelected, appointed to 12 year terms by the governor of California, and almost without exception, they have no real background or apparent interest in education. They are corporate moguls, the 1%, whatever you want to call them.

On Monday, they defied California’s open meeting laws by sort-of teleconferencing from four different campuses, voting to raise various administrative salaries by about $3.5 million, including the UC Davis chief campus counsel. Perhaps they suspected he would be busy in the near future? But as many are pointing out, at a time of across-the-board-cutbacks in the work of teaching and being a university, to find raising executive salaries to be “essential” — as UC president Mark Yudof put it, “We consider these retention efforts to be essential. I understand it’s not a great time, but we can’t really close down shop and say we’re not going to make any effort to retain our best people” — tells you a lot about their priorities.

The students still came. And this is still a temporary victory for the student protesters. The regents are trying to work towards an 81% tuition hike, but student protesters threw a sufficient scare into them that they had to make up bullshit warnings of violence and hide behind telephones and police. I predict they’ll raise tuition dramatically this summer; SOP is do the dirty stuff during summer break (though, of course, winter break is around the corner too). Anyway, here’s a column of peace police at UCLA, for example, protecting the regents from students:

As a scathing editorial in the San Jose Mercury put it:

The phone-it-in session conducted in four locations was an abuse of the spirit, if not the letter, of state open-meeting laws. And for the premier public university system of the state that leads the world in technology, it was a logistical embarrassment…Public comments were heard in rotation from each site — but heard only. There was an audio connection but no video. Students couldn’t see most of the people they were addressing — indeed, had no way of knowing if anyone outside the immediate room was seriously listening to them and not rolling their eyes, checking email or whispering among themselves. It was a recipe for frustration, and predictably, it all boiled over.

Angry students shut down the meeting. In the attempt to calm things, the regents had managed to increase the tensions.

After a break, it got worse. At three of the venues, the session was moved to smaller rooms. At UCSF, there was little room for the public beyond the press.

We cannot recall another state agency holding a public meeting by teleconference. It’s within the letter of the open-meeting law that governs the regents meetings; the Bagley-Keene Act allows for teleconferencing — but this is not how it was intended to be used. The provision was included to accommodate a board member who could not physically attend a meeting. That wasn’t the issue here.

Perhaps we’re old-fashioned, but we still believe that in adversarial situations, it’s important to be able to look people in the eye when talking with or listening to them. It shows respect and fosters better communication. And at a public meeting, all members of the public should be able to not only listen to board members but also see them. All of them. While staff can efficiently conduct business by voice and video conferences, policymakers like the regents need to meet openly in front of the people they govern.

The Monday experiment turned into a farce. Participants at the four venues could not see each other, any more than residents across the state monitoring the disembodied voices on the Internet could see any of them. It was no way to do the public’s business, and it better not happen again.

It will though. This wasn’t a blip; this is what they always do, every time. They are waging a war on their students. When students and faculty and workers try to make their voices heard, they hide behind closed doors and police. So we should now turn to look at the regents themselves. Who are these people who are entrusted with total power over the UC system?

There are 26 of them; one student is appointed to the board by the board — for a one-year term — and then there are 7 ex officio members, the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the state assembly, state superintendent of public instruction, president and vice president of the UC Alumni association, and also the president of the UC (appointed by the regents), Mark Yudof himself.

The other 18 are appointed by the governor, as I said, to 12 year terms (5 by Gray Davis, the other 13 by Schwarzenegger). The best reporting on the UC Regents is Peter Byrne’s “Investor’s Club,” from which I’ve liberally poached a lot of details. But I’ve spent some time profiling the appointed regents more briefly, just so we can get a sense for their overall makeup.

Some, like Richard Blum, are almost caricatures of everything the Occupy Wall Street movement is opposed to: a hyper-connected investment banker (founder of Blum Capital) who sits on the boards of all sorts of corporate and nonprofit firms, is married to a powerful congresswoman, and functions as a living and breathing embodiment of the phrase “conflict of interest.” Blum takes center stage in Byrne’s reporting, here, for example. Or this, from Changing Universities.

One tidbit from Byrne’s reporting, though you should read the whole thing if you’re interested; Blum oversees investment for the UC’s $63 billion portfolio, and is also the largest shareholder in two for-profit corporate-run universities, which the UC invests in. As Peter Byrne puts it,

“Marketing strategy aside, Mr. Blum has taken on two seemingly disparate roles— one as an advocate for a nonprofit university, and the other as an owner of two for-profit educational corporations. As a regent, Mr. Blum has approved cost-cutting policies for UC that appear to have enhanced the profitability of his vocational schools. And in 2007, Mr. Blum’s spouse, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), wrote federal legislation that benefited the for-profit college industry. For several years, Mr. Blum’s firm, Blum Capital Partners, has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services.”

But Blum is just one, and it’s the whole 18 that we need to look at. So the first thing you notice, is that quite a few have close Schwarzenegger connections. Most prominently, Bonnie Reiss and Paul Wachter (who both work in finance) are two of Schwarzenegger’s closest associates and advisors for decades, his ”anchors, the people who were with him before politics and will be with him after.” George Kieffer was Maria Shriver’s attorney, co-chaired Schwarzenegger’s reelection committee, and recruited staff for his administration. And Charlene Zettel was a two-time member of the California state assembly, before Schwarzenegger appointed her as his Director of the Department of Consumer Affairs from 2004-2007 And it won’t surprise you to learn that most have donated to Schwarzenegger campaigns over the years; Hadi Makarechian, for example, was one of the top 50 contributors to Schwarzenegger’s reelection campaign (and was also national campaign finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential run); he’s a real estate developer (the founder, chairman, and CEO of Capital Pacific Holdings). He’s also Orange County aristocracy, his family the “closest thing Orange County has to the Rockefellers.”

Along with Reiss and Wachter, there are a lot of financiers. George M. Marcus is the founder and chairman of The Marcus & Millichap Company, whose mission ”is to help our clients create and preserve wealth by providing the best real estate investment sales, financing, research and advisory services available.” Leslie Tang Schilling is an investment banker, the founder of Union Square Investments Company, and Russell Gould was a Senior VP at Wachovia and is still president of Gould Financial Consulting.

Odessa Johnson is the only regent who has anything like a real education profile, having been a community college dean for two decades. Others, like David Crane, have spent some time doing stuff that looks like education — he’s a “lecturer” at Stanford, for example – but he spent twenty four years as a partner at Babcock and Brown, an octopus of an investment firm specializing in structured finance and spends a lot of time talking about how terrible it is that public sector employees are allowed to be in unions. Or William De La Peña, whose official UC Regent bio describes him, at the very top, as a professor of ophthalmology. In reality, he the founder and director of “De La Peña Eye Clinics” while the fact that he’s the owner and CEO of WDLP Broadcasting Company, Llc. and used to own a soccer club in Los Angeles is obliquely acknowledge by the sentence: “Other business interests include the media and soccer.” As far as I can tell, the biography’s statement that he “is” a professor refers to a position he held for for six years in the 80′s, but to which he has not returned.

The chair of the board, Sherry Lansing was the CEO of Paramount Pictures, but more recently (vi ReclaimUC) she’s created a thing called the “Encore Career Institute,” which will help unemployed Baby Boomers “rewire instead of retire.” Courses will be designed by and taught through UCLA Extension — a certificate program which will cost between $5,000 and $10,000 — and will accomplish the goal of ”deliver[ing] some of the fantastic intellectual property that UC has” to students in the state and the world. (Also worth noting (and noted by Byrne), she’s on the board of directors of Qualcomm Inc– annual director’s fee of $135,000, plus stock options, of which she owns “more than $1 million” and which came to a direct payment of $485,252 in 2009 — and after Ms. Lansing joined the Qualcomm board, UC quadrupled its investment in Qualcomm).

And then there’s your general captains of industry. Eddie Island was a vice president at McDonnell-Douglas, which used to be a gigantic defense contractor until it merged with Boeing in 1997, and became a behemoth defense contractor. Norman Pattiz was the founder and Chairman of Westwood One, “America’s largest radio network and one of the world’s leading media companies.” Monica Lozano is the publisher and CEO of La Opinión Newspaper, which she inherited from her father (and which he inherited from his father), and she makes almost a half million a year for sitting on the boards of directors at Bank of America and Walt Disney. And Frederick Ruiz is retired from being the CEO and founder of Ruiz Foods, “America’s top frozen Mexican food manufacturer.”

Finally, there’s prominent lawyer Bruce Varner. When he was appointed to the regency, UC Riverside’s Chancellor said that “He will be an excellent ambassador to the Regents about the growth, vitality, and promise of the Inland Empire,” which is a quote I can’t particularly make sense of.

The most important thing is just to recognize that these are the (mostly) men who are entrusted with almost complete power over one of the most important and valuable public resources the state of California has, an institution of higher learning that was built by the state of California for the good of the state of California. But one particular reason all of this matters so much is that the greatest loss of revenue to the UC was not, in fact, from state budget cuts, but from investment losses (though the privatization of the university was well on its way even before the financial crisis). And as Peter Byrne shows in his massive series, the UC investment strategy was radically shifted in the early 2000′s away from safe and reliable (and more modest) methods of investing into (ultimately disastrous) modes of investing that caused the UC’s finances to drop like a stone when the bubble burst:

“[After 2003] regents Gerald Parsky, Richard C. Blum, and Paul Wachter—all financiers by trade—took control of UC’s investment strategy. Sitting on the board’s investment committee, the three men steered away from investing in more traditional instruments, such as blue-chip stocks and bonds, toward largely unregulated “alternative” investments, such as private equity and private real estate deals. According to UC internal reports, the dramatic investment change has led to an “overweighting” of investments in private equity. One concerned regent has likened the change to “gambling in Las Vegas.” [that's George Marcus, by the way, who objected to investing pension fund money in that way, to his credit (and to the discredit of the other regents who disagreed)]

This is important, because — as Bob Samuels pointed out a year ago, the UC’s funding shortfalls owe much more to investment losses than to state cutbacks:

…UC administration has argued that since the state reduced university funding by a combined $600 million in 2008 and 2009 (after we account for $718 million in federal recovery money), the system had to raise fees 41%, furlough employees, and layoff teachers. However, during this same time period, the UC lost over $23 billion in its investments.

This means that the investment losses were more than forty times greater than the state reductions, but the university administrators never talk about these huge investment losses. In fact, at the last UC Regents meeting, after I brought up the lack of discussion concerning the UC’s investment losses, the head regent, Russell Gould, exclaimed that, “Our investments have outperformed our peers in the last twenty years.” Not only was this statement incorrect, but it shows how the people overseeing the university do not want to deal with the real issues. Rather than looking at their own internal problems, the UC administration’s central strategy is to blame all problems on the state.