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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Changes to UC Regents Policy 7401 would extend the freedom of UC faculty and staff to freely critique policies adopted by the administration without fear of administrative discipline. The adoption comes amid a series of lawsuits that raise concerns about the limits of freedom of expression for public employees.

“There’s the issue that this policy revision will affect employer-employee relations, but I don’t think that’s a legitimate concern,” said UC President Mark Yudof of the decision.

Minor amendments also included revising the anti-discrimination policy to include “gender” and “gender expression” as well as members of all uniformed services among the prohibited types of discrimination in employment.

Susan Carlson, vice provost for academic personnel, presented the amendment to the regents on Thursday and argued that the revision protecting free speech is necessary to encourage faculty participation in governance of the UC system by ensuring protection under the First Amendment.

“Foundational policies are not often changed unless absolutely necessary,” Carlson said. “Faculty involvement in the governance of the UC is incredibly important to our public mission, and we’re ensuring that this policy change gives our employees the right to express their opinions towards university policy without fear of negative ramifications.”

The issue of free speech protection for government employees became a contentious issue in 2006, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Garcetti v. Ceballos, a case involving a Los Angeles district attorney, that the First Amendment does not prevent citizens from being disciplined for comments they make as public employees.

Joe Kiskis, vice chair of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, said that the decision did not present a problem for higher education until 2007, when UC Irvine professor Juan Hong brought up the issue in a 2007 U.S. District Court case.

In his lawsuit against university officials and the regents, Hong alleged that he had been denied a salary increase in 2004 due to his criticism of the hiring and promotion decisions within his department.

The District Court ruled in 2007 that Hong was not entitled to protection under the First Amendment because he made the comments as a public employee and not as a private citizen.

According to Kiskis, the court’s ruling in Hong’s appeal of the original decision left the question of the limits of academic expression unanswered. Before Hong’s appeal, Kiskis said faculty members believed they had the freedom to critique policies enacted by the university.

After the case, UC Davis professor Greg Pasternack, who chaired that campus’s committee of academic freedom, set out to revise university policy by proposing changes to the code of conduct. However, after the issue became entangled in several committees for the past two years, Pasternack lost track of his proposition and was surprised to hear about the regents’ decision.

“This is the greatest expansion of academic freedom made in a long time,” Pasternack said.

Contact Dennis Vidal at dvidal@dailycal.org. Follow Dennis Vidal on Twitter @vidaldennis.

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Javier Panzar/Senior Staff

UC President Mark Yudof spoke at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, answering questions about his tenure as president and the complicated problems that public higher education has faced in recent years.

Yudof, who is set to step down in August after almost five years in office, leaves behind a mixed legacy including both tuition increases and improvements to financial aid programs. Only months after taking office, Yudof faced a plunging economy and harsh statewide cuts to the UC system.

Tuesday’s event was part of a speaker series on California’s future and was organized by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy research institution.

Among the several topics discussed at the event, Yudof addressed his relationship with Gov. Jerry Brown, the challenge of delineating responsibilities between individual UC campuses and the UC Office of the President and most importantly, he said, the burdensome pension obligations that affect the UC system’s finances.

“There are many challenges facing higher education,” Yudof said. “The first is, of course, financial issues and the budget.”

He also addressed what he considers other pressing issues, including the fact that the UC system should be enrolling 30,000 more students than it currently does while also providing more opportunities for low-income and underrepresented students.

These problems do not have simple solutions, Yudof said. He noted that reforming the UC’s pension system and increasing graduation and transfer rates are multifaceted issues that require an executive.

Yudof also talked about the role of online education in the UC system, tentatively proposing a program in which students rejected from the university could take a year of online courses with the intent of transferring. But this would have its own set of financial aid implications for students who cannot afford computers, Yudof said — another example of the complexity of improving educational outcomes.

His advice to the next UC president, who has not yet been selected, was to continue searching for nonstate sources of funding and, more importantly, to understand how to work with the other regents and chancellors of the university.

Finding any remedy was only “10 percent of the solution,” Yudof said. “The other 90 percent is selling it to people.”

He also lent his own advice to incoming students.

“Study what interests you,” Yudof said. “Make sure you call your parents at least once a week. Find a subset of people on campus who share your interests, because universities can be large. They will help you keep your sense of belonging.”

Contact Sophie Ho at sho@dailycal.org.

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Leya Andrews/Staff

Pursuant to a universitywide ban on tobacco products, UC Berkeley has established a committee to oversee the move toward becoming tobacco-free by 2014.

To lead the tobacco-free initiative, the campus has created the Tobacco-Free Berkeley Steering Committee to design and implement transitional policies. The committee is composed of representatives from several campus groups, including the ASUC Senate, University Health Services and the City of Berkeley Public Health Division.

“Smokers who are trying to quit have a much higher relapse rate if they are exposed to tobacco smoke,” said Joel Moskowitz, director for the Center for Family and Community Health and co-chair of the committee. “By moving smoking off campus, smokers are more likely to try and quit and be more successful in quitting.”

According to Steve Maranzana, assistant manager of the Health and Safety Team at the Office of Environment, Health & Safety and project manager for the initiative, the committee’s focus will be on education, but the committee is currently planning on leveraging existing processes, such as the Student Code of Conduct and administrative supervisory actions, to enforce the ban.

“All members of the university community will share the responsibility of adhering to and enforcing the policy and will have the responsibility for bringing it to the attention of visitors and guests,” Maranzana said.

University Health Services will provide several smoking cessation programs and resources, including a one-on-one cessation assistance to develop a quit plan, free quit kits and a free nicotine replacement therapy starter pack.

Smoking is currently not allowed inside of or within 25 feet of campus buildings. However, smoking, the use of smokeless tobacco products and the use of unregulated nicotine products will be completely banned from all outdoor spaces at any UC campus in 2014 following a mandate issued by UC President Mark Yudof last year.

According to Trish Ratto, manager of the Health Matters wellness program for faculty and staff, the prevalence of smoking is prevalent among 3 to 9 percent of UC Berkeley employees and 6 to 10 percent of students.

Jeremy Palmer, a UC Berkeley senior who frequently smokes on campus as a way to relieve stress, said the university should instead should offer the alternative of designated smoking areas.

“It puts smokers at a disadvantage,” Palmer said. “I have a right to smoke, and they are trying to criminalize what is not criminal.”

To Amanda Fallin, a postdoctorate researcher at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, policies like these at colleges are vital to the prevention of developing smoking habits.

“It is important to implement policies like these because almost all adult daily smokers start before the age of 26,” Fallin said. “Policies like these can help or stop young adults from starting to smoke or stop smoking.”

Andrea Guzman covers academics and administration. Contact her at aguzman@dailycal.org and on Twitter @guzmanandrea5.

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Around 15 protesters dressed in black and holding flower-adorned coffins held a “Funeral for Workers’ Rights” on Sproul Plaza Thursday morning in protest of proposed cuts to UC workers’ benefits.

Read more here.

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Daphne Chen/Staff

Around 15 protesters dressed in black and holding flower-adorned coffins held a “Funeral for Workers’ Rights” on Sproul Plaza Thursday morning in protest of proposed cuts to UC workers’ benefits.

The mock funeral was part of a universitywide day of student action in support of yearlong negotiations with the UC system for better workers’ benefits. The negotiations are being led by AFSCME 3299, a statewide union representing UC employees. Protesters complained about a staff salary freeze as well as the use of a two-tier system for pension plans in which newly hired employees receive less financial contribution from the university.

“I’m standing in solidarity with campus workers,” said UC Berkeley student and UC United Students Against Sweatshops spokesperson Amanda Mendez. “The university right now can’t afford to give workers a raise, yet we can afford a $50,000 bonus for the chancellor.”

Mendez said she saw firsthand how undercompensated and overworked UC employees are through her own experience as a student employee at Peet’s Coffee on campus.

In the past, employees were expected to contribute 5 percent of their salaries toward their pension plans. The two-tier pension system increases that contribution for new employees to 7 percent and 6.5 percent for current employees beginning in July.

The protest comes three weeks after UC President Mark Yudof announced in a letter that the university will not be able to implement salary increases for staff during the current fiscal year.

After the mock funeral procession at Sather Gate, protesters marched to California Hall in an effort to voice their concerns to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.

Debra Harrington, the campus’s employee and labor relations director, accepted the mock coffin protesters had made. Harrington told the protesters that the chancellor understands the concerns of organizers and that the administration is currently trying to end the bargaining process in a timely manner.

“The Berkeley campus is committed to bargaining in faith,” Harrington said to the protesters. “Bargaining is actively is occurring right now, and we are hoping for an amicable and early resolution.”

The protest came to a close shortly after Harrington went back inside, ending with a unity clap and plans to mobilize further with worker sit-ins and additional demonstrations.

“I think it’s really disappointing that the chancellor sent out a representative,” said labor organizer KB Brower. “They lie to our face and say that they care, but they haven’t been acting in a timely fashion. They’ve known our demands for a year.”

The rally had relatively low turnout compared to a similar protest more than a month ago, in which more than 100 students and service workers blocked the intersection of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue in a systemwide AFSCME 3299 union picket against the reduced pension plan.

Shirin Ghaffary is the lead academics and administration reporter. Contact her at sghaffary@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter at @sheesnaps.

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Taryn Erhardt/File

After the announcement on Friday of UC President Mark Yudof’s resignation, the UC Board of Regents faces a much shorter time frame in comparison to previous searches to select a successor.

The last two presidential searches — Yudof’s in 2007-08 and that of his predecessor, Robert Dynes, in 2002-03 — had about 11 months to complete and designated a successor three months before the outgoing president officially stepped down. Yudof’s announcement of his resignation in January means that there is a little more than seven months to find a successor before he leaves office on Aug. 31, 2013.

ASUC Vice President of External Affairs Shahryar Abbasi, one of the student representatives on the recent search committee to replace UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, said that attracting potential candidates from outside the UC system will present a challenge.

“There will be times when you don’t know if you’re going to find someone, and you’re going to have to pick other state systems,” Abbasi said. “How do you convince people to leave universities and come to the UC? That’s going to be a difficult thing to do. It’s not going to be an easy search.”

According to the UC Board of Regents’ appointment policy, the selection of a new president begins when a vacancy for the position is anticipated. The chair of the board, currently Sherry Lansing, will appoint a special committee consisting of the alumni regent, the student regent, ex officio regents and up to six other board members to nominate candidates.

In the last phase of the selection process, the committee will present its final selection to the entire Board of Regents for voting.

An important aspect of the selection process is broad and thorough consultation with various UC stakeholders, including the Academic Council, Laboratory Directors, campus chancellors, students, staff and alumni. They will have the opportunity to weigh in on the selection criteria and eventual candidates.

“The next president (should) figure out how to maintain excellence in light of new technological developments,” Abbasi said. “There is pressure and a general consensus that people want to do a lot more with online education.”

The UC Student Association consulted with the search committee five years ago when Yudof was selected and expects to be just as involved in the selection of the next UC president.

“As a whole, we haven’t decided on what our exact qualifications are,” said Darius Kemp, UCSA director of organizing and communications. “However, we still concretely believe the next UC president should be someone just as open as Mark Yudof in the past few months and, even more so than he has ever been, open to student input.”

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Members of the board’s Committee on Educational Policy weighed the different benefits an expanded program of online courses could provide the university. As a cost-cutting measure, an online curriculum could dramatically reduce the cost of teaching per student, making a UC education much more affordable.

“The costs of an undergraduate education would be reduced for students and their families, and the greater throughput would allow UC to educate more undergraduates over a given time period,” an executive summary from the UC Office of the President reads. “It is also possible that online courses can decrease, or slow increases in, the university’s instructional costs, while sustaining UC’s high curricular standards.”

An expanded online catalog can also fill and improve upon the niche currently occupied by community colleges under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, said UC President Mark Yudof at the meeting.

“It should be possible for students to take one or two years’ worth of high-quality general education courses and then transfer to a UC campus,” Yudof said.

But according to UC Provost Aimee Dorr, current online offerings are mostly incompatible with the different requirements of the individual UC campuses. The transfer process is difficult under the current model, where each campus produces and gives credit for its own selection of online courses.

The board discussed UC Online, a systemwide program launched in January last year that offers online courses for credit accepted at all UC campuses. In the last year, about 1,700 UC students were enrolled in its 13 courses, which each cost about the same as a UC summer course.

The program, however, may not be operating as planned. Last year, only one non-UC student enrolled in a UC Online course, a problem that must be solved if the program will work as a gateway to other campuses.

The meeting comes less than a week after Gov. Jerry Brown announced his proposed 2013-14 budget, which allocates $10 million to the university for developing online and technology-based courses. Brown’s budget recommended the UC system be more responsible with its spending and continue to eliminate inefficiencies.

The expansion of online classes in the university might be a move in the wrong direction, said Student Regent Jonathan Stein, noting that the UC leadership has not paid adequate attention to student input.

“We’ve talked extensively about how students learn today and that students are more native to the Internet,” said Stein. “No one has asked students if they’re interested in this.”

Contact Jacob Brown at jbrown@dailycal.org.

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The resolution, which passed Nov. 13, asks UC Irvine to pull out funds from various companies, including Caterpillar, General Electric and Hewlett-Packard. The resolution still needs to be approved by the judicial and executive branches of the Irvine campus’s ASUC, after which it can be presented to the campus administration.

“It wasn’t because they were pro-Israel,” said Sabreen Shalabi, a representative in the campus’s ASUC legislative branch and the author of the resolution. “We were discontent with the fact that our university is investing in companies profiting off of human rights violations.”

The resolution argues that UCI’s investment in the companies is a violation of the university’s values.

“It is the mission of the UCI Foundation to ‘ensure the appropriate use of all funds’ in order to uphold the values of respect, intellectual curiosity, integrity, commitment appreciation, and empathy,” the resolution reads.

In the spring of 2010, UC Berkeley’s ASUC Senate passed a resolution urging the UC Board of Regents and the campus administration to divest from companies it alleged had provided war supplies to the Israeli military. The resolution drew international attention, with figures ranging from Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu to prominent philosopher Noam Chomsky weighing in.

Though the Berkeley resolution passed the ASUC Senate, it was ultimately vetoed by then-president Will Smelko. The senate held a vote to override Smelko’s veto, but the move failed after a number of senators who initially supported the bill decided to oppose it.

At Berkeley, the resolution polarized the campus community, said Noah Stern, who opposed the resolution as an ASUC senator when it passed.

“It took several years for different campus communities to recover from the divisiveness of that event,” said Stern, who was ASUC president the following year. “There is no real sense of unanimity around the Israel-Palestine conflict when you actually talk to students on campus.”

Graduate student Tom Pessah, a member of the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine and co-author of the 2010 divestment resolution, said the veto came about because of pressure by nonuniversity organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“AIPAC representatives … as well as senators who’ve been sent on trips to Israel continue to oppose the passing of such a resolution on our campus, despite students’ strong support for it,” Pessah said.

The UC Irvine administration issued a response to the resolution saying that it is not the policy of the campus nor of the university to divest from a foreign government unless the U.S. government deems it necessary.

According to Shalabi, the Irvine resolution garnered significant support from the student body.

“It was really nice to see students unafraid to stand up against human rights violations,” she said. “I feel like the resolution was very logical — there’s nothing emotional about it.”

Contact Andy Nguyen at anguyen@dailycal.org.

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Dean Ignacio/Staff

SAN FRANCISCO — Despite protesters briefly halting the third and last day of the UC Board of Regents meeting Thursday, members of the board focused most of their discussion on strategies to maximize revenue for the UC system using the relationship between the university and private enterprises.

The discussion came about a week after voters approved Proposition 30, a tax increase that would prevent a $250 million midyear budget cut to the UC system, and a day after the board’s finance committee voted to approve a budget plan that calls for state funding to increase by more than $267 million for the 2013-2014 fiscal year and assumes a 6 percent increase in student tuition.

Yet, on Wednesday, both Gov. Jerry Brown and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said an increase in state funding to the UC system is unlikely, heightening public pressure for the university to find additional sources of revenue beyond student tuition increases.

Members of the board’s Working Group on Technology Transfer urged UC officials to re-evaluate how UC research and patents generate revenue. Although inventions and patents created by UC researchers have increased in recent years, the group found that the system could do much more to tap into those revenue sources.

The group proposed four recommendations to increase cash flow to the university over the long term, including investing more into UC research and startups, creating local advisory boards at each UC campus and establishing an ad-hoc committee of the board.

According to the group’s report, these strategies will not solve the at least $1.5 billion budget shortfall the university will face in the next five years. But, board chair Sherry Lansing and others spoke in support of technology investment’s long-term benefits, urging more public-private partnerships.

UC President Mark Yudof called the plan a “dynamite idea,” adding that those who implement it need to collaborate closely with campuses.

“When you can bring together all the campuses to focus on one specific item, that’s power, brain power, to create,” said Regent Frederick Ruiz at the meeting.
The board also considered a proposal to transfer the Center for Executive Education at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to a nonprofit entity, in an effort to increase revenue for the campus.

Some regents expressed concern that the transfer aimed to evade UC oversight, but the board approved the plan, considering its fiscal benefits.

As a result of the transfer, UC Berkeley is projected to increase revenue by $50 million in the next seven years. The center offers open-enrollment programs to part-time students and currently accounts for 16 percent of Haas’ gross revenue, according to the plan.

“It’s anticipated that … this will generate significant revenue both for the Haas School and the (campus) overall,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau at the meeting.

The regents also approved the creation of an limited-liability company between the UC Davis Medical Center and Dameron Hospital in Stockton, Calif. to expand the campus’s medical education program.

Contact Libby Rainey at lrainey@dailycal.org.

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