The UC Board of Regents will vote on a $662-per-year increase in student fees over the phone this week.
Plans for discussing the tuition hike were originally scheduled to take place later this week at UCSD, but in a statement issued May 1, the regents said the meeting would be switched to a teleconference in order to avoid distracting campus officials from efforts to combat the swine-flu virus.
‘Our decision to conduct the meeting telephonically is to ensure we do not divert the attention or resources of the campus as they work to keep the campus community safe and prevent any health issues related to the H1N1 flu,’ Chair of the Board of Regents Richard Blum said. ‘We thought it best to meet our legal and operational obligations and conduct the meeting by phone, without asking the campus to stretch resources better applied elsewhere during this challenging time.’
Initially scheduled to take place over the course of three days this week, the meeting will now be conducted in its entirety on May 7. The regents will discuss approving a $626 increase in the systemwide student educational fee, in addition to a $36 increase in the systemwide student registration fee.
The teleconference format will derail plans by students to stage a series of demonstrations against the fee increase during the regents’ discussion.
A.S. Vice President of External Affairs Lisa Chen, along with students from UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, UCLA and the systemwide UC Students Association, planned to stage a rally at UCSD on May 6 to raise awareness about the proposed fee increases.
‘We were exposing this myth that the regents are trying to push where they’re saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ll be covered by the federal stimulus plan or you’ll be covered by the new Blue and Gold plan,” Chen said. ‘It’s sort of this high-aid, high-fee model, and we’re trying to expose that as far as the fact that it’s not sustainable, and it’s actually pushing a lot of middle-class students that aren’t on financial aid into lower-income status because of the fee increases.’
Chen was critical of the regents’ decision to cancel their UCSD visit.
‘It shows how nontransparent the regents are and how they’ve continued to cut students out of the decision-making process,’ she said. ‘Without any student or anyone holding them accountable and no one making them feel pressured to vote a certain way, there’s no repercussions to their vote now.’
Chen said a group of UCSD students still plans to publicly address the regents’ decision, though the protest will now take place on May 7 at 9:30 a.m. at Price Center and will include a 20-minute public-input session at the beginning of the teleconference.
According to university officials, the new fees are designed to compensate for a continued lack of state funding, which has left the university with a multimillion-dollar budget gap over the last several years.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2009-10 budget, adopted by the state Legislature in February, included $115.5 million in new budget reductions for the university and assumed a 9.3 percent increase in student fees.
In addition to addressing the proposed tuition hike, the regents are expected to approve the 2009-10 operating budget for the UC Office of the President at their Thursday meeting.
Readers can contact Reza Farazmand at [email protected].