The problem is as basic as a butter shortage. Essential classes are in critically short supply as the state’s economic crisis lumbers on. Last year, 137,000 students couldn’t get into at least one class they needed, including first-year English and math. And many who are entitled to financial aid never apply for it because there aren’t enough counselors to help them navigate the complex process. The result is a dropout rate of 60 percent among students who expect to transfer to a four-year university or earn a vocational certificate, according to a 2010 study by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy in Sacramento.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: December 25th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The Chancellor wondered exactly what number in the vast university Jerika had been calling and why the messages had not made their way to her. Jerika replied that the number was listed as that of the Chancellor’s office on the Chancellor’s web page,. She said she spoken over and over with a woman named Allison. The Chancellor claimed that no Allison worked in her office… The next morning I called the number that appears so often in the ‘previous calls’ list on Jerika’s cellphone. A woman named Allison answered, “Chancellor’s office…”

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by Bob Ostertag, The Huffington Post.

Posted: December 21st, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Blum donated heavily to the political campaigns of California Governor Gray Davis, amounting to at least $75,000 in a two-year period beginning in about 2000. As a result, Davis, following his “pay to play” politics, appointed Blum to be a member of the University of California Board of Regents… Blum led the Board while it raised tuition for university students again and again, increases that amounted to 32 percent in one year. Students have had to take out massive loans to attend school… As students were priced out of an expensive public university system, the inferior, privately operated correspondence type diploma mills where Blum had major investments became increasingly attractive.

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by Laurence H. Shoup, Z Magazine.

Posted: December 21st, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Though the regents (and leading California Democrats) have blamed the current tuition hikes on the Great Recession, students say the regents have been pushing privatization on their public university for a long time. In the decade leading up to 2007, the UC system’s management positions grew four times as quickly as its faculty. In 2004, the chancellors signed an agreement with then-Governor Schwarzenegger to seek private donations to the system’s budget. Berkeley’s chancellor paid Mitt Romney’s old consulting firm, Bain & Company, $7.5 million to help the university “achieve [greater] efficiency.” Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley has called for Berkeley to build more virtual campuses, rather than “bricks and mortar” ones. Nowhere is the close relationship between California’s public universities and private corporations more apparent than in the UC Board of Regents. UC Regent Richard C. Blum is both the husband of Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Chairman of the San Francisco-based investment firm Blum Capital Partners. Though he has served on the board since 2002, his firm is also the largest shareholder in Career Education Corporation and ITT Education Services Inc., two for-profit higher education companies that have both been under federal investigation. In a 2010 expose, the Sacramento News & Review reported that the UC investment managers invested $53 million in public funds in both companies. Despite these connections, UC officials claim that no conflicts of interest occurred.

Read full article [here].
by Josh Eidelson, The Nation.

Posted: December 16th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

California State University trustees are understandably concerned about security and safety at their meetings, but canceling them is not the solution. They’re avoiding the real issue: As long as they keep giving big raises to top administrators while jacking up tuition, angry protestors are going to show up… in July when CSU trustees hiked tuition by another 12 percent, and then mere minutes later gave the new San Diego State president a salary of $400,000, $100,000 more than his predecessor… Last Monday, when shouting protestors interrupted proceedings, UC regents disconnected a teleconference and reconvened in rooms accessible to the media, but not the demonstrators. They still found time, however, to grant raises ranging from 6 percent to 22 percent for the chief lawyers at six UC campuses.

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by The Editors, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: December 4th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

But it’s time for UC to lead the way toward a new model of doing business by stopping this practice of justifying raises through compensation studies. Those studies, an industry unto themselves, have been a disheartening factor nationwide in the academic arms race that has prompted tuition hikes to outstrip most other sectors. The question shouldn’t be what other schools pay, providing a theoretical model of competition, but a true study of what it takes to hire and retain great people in the real world of the ivory tower.

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by Karin Klein, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: December 2nd, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“The University is literally hiring the same security company that is protecting the financial service industry,” Meister told HuffPost… In the open letter, Meister also wrote that Kroll’s parent company, Providence Private Equity, is a “major global investor in for-profit higher education companies that benefit from the decline of publicly funded higher education.” Other professors were pessimistic about any investigation, after seeing reviews of controversial campus police action before. Catherine Cole, a professor in the theater department of the UC Berkeley campus, said “There’s a lot of suspicion about these reports and investigations that don’t lead to anything [despite taking a lot of time].”

Read full article [here].
by Tyler Kingkade, The Huffington Post.

Posted: December 1st, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In controlling the review from the top and appropriating for the Regents’ own interests a process that ought to be democratic, President Yudof displays in action the policy for which he is best known: the privatization of the great public university. Yudof’s appointments disguise as reform what is actually its opposite, crisis exploitation and a bid to solidify authority: and this is exactly how Yudof has used the very real California state budget shortfall. People outside the UC may not completely understand what we in the University mean when we complain of “privatization.” We mean not only the policy of shifting toward private funding and out-of-state students who pay more tuition, which year by year gives the California Legislature and middle-income California residents less and less reason to support the UC system. We mean a whole world of interlocking conflicts of interest, administrative greed, and erosion of democratic processes that expropriate spaces and decisions that ought to belong to all, not just the most highly-paid administrators.

Read full article [here].
by Michael Meranze and Rei Terada, The Huffington Post.

Posted: December 1st, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Before Monday’s meeting began, the union representing UC Berkeley police officers released a statement asking regents and UC administrators not to “ask us to enforce your policies, then refuse to stand by us when we do.” “It was not our decision to engage campus protesters,” said the UC Berkeley Police Officers Association. “We are now faced with ‘managing’ the results of years of poor budget planning.” The regents met Monday after postponing their regularly scheduled meeting earlier this month out of fear of violent demonstrations. 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.”

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by Jill Tucker, Kevin Fagan and Carolyn Jones, The San Francisco Chonicle.

Posted: November 29th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

They couldn’t have been farther apart—in socioeconomic status, and, quite likely, in point of view. And the divide was something that students and faculty members pointed out again and again when they addressed the University of California’s Board of Regents during a raucous meeting on Monday. The regents met at four system campuses, linked to each other by teleconference, and then heard public comment. “Honestly, I am not interested in a false dialogue with a body, the UC regents, that is not democratically accountable to the students or any members of the community,” said Robin Marie Averbeck, a graduate student at the University of California at Davis. Meetings like this, she said, were meant to “make us feel like we’re being heard, when the fact that we are here on teleconference shows how absurd it is.” The meeting ended early, as chanting protesters drowned out the regents’ meeting, following the public-comment session.

Read full article [here].
by Scott Carlson and Collin Eaton, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: November 29th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.