Melanie Chan/Staff

Right now, the city of Berkeley is considering an increase in its minimum wage. A higher minimum wage would help thousands of residents afford the city’s high costs of basic living necessities, like food and rent. It would also give our university’s students a fighting chance to pay for college.

I am fortunate enough not to be in a situation where I need to depend on a minimum-wage job to support myself during school. But as a Cal student and a former restaurant worker, I know how difficult it is to maintain such a job while taking a full course load. Living on those wages while paying for tuition would be nearly impossible. Unfortunately, for many of my classmates, surviving on low-wage jobs is a reality.

A lot of people don’t realize that putting yourself through college is much more difficult now than it was 20 years ago. Today, tuition prices are higher than ever, and students are struggling to survive on a severely outdated minimum wage.

A couple decades ago, the total amount of fees due for the 1994-95 academic year at UC Berkeley was $4,346.50 for an in-state student, as reported in the fee schedule archive on UC Berkeley’s Office of the Registrar website. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator, that amount of money has the same buying power as $6,848.35 in 2013. That’s half of the $12,864 an in-state UC Berkeley student is going to have to pay this year. This hefty price tag doesn’t even include textbooks or housing.

In 1994, California’s minimum wage was $4.25 an hour, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations website. That would be would be worth $6.70 today, as measured by the CPI inflation calculator. If the 1994 minimum wage worth $6.70 doubled in constant dollars like UC Berkeley’s tuition costs, students today would be paid more than $12 an hour. It’s absurd that the minimum wage has only increased from what would be worth $6.70 today to just $8 — or $1.30 in constant dollars over the last two decades.

In an ideal world, a full-time student would be able to work 25 hours a week, every week, earning $10,400 for the entire year. However, a more realistic picture would take into consideration all of a student’s responsibilities outside of class: doing homework, studying for midterms and finals, writing research papers and participating in extracurricular activities and internships. These overwhelming priorities are vital for a successful career after graduation, but they often make sleeping, eating and sometimes even maintaining personal hygiene difficult to attain for most college kids.

Furthermore, anyone who has ever worked a minimum-wage job knows it isn’t easy, especially in a restaurant. Contrary to popular belief, this type of job can be incredibly fast-paced, intense and exhausting. Customers don’t often realize that their server has been running around like crazy, constantly rushing to get the next order out for the last five hours. They don’t know their server’s friendly smile could be masking the aching of tired feet as well as anxiety about an upcoming midterm.

That smile is bright and cheerful because getting decent tips could mean the ability to afford groceries that week. Still, there’s never any real certainty or stability in tips, especially for servers at casual restaurants. Tipped workers depend on the noncompulsory generosity of strangers, which can vary greatly among restaurants. At least tipped workers in California can rely on the guarantee of the minimum wage; tipped workers in some other states are paid as little as $2.13 an hour.

However, here in Berkeley, we have an opportunity to do better. Adding a couple of dollars to the minimum wage isn’t a lofty or outrageous goal; it is a small but vital change that would better the lives of our poorest workers.

Raising the minimum wage for everyone isn’t an attempt to run beloved local businesses out of town either. A higher minimum wage would increase the spending power of tens of thousands of people, including Berkeley’s students — one of the city’s largest consumer demographics. It’s a hard fact that operating costs are getting higher and harder for business owners to maintain. But that also means rent and food costs are increasing for their employees as well.

Our college students and minimum-wage workers need higher wages, especially here in Berkeley. We desperately need a higher city minimum wage for everybody, including tipped workers. The cost of living in Berkeley is much higher than it is in the rest of California. It is far too much to ask of anyone to survive on $8 an hour. It’s completely unrealistic to expect a stagnant wage to adequately provide for the constantly rising costs of going to college and living a decent life.

Shannon Lin is a second year student at UC Berkeley.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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Today, we hear constantly that “taxpayers” shouldn’t fund such “entitlements” because they represent cave-ins to powerful unions. This is certainly not the case with the UC retirement system. The current problems with the retirement plan began back in 1991: During a state financial crisis, the regents and the state decided to suspend all contributions to what was then a technically overfunded retirement plan, hoping that its investment income would fill the gap.

Not contributing saved the tax-starved state of California hundreds of millions of dollars and softened the impact of state budget cuts on university operations. But it impoverished the UC retirement system. Within little more than a decade, as the disastrous consequences became clear, the UC Academic Senate began calling for the resumption of contributions. The state refused. Without state funding, the regents declined to restart either the employer or employee contribution.

The situation worsened with the financial crisis of 2008 and the Federal Reserve System’s policy of keeping interest rates at historically low levels. The financial managers of the retirement plan began to borrow from future retirees to honor the pensions of those who had already retired. They spent funds that they had counted on to generate the investment income needed to cover the cost of financing future pensions. The percentage of funded liabilities began to plunge, beginning a downward spiral that could have led to the plan’s financial implosion.

To forestall this, the regents boldly agreed to self-finance the employer contribution in 2010. To reduce the financial shock, however, they approved a plan to ramp up contributions gradually over eight years. The slow ramp-up meant that the unfunded liability continued to grow — to roughly $10 billion (yes, billion!) in 2011. Even with this year’s contribution increases and the start of a tiered system in which new employees receive reduced pension benefits, our combined employer and employee contributions don’t yet come close to covering the interest on this huge unfunded liability. We won’t begin the long, costly process of paying off the interest on this debt until 2018, when the employer contributions rise to 18 percent and total contributions reach 26 percent.

The state’s decision to shift the entire cost of funding the university’s retirement plan onto the university itself has had a terrible impact on students, faculty and staff members. Together with repeated state budget cuts, it has forced the university to keep raising tuition, pushing more students and their families into debt. It’s degraded operations by necessitating massive staff layoffs. Because the 3 percent and 2 percent salary increases that went into effect in October 2011 and July 2013 only partly offset the increase of employee contributions to 8 percent and the skyrocketing cost of health benefits, the decision has also created hardship for many employees raising families in our state, which has a high cost of living. It’s also put the university’s ability to maintain the quality of its faculty at risk by adding to the cost of recruiting and retaining world-class scholars. (Berkeley now ranks 24th in faculty salaries at elite research universities.)

Our new president, Janet Napolitano, should make correcting this situation one of her top priorities. She could start by urging the regents to reduce the current $250,000 cap on retirement plan pensions to $200,000 until the unfunded liability is extinguished. Except for top administrators — whose bloated salaries are so unpopular with many Californians — and some medical and professional school faculty members, very few UC employees are close to reaching this cap. Reducing it would ensure that the pensions of the best-paid few will not drain the retirement funds of the rest while the retirement plan is being restored to financial health.

Above all, Napolitano must use her political skills to remind those in Sacramento that the state’s refusal to fund the employer contribution threatens the university’s historic mission to provide world-class, affordable education to all qualified Californians. It is a shameful retreat from a legal obligation that it continues to honor with all other state pension plans. Napolitano needs to convince the legislators and citizens of California that the refunding of the current retirement plan is in the public interest. UC faculty and staff members serve the public. They are already doing their part to restore the retirement plan’s fiscal health. So are UC students. It’s time for the state to share the burden.

Christine Rosen is an associate professor at Haas School of Business and vice chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association. James Vernon is a campus professor in the department of history and a co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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But upon further inspection, significant excitement over the UC policy is unfounded. As it stands, the policy is contradictory because of a loophole allowing faculty members to submit waivers on a per-article basis to opt out of open publication.

The university cannot call its policy an open access one when it allows some research articles to be exempt to open access over others. The waiver essentially disincentivizes those who work for a public institution from sharing all their research and allows them to pick and choose where their research goes, thereby creating a divide between those who can afford access to a private academic journal and those who cannot. It also isn’t much different from the way faculty members originally differentiated between publishing privately in an academic journal versus publishing for public access.

Additionally, as a co-founder of The Open Access Initiative at Berkeley pointed out, the waiver option is a problem because it could lead to uncooperative publishers taking advantage of authors. Also, by giving faculty members the choice of opting out of open access, there is a good chance the best research will remain in expensive journals exclusively, meaning it will once again be inaccessible to those cannot afford subscription fees.

It is true that some professors will want to choose whether to submit their research for public access or to academic journals. According to Christopher Kelty, a UCLA professor and Academic Senate committee member who drafted the policy, the opt-out clause was included at the faculty’s request. But this clause will misrepresent a movement that is proudly portrayed as universally open. The policy sets a dangerous precedent for other schools to adopt similar policies, thinking that it is acceptable to have open access movements in which openness isn’t actually guaranteed.

The point of The Open Access Initiative at Berkeley was to disseminate UC research for the public’s benefit, whether the public is at UC Berkeley or across the globe. The UC Academic Senate had the opportunity to accomplish this goal, but instead it passed a watered-down version of the policy that probably will fail to accomplish the original goals.

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Maura Chen/Staff

Contact Maura Chen at mchen@dailycal.org.

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They came to me in the middle of the night. They were young and beautiful and dressed up like they were about to go out. I had about an hour’s warning, and their knock on the door was light so as to wake no one who wasn’t already up. When they got to my doorstep, I was ready. I knew it would be hasty and impromptu, but there’s no reason even a simple wedding can’t be beautiful.

We shared grapes and wine, and I told them that what begins as new and perfect fruit can end up a rich, fermented, much-changed substance that the vine might not recognize. They tasted both and said their vows, and we signed the paperwork. With a little help from their friends, they were married.

In the state of California, any recognized member of the church clergy can marry individuals to one another if the couple has a license. Over the years, I’ve married a handful of couples in the woods and in my living room. I’ve seen the state and the nation struggle over the definition of marriage, and I’ve seen it take many forms. I’ve heard the academic and feminist arguments that marriage was, for many centuries, a primarily economic arrangement to secure the merging and inheritance of property. Much about marriage has changed, but for the very rich and the very poor, the economic part remains the same.

The rich have assets to protect. They draw up contracts and agreements to ensure no one is seduced into a holy and blissful union by a heartless and calculating gold digger.

The poor have other arrangements to make. We are more likely to cohabitate to save money, whether it is appropriate for the relationship or not. In my life, I have known men and women who choose to stay with partners who are abusive or merely unsuited because breaking up means giving up a place to call home.

My friends who were married that night in my living room loved one another and probably would have chosen to marry at some point. The reason they came to me with so little notice, however, was not a pregnancy or a shotgun or even a romantic whim. It was the deadline for FAFSA submissions for the following academic year. Too young to be considered independent from their parents, they were desperate for enough financial aid to transfer to a four-year university. They were the children of vanishing middle class. On paper, their folks could afford to contribute to their tuition, but real life is complicated with gambling addictions and jobs that don’t offer health care.

It wasn’t young love. It wasn’t an impetuous gesture or an adherence to belief. It was a financial decision. Like many decisions forced upon us by poverty, it was a decision that puts the future in jeopardy — no money down, crippling credit terms down the road. The FAFSA considers married students independent and places a student in a wholly separate category for aid. Choosing to marry now to qualify for aid may result in a possibly messy and potentially expensive divorce later, but in the moment, we do what we must. In the meantime, we give one another the gift of an education otherwise out of reach.

Tuition has outpaced the cost of living, outpaced inflation and shows no sign of slowing. People all over are taking drastic measures to afford school, and at the University of California, we are no different. A recent discussion on the cost of housing led some of my classmates to speculate on the appearance of quad dorms with four bunks to a room and the feasibility of (not kidding) camping on the Glade and writing a blog called The Great Outdorms. The idea of getting married for mercenary causes may rankle the romantic soul, but in the scheme of desperation, it seems almost a tame solution.

In my tradition, couples being wed grasp hands and are gently tied together to symbolize their bond. When this couple was tied, I told them to remember that it’s only one hand they’ve given and that the other remains free. True of their marriage, this also became a symbol of their shared commitment to helping one another get through school, support one another’s dreams and be good partners; they were not entirely bound, but they were also not entirely free.

Marriage was never pure. It is sometimes undertaken in the spirit of perfect altruism and true love, but my friends’ practical decision was perfectly in line with the long and fraught history of this evolving institution. They might have given up, waited a few years or taken on crushing loans to move forward with their education. A license to marry costs $97 and takes effect the moment both people say “I do.” They’re responsible to one another and for one another, and they take that seriously. This year, they’ll both graduate from a UC school with their respective bachelor’s degrees.

I now pronounce you educated to the minimum degree necessary to get a decent job.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

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Over the past few days, I’ve become the most unproductive, groggy, exhausted human being. This is no doubt a result of my erratic sleeping patterns. My sleep schedule has consisted of going to bed no earlier than 3 a.m., waking up no later than 2 p.m. and taking obscenely long naps throughout the day when the exhaustion becomes too much to handle.

This isn’t something we students are unfamiliar with — during the school year, it basically becomes the norm. Days chock-full of classes, meetings, job obligations and extracurriculars leave the wee hours of the night as the only time to do homework, party or continue procrastinating. Our to-do lists are so cluttered that sleep is typically the last item on the list. No one disputes the necessity of sleep, but many of us downplay its importance — some of us believe it’s something we can be successful without. Even if you run consistently on four to five hours of sleep and manage to get the grades and have a social life, you’re definitely not as healthy as you could be.

In an April 2013 National Institute of Health newsletter, sleep expert Michael Twery explains that sleep regulates the immune system, growth hormones, appetite, cardiovascular health and blood pressure. Lack of sleep has also been linked to higher risks of heart disease, obesity and depression, according to the newsletter.

The environment at UC Berkeley inevitably leads us to believe that sleep and academic success are mutually exclusive. While I’m clearly no paragon of sleeping — there have been countless occasions when I’ve gotten out of bed in the morning only looking forward to the nap I’d take a few long and miserable hours later — it’s important to re-evaluate the way we sleep in the context of our daily lives and commitments, regardless of how difficult change may be.

The first step to getting a good night’s rest — finding out how much sleep is actually necessary. That amount of sleep actually varies from person to person, and what makes some people feel rested and refreshed may be completely different for others. On average, according to UC Berkeley’s own Tang Center, adults should sleep seven to eight hours per night to feel alert and free of fatigue.

But this fact doesn’t help much — simply knowing how much sleep you need doesn’t mean you’ll get it. So how do you fix your sleep schedule? It means going to bed before 3 a.m. in order to get more hours in. It means establishing a schedule and sticking to it — yes, even on weekends — which is something just as important as the quantity of sleep. Waking up at 8 a.m. one day, snoozing until noon the next and sleeping in all day during the weekend disrupts the body’s natural rhythms and makes you feel awful. By getting quality sleep consistently, you can prevent stress and psychological strain, according to a Clayton Sleep Institute study.

This same sleep quantity and consistency should also be supplemented with regular exercise and maintenance of a well-rounded diet free of stimulants late in the day to maximize the quality of sleep each night.

What happens when we hit the mid-afternoon wall and just can’t function? Well, that’s when our buddy, the nap, comes into play. Napping shouldn’t replace a good night’s sleep, but if done right, it can seriously improve concentration and focus. The Harvard School of Public Health concluded that the likelihood of developing heart disease is 40 percent less in people who nap regularly. The benefits are so potent that UC Davis health professionals have begun to encourage their students to accompany a full night’s sleep with 20- to 30-minute naps to improve productivity and boost academic success. But the key here is to not overdo it — a nap longer than 30 minutes might backfire, making you feel more tired and sluggish than you originally were.

So if you’re sick of constantly feeling fatigued and lethargic, try this experiment: Go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day just for a week and notice how you feel. Our commitments and obligations are hopefully a little less intense now than they are during the school year, so use the next month to gear up for the school year by stocking up on sleep.

Our generation has done a great job of giving sleep less priority than everything else, but its importance is on par with developing healthy eating habits, exercising and maintaining proper hygiene and psychological health — all things we vehemently try to pursue. But without the energy and and restorative benefits of sleep, we’re mistaken in thinking that health and general wellness are attainable.

If we truly want to take control of our health, we have to start prioritizing sleep, even if that means getting a little less done. Our post-college lives aren’t going to get much easier. The next four years aren’t the peak of our responsibilities and commitments, but they may very well be the peak of our youth. We need to establish proper routines and sleep habits now, because our bodies won’t be able to withstand college-style sleep patterns forever. The earlier we start, the healthier we’ll be in the long run.

Shahin Firouzbakht writes a Thursday column on health issues affecting student life.
Contact Shahin Firouzbakht at sfirouzbakht@dailycal.org.

The post You snooze, you gain? appeared first on The Daily Californian.

UC student regents are supposed to represent all UC students. Sadia Saifuddin’s leading role in the UC-wide anti-Israel divestment movement calls into question her willingness to represent the Jewish community — its extreme left excepted.

In pushing for divestment from the Middle East’s sole liberal democracy, she proved herself part of a radical passel of sanctimonious students whose pursuit of a narrow agenda knows no bounds of reason, propriety or honesty. She pursued the agenda of the Muslim community to the derogation of the Jewish community, and many Jewish students are anxious about what she will do next year.

Saifuddin’s record on free speech is also poor. Her sponsorship of SB 114, censuring professor Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of UC Santa Cruz (who had remarked on the worrying prevalence of anti-Semitism among Muslims in the UC system), was startlingly intolerant of Benjamin’s free speech rights.

Amid the invective directed against her during her confirmation process, there was substantial truth. We can only hope that Saifuddin will make her year as the first Muslim-American UC student regent a positive milestone — for which there is tremendous potential. If she uses her position to bring Muslim and Jewish students together and stands up for free campus dialogue, her tenure can fulfill that potential. We hope it does.

— Ariel Fridman,

UC Berkeley junior

Having the right to smoke

I am a nonsmoker and a proponent of healthy lifestyles, but I disagree with the Draft Tobacco-Free Campus Policy at UC Berkeley which states that there is no safe level of second-hand smoke.

The U.S. Surgeon General and the campus policy claim that “there is no safe level of secondhand smoke.” That is an unfounded claim and probably a false one when you consider infinitesimal quantities. Second, the policy prohibits tobacco products that affect only the user, including smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarettes.

I believe that people should be free to do what they want, especially if it does not directly harm someone else.

Also, I’d prefer that UC Berkeley spend its resources on education rather than on the enforcement of this policy.

—Jeffrey Yunes

Bioengineering doctoral student

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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Joe Wright/File

Students, like others who pass by the tents pitched on the steps of Berkeley’s century-old Downtown post office, may well wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, we’re all using the Internet now instead of popping letters to Mom in those disappearing street mailboxes, and the lines at that post office and many others grow irritatingly long as the clerks who used to staff them vanish as well.

A recent article in The Daily Californian attributes U.S. Postal Service spokesman Augustine Ruiz as explaining that as a result of a decline in mail volume, the Postal Service only needs to retain 4,000 of its 57,000 square feet of space and that keeping ownership of the entire building would not be economical. Disposing of a tax-exempt property one holds to lease space elsewhere doesn’t make long-range economic sense, but doing so doesn’t enter into the accounting of current Postal Service management. That the public paid for Berkeley’s post office also goes unmentioned in the service’s press releases. Indeed, the very notion of the public good represented by the ennobling architecture of the Downtown post office as well as the buildings at the center of the UC Berkeley campus has faded in tandem with the right of every American to have quality and tuition-free education along with a cheap and efficient postal service mandated by the Constitution.

Take a look at the materials, craftsmanship and design of buildings such as Doe Library, Wheeler Hall, the Campanile and Hearst Gym. Equivalent to those of expensive Ivy League colleges, those buildings and others at the heart of what was once simply the state university represent that taxpayers and wealthy individuals previously believed students from even the remotest parts of the state deserved to to become fully-rounded citizens. They were elements of two Hearst-sponsored plans that sought to create an ideal City of Learning on the hills facing the Golden Gate Bridge. By 1914, the treasury allotted a generous bonus to erect a post office in Berkeley worthy of the nearby university. It was modeled after Brunelleschi’s famous Foundling Hospital in Florence, Italy. During the Great Depression, the Treasury Relief Art Project further embellished the post office with both a mural and a sculpture at the same time that the Works Progress Administration set female artists to work laying mosaics on the university’s brick powerhouse east of Sather Gate. Those mosaics celebrate the expansive power of the humanities.

The language of the public good is neither spoken nor understood by those who now run both our postal service and once-public universities. Postmaster General Patrick Donohoe let Mayor Tom Bates know that he feels Berkeley’s pain, informing the mayor that “the Postal Service is the first to acknowledge how important it is to preserve our historic buildings, which is why we are going through a lengthy and transparent process to assure their protection before they are sold.” Three months later, Tom Samra, vice president of facilities, wrote that though he was “sympathetic to the concerns raised by (the city, elected officials and numerous other parties),” he was denying their appeals so that there “is no right to further administrative or judicial review of this decision.” Though listed on the National Register and paid for by the public it serves, Berkeley’s post office and others don’t represent a trust to those such as Donohoe and Samra but simply real are estate assets to be flogged by their exclusively contracted agent CBRE, the broker chaired by UC Regent Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Although not for sale yet, the decay of the classically inspired buildings at the core of the UC Berkeley campus suggests that those who run the university ever more like a business, rather than a public trust, regard them as plum sites of opportunity for more profitable ventures. While they have recently poured hundreds of millions of dollars into new sports and biotech facilities, buildings such as the magnificent women’s gymnasium designed by Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck as a memorial to UC benefactor Phoebe Hearst slouch toward ruin.

The physical decay and outright sale of what their builders intended as monuments of unaging intellect represents not just a betrayal of the public trust but also the loss of an ethical language that created a world-class university and universal postal service. We must recover that language to understand what is being taken from us and to whose advantage it is taken at our collective loss.

Gray Brechin is the project scientist of the Living New Deal based in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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Phoenix Delman/Staff

Everyone should be able to retire with dignity with a pension after a lifetime of work. Productivity has increased dramatically over the last 30 years, but most of this increased income has gone to the top 1 percent of earners. At the same time, these earners in the top 1 percent have made the decisions that have taken away pensions, so most will be forced to try to work into their 70s. 401k plans have not made up the difference, as 57 percent of Americans have less than $25,000 in their 401k plans and other savings. Many will be laid off at an earlier age and be forced to live in poverty or move in with their adult children. What happened? The top 1 percent have underfunded pensions, then claimed they are too expensive and discontinued them. IBM underfunded its employees’ pensions, then converted them to 401k plans, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars each for many IBM employees. United Airlines went bankrupt in order to stop paying its pensions, ruining the lives of many former employees. Is the UC system following this example?

From 1990 to 2010, no taxpayer money or student fees went into the UC pension system. UC employees were assured that the pension was so overfunded that the regents actually took money out in 1991 to 1993 and even 2002 to 2003. By 2006, the regents claimed that contributions were needed again but refused to allow an actuary hired by the unions to verify this. It took five years of litigation for the UC system to allow a union-hired actuary to even get the data. What was UC system trying to hide? The union-hired actuary found a potential $1 billion in savings. Meanwhile, the state got used to not funding UC pensions despite funding CSU pensions at 20 percent of salary — compared to a 5 percent employee contribution. Has UC management displayed competence and transparency in allowing this to happen?

Who gets hurt by these changes? In the case of the UC system, executives like President Mark Yudof come out unscathed. He’ll receive an additional $230,000 per year after his five years of service. But UC workers pay more for fewer benefits. For younger workers, the system has drastically changed the rules on qualifications for retiree health care benefits. As of July 1, one’s age and years of service must equal 50 — and one must be vested — in order to avoid cuts to health care benefits in retirement. These cuts could equal one-third of one’s retirement income. For faculty and staff members hired on or after July 1, the UC system has a new retirement tier in which employees must pay a little less and get a lot less, about one-third of what some co-workers will get and about half of what others will get.

Two unions, UPTE-CWA 9119 and California Nurses Association, oppose the tiered retiree benefits and are in bargaining over these and other matters. The UC system refuses to consider any proposals from the unions.

Before the contribution holiday, the sysetm had contributed two, three and five times as much as employees contributed to the fund. The retirement benefits helped retain faculty and staff members. Now, with two tiers of retirement, why would newly hired employees spend lifetimes at the UC system for meager pensions? And if these tens of thousands of employees do not stay, how does the fund stay solvent?

The UC Regents now want UC employees to pay more and get less, an experience familiar to UC students. It’s really up to us to say no to these ongoing shifts of resources from students and workers to, yes, executives, Regents with connections to development and finance, CEOs, consultants …

Turning the tide means working together to challenge decisions and priorities that diminish our future and the future of the university and working together to preserve (and, where needed, reintroduce) decent pensions for all.

No to exorbitant UC executive pensions; yes to decent pensions for UC faculty and staff members.

Paul Brooks is an elected staff representative on UC Retirement Advisory Board. Tanya Smith is president of the Local 1 of UPTE-CWA 9119.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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This year, 5,979 students submitted a Statement of Intent to Register to UC Berkeley — 614 more students than last year. RSSP spokesperson Marty Takimoto said that although the number could fluctuate, he anticipates that there will be 50 more students looking for on-campus housing this year than the typical occupancy in the residence halls allows.

To address the possible scarcity this year, like it has done in the past few years, RSSP has said that it may need to convert study lounges to four-person rooms and turn some double rooms into triples. With UC Berkeley having one of the costliest room and board rates in the nation, this possibility just isn’t up to the standards, considering students pay thousands of dollars each semester to live on campus. Because this is also not the first year RSSP has resorted to converting student lounges to make more room for students — albeit temporarily — the program needs to come up with a more permanent solution to handle an increase in student occupancy.

For example, the recently opened Maximino Martinez Commons could give priority to freshmen instead of second-year students or upperclassmen, like it currently does. Freshmen are often new to campus and don’t have the time or experience to explore off-campus housing options and should be given every chance possible to live on campus if they choose.

The campus admissions office should also work with RSSP to ensure that the program adheres to its policy ensuring housing for freshmen, transfer and extension students. The sooner the office communicates fluctuations in the student body to RSSP, the better.

If on-campus housing is not available, the campus should also work with off-campus private housing alternatives to provide incoming students with a variety of quality off-campus options. Having the campus vet and endorse other housing options could make students feel safer if they choose to forgo the crowded residence halls and live off-campus the first year they come to UC Berkeley.

RSSP says that converting floor lounges for students to live in is a temporary solution and that almost all students would be moved out of the lounges when regular rooms become available in the spring. This cannot even be a last-resort option, as it is not conducive to a comfortable living environment.

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