Chase the Regents Out of Town, Already

Who the hell are the Regents and why do they govern our school?

That’s the question we students ought to be asking.  Who the hell are these old white guys, and why does every single check we write for school matters get written to them?  Why does an archaic institution from the late 1800s still have complete and utter sway over the way we run things in the 21st century?  Why is a public university run by an authoritarian, non-transparent, and unaccountable group of businessmen, speculators, and bankers?

For somebody who is perpetually angry at The System, the Regents and their affairs is a treasure trove of exemplars of why centralized power and undemocratic administration systemically results in corruption and incompetence.  Unfortunately, this treasure trove is buried rather deep–other than the occasional outcry over excessive executive compensation like those in the early 1990s and mid 2000s, most of the Regents activities go unnoticed and unchallenged by the general population.

How about the fact the Regents have increased the size of the Administration by 118% in the decade between 1996 and 2006, despite the fact that student enrollment and faculty employment has only risen by about 30% each?  Seems like the Regents are having a great time using our tuition money to enroll an army of assistants for themselves, as a mechanism to both alleviate their own duties, as well as increase their relative power to one another–and unfortunately, this excess administration is estimated to cost the University of California some $600 million every year.  This problem is even worse when looking specifically at UC Berkeley data–according to data compiled by Professor Charlie Schwartz, management seems to have grown by 320% from 1993 to 2011, while total employment has only risen by 20%.

But even more insidious than the administrative bloat is the insider trading and fraud that the Regents seem to regularly engage in.  For example, take Regent Richard Blum (I like to refer to him as “Dick”), a career Wall Street financier, who has managed to get the UC to invest over $700 million in private equity deals that either Blum or his investment firm, the subtly-labeled Blum Capital Partners, was also a major investor in.  And how about Regent Sherry Lansing, the former Chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures Motion Pictures Group, who also sits on the Board of Directors of the technology firm Qualcomm Incorporated, a company which got its UC investment quadrupled to nearly $400 million after Lansing joined its board of directors?

Those two examples are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the systemic fraud that the Regents engage in.  But are we really justified in being surprised?  Check out the biographies of the eighteen appointed Regents, and you’ll find that only one Regent has any real background in education.  The rest are some kind of Wall Street executive or business leader.  They have a background in making their bank accounts grow–should we be shocked that when they gain control of one of the biggest public universities in the world, they will continue their past behavior, and do everything they can to covertly loot as much as they can from us before their term expires?

The more surprising thing is that we students, who supposedly pride ourselves on being “informed Berkeley students” are mostly blind to the systemic atrocities that happen under our noses and to the bank accounts of us, our families, and the public.  I myself was only alerted to the facts behind the Regency over the winter break, when I decided to sit down and actually look through the literature online about the budget crisis and tuition hikes.  Before that, I bought into the Lie that was continuously told about the tuition hikes–that it was purely a symptom of the State’s own impending bankruptcy, and had nothing to do with the internal dynamics of the University.

Well, I’m through with that narrative.  And what I’ve touched upon here is only part of the story, and doesn’t go into details on other matters, such as the lack of accountable to the Academic Senate, the routine bonuses that the Administration gives themselves each time they meet, and other sectors of criminal incompetence and corruption.

It is clear that the budget crisis is one that the Regents are at least partly responsible for, and that the reasons for protesting on campus, rather than in Sacramento as the Administration and their shills recommend, are clear.  And if public education in California is to have any chance at all of being returned to its pre-crisis state of free tuition and excellent education, the Regency must be toppled.

So, anybody else down to storm California Hall and chase these bastards out of town?