Students vs. Regents of University of California

The University of California's governing Regents' meeting this Monday was interrupted by protesting students against ever rising tuition and fees. 

The SFGate.com reported that 

Hundreds of students and faculty members chanted and shouted so loudly at a number of UC Board of Regents meetings Monday that the university officials had to move to different rooms to take up their business, including voting to ask the state for millions of dollars in new funding.

UC Berkeley social policy graduate student Megan Wachspress, 27, said the regents are part of the problem.
"We need to find a new way to pick regents," she said at the Mission Bay campus. "So many of them have conflicts of interest. They're on the boards of corporations. They belong to groups that oppose tax increases, and they keep raising the pay for top administrators."

Lawmakers have cut hundreds of millions of dollars from UC's state allocation over the past few years, including $650 million this year alone. Another $100 million could be cut this winter if state revenues fall short as expected.
At the same time, the regents have raised tuition and fees annually since 2006, when they totaled $8,323. Tuition and fees this year amount to $13,218.

UC President Mark Yudof said afterward in San Francisco that he sympathized with the protesters' plight.

"I wish they wouldn't interrupt a public meeting," he said, but added "the students have taken it on the chin for the past decade ... I definitely understand the students' position."

However, he and several regents said - reiterating what they have said before - students should direct their efforts to restore funding to higher education at state leadership in Sacramento rather than at UC's administrators.

It is understandable that UC's administrators were just as frustrated and upset as the student when the State has failed them repeatedly.

However, UC Regent's plea for the students to protest at the door step of the state legislators instead of their schools sounded rather like shrugging their collective shoulders.

The students live and study around their campuses and they should have the right to speak out and protest in their home turf.  It was the Regents who imposed the fee and tuition hikes, and they have the right to protest against the Regents.

In turn, if the Regents feel the urgency and the pain the students are suffering from, they ought to camping out in Sacramento themselves, and demand tax increase from the super rich, the rich and even the middle class to support our once great educational systems in California.  Our Regents ought to occupy Sacramento themselves.

Perhaps, Wachspress hit the nail on the head.  If our Regents could or would not fight to solve the problems, then they are part of the problems.  Then they ought to be replaced.

Linda Katehi (UC Davis Chancellor) and Administrative Costs at Public Universities

The police's dosing of pepper spray over peaceful protesting students last week had called attention once again to the chancellor of University of California, Davis (UC Davis), Linda Katehi, with many calls for her resignation from students, faculty and staff and alumni and others.

According to UC Davis's web site, that Chancellor Katehi, was hired in 2009.

As chancellor of UC Davis, Katehi will receive an annual salary of $400,000. This is a 12.4 percent increase above her current salary of $356,000 at the University of Illinois. Vanderhoef currently earns $315,000 as UC Davis chancellor.

UC seeks to be competitive in the employment markets relevant to its faculty and staff hires, and the base salary of $400,000 is still substantially below the 2008 median of $628,000 among chancellors at UC’s comparison group of 14 public and private U.S. campuses with medical schools.

Her $400,000 annual salary, approved by the UC Board of Regents, equated to a 27 percent hike from her predecessor and a 12.4 percent increase from her previous position at the University of Illinois.  That happened during the time when the funding to the University from the state had been cut year after year, after staff and faculty were forced to take unpaid furloughs, and endless tuition hikes threatened the quality of the university system.  It was an obscene amount of money thrown at a civil servant, a public university administrator. 

Considering the protest on UC Davis, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, was a rallying cry against greedy individuals and their enablers, and the institutions behind them, asserting the rights to an affordable good education, and taking back our country, our state and our public university, it is very pertinent that Chancellor Katehi be replaced by a dedicated, highly qualified administrator, who would not demand such an exorbitant salary.  Claiming it is impossible to find such candidate is not good enough.

University of California's present and regents must act.


Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis

Republicans Goal - Taxing the Poor To Fatten the Rich

Our country on all levels - federal, state, county and city - is in such dire financial state and it is inconceivable that the Republican leaders, particularly those with Tea Party bend, would choose to refuse to close tax loops (amounting to tax increase for the rich, according to their argument), while demanding steep cut for the middle class and the poor.  By their argument, that deep cut would amount to taxing the middle class and the poor.

There we go again, let's tax the have-nots so the have can have more.

This is beyond sickening.  Republicans have proofed that they are not fit to govern.  Whoever voted them into offices must answer for their own conscious.  This is a moral issue.  What the Republicans and Tea Party members demand - to balance the budget by taxing the middle class and the poor alone - is immoral.

This insistence of taxing the poor to fatten the rich affects people on multiple levels.  Take two great public institutions in California for example.  California State University (CS) just passed a 12% increase of tuition while in the same meeting the trustees also approved a salary for the incoming president of CSU's San Diego campus that's about $100,000 higher than his predecessor. San Francisco Chronicle reported that:

Despite Gov. Jerry Brown's urging them not to: "I fear your approach to compensation is setting a pattern for public service that we cannot afford," Brown wrote to Carter. "The assumption is that you cannot find a qualified man or woman to lead the university unless paid twice that of the chief justice of the United States. I reject that notion."

Elliot Hirshman, the new San Diego campus president, will earn $400,000 compared with $299,435 earned by his predecessor, Stephen Weber.

In voting for the raise, Carter said it was pointless to oppose it because Hirshman was promised that salary and has already begun working at the campus. Carter also appointed a panel to study how CSU selects and compensates its presidents.  

Well, may we ask who had promised his such salary?

A few days later, University of California (UC) approved a 9.6% increase of fees and tuition.  According to San Francisco Chronicle,

University of California regents voted Thursday to raise tuition by 9.6 percent - on top of an 8 percent increase already approved for this fall - over the objections of students who said they'll drown in debt.

At the same meeting in San Francisco, the regents also gave large pay raises to three executives, including two who are paid from state funds.

This fall, undergraduate tuition for California residents will rise to $12,192, more than 18 percent higher than last year's $10,302 - a level that prompted violent student protests. With a mandatory campus fee that averages $1,026, a year at UC now costs $13,218 before room and board.

That's more than twice what it cost in 2005. 

Again, while the UC system is becoming less competitive, UC approved big salary increases for three high-ranking executives:

Marye Anne Fox, chancellor of UC San Diego, said rising fees for graduate students make UC less competitive.

"We're starting to lose students," she told the regents.

Other chancellors reported cutting academic programs, losing faculty and raising class size.
The regents also gave raises to three executives.

Patrick Lenz, a UC system vice president, will earn a base salary of $300,000 from taxpayer funds, a $27,500 increase.

Santiago Muñoz, an associate vice president, got a 24.1 percent raise, from $201,400 to $250,000. Taxpayers pay 40 percent of his salary.

Mark Laret, who runs the UCSF Medical Center, will get a base salary of $935,000, a $195,300 raise, and a retention bonus of $1 million over four years. It's paid from medical center revenue. 

Again and again, this scenarios play out from east coast to the west cost, from Alaska to Florida.  More and more, many of the Republicans demand, Democrats demur, and the masses accept this unsustainable and unholy thinking that we can and ought to balance our budget, pay off our debt by squeezing the middle class and the poor, ever more tightly.

Again, we must remind people, that if the Republicans insists on any revenue growth is a tax increase, then any service spending cut is also a tax increase, only not on the rich, but on the poor.

Those Republicans ought be ashamed of themselves.  They also have no business of governing.

However, this is a country knows no shame and shaming them would not produce anything worthy.


Swamp © Matthew Felix Sun

What Good Does A Protest Do?

Last Thursday, March 3, 2011, a small group of students managed to sit on the ledge of Wheeler Hall at University of California, Berkeley to protest the rising tuition and other related issues.

According to San Francisco Chronicle,

Eight protesters who spent more than seven hours on a fourth-floor ledge at UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall returned to terra firm at 9:20 p.m., greeted by the enthusiastic cheers of a band of fervent supporters on the academic building's steps.

As part of the agreement for the activists to depart peacefully, university officials apparently have agreed to drop charges against several protesters for this and other demonstrations in the past year.

The resolution follows an often tense stand-off, with police in riot gear at one point clearing demonstrators away from a portion of Wheeler Hall's steps.

Wheeler Hall was closed for the rest of the day after the sit-in and there were at least three helicopters circling over Berkeley.



Next day, after the peaceful resolve, things seemed went back to normal, or usual.  Someone I know wondered philosophically: "What good does this protest do?"

This question has been repeated posed to activists of any convictions.  Last month, after the departure of Mubarak from Egyptian presidency, Berkeley resident and writer Steve Masover wrote an excellent blog, which can be a perfect answer to this musing:

Lessons from Egypt: demonstrations work -- What good comes of all that protesting?

As a longtime activist I have often gotten this question from all sides: what good comes of all that protesting?

On the one hand there are people who don't participate in grassroots politics and think those who do are wasting their time (despite all the obvious counter-evidence; if you don't know what I mean by that, keep reading).

On the other, pickets, boycotts, marches, and demonstrations through all the months and years when nothing much comes of them leaves attendees and organizers alike discouraged by the seemingly-poor return on investment ("ROI" as the business folk would have it): the microscopic changes (if any) effected by effort that is actually pretty taxing, on a personal level.

Yes, it's true. It takes a lot to organize even an 'unsuccessful' movement. This isn't contradicted by the welcome social aspect to grassroots politics: hanging out with people you like (or at least a mix of people that includes some you like!), and the camaraderie of roughly aligned beliefs about what's good and important. Countering these pluses, though, is the time, attention, and energy that get debited from other stuff you might like to do. Raising kids, lying on a beach, finishing school, writing a book, learning to cook, climbing a career ladder, sailing a boat, bowling.

Is it worth the effort, the sacrifice, the time? Or is demonstrating an exercise in futility?

The answer seems obvious this week.

Every so often we get unmistakable evidence that, whatever else demonstrations might be, they're not futile. Evidence of just this truth unfolded in North Africa -- Tunisia and Egypt especially (so far) -- in the early weeks of this year. And here comes Algeria.

So if the answer is obvious, why all this typing? For me it's worth typing about because people forget. I've heard the "what good comes of all that protesting?" question come from people who may have been in grade school in 1991, but can't possibly have missed reading about mostly-unarmed masses defending a Soviet government against what amounted to a KGB coup, so it could dissolve itself later the same month. Perhaps they're taking the long view of history, knowing now that the KGB would rise again in the person of Vladamir Putin.

But for all the compromise and backsliding inherent in human affairs, how can anyone think that no good came of the Civil Rights protests in the U.S., or the worldwide protests that helped the A.N.C. and their allies bring down P.W. Botha and South African apartheid? Let alone the Velvet Revolution of 1989? Or resistance to British colonizers in Ghandi's India?

Therefore, speaking out, we must.  Act now, before California degenerate into something like Wisconsin, and before we, Americans, have to act like Egyptians and Libyans.  It's both our civil right and our civic duty.

For Every Bill Gates, There Are Thirty-Six of These Executives of UC

Yesterday, Steve Masover commented about the demands of thirty-six highly paid executives of severely under-funded University of California for ever higher retirement pension:

The Whinging 36 are threatening legal action if they don't get their pensions plumped.

These executives claim in their letter and attached position paper (from which the foregoing quote was drawn) that the changes they demand were promised by the University's governing Board of Regents and other executives. This is actually pretty important, and I'm inclined to believe them on that point. I'm not qualified to debate signatory and Whinging 36 leader Christopher J. Edley, the dean of UC Berkeley's law school, on questions to do with the legal obligations in play.

I do note, however, that it was apparently legal for the princes of Wall St. to slurp down bonuses that make UC executive compensation look like couch-cushion change, even after financial firms accepted billions of taxpayer dollars in bailouts for the mess they made of the economy. Never mind that the "recovery" that this bailout effected has yet to return millions of people to work at real-world wages.

So it's not so surprising that some executives at the University of California feel entitled to demand exceptional pensions to wash down their exceptional pay, even though the state's and university's budgets are in crisis, layoffs are rampant, belts are tightening, employee pension plans are requiring greater contributions from staff and faculty, retirement age is being pushed back, new-employee benefits will be offered on lesser terms, and ...

Naturally, it is always the powerful to wield weapons of legality to protect their perks.  When the Wall Street capitalists were bailed out, Obama administration didn't demand them to take less payment or bonuses, due to existing contracts.  Yet, when auto companies were rescued, the existing contracts of the auto workers were modified and the waged workers were make to take less home.

People here don't like to talk about class struggle.  But ignoring it won't make it disappear.  In my blog article Nobility of the Bailliage of Blois, George Soros and Wen Jiabao, I commented that:

When I examined certain terrible political situations, I was often struck by the inability and ineffectual of some enlightened insiders' attempt to improve the situation and the great weight of societal inertia.

The ever-larger income inequality in the US is marching the entire nation towards a precipice.  In the face of a clear and present danger, someone in the upper crest of the society, such as George Soros, Bill Gates and Nancy Pelosi are trying valiantly to stem the redistribution of wealth from the middle- and lower- class to the supremely rich, in order to create a more sustainable social structure.  But the oppositions from deceptive figures like Meg Whitman and Sarah Palin, some ignorant members of Tea Party, and indifferent "independent voters", thwarted their efforts repeatedly and at the brink of decimate such attempts.  If that happens, it would be tragic for the people those enlightened insiders trying to help, and it would be even more tragic for these enlightened insiders if the order of the society collapses and they become personal victims to the situations they had tried to change, either out of selfless compassion or calculated long-term view.  Then the scale their tragedy would mount to Shakespearean.

Try they might, these enlighten members of establishment won't succeed, I'm afraid.  For every Bill Gates, there are thirty-six of these executives of University of California.

Online Education

San Francisco Chronicle in their article UC online degree proposal rattles academics reported that "University of California wants to jump into online education for undergraduates, hoping to become the nation's first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program."

"'We want to do a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale - and that has not been done,' said UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley, who is leading the effort."

This proposal is controversial not only in doubt of the validity of the claim that by teaching online, it will save money, more important, many people, students and faculty included, don't believe that face-to-face interaction is dispensable, even for the courses lab hours are not needed.

At this very moment, a minor academic scandal is raging in China. A former Microsoft executive turned entrepreneur, Mr TANG Jun, was confronted with the unpleasant fact that his doctorate degree in Electronic Engineering was issued by an uncredited Pacific Western University ("PWU"), which was established in 1988 and closed in 2006.

In 1994, Louisiana's Board of Regents closed PWU's office in that state, because PWU gave theses too many credits, had too few lecturers and did not provide enough courses, amongst other reasons.

One has to shudder to think that the glorious Cal will be mentioned in a single sentence of other uncredited diploma factories.

Even with better monitoring and administration from the universities, what can they do to prevent someone else other then the enrolled students "take" and courses and exams? Are we to dispatch monitors to the remotest part of the world to guarantee that the online education is just as good as they sit in the classrooms with stimulating discussions with peers and professors?




Interaction by Matthew Felix Sun on Flickr

PS:

According to Wikipedia,

Pacific Western University in Hawaii and Pacific Western University in California were once owned and operated by the same party. According to Inside Higher Ed, the association ended in 2004 when Pacific Western University in California) was sold and began operating under new ownership, administration, and faculty.

Pacific Western University in California has subsequently changed its name to California Miramar University. On June 6, 2009, California Miramar University received accreditation from the Distance Education and Training Council.