mortiz055

Dear President Napolitano, You have now been the president of the University of California for nearly five years. You are one of a handful of people who speak for the entirety of the university system. You are the head of a slightly larger group (two or three dozen?) that decides UC policy.  You also have direct access to the mass media to explain the needs and benefits of UC.  You represent a university that consists of hundreds of thousands of students as well as about 150,000 staff and over 10,000 faculty. Many of us have given decades of our working lives to UC. We have deep experience of the institution and highly developed expertise in our subject areas.  And yet with few exceptions, we have no way of bringing this expertise to the wider public.  As a group, our views are as unknown to the state at the end of our thirty-to-forty-year careers as they were at the beginning.   This places an enormous moral responsibility on you to represent hundreds of thousa...

Political Science Commencement, UC Berkeley, May 14, 2018 by Wendy Brown Tonight, your commencement speaker was supposed to be John Perez, three-term California Assemblyman from Los Angeles, speaker of the Assembly from 2010-14, Latino and the first openly gay Speaker in the Assembly’s history.  Perez played a leading role in raising California’s minimum wage, improving access to higher education for working and middle class students, shepherding bills supporting green technologies and urban development, promoting jobs for veterans, and subsidizing childcare and healthcare for the disadvantaged.   Before entering electoral politics, Perez was a labor organizer and political adviser for the grocery store workers union.  He also worked in LA on behalf of immigrants, tenants, HIV/AIDS groups, and coastline conservation.  Since 2014, Perez has been a UC Regent, where he has worked to cap tuition and improve access and matriculation by under-represented minorities....

Governor Brown released his May Revision of the California budget.  His higher education revisions  suggest little beyond his continuing refusal to recognize the challenges of contemporary higher education and the social need for an expanded and deepened system of tertiary education. Perhaps the most significant new element in the Governor's proposals is his announcement that, if either CSU or UC choose to raise tuition, the state will lower its general funding in the exact amount that the State must increase funding in Cal Grants to cover the raised tuition ( 7 ). As Dan Mitchell has pointed out , this does not mean that either UC or CSU will lose all the revenue from tuition increases.  They may therefore be tempted to raise tuition.  But it does mean that the Governor is setting the most important source of tuition aid for Californians against the general needs of improving the campuses. As early as 2013 then Speaker John Pérez warned that UC could not expect the...

UC Service and Patient Care workers will be going on strike from Monday May 7 to Wednesday May 9.  AFSCME, the union representing these workers, has been negotiating with UC for over a year with little success and the University had imposed a settlement for the 2017-18 fiscal year .  As the union indicates here  the University's latest offer includes pay raises between 2 and 3% (depending on your workplace) combined with a freezing of step increases for 5 years, a rise in health care costs, and a shift to less retirement support.  Given that inflation is now hovering around 2%  this can hardly be considered the generous offer the University insists it is.   To make matters worse, service and patient care workers are already among the lowest paid workers at UC.  As a recent AFSCME Study made clear inequality within UC has been increasing dramatically over the recent past.  UC's lowest paid workers already face difficulties making ends meet....