Davis Faculty Association

The DFA board reiterates its support of the Occupy Cal call for a strike on November 15 to protest the use of police brutality to stifle the important debate about the current course of the University.

While we believe the short notice for this strike will result in less response than a well organized action would have, we do still call on students, staff, and faculty to support the Occupy Cal strike to the extent that you feel legally or contractually allowed and that you believe is appropriate to recent events at the Berkeley campus and the changing structures of the University and its relations to the larger society.

Rally, 12 noon, Quad:

We encourage everyone to attend a rally that will be held starting at 12 noon tomorrow on the quad. Please advertise the rally widely among your colleagues and students.

Here is a short list of links with background information about the strike which we encourage you to share among your students and colleagues:

DFA’s Endorsement of the Strike:
http://ucdfa.org/

A list of other endorsements, including other campus faculty associations:
http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2011/11/update-on-strike-endorsements-and.html

UCD Rally Event Page on Facebook (by far the most helpful link for students):
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=246092445449061

UCD Student Movement Page with Strike Information:
http://bicyclebarricade.wordpress.com/

UCB faculty member Celeste Langan’s “Why I Got Arrested with Occupy Cal–and How”
http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-i-got-arrested-with-occupy-cal-and.html

Videos of the use of police brutality to suppress faculty and student protest at Berkeley:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_f06VQOkI4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNHXuf6qJas&feature=player_embedded

CUCFA President Bob Meister’s excellent article on why tuition increases are the problem, not the solution:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9806378/Meister%20-%20Can%20the%20Financial%20Industry%20Save%20Public%20Universities.pdf

Teach the Budget page, containing helpful information, charts, and graphs to share with students:
http://teachthebudget.com/

The board of the Davis Faculty Association has voted to endorse the strike called for by Occupy Cal to occur on November 15.

After a mass rally and march of over 3,000 people, and repeated police assaults on the encampment, the Occupy Cal general assembly decided — with over 500 votes, 95% of the assembly — to organize and call for a strike and day of action on Tuesday, November 15 in all sectors of higher education. We will strike in opposition to the cuts to public education, university privatization, and the indebting of our generation. [source]

Re-Fund California Coalition, which the Council of UC Faculty Associations has endorsed, has now produced a statement that provides more background and context to this issue:

Today we announce a student strike at UC Berkeley on Tuesday, Nov. 15th to reject the excessive police force used against our protests to make Wall Street — and the corporate elite on the boards governing our universities — pay for refunding public education. Some faculty are expected to join the student strike, and the actions will add to the growing momentum for statewide convergences at the CSU Trustees meeting in Long Beach and the UC Regents meeting at UCSF Mission Bay on November 16th.

There is a crisis today for California’s students and their families, but not for the Wall Street and corporate elites who control the economy and dominate the governing boards of California’s universities.

California leads the nation in tuition increases with nearly 100 percent rise in tuition costs since 2008, inflating student loans to $1 trillion nationally. We keep paying the price while Wall Street and corporations are left off the hook. We didn’t cause the economic crisis — they did.

That’s why we call on the board members and executives of our universities to sign the ReFund California pledge to support real solutions to fund public education and improve the economy for California families. They should join the community whose interests they say they represent instead of irresponsibly using police force to silence our freedom of expression.

Again, more information about this issue will be posted here as it becomes available.

Students at UC Davis and college campuses around the state are planning to walk out tomorrow, at least long enough to hold noon information meetings leading to protests planned at next week’s UC Regents’ meeting.

Although such activities on the Davis campus currently seem to have less traction than on some of the other campuses, that may change as the focus on the costs of athletics and related matters become more transparent (e.g. discussions regarding the replacement of athletic director Greg Warzecka and the current administration’s athletic aspirations). As you may be aware, student costs are higher at UCD than at most of the other campuses, because of their contributions to the costs of athletics in its current configurations (e.g. through the Student Activities and Services Initiatives Fees).

More information about the call for protests at UC Davis tomorrow and at the Regents’ meeting on the 16th is available at various web sites, including:

http://www.makebankspaycalifornia.com/refund_public_education_action_week

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=149401828492122

http://www.dailycal.org/2011/11/02/bill-nicholas/

The social movement known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is growing and raising issues of direct relevance to the faculty, students and staff of the University of California, including contracting opportunities and increasing debt loads for our students created by a system of privatized education and a refusal to provide high quality affordable public higher education.

The Council of UC Faculty Associations, on behalf of all UC faculty, is making a statement supporting OWS available for UC faculty to sign. The text of the statement reads:

We, members of the faculty of the University of California, write in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere. Many observers claim that the movement has no specific goals; this is not our understanding. The movement aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few.

The demonstrators are demanding substantive change that redresses the many inequitable features of our society, which have been exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2009 and the subsequent recession.  Among these are: the lack of accountability on the part of the bankers and Wall Street firms that drove the economy to disaster; rising economic inequality in the United States; the intimate relationship between corporate power and government at all levels, which has made genuine change impossible; the need for dramatic action to provide employment for the jobless and protect programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in part by requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes; and the disastrous effects of the costly wars that the United States has been conducting.

Only by identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social and political regimes can social and economic justice prevail in this country and around the globe.  It is this identification that we applaud, and we call on all members of the University of California community to lend their support to this peaceful and potentially transformative movement.

We urge you to read the statement and support it by clicking here.

(iPetitions is a free internet service that CUCFA chose for this statement because other “Occupy” statements are being hosted there.)

This statement was originally developed by faculty at Columbia and Barnard. For an excellent short article on this growing movement and how it relates to higher education, read Prof. Jonathan Cole’s post on OWS which is reproduced below:

The social movement known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is growing and too few of our government and corporate leaders are willing to examine closely what this movement is about. Instead, the political right resorts to mudslinging and labeling, claiming that those who participate in the rallies and marches are un-American (we have a long history in this country of placing this tag on legitimate dissent), or are moving towards “class warfare.” Some critics, and so-called Sunday morning television pundits, claim that the group lacks clearly stated goals and policy objectives. In fact, this movement of dissent has exceedingly clear goals and objectives that our national leaders and corporate America ought to take seriously.

Here are a few of the goals and objectives of OWS, at least as seen by me and many of my colleagues at Columbia University, where more than 300 faculty members have just signed a statement in support of the group’s goals. Much of the protest focuses on inequalities in social and economic outcomes and on the sharp differentials in power between the super-rich in our society (the fraction of one percent of the population in corporate America with the power and resources to shape policies that disproportionately favor themselves), and the rest who feel totally incapable of effecting meaningful social and economic change. In 2011, one percent of the nation’s population controlled roughly 40 percent of our society’s wealth. Not since the gilded age at the end of the 19th century, when the robber barons were making their fortunes, has wealth inequality in America been so great. As one might suspect, the corresponding percentage of the population who are living in poverty is growing — it is now greater than it has been in about 20 years. Median incomes for Americans have actually declined since the recession of 2008. The incomes of middle-class America have been stagnant for over 20 years.

The aspirations of talented young people who are born by chance into families of the 99 percent and who lack the kind of wealth that we find on Wall Street and among the leaders of large hedge funds, private equity companies, and banks, will never be realized. Their educational opportunities are limited — not by their ability, but by their inability to afford college educations that are commensurate with their talent. Meanwhile, the millionaires and billionaires, and large multinational corporations, receive tax breaks that result in them paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries. Their children compete on anything but a level playing field. We have one of the lowest marginal tax rates in the Western world; we have grossly unequal access to educational opportunities for minorities and the poor; we still have tens of millions of our citizens who lack any health care coverage. OWS wants to put back some modicum of equality of opportunity in America.

The OWS is asking for some form of accountability for those people responsible for the housing bubble and the economic tsunami that has hit this country. Few of the super-rich complain about the millions of families who have abandoned their homes because their value had been outstripped by their mortgage debt. All we hear from them are warnings of “moral hazards” if the banks and the nation were to buy down some percentage of each mortgage so that families could have a reason to hold onto their homes. The banks are not willing to refinance these loans at lower levels, but are willing to ask for bailout money from these same taxpayers.

The leaders of the banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, and private equity firms fail to realize that their wealth is not only a result of their individual talent and hard work. They are the beneficiaries of a system that has provided them disproportionate opportunities and great tax advantages from the time they began their careers. Are they really going to have us believe in Herbert Spenser’s 19th century, worn out idea of the “survival of the fittest” — with them cast, of course, as the fittest? While official unemployment exceeds 9 percent, and the actual proportion of the population without work (including discouraged workers) exceeds 15 percent. Meanwhile, Republican leaders in Congress, supported by the beneficiaries of the current system, refuse to create a meaningful jobs program that would put people back to work on jobs that have real social value — work, for example, on a crumbling American infrastructure, and jobs in new industries that pay decent wages. We cannot even build a high-speed rail system of the sort one finds all around the world in countries that don’t have half of our wealth. Instead, these leaders on the right call for even greater surgery on the 99 percent — for cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while they rant against any increase in the marginal tax rates on the super wealthy. Has there been no criminal or civil liability associated with the mortgage catastrophe that the banks and associated insurance companies led us into? There surely has been no serious accountability for the group of financiers who got us into this mess. OWS would like to see just a little bit of accountability for those who drove us into our current economic mess.

The OWS is also asking whether or not this nation has its economic and social priorities straight and whether our moral compass is broken. Should we be spending trillions of dollars on misguided wars that last over a decade to no clear result? OWS is asking whether we have not ignored our own best instincts and our treasured national values in using our resources in out-dated forms of warfare in places that pose little or no threat to our nation. The liberties granted to the people — those that are set forth in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution — are being eroded because of our national obsession with terrorism. Should we be spying on each other? Should we be able to search people’s homes without probable cause or even search warrants? Should we be killing our own citizens without any trial? Should we be spending resources on things that have no productive social value when we could be building a better society at home? Are we going to crumble from within before we crumble from the action of external threats? OWS is suggesting, as did Walt Kelly’s famous cartoon character, Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

OWS also asks: Are our leaders adhering to our constitution at all, or are they committed to secret tortures, renditions, violations of basic civil liberties, which are only disclosed after the fact and never publicly debated. All that we are allowed to see may well be epiphenomenal — the real running of the country is done in secret and often in violation of fundamental constitutional principles, couched behind the banner of national security. OWS wants debate and more transparency and wants a government that acts for the people and adheres to our Constitution and its interpretation by the Supreme Court.

Finally, OWS is a peaceful, non-violent form of protest against government policies that produce still greater inequalities in our society. They are the conscience of America, not its enemy. For this we should be thankful and should join in their cause.

Jonathan R. Cole is currently the John Mitchell Mason Professor and former Provost and Dean of Faculties of Columbia University (1989-2003)

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-r-cole/occupy-wall-street-as-the_b_1005147.html

The Faculty Association leaders would like to draw your attention to proposed APM 668, Negotiated Salary Program:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/underreview/APM-668SystemwideReviewRequestandmaterials.pdf

The origins of this proposed addition to that Academic Personnel Manual are in the Joint Senate-Administration Compensation Plan Steering Committee http://www.ucop.edu/acadpersonnel/documents/compplan_gottfredson.pdf June 2010. Proposed APM 668 is, to some extent, modeled on the Health Sciences Compensation Plan (HSCP).

The basic proposal is to allow the use of non-State funds to supplement faculty salaries. This would be done on an individual basis. I.e. each faculty member in “Good Standing” could apply to his or her department chair for a temporary supplemental salary to be paid from non-State funds. This proposal would be reviewed by the chair and the dean. The procedure for further review and the possible involvement of Senate academic personnel procedures is vague. Final approval authority would be with the EVC.

Although the materials surrounding the policy seem to envision a very close connection between external funds generated by the faculty member (e.g. research grants) and the possibility of receiving a negotiated supplement, the policy itself is written to be much more general than that. It appears that tuition funds could be used to fund the supplement.

Implementation of the plan would be fine grained. Chancellors may decide if and how to implement the plan on each campus. Implementation may vary by unit on a campus.

Of course there is much more to the policy than can be mentioned here. The policy and surrounding materials answer many questions. However there are many issues that are not addressed very well.

Adoption of APM 668 would be a major departure from University of California academic personnel practice and tradition and raises concerns of equity and transparency. The proposed policy is currently out for review with comments due by Nov. 18. The DFA will be providing comment and would encourage your feedback.