• Home
  • About Us
  • Guest Posts

Friday, October 23, 2009

Friday, October 23, 2009

Where Were the Regents?

The Regents' UC Com- mission for the Future came to UCSB on October 22nd. No Regents other than student Regent Jesse Bernal (from UCSB) actually showed up

Why would they schedule a meeting of the Regents' Commission on the Future when no permanent Regent would actually attend?  Were they planning to come but got put off by what was reportedly UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang's insistence that most of the time be allotted to statements from faculty, staff, and students?

The webcast shows that good talks fell on absent ears. See the texts by Profs. Sharon Farmer and Jack Sutton, History and Sociology;  Prof. Claudio Fogu, French and Italian; Prof. Songi Han, Chemisty, Prof. Harry Nelson, Physics; Prof. Mark Srednicki, Phyiscs; Prof. William Warner, English; Prof Elisabeth Weber, German and Slavic Studies.  Prof. Yunte Huang of the English Department read a poem.  There were many others, including some highly-praised student statements towards the end, and we will post more texts as they come in. We have linked to some excerpts of the post-mortem among some participants.

Our email traffic already favored the view that the UCOF roadshow - like UCOF itself -  is a diversion that allows the UC masses to vent while the real work of privatizing UC - making it smaller, more expensive, more oriented towards sponsor and donor money, more cut off from California's diverse majority - goes on behind closed doors.   Yesterday was a good day for this suspicion, as the Regents Commission had better things to do than go to their own Commission's forum, like perhaps attend meetings behind closed doors.

It as rude, thoughtless, somewhat insulting, and pretty dumb  for the Regents not to mix with the unwashed who actually do the teaching, studying, discovering, and many other necessary things like data entering on hundreds of thousands of tuition checks each and every one of which is written out to "UC Regents."  It's dumb because the Regents, if they paid attention, would notice that they are already in the shit with the greater UC community, which regards them as arrogant, out of touch, autocratic, and not too bright about money. 


The Regents are legally and procedurally insulated from the University over which they preside, and so may not care too much what the UC community thinks about them.  Last summer, when several Faculty Associations wrote to the Regents to ask them to show signs of life in response to the obvious crisis, the joint response from then-Chair Blum and President Yudof included this statement: "We appreciate your sharing your views and we welcome having them, but we do wish to remind you of Bylaw 16.9 of the University, which states that communications from members of the faculty to the Board of Regents must be presented through the President."

This Bylaw is more suited to a caste society than to a learning community.  In any case it makes it all the more important that the Regents show up to the meetings they call the rest of us to.  If they miss the next UCOF session, they should have to repeal Bylaw 16.9.  If they miss a third, they should just go ahead and democratize themselves.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope people wake and make sure that this university is not closed down.


english courses oxford


Thanks for the share.

Anonymous Souls said...

It is remarkable that a "Meeting of the Regents' Commission on the Future" did not merit the attention of a single permanent Regent, never mind President Yudof or Regent Gould, who obviously have more pressing engagements.

One wonders if any of them will bother to show up at even at UCLA or Berkeley.

The effect of having a "Regents' Meeting" with no Regents reminds me of the "Free Speech Zones" (usually cages) so popular during the Bush administration--remote spaces in which dissidents are permitted to express their views (to each other), far removed from the actual apparatus of power.

Anonymous said...

We just learned who will be representing the Gould Commission at UC-Santa Cruz on Thursday:

UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal
Steven Beckwith
Mary Croughan
Keith Williams

immaletyoufinish kanye said...

Why, thank you senator Yee. Democratize yourself!

Anonymous said...

Regents look past $3,000,000 excessive spending on Consultants by Yudof/Birgeneau---when the consultant work can be done both impartially and internally by world-class faculty and staff

Join the Conversation

Note: Firefox is occasionally incompatible with our comments section. We apologize for the inconvenience.