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UC Budget Crisis at Forefront of UCSB Teach-In

Hundreds of students and others filtered in and out of UCSB’s Campbell Hall on Wednesday as part of “Defending the University: A Teach-In On the Current Crisis,” organized as an educational and political response to the University of California budget woes.
The teach-in came just weeks after students and faculty gathered on campus to protest fee hikes. Students returning to campuses this fall saw an increase in fees of nearly 10 percent, approved by the UC Regents in May.
Under fire is UC’s administrative compensation, in which UC President Mark Yudof makes $828,000 — a salary critics contend is double that of his predecessor. Turmoil also has been eminent within the university’s unions.
The Regents will meet again Nov. 17-19, when they’ll discuss another fee hike — one that would increase student fees 32 percent.
Privatization of the university, furloughs and fee hikes were all part of Wednesday’s discussion. Breakout sessions with titles such as “The UC Budget and California Tax Policy” and “The California Dream Act: Help for Undocumented Students” were held between speakers.
Several students spoke during the teach-in, including Reginald Archer, who said he moved from Florida to pursue graduate studies at UCSB.
“I’m here because of the system that’s here,” he said. “We need to save our most precious resources — the minds of the faculty, staff and students.”
Archer took issue with the fee increases and said many students felt resigned to accept them. “I’m not OK with that,” he said. “That’s unacceptable to me. It’s not coming out of my pocket.”

History professor Nelson Lichtenstein offered historical context and talked about Clark Kerr, UC’s 12th president who expanded the system greatly to support the influx of baby boomers.
“Under Kerr’s tenure, UC students had no tuition and almost no fees,” he said, eliciting cheers from the audience. Kerr saw to it that the university resisted privatization and remained subsidized by taxpayers, “safe and accountable to democratic policies.”
Stan Glantz, a professor at UC San Francisco and a past chairman of the system’s committee on planning and budget, spoke about UC’s budget woes and their origins within the political landscape, taking specific issue with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cuts of higher education. Glantz was equally scathing in his treatment of former Gov. Gray Davis, and said no one was looking out for the interests of students and faculty.
“There’s no one that I see — not President Yudof, not the Regents, not the chancellors — whose out there defending the idea of public education,” he said.
Bob Samuels, UC president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the UC system doesn’t have a budget problem, but a priority problem.
The total UC budget is $20 billion, and expected funding cuts were $700 million to $800 million, less than 3 percent — all in addition to billions of dollars in assets, he said.
Undergraduates are already subsidizing research, instruction and other money-making activities, Samuels said.
“It makes no sense to cut undergraduate enrollment or increase student fees,” he said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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» on 10.14.09 @ 10:50 PM
Because UCSB is an unaccountable criminal mafia organization where I endured four years of near-constant hostility in the form of verbal and visual abuse, physical threats, an assault, bullying, mobbing, and finally getting unjustly fired followed by being sabotaged and libeled into permanent unemployment, I held little hope that I would be rehired by the UCSB crime family.
Although I guessed correctly that the unacceptable criminal UCSB mafia would refuse to even grant a telephone interview when I applied a few years ago for the newly created $100K/year executive position of Associate Vice Chancellor for Administrative Services, I applied anyway because the position was purposefully left mostly undefined and it provided a great opportunity to present my visionary ideas for how to rehabilitate and redeem the UCSB criminal mafia organization.
I want the record to show that at least one good person correctly predicted the current crisis and attempted to head it off with an excellent visionary proposal. (I did the same thing for the State of California when I presented a detailed radical but workable engineering proposal for California that would have had us in the black instead of the economic degradation experienced under the Zionist mafia-installed Arnold)
It doesn’t take an MBA or a business genius to recognize that the key to UC prosperity is increased revenue via an increased enrollment of diverse satisfied customers willingly paying reduced tuition for a product of increased cutting-edge quality that results in greater overall income, endowments and prestige to the University.
My proposal was to lead the experimental project to better utilize 21st Century communications technology to liberate undergrads from the bricks and mortar of a retarding unstimulating stationary campus that allowed the UCSB campus to be converted solely into a Grad School and revenue-generating business park while permitting UCSB undergrads to trek around the World between UCSB-owned or controlled hostels through the best places of the World while earning their degrees.
I proposed a variant combination of Netflix, Microtel, tourist hostels and MIT’s online university business models to provide superior, profitable, exciting and stimulating undergraduate educations to Californians, out-of-staters, international students and students of non-traditional age.
Instead of tuition increases, reductions in service, layoffs, furloughs, pay-cuts and the inevitable default of the retirement system, UCSB could be leading UC toward greater prosperity, greater support to graduate research programs and making a significant improvement in American student social awareness and ability to compete internationally.
Instead UCSB mafia hired Ron Cortez to supervise the UCSB campus food waste composting project. Hip, Hip, Hooray.
UCSB mafia is a mediocrity mill and its dull and dim criminal leadership has no interest in implementing any plan of improvement they perceive to be a threat to their prevailing power preserved with pusillanimous propaganda.
Where there is no vision, people perish.
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» on 10.15.09 @ 02:47 AM
Reginald Archer about the UC budget issues and need for fee increases: “I’m not okay with that. That’s unacceptable to me. It’s not coming out of my pocket.” It has never come out of the pocket of Reggie. He’s from Florida. Neither he nor his family have ever supported public education in this state until he decided to come here. He loves the fact that we all have made a UC available for him to come here and demand that we support him further with our taxes.
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» on 10.15.09 @ 03:48 AM
Fire these overpaid union nuts and send a messsage. The U.C system hass 250K students and 188K staff members—just a Rediculous number of employee’s..cut wages and staff for the kids..Typical Government..
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» on 10.15.09 @ 06:02 AM
A full professor at UC has to teach two classes a year. Two. 2. Got that?
Let’s try this. Fire one quarter of the professoriate. That will pay for all the cost savings needed to keep student fees low. Then the remaining professors teach one more class a year. We can cut class sizes and keep costs low to students at the same time. What won’t get done under this scenario? Profs will have less time to research. Boo. Hoo. Research gets a prof their next job. Not our problem.
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» on 10.15.09 @ 06:22 AM
Lets be clear- CA’s state budget (and UC’s) has been controlled by liberals in the legislature for many years who think they know best what California needs-which has led directly to the state’s budget collapsing due to ridiculous overspending and ridiculous regulations that drive businesses out of CA. These budget impacts then ripple down to UC’s budget. The vast majority of teachers and students in the UC system voted for the same political morons that caused this mess and allowed the unions to take control of the legislature. Well, gee wiz, ya think the intellectuals at UC could have seen this mess coming? And guess what- they will overwhelmingly vote the same bozos back into office the next election and then stage more teach-in’s, sit-in’s, and protests because they don’t like the budget cuts that come from stupid economic policies. Just wait until AB32 (CA’s greenhouse gas law)drives the rest of businesses out of CA, and UC’s budget gets even worse, there will be plenty more teach-ins complaining about all the budget cuts, and of course the people doing the complaining will be the same people that voted for the legislators that caused this mess. Arnold’s biggest sin was trying to “go along” with the legislators. He wasn’t any better in the end than Gray Davis.
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» on 10.15.09 @ 06:42 AM
Prior to Ronald Reagan becoming our Governor the UC System was a non-profit organization in which tuiton was free for those who qualified to attend. Then in all of his brillance he decided to make it a for profit instituition and here we are today. The same thing happened with the insurance companies in California. Blue Cross and Blue Shield were non-profit providers of insurance and the premiums were very low. Do you see a pattern here? When given the opportunity, unfortunately many people will do the wrong thing and be extremely greedy and not do the right thing.
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» on 10.15.09 @ 08:10 AM
Please Cut the wages and staff for our families..
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» on 10.15.09 @ 01:09 PM
Hope Mr. Baker has access to job-prep training, and anger management counseling.
God watch over him.
At a campus with over 20,000 students and over 5,000 faculty and staff, tv reports
suggested only 200-300 people participated - less than 1% of the campus population.
Was it the bad weather? Lack of time?
Or just a statewide bone-weariness with those “higher education” bureaucrats, Regents, governors, legislators, who have all fiddled quietly (and drawn full pay and benefits), while the CA Dream of high quality, low cost college education publicly crashed and burned?
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» on 10.15.09 @ 03:50 PM
@LTR
My unemployment doesn’t have anything to do with my lack of training, inability or poor past performance. My education and experience are ample. I’ve had the misfortune of being sabotaged, smeared and libeled by an unaccountable criminal UCSB mafia organization to a degree that I’m unable to pass any employment background checks. Hence, the perpetual unemployment.
When I was falsely accused of illegal behavior by UCSB mafia, I was accountable and responsibly answered their irresponsible and criminally libelous false charges. Even though UCSB mafia was powerful enough to have four years of my private emails subpoenaed by a corrupt UCLA mafia lawyer, George Cardona, installed as a U.S. Attorney who then handed over the private emails to my criminal former UCSB employer who had just illegally sabotaged my efforts to acquire employment with Yale University, I restrained my rage. UCSB has never been accountable to having broken the law and they continue to illegally and criminally libel me. I strongly suspect UCSB crimes directed at me are only the tip of the iceberg.
It doesn’t have anything to do with God. It’s about a local Goleta/Santa Barbara community with presumptions of virtue tolerating a criminal UCSB mafia organization that has sunken into the deepest wretched and wicked iniquity.
No university in the history of the World has more disgracefully failed to fulfill its responsibility to the human species and TRUTH more than UCSB. UCSB is utterly contemptible and its complete destruction is honorably justifiable.
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» on 10.15.09 @ 09:51 PM
They all want to retire young, and be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do NOTHING every year….—Civil servants—Funny…
Demand cuts
Overtax Taxpayer…
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» on 10.16.09 @ 01:35 PM
i agree with every one, cut the costs
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» on 10.16.09 @ 05:03 PM
I think anything government does is overstaffed and overpaid—Do you hear me Liberals..
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» on 10.17.09 @ 04:58 PM
UCSB is a great school and served many students, including me, very well.
However in these times we all must figure out how do do with less and become self supporting.
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» on 10.20.09 @ 06:47 AM
Remember the bloated Soviet Union from the 1970-1980’s. They oppressed the workers while government officials lived comfortably. Here we are America. Government oppression.
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» on 10.21.09 @ 05:22 AM
At least this time they called it a ‘teach-in’. Last time they called it a ‘forum’ ( http://sb4af.wordpress.com/ ), suggessting they would have more than their own point of view. No danger of that.
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