UC Regents recap – Jan. 17

The governing board of the University of California met for the second day of its January meeting at UC San Francisco on Thursday. Regents approved committee action items from the previous day and discussed changes to regents policy and discontinuing the student adviser position.

Governance and Compensation

• Chair George Kieffer said he consulted Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting in 2017 to survey the 10 UC campuses and release a report with the results of the survey. UC President Janet Napolitano said she formed a working group with Kieffer and campus chancellors to address the results of the report, which was released in April. The report addressed the governance relationship between campuses and the UC Office of the President, such as whether UCOP duplicated campus programs and which programs were performed better by which campus.
• George Blumenthal, the chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, said the report results found little redundancy in programs between UCOP and the UC campuses. He added the report found a large number of UCOP programs were working well. Blumenthal said the report found areas that could be changed, such as raising the gift threshold that campuses can accept without UCOP’s approval from $5 to $10 million.
• The committee amended a regents policy to allow Senior Management Group members to participate in outside uncompensated activities without requiring preapproval from the University president. SMG members include those with certain leadership positions in the University, such as vice chancellors. However, SMG members must annually report their board memberships to the UCOP and are limited to hold two compensated outside Board memberships every year.
• The committee passed a motion to discontinue the student adviser position and increase the number of Student Advocates to the Regents and Student Observers.

Board

• During public comment, Jamie Kennerk, external vice president of UCLA, said she encourages the regents to visit the UCPath center to learn more about it.
• The board approved the action item from the Academic Affairs committee to charge supplemental tuition for the Natural Language Processing program, a one-year program at UC Santa Cruz to train people to be engineers with expertise in NLP. However, it pushed approval of tuition for the UC Berkeley Leadership for Educational Equity Program to next meeting.
• The board approved the amendment about the regents policy allowing Senior Management Group members to participate in some outside activities without requiring preapproval from the University president.
• The board voted to discontinue the student adviser program in exchange for more Student Advocates to the Regents and Committee Observer positions.
• The board approved the Health Services Committee’s request that health and counseling centers on the UC campuses have access to electronic records that hospitals have.