UC System Divests $25 Million from Private Prison Industry
December 18, 2015
The University of California divested $25 million worth of its shares from the nation’s two largest private prison corporations: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group. The decision followed a report by the Afrikan Black Coalition revealing the university’s private prison investments and a resolution passed by all nine Black Student Unions calling on the university to divest immediately. UC Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Bachher assured ABC that the university would divest its remaining $2 million in shares.
UC President Announces Plan to Add 14,000 Beds by 2020
January 20, 2016
When UC President Janet Napolitano announced last Fall that the University of California would enroll an additional 5,000 students this upcoming school year and 10,000 over the next three years, many wondered how they would all fit. Months later, Napolitano announced the Student Housing Initiative, calling for a total 14,000 beds to be added across the UC campuses by 2020. Following the announcement, UC officials began a tour of each campus to get a better understanding its housing goals.
UC Berkeley Officials Reveal Financial Servers Were Breached
February 26, 2016
UC Berkeley informed over 80,000 current and former students, employees and vendors that its financial system, which stores bank account and social security numbers, was breached nearly two months earlier. University officials stated that they could not reveal that the cyber attack happened until they ensured that the threat was expelled. The breach occurred amid an ongoing operation to patch a security flaw in its cybersecurity system that was exploited by another attack that happened at the campus 15 months earlier. Though officials maintain that there is no evidence that any sensitive information was accessed or used, they offered victims of the attack free enrollment in credit-monitoring services as a precaution.
UC Campuses Establish Gender-Inclusive Restrooms
March 1, 2016
UC President Napolitano adopted a measure to convert all single-stall restrooms into gender-inclusive, nonbinary spaces to protect transgender and gender-nonconforming people from harassment. UC Davis was the first to begin this transition in February by removing gendered signs from 120 restroom doors across its campus. In October, Affordable Colleges Online included UCSD, UC Berkeley and UC Irvine on its list of the top 23 most LGBTQ-friendly universities in the nation.
State Legislator Calls for UC Davis Chancellor to Resign
March 4, 2016
Assemblymember Kevin McCarty called for UC Davis Chancellor Linda Kathei to resign from her position after he and the public learned that she represented a conflict of interest by taking positions at both DeVry, a for-profit university and at textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons. Katehi apologized for her actions and announced that she would donate the $200,000 she earned from her Wiley stocks to a UC Davis scholarship fund. Though UC President Janet Napolitano deemed Katehi’s decision a mistake, she accepted the chancellor’s apology and told the Sacramento Bee that she should not resign. During finals week last quarter, approximately 40 UC Davis students, staff and faculty protested in the campus’ Office of the Chancellor, demanding that Napolitano “Fire Katehi.”
