mortiz055

Most of this text was read at the UC Regents Public Comment session this morning in San Francisco.  Following public comment, the regents rejected the original text of the "Principles Against Intolerance" to which this statement refers. The new preamble text reads , "Anti-Semitism, Anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California" (the underlined phrase is the modification). The new language was suggested by the Academic Senate Universitywide Committee on Academic Freedom (UCAF); its recommendation to modify "other forms of  discrimination " to "other forms of unlawful  discrimination " seems not to have been taken up. Statement by Judith Butler, Maxine Elliott Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley We would like to congratulate the Regents for trying to develop principles that can guide us as we identify and oppose intolerance and bigotry on the UC campuses.  Any docu...

This Wednesday the Regents Committee on Educational Policy will be taking up the Final Report of the Regents Working Group on Principles Against Intolerance  which includes both a contextual statement and a proposal of new principles against intolerance.  You may recall that the Regents considered an earlier version of these principles at their September meeting.  That version--which was vague in its subject and contradictory on academic freedom--was rejected by the Regents. Unfortunately, at least part of that rejection was due to the claim of some --including Regent Blum--that the principles were not strong enough because they didn't specifically address questions of antisemitism. Having reconsidered the issue, the Regents' committee have now made things worse. Should the Regents as a whole approve the proposed report and principles, they threaten to undermine both academic freedom and freedom of speech in the University. The problem, as noted by numerous commentators ...

President Napolitano's formal proposal for a new pension tier has been posted in the Agenda for next week's Regents' Meeting.  I do not have time today to offer a detailed reading of it (although Chris and I hope to have something up soon). But on first glance it does differ in some significant ways from the majority positions of the Retirement Options Task Force that President Napolitano had appointed last fall. The pension options for faculty (especially faculty who are hired at a salary below the PEPRA cap) appear to be better than the ROTF proposed while the pension options for staff are worse than the ROTF proposed.  One thing that hasn't changed is that retirement benefits for the proposed 2016 Tier will be worse than for the 2013 Tier, let alone the 1976 Tier that includes all pre-2013 employees. If I can't offer a full reading of the proposal it is possible to respond to another issue raised by the President's announcement: the significance of the ann...

Following Chancellor White's February 29th visit to CSU East Bay, Hank Reichman, Emeritus Professor at CSUEB and First Vice President of the AAUP wrote an open letter to the Chancellor.  It appeared at the AAUP's ACADEME blog .  We are reposting it with Hank's permission--Michael Meranze Chancellor White, it takes a lot of nerve for someone making over $430,000 a year, with a free mansion and a car allowance, to tell an audience of students and faculty, who earn perhaps a fifth or even a tenth of your income and who must pay to live in the most expensive housing market in America, that “we” need to live within our means. I’m quite certain, sir, that everyone in this audience would find it pretty simple to live within your means, but my question to you is, could you survive within the means the institution that you lead provides to us? I suspect not. Of course, you are correct when you blame this situation largely on Sacramento’s quarter-century or more of disinvesting in hi...

President's Proposal March 11, 2016 MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY Dear Colleagues: I am writing to outline the proposal for the new retirement program I am bringing to The Regents later this month that includes new retirement benefits for future UC employees. As a reminder, the new retirement benefits will apply only to UC employees hired on or after July 1, 2016. Current employees and retirees are unaffected by these changes as accrued pension benefits are protected by law and cannot be reduced or revoked. Before getting into the specifics of my proposal, I want to share with you my thinking behind it. The University of California is a very special institution. There are other fine universities, but there is no other university on the planet that contributes as much to the public, in as many ways as UC does. Arguably, no other single institution does as much for so many. And at the heart of everything we do, and the excellence UC is renowned for, are our talent...

The scandal engulfing UC Davis Chancellor Katehi is only the latest sign of the disconnection between our managerial elite and the rest of the University. While students face increased tuition and debt, faculty and staff face a reduction in benefits, and the entire Berkeley campus faces the possibility of a reduction in academic range and quality, some managers operate in a bubble of their own, hobnobbing in Davos and being paid to sit on corporate boards . The story surrounding Chancellor Katehi is fairly simple. It turns out that she accepted a position on the Board of the Devry Educational Group, a for-profit college under investigation by two federal agencies. Before that she had also served on the Board of John Wiley and Sons, a publisher of textbooks and academic journals from whom she received $420,000 in stocks and cash. Each of these positions posed potential conflicts of interest: advising companies doing business with UC, her primary employer; supporting a for-profit (a...