The night before Chancellor Robert Birgeneau announced that he will be stepping down at the end of this calendar year, an ASUC Senate committee voted not to support a bill that would have put a referendum before students asking if the ASUC should call for Birgeneau’s resignation.
In a campuswide email announcement Tuesday, Birgeneau said he will step down from his position, which he has held since 2004. UC Berkeley senior William Skewes-Cox, who authored the senate bill, said in an email that the announcement will be regarded as a victory.
“No one will ever know the true role (the referendum) played in his decision, but undoubtedly students have made known on campus that we have not been happy with him, and his exit clears the way for a new — and hopefully better — chapter in our university’s history,” Skewes-Cox said in the email.
The bill claimed “distressingly repeated instances of excessive use of police force on non-violent students protesters” as well as “widespread discontent among students with privatization (and) fee hikes” as the main reasons the resignation was necessary.
Several senators voted against the referendum at Monday’s meeting of the Committee on Constitutional and Procedural Review, saying that doing so might seem like an endorsement by the ASUC.
CalSERVE Senator Ju Hong called Birgeneau a “very strong supporter of undocumented students on campus” and credited him with fighting for scholarships and financial aid opportunities.
Students who attended the meeting in support of the referendum asked the committee to approve it on the grounds that Skewes-Cox had received conflicting information regarding how many signatures he needed to collect in order to put the referendum on the ballot, which he said prevented him from gathering the necessary amount.
Although Skewes-Cox said there is no longer a need for the referendum, he said he will dedicate his remaining time on campus to organizing “a large degree of student involvement in the selection process” of a new chancellor.
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ASUC does not represent me. Thank you Chancellor Birgeneau for your hard work and dedication and for you activism in passing the DREAM Act.
ASUC voted not to even ask the question of his resignation, let alone endorse an opinion on it. So yeah, they didn’t really represent anyone at all.
““No one will ever know the true role (the referendum) played in his decision,” Skewes-Cox said in the email.”
What a dishonest statement! The referendum _couldn’t_ have had _any_ role, and apparently Skewes-Cox is either too stupid to realize that, or too dishonest to say it.
1) The referendum had already been defeated when the Chancellor made the announcement
2) Resigning from a Chancellorship is not something that takes five minutes on Tuesday morning. The Chancellor had talked to both Pres. Yudoff and others, the press office had time to pull together articles with long quotes from people all over the country, they even made a _video_!
This was not something that happened in response to the internals of a single ASUC Senate meeting.
Ju Hong is so grimey, using undocumented folks to justify a scumbag chancellor.
“the true role (the referendum) played in [Birgeneau's] decision [to step down in December]”
none, no role at all! there’s no need to claim ambiguity here, folks, b/c the administration simply does not respect ASUC (or the student body in any form/representation).
the administration is terrified of bad press, but this is not the same as taking under consideration the views of student body
Since the ASUC president expressed support for the Chancellor, and the ASUC Senate voted down the referendum (and the students probably would have voted in favor of the Chancellor, since most of the real students around here appreciate what he’s done; we’re certainly not in favor of most of the “Occupy instead of studying for an occupation” crowd”), I don’t quite see your point.