Postponed UC regents meeting rescheduled as telephone conference

The next University of California Board of Regents meeting has been rescheduled to take place via telephone conference on Nov. 28, UC officials said Friday.

The meeting, originally set to take place Nov. 16-17, was postponed after university police warned of a threat of violent protests, according to a joint statement by Regents Chair Sherry Lansing, Vice Chair Bruce Varner and UC President Mark Yudof.

The telephone conference will connect regents from four different locations “”mdash; UC San Francisco Mission Bay, UC Davis, UC Merced and UCLA, according to a statement from the UC Office of the President.

The switch to a telephone conference is not meant to hinder students’ protesting efforts, said Ricardo Vazquez, a spokesperson for UCOP.

“Because the meeting will take place in four locations, students can more readily go to the site of their choice,” Vazquez said. “For a student who may not have made it to the usual UCSF location, they could go the (UCLA) campus or the Merced campus.”

Vazquez said teleconferences have been planned before to accommodate special circumstances, including the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the Iraq War in 2003.

Most recently, a teleconference took place in the spring of 2009 during a swine flu breakout.

In the upcoming meeting, the regents must approve Yudof’s budget request to the state, Vasquez said. Because the budget request needs to be passed as soon as possible, the regents decided a teleconference would be more time and cost efficient than trying to meet in person, he said.

He added the new teleconference format will not become routine. Critics say, however, the regents are effectively inhibiting students’ participation in the decision-making process.

Bob Samuels, UCLA lecturer and president of the UC lecturers’ and librarians’ union, said having the meeting through teleconference is an unfair practice, equivalent to holding a private meeting.

“There is no room for dialogue between the regents and the students and protesters if they’re all in different places,” Samuels said.

The UC lecturers’ and librarians’ union plans to protest at all four sites of the meeting, Samuels said. The union especially wants to make a statement condemning the recent police action during students’ protests on UC campuses, he said.

Recently, there were incidents of pepper-spraying at UC Davis and beatings at UC Berkeley by university police during nonviolent protests.

Kyle Arnone, a graduate student in sociology and trustee of United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents UC teaching assistants, readers and tutors, said he feels the regents are limiting one of few venues students have to communicate with UC administrators by holding a teleconference. He compared the regents’ decision to a “divide and conquer” tactic.

“It’s much more difficult for students to present their grievances when there is a telephone conference in place of meeting in a single location,” Arnone said.

Vazquez said the regents have taken this into account. Time allocated for public comments has been extended from 20 minutes to an hour to allow for more public input, he said.

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