mortiz055

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations has drafted a letter/petition to President Napolitano in response to proposals to reduce the health care options available to UC Employees.  I am posting CUCFA's letter and petition in the hope of widening its circulation among faculty members.  Staff unions and UC-AFT may be proceeding with their own responses.  If any faculty members wish to sign the petition you can find it at: http://cucfa.org/healthcare-options-petition/ michael m Dear Faculty Colleague, As you may be aware, the University of California is considering restructuring the provision of medical plans for its employees across the ten campuses of the system. These changes would have a dramatic impact upon the health care options currently available to faculty and other UC employees. In brief, the plan is to create a new UC Care HMO program that will replace Health Net and possibly Kaiser. The aim is to generate savings for the university by forcin...

Yesterday, a meeting of the UC Irvine student government Legislative Council was cancelled due to what campus police determined was a " viable threat of violence associated with the recent controversy over the display of national flags in the lobby of student government offices. " Chancellor Gillman issued an accompanying statement decrying the threat of violence and declaring " Regardless of your opinion on the display of the American flag, we must be united in protecting the people who make this university a premier institution of higher learning ."  This cancellation and threat of violence follows several days in which the student officers who had supported the removal of flags from a portion of the student government building had been receiving various forms of abuse, threats, and condemnation . Although the Chancellor is to be commended for yesterday's statement decrying violence and threats against the student representatives, noticeably missing was any co...

Understandably, most public attention on California higher ed has been focused on the meetings between President Napolitano and Governor Brown.  But in the last few weeks the Legislature and the Legislative Analyst's office have both attempted to intervene and shape the debate over UC funding.  To some extent these interventions may simply indicate the Legislature's desire to become part of a process they seem excluded from at present.  But they do suggest both a wider political context for UC and that UC faces a significant debate over the nature of the research university and how the state will conceive of its relationship to the research moving forward.  This debate is not, to be sure, limited to California.  As events in Oregon, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Florida, and North Carolina make clear, university systems are embroiled in both internal and external conflicts.  Although the fights are most immediately about money--often still in  the  mode o...