Activists and school officials are preparing for next week’s visit by the regents
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2009/AP
UCLA students protest a board of regents committee meeting in 2009. UCR expects protests when the regents meet in Riverside next week.
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UC Riverside officials are preparing for protests during a visit by the university system’s regents next week — the first meeting since demonstrators angry over student fee hikes and education funding cuts triggered the cancellation of one meeting and disrupted another in November.
Campus police will use hand-held metal detectors and check the bags of visitors to the board meeting Wednesday and Thursday. Those are standard screening measures dictated by the regents’ office, university spokeswoman Kris Lovekin said. Similar precautions were taken at UCR when the board last met on campus in 2009, she said.
Lovekin declined to elaborate about other safety measures for the 26-member board, which includes Riverside attorney Bruce Varner. Officers are making sure they have good access to the building so they can hold their meeting, she said.
“We’ll really have a lot of people here. They will be expressing their opinions, they will be protesting peacefully. It will be busy and peaceful, that is the expectation,” she said.
Busloads of students from other UC campuses are expected, Lovekin said. The meeting at the Highland Union Building is open, although seating is limited. The proceedings will be broadcast outside. A 20-minute comment period is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. both days.
Free UCR Alliance, Occupy Riverside and Occupy UCR are posting numerous invitations to “a day of mass mobilization to defend public education” on the Internet. The rally is planned from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday outside the Highlander building. The gathering is billed as a nonviolent protest and open mic. Taking a Stand, sponsored by the Associated Students, will take place on both days with speakers, presentations and demonstrations.
The critics are protesting college fee hikes and state cutbacks to higher-education funding. They say some regents have ties to banking and profit from relationships with the UC and other public institutions.
Members of UCR’s Highlander student newspaper plan to present the regents with a petition promoting their solution to funding problems, which is on their website, www.FixUC.org. Their UC Student Investment Proposal, nine months in the works, aims to eliminate upfront costs of college by having graduates pay 5 percent of their working salary back to the system for 20 years.
The plan, released Tuesday, would eliminate student loans and debt, and free the UC system from its dependence on state funding, the group says.
“We will absolutely be having a presence there,” said Chris LoCascio, 20, the Highlander’s editor in chief. “I hope there’s no violence on the part of law enforcement or students, but I can’t predict that.”
The regents are not scheduled to discuss or vote on tuition increases at this meeting.
On Nov. 17, they canceled an in-person meeting in San Francisco after citing “a real danger of significant violence and vandalism” by “rogue elements.”
Other, violent UC campus protests by the Occupy movement had raised alerts. Leading up to the Nov. 17 regents meeting, police used batons to push back students at UC Berkeley and pepper-sprayed sitting students at UC Davis, incidents that went viral on the Internet and sparked public outrage.
The regents rescheduled their meeting as a teleconference on Nov. 28, allowing public comment from UC campuses in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Davis and Merced. Protests grew so rowdy that the regents had to move to other conference rooms. The 10 regents meeting at UCLA were guarded under high security by campus police, and outside some wore riot gear.
Partly in response to those incidents, UCR Chancellor Timothy P. White and the campus police chief met with student activists on campus. White has formed a task force of police, administrators, faculty and students to hammer out guidelines for free speech and assembly on campus.
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