“In recent years, students seemed to have lost faith in the people meant to represent and support them, an indication that dialogue between students and campus and system administrators has been stalled.”
No, it’s an indication that they do not represent us, and never have. 18 of the regents are appointed without any form of democratic intervention either in the form of elections or vetoes—the governor appoints each of them for 12 year terms, usually as recompense for financing the governor’s campaign. No regents have ever been vetoed or recalled. Only 1 of these 18 has any background in any form of actual education, and it’s very tangential experience at that; all of them are from the financial sphere (eg Sherry Lansing is simultaneously a board member of Bank of America who makes 300,000 dollars a year from them and six figures of our tuition money for being a regent as well; another is a head of Paramount pictures, etc). There is one student regent—who is appointed by the other regents for a 1 year term. 7 others vote with the regents (4 from the state, 3 from unelected offices in the U.C. system), and 2 others do not vote, but sit on the board, from unelected offices in the U.C. system. They are the 1%, and college students are the least wealthy demographic in California, and they are not elected, not recallable, and there is no means of democratic intervention or response to them (short of shutting their meetings down, for which they hire out the UCPD to beat us)—public comment is a measely, token amount of time during which they smile and nod or look sad and ignore us, then get back to talking about their interests with regard to the UC system.
Students should not be distracted in taking this fight to the state—that is what the regents are trying to do to cover their own asses and to divide us. The regents have sway in the state—they and all their banker friends are the campaign financiers of all our CA politicians, and so they have major influence; however, when Sherry Lansing sits on the board of Bank of America, and there is a proposal in the state legislature to tax banks more to fund public higher education, what do you think she does (this actually happened)?
Sure, there is a major problem in the way the state funds the UC system—however, if the regents can ignore us, the state legislature can ignore us even more; the regents just want to be seen to be taking our side in this issue, since resistance to them is finally mounting. We can get to the regents, and the regents can get to the state by backing policies like the ReFund CA Pledge which we’ve been trying to force them to sign (http://www.makebankspaycalifornia.com/the_refund_california_pledge)—they all say they sort of support these policies—though they don’t, because said policies are contrary to their interests—but they refuse to sign it, for now. If we continue to put pressure on them, maybe we can actually effect change through their and their peers’ major influence in state politics.
Furthermore, the regents have created a huge amount of this problem, and are just trying to blame it all on the state. Again, state policies regarding education in CA are majorly messed up, but the regents are culpable to: by taking a state who annually always has problems balancing its budget (CA), and giving it an easy alternative it can always cut from (the U.C. system, since over the past 30 years the regents have consistently taught the state that any deficit in funding to the U.C.‘s will be more than made up without resistance on the backs of students, which is de facto regressive taxation without representation)—by doing these two things, the regents have ensured that the state of CA will continue to cut from our budgets until we are a private school system. What the regents must do is take a stand—refuse to raise tuition to cover the costs of a crisis they enabled, and then California’s legislature will definitely sit back and reconsider funding the budget of UC (e.g. any bill with “Emergency Education Fund to Save the UC” or something similar as its name is sure to pass once it’s required—the regents just haven’t required it to be passed yet).
Furthermore, it is disgusting that the regents would so two-facedly try to “take our side” in bringing this to the state: if we march to the state, it will not be with them. They have hired UCPD to beat and bludgeon and taze and mace and shoot us with less lethal projectiles for peacefully protesting them; they are an inherently anti-democratic body in policy and procedure. They are just trying to save their own asses by being seen with the students.
And finally, we must clean our own house before we can expect someone else to save it. Mark Yudof, UC president, made $577,650.56 in 2009 alone, the year he first declared a budget crisis and austerity measures and a 32% fee hike. In that same year, he spent over $600,000 of UC money not included in his pay check (ie embezzlement) to buy and renovate an additional mansion (equipped with its own elevator) in addition to the mansion our fees go to funding that the UC president gets to live in free of charge, and in further addition to six-figure bonuses (http://www.baycitizen.org/education/story/uc-presidents-housing-raises-ire-and/). All regents make 6 figures a year in salary, and six figures more in bonuses (last year, one administrator got a $744,950 bonus on top of its salary), and get crazy benefits, all paid for by us, though they only work against us, and so are only worth negative salaries, and negative bonuses, and negative benefits.
Furthermore, there are now more administrators than educators in the U.C. system due to the regents’ restructuring policies—this is not and can never be an effective or efficient model for an educational environment. We must fix these internal problems, which will already give us much more efficiency, efficacy, and funding, before we can expect to get more funding in ways that will be efficient and efficacious from the state.
The regents are nothing short of the UC’s version of the Bernie Madoffs who awarded themselves record bonuses while embezzling money and destroying their constituents’ wealth they were hired to protect. Do you think Occupy Wall Street would march with Bernie Madoff on Washington to get another bailout? Hell no. That is what the regents are asking us to do. Everyone I know in the protest movement at UCLA is extremely opposed to this, but I guess you guys can print anything and it becomes fact (like the lack of UCR police brutality last thursday undocumented here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/19/1056471/-BREAKING:-Police-Fire-Projectiles-at-Students-from-Occupy-UC-Riverside-Protesting-Board-of-Regents
http://ola-asm.tumblr.com/
http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2012/01/cops-and-cowards-reflections-on-recent.html
http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/violence-at-the-regents-meeting/
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/01/20/two-arrested-plastic-pellets-fired-during-thursday-riverside-protests/).

“Rather than being at odds with one another, students, faculty and regents should be looking toward the root cause of budget turmoil – the state.”

Where does the state end?
Is the UC system not a state body?
Being critical of the way our university is governed by a small body of unelected corporate elite is looking at the state.

This whole move by the Regents is just an effort to deflect the arguments of those who have completely legitimate critiques about their lack of transparency and democratic accountability. Also, the point made by KT is pressing… who put the Regents in power? How do the Regents become Regents? This all has to do with the collusion of corporate interests and the state. We’re all little Eichmanns, dig?

“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power” – Benito Mussolini

Just because the UC system is run by the state doesn’t mean that the people who are cutting the legislators who are cutting the UC budget and regents who appear to be doing their best to maintain a cash-strapped university are the same people. It frustrates me that while the regents have repeatedly asked the students for concrete solutions and are genuinely considering the proposal set forth by UCR students, most UC students continue to protest them. It is a combination of the fact that the cost of education is rising faster than the price of inflation and the fact that legislators are cutting UC funds from the state budget that is the problem, NOT the regents (mostly).

GT:
Even if we were to receive extra funding, it would go to all the wrong places under the regents’ current allocations (and they have pretty much complete control over the allocations of the funding they do receive). So there’s no point in asking the state for more money until we send it to better places (e.g. not sending over half the funds to administrative rather than educational pursuits, not cutting liberal arts programs mercilessly so that they can build unprofitable hotels on campus that create capital for the regents, not giving all administrative higher-ups 6 figure salaries with 6 figure bonuses every year, etc.). We have to clean house first, and that starts with the regents.
Also, any anti-democratic system is immoral, even if it does work. This doesn’t work, nor is it democratic in any capacity—it shuts down democratic efforts to improve its educational efficacy with extreme force, greed, and prejudice. Even if they worked while being anti-democratic, it would be based on happenstance and the “graces” of the rich and an inherently classist infrastructure rather than actual systemic functionality or success. The first step is to democratize the regents regardless—then we can even force them to put actual rather than just token pressure on the state (as any pressure they put on it now for actual and substantive educational reform would run directly contrary to their interests—if they do sincerely fight for more funding, it’s more funding for their pocketbooks and cronies).
Example: look at how much money UCPD gets, making our campuses more militarized than a lot of much higher risk areas (though those areas are normally higher risk because of Reganite police intervention), while libraries and faculty salaries and so on are facing austerity: http://wearestillthecrisis.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/are-ucpd-the-99/
You may be frustrated by our pressure on the regents instead of the capitol, but we’re frustrated by your forgiveness/ignorance of the true problems the regents are (willfully) causing to our system that make reform at a state level impossible until they are completely democratized or (better yet) abolished. We find the focus on state legislature to be a distraction from our true cause, at least for now, used by Darth Lansing as a sinkhole for otherwise good intentions and impetuses from people such as yourself—I think this is the main obstacle between the fledgling student movement we have going (and growing) and a full-on student rebellion that could really make a long-term difference in California, and maybe even US, higher education.

Thanks for the response. However, if corruption in the Board of Regents is the problem, it seems that the best solution would be a bill that limits the regents’ ability to profit off of outside firms. Especially if the most corrupt regents and administrators are making most of their money from firms other than the UC, I would doubt that lowering their UC pay would send any strong message. If anything, it would drive out the non-corrupt administrators. Also, I investigated the current construction at UCLA, and I came across this list of projects:
Life Sciences Replacement Building
Police Station
Hilgard Student Housing
100 Medical Plaza Building
Northwest Campus Student Housing Infill
Lake Arrowhead
Weybum Terrace
Pauley Pavilion
(source: http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/383/they-pledged-your-tuition)

The Northwest Infill Student Housing will directly benefit undergrads. In addition, most students I talk to support the reconstruction of Pauley Pavilion. The UCLA medical center is highly profitable, so I would imagine that medical center construction has a positive return on investment. So, I do not see the problem with spending money on these projects to make our university better. None of this construction is unnecessary.

The problem I see with construction projects is that they must be funded through a secure source of revenue, which the state has been unable to provide. Given the inadequacy of the state, these projects must be funded through tuition. The real question, then, is are these projects worth their price tag to students.

I would love a bill that addresses the core problem facing the UC. But such a bill would have nothing to do with the UC executives pay. Rather, it would ensure that the regents don’t have commitments to outside companies or stocks that conflict with their commitment to the UC, that they are working solely to improve the University.