[See the memo of CUCFA priorities that we sent to the meeting in advance. These priorities emerged from our productive January 25 town hall meeting to discuss what FA members wanted us to present to President Drake. Thanks to everyone who contributed to that meeting.]
In attendance:
Constance Penley (CUCFA President), Wendy Matsumura (CUCFA Vice-President), Deborah Rosenberg (CUCFA Managing Director)
Michael Drake (President, University of California), Michael Brown (Provost, Executive VP for Academic Affairs, UCOP), Corey Feinstein (Manager of Strategic Engagement, UCOP)
President Drake led off the conversation, noting his main priorities for his tenure:
- Keeping the UCs moving forward as a place to live, learn, work
- COVID and pandemics
- Making the UC an attractive site of investment for the state
- Racial equity and social justice
- Climate justice and equity
At the very start of our portion of the meeting, Constance noted that CUCFA meets each week with the UC Unions Coalition and that we had also shown support for our union comrades by attending virtual bargaining sessions. As this didn’t elicit any response from President Drake, we moved to presenting 3 items of urgency that we had selected beforehand. All were items on which we could give an update on recent progress.
Constance presented item 1 of our priorities, the $66 fix/Reclaiming the Master Plan for California Higher Education. We told President Drake that our efforts had been helped by the national exposure garnered for tuition-free/debt-free proposals when they were taken up by progressive Democratic presidential candidates and then the new administration. We also now have a chance to get legislative purchase on the $66Fix. Progressive Democrats of America-CA is hosting a statewide forum on the $66Fix on February 21, featuring Chris Newfield and Wendy Brown as speakers. President Drake responded more favorably to the debt-free college idea and offered initiatives to make this happen without federal support, but not to the tuition-free idea. We included a link to the $66Fix/Reclaiming the Master Plan for California Higher Education in our advance materials but will resend it in our meeting follow-up letter.
Next, Wendy moved to a discussion of item 2 of our priorities, non-punitive solutions to campus and community safety, including the abolition of the police force and classroom surveillance technologies. President Drake responded that he was open to all ideas but noted that as he was responsible to “protect people on the campus,” any reimaginings would have to serve this purpose of protecting campus members from outsiders. He warned that with the dissolution of campus police, city/county/state police could become responsible for policing our campus. He noted that arrest records indicated that 95-98% of assailants were “non-affiliates” of campus. He emphasized the importance of police protecting students from armed robbery, murder, and rape on campus. Hearing Drake’s support for incremental reforms only reinforced our idea that CUCFA needs to partner with transformative justice groups to provide more education on alternatives to policing.
By the end of the discussion, we were over our 30 minutes, so Constance didn’t have much time to get to item 3, the problem of UC’s outsourcing of our teaching mission and academic freedom to unaccountable private technology platforms. (That was okay because Provost Michael Brown unexpectedly attended the meeting, and CUCFA is already in conversation with him because he is the UCOP point person on this issue.) She instead brought the issue of climate justice as racial justice into the conversation. This felt like a place where our position most closely aligned with President Drake’s, though we didn’t have much time to clarify whether this was true or not.
President Drake concluded the meeting with an invitation to continue conversations/a cooperative relationship with CUCFA. Provost Brown will also be in touch with Constance about our questions on UC’s use of private technology services like Zoom. We will follow up with him about the UC Academic Freedom committee’s recommendation that UC not agree to terms-of-service that limit academic freedom, which cited CUCFA’s earlier letters on this matter.