Last week’s UC Board of Regents meeting was originally scheduled to be held at UC San Diego, and student groups from UCLA and other UCs were planning to attend.
Some time after the November regents meeting at UCLA, the location of the January meeting was changed to UC San Francisco, a campus with no central location or undergraduate student body. Only a handful of students attended, one from UCLA. Students have questioned the motives behind the change in location.
“They moved the location spontaneously to UC San Francisco, which is strategic because there’s no undergraduate student body there,” said Corey Matthews, chair of the Afrikan Student Union at UCLA.
However, Peter King, a spokesman for the UC Office of the President, said the UC has nothing to hide, and that the meeting was held in San Francisco to save money.
“I would challenge you to find a public organization that is more transparent than the UC,” King said.
He said there are two financial reasons for moving the meeting from San Diego to San Francisco.
First, he said it costs a lot of money to move the regents from campus to campus, as well as to send the entire University of California Office of the President staff to a location where local public transit does not travel.
The second reason he gave was regarding the cost of security.
“It costs even more when you have to have the kind of security that was in play down in Westwood,” King said.
He could not speak further on the subject of security and said he is not informed on the specifics of those matters.
Susan Li, external vice president of Undergraduate Students Association Council, was the only UCLA student at the meeting Thursday.
Both Li and University of California Students Association President Victor Sanchez spoke of a march in Sacramento they hope to hold on March 1 in an effort to get state legislators to support the UC.
Li said that while students are not yet ready to work with the regents in Sacramento, she thinks that the students cannot win the battle in the state capital without them.
“It’s going to be an uphill battle to reorient the students,” she said. “(The regents) bring what we can’t: … political leverage.”
MEChA chair Maritza Santillan said she thinks many students would feel threatened by the possibility of working with regents in Sacramento. But Santillan is not entirely against the possibility of working with the regents.
“I think it would take a while for us to trust the regents again,” Santillan said.
Both Santillan and Matthews said their organizations were planning trips to the meeting in San Diego, and it was discouraging to hear that the meeting location had been moved to San Francisco.
Matthews suggested that if the move was for financial reasons, the regents could have met at Berkeley, where there is an undergraduate student population.
According to King, Berkeley has only hosted three regents meetings in the last 27 years, whereas San Francisco has been a frequent location throughout the regents’ history.
“I guarantee you that if we were talking about a 32 percent fee increase there would have been a boisterous student voice and presence at the meeting,” he said of last week’s meeting.
While Matthews was upset that the regents changed locations, he would still see the greater good in working with the regents in Sacramento.
“The fact that they (would be) marching in solidarity with the students, I think, would be the best thing,” he said.
Li echoed his statement.
“It would be amazing to have Mark Yudof there with us,” she said.