Photo by Prescott Watson

Held simultaneously at the Mission Bay campus in San Francisco, UC Merced, UCLA and UC Davis, (with UC President Mark Yudof absent from the proceedings) the meetings were conducted via teleconference and were temporarily disrupted by chanting protestors.

UC Office of the President said the decision to hold the meetings at different locations was “cost-effective.”

“Regents are in different locations and it’s not cost-effective to bring them to one central meeting that will only be four hours,” said Director of Admissions and Ethnic Media Ricardo Vazquez. The UC subsidizes the regents’ lodging and transportation for meetings.
Vazquez said there is an urgency for the regents’ approval for the expenditure budget request submission to the state because the government budget approval is released in January.

Students and protestors occupied the spaces in which the meetings took place, and held extended comment sessions. Under a hundred people attended each of the protests, in sharp contrast to the thousand-plus who rallied in San Francisco on Nov. 16th, when the meeting was originally scheduled to take place.

Rescheduled from Nov. 16th after the UCPD advised the Regents to do so, the meetings ended with the approval of a proposal to petition the state for additional UC funding. No tuition hikes were discussed today, contrary to public perception of the purpose of today’s meetings.