UC Riverside Faculty Association

November 18, 2013
by Admin 2
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Petition in support of graduate student workers

At the end of September, the current 3 year-contract of UAW 2865 representing UC Academic Student Employees (GSIs, readers and tutors) expired and ASEs are now working without a contract. UCOP Labor Relations and UAW 2865 have not yet reached an official “impasse.” But the Riverside Faculty Association is concerned that UCOP’s last offer of a 2% rise doesn’t come close to eliminating the gap with our comparator institutions, based on a 2010 UCOP survey. Currently the 10-month (49.5%) GSI stipend is $17,655 for an incoming student. The Report of the Taskforce on Competitiveness in Academic Graduate Student Support, adopted by UC Academic Council in June 2012, declared “rising tuition and uncompetitive stipends threaten to seriously undermine program quality” and asks that additional resources be allocated for net stipends for academic doctoral support.  On the discussion agenda of the Regents meeting this week, a report from the Committee on Educational Policy restates the situation: “It has become more difficult for UC departments and faculty to offer competitive financial support for their doctoral students.

In letters sent up to UCOP on September 16 and October 3, 33 Department Chairs at Berkeley and 21 Chairs at San Diego asked the University to raise the GSI base wage so as to enable our PhD programs to stay competitive, citing the unsustainable practice of having to top up students’ support from scarce and unpredictable resources. Please lend your voice as a UC faculty member by signing this petition, which will be sent to Director of UCOP Labor Relations Peter Chester.

http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/uc-faculty-in-support?source=c.url&r_by=9477459

November 16, 2013
by Admin 2
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RFA Statement on New Health Care Plans – November 15, 2013

Dear Colleagues:

The recent changes to the health care insurance plans available to UC faculty and staff have resulted in a radical reduction in both choices and quality of our insurance options.  In particular, UC Care, a new “self-funded” PPO medical insurance plan that replaces Blue Cross Plus and Blue Cross PPO, does not provide equivalent coverage for campuses that do not have a medical center, such as UCR.  The UC Select (Tier 1)  network of providers and facilities is grossly inadequate, excluding many of the best doctors and hospitals that were covered under the Blue Cross plans.

For example, Riverside Community Hospital, a partner with UCR’s new medical school, and Loma Linda University Medical Center are NOT included in the UC Select network.  The nearest UC Select hospital, Parkview Community Hospital, does not have a trauma center and has twice almost gone bankrupt.  This leaves UCR faculty and staff with the poor choice of paying 20% co-payments for care at the best  facilities, using the facilities in the UC Select network or choosing another health insurance plan.
The Riverside Faculty Association endorses the Riverside Division Senate resolution protesting the paucity of choices available to Riverside faculty and staff in the UC-Care option:
The Riverside Division writes to register its outrage at both the health benefit options available to its faculty for the 2014-calendar year and the process by which these options were determined.  In particular, UC Care, which replaces multiple Anthem plans, leads to serious inequities between faculty and staff on those campuses with medical centers and faculty on those campuses without them.  As a whole, moreover, the new benefits raise concerns about recruiting and retaining faculty and staff. Therefore, we insist on an expanded set of tier 1 options under UC Care so that campuses without medical centers can provide the same level of care as those with medical centers.  We also insist on a more consultative process with regard to all future changes.  Both the process and the result of changing our health care options are unworthy of the University of California.
In addition we demand that the Riverside Community Hospital and the Loma Linda University Medical Center be added to the Tier 1 option in the UC Care plan immediately. Otherwise many faculty and staff will migrate to Kaiser or other plans.  Adding these hospitals to UC Select must be done and announced before the closing of the open enrollment period on November 26, 2013.
Sincerely,
The Board of the UC Riverside Faculty Association
This statement from the systemwide Academic Council outlines the inequities and problems with UC Care http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/reports/BJ_JN_UCCare_FINAL.pdf
and this blog post analyzes the consequences of losing the Blue Cross plans http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2013/10/health-care-troubles-and-simple-solution.html.
The problems with UC Care go beyond UC Select network choices and include a sharp reduction in the services covered, as are detailed in this blog post.  http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2013/10/more-on-uc-care.html

October 10, 2013
by Teddie Bozhilova
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Statements concerning the selection of Janet Napolitano as incoming UC President

CUCFA statement on the selection of Janet Napolitano as incoming UC President:

The Council of the University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) urges brisk and open discussion within and without the university community of the Board of Regents’ choice of Janet Napolitano to replace Mark Yudof as the new President of the University of California.  We also urge Janet Napolitano to join in these discussions. She was chosen by the Regents in the course of a secretive process that largely excluded the meaningful participation of UC faculty; now she has been asked to refrain from dialogue with the press, and the university community she hopes to lead, until her appointment is officially confirmed.  But Janet Napolitano is a member of the public we serve, and transparency of information and the free exchange of ideas are of the utmost importance to the University of California.  We ask her to demonstrate her own commitment to these values by confirming her support of the Master Plan and meeting with representatives of the academic community, CUCFA among them, to discuss our concerns and hopes for the future of our university.

Mark Levine,  Irvine Faculty Association:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/2013719133744121515.html

The LA Times calls for delay of Napolitano confirmation:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-napolitano-university-of-california-20130717,0,7835174.story

Professor of Physics at UCD Joe Kiskis on Napolitano’s background in the security industry:http://utotherescue.blogspot.fr/2013/07/celebrity-trumps-substance.html

Chris Newfield’s comments on Napolitano’s lack of familiarity with education:http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-regents-select-americas-top-cop-as.html

SDFA Board’s response to the nomination of Secretary Janet Napolitano:http://ucsdfa.org/open-letter-to-uc-on-the-nomination-of-napolitano-as-president-of-uc/647

 Official Statement of UC Student Workers’ Union:http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/13036/university-of-california-student-workers-union-on

UAW 2865 UC Student Workers protested her appointment: http://www.uaw2865.org/?p=3365

March 22, 2013
by Admin 2
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Add your voice to a call for changes to SB 520

Dear Colleagues,

The Berkeley Faculty Association is deeply concerned by Senator Darrell Steinberg’s attempt to force the UCs, CSUs, and Community Colleges to accept credit for online courses from any source. Please help us convince him to pull or amend his bill by signing the petition at the link below.

http://signon.org/sign/uc-faculty-opposition?source=c.em.cp&r_by=985930

Thanks

on behalf of the Berkeley Faculty Association

– Shannon Steen Associate Professor Department of Theater, Dance, Performance Studies Program in American Studies UC Berkeley

 

For more information on this impending legislation, see the various links at:

http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-academic-senate-and-others-respond.html

January 12, 2013
by Admin 2
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Concerns re: open access to publications policy

Chris M. Kelty Chair, University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communications

January 10,2013

Dear Professor Kelty,

We write to you on behalf of the Berkeley Faculty Association to express our concern that the proposed policy to expand open access to research publications fails to address many of the issues faced by faculty whose articles, books, and other publications include embedded copyrighted material. This problem was originally brought to your attention in a September 2012 letter signed by Margaretta M. Lovell and a number of other professors. We agree with the concerns expressed in this letter and want to be sure that the problem is resolved in an appropriate way.

Certainly the ability to opt out of the open access policy still allows these articles to be published. However, this is less than an ideal solution, for as the previously mentioned letter said, it requires faculty “to negotiate as individuals between two sets of intransigent powerful parties with incompatible interests.” At a minimum, this proposed policy must be modified so that it automatically excludes articles with embedded copyright content from its strictures.

We support the university’s effort to tackle the absurd increases in cost of journals for libraries. We remain concerned, however, that, as currently written, this open-access policy lacks the scope and sophistication to solve the wide range of problems associated with the rise of for-profit publishers. These problems threaten to compromise not only public access to faculty research, but also the quality of research.

Among other concerns, we fear that the proposed policy may actually add to the pressures on the struggling non-profit academic publishers who still publish most of the research of faculty in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, providing the most prestigious and widely available outlets for their work. We also find nothing in this policy that allays our concerns about the shifting of publication costs to faculty. It is often incorrectly assumed that scientists and engineers can cover this cost from their large research grants, and this is certainly not the case in the humanities and many social sciences, where large research grants are very rare.

The September 2012 letter focuses on the special problems faced by faculty whose research involves studying art and material culture. What these faculty, and all faculty, need is access to experienced campus or university staff who can assist them in negotiating the use of embedded copyrighted and privately owned material. If specialized legal counsel is not currently employed by the University, then it should be engaged, just as all sorts of outside consultants are engaged by the University for the critical legal concerns of its mission. We understand that the university once had a program that provided assistance to faculty who needed help negotiating copyright with publishers several years ago, but that it collapsed when it became clear that the real problem was the lack of symmetry in power between the commercial publishers and individual academics, not the lack of expert advice to individual faculty members. We think this issue needs to be revisited from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including that of faculty whose research involves analyzing and interpreting cultural artifacts subject to the copyright claims of the owners of these materials, for whom negotiating these rights has become an increasingly time-consuming and costly burden.

In short, we do not think that the proposed open access policy will actually solve the problem it seems intended to solve, even with the modification we are urging. We would like to work with you to ensure that our faculty can continue to publish their research in high-quality venues and make their findings widely available at an affordable cost.

Equally importantly, please broaden this initiative to address the needs of faculty in all the humanities and social sciences, as well as all the sciences and all the professional schools. This is not a problem of specific academic fields, but of the principles of droit d’auteur and droit morale that are intrinsic to all intellectual and scholarly creativity.

We urge Academic Senate leaders to continue to work with leaders in peer universities and colleges to devise creative, joint strategies for dealing with the changes in the publishing world that threaten all of us who seek to conduct and publish academic research. Remember that it was mainly the UC library system, in concert with peer universities, that broke the choke-hold of Elsevier on monopolistic practices in science publishing. UC should not regard this problem as unique to itself.

Thank you for your consideration,

Sincerely,

Louise Fortmann and Christine Rosen Chair and Vice Chair, Berkeley Faculty Association

cc: Robert Powell, Chair, Academic Council Martha Kendall Winnacker, J.D., Executive Director, Universitywide Academic Senate

October 30, 2012
by Patricia
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RFA endorses Proposition 30

The UC Riverside Faculty Association endorses Proposition 30.

As President Mark Yudof noted in his recent letter to the University, this election and Proposition 30 “could prove pivotal to the University of California and its immediate future.”

We believe Proposition 30 is essential to the continued position of the University of California as a leading institution of higher education and research.  If it fails, UC will be subject to unsustainable budget cuts that could eviscerate its core mission to educate all qualified Californians.

Proposition 30 would increase income and sales taxes on a temporary basis and thus avoid an assortment of prospective “trigger cuts” that were written into the current State budget, pending the election outcome.  Last summer, The Regents took the extraordinary step of endorsing Proposition 30, stating that “the ability of the University of California to ensure the high-quality education that Californians have come to expect will be jeopardized….” if it does not pass.  They noted that should it fail UC’s budget will be reduced by $250 million and an additional $125 million currently in the budget to ensure no increases in tuition through fiscal year 2012-13 will be forfeited.

The Regents have indicated that they will be forced to raise tuition by 20.3% ($2400) in January if Proposition 30 does not pass.  Such an increase is unsupportable after years of drastic tuition increases and could force students to drop out of UC or take on more debt.

We urge all California voters to educate themselves about Proposition 30 and encourage them to vote for it.

 

For more about Proposition 30: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/28244

May 16, 2012
by Patricia
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Alternative Funding Models for the UC System: The $49 Fix vs. Fix UC

Alternative Funding Models for the UC System

 

“Restoring the Promise of California Higher Education:  The $49 Fix,”

Stan Glantz, Professor of Medicine at UCSF and Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, UCSF

“Fix UC: UC Student Investment Proposal,” Chris LoCascio and Alex Abelson, UCR students and officers of Fix UC

Date and Time: Thursday, May 17, 3:00 – 5:00 PM

Location: HMNSS 1500

Sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society, College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, UC Riverside Faculty Association and CHASS F1RST. This event is free and open to the public. For more information on this or any other event sponsored by The Center for Ideas and Society, visit The Center for Ideas and Society

April 24, 2012
by Admin 2
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The UC Riverside Faculty Association Presents: Nathan Brown POLICE BRUTALITY, ADMINSTRATIVE POWER AND DIRECTION

Nathan Brown, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UC Davis and Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association, presented his paper “Administrative Totalitarianism at the UC and the Necessity of Direct Action by Faculty” at U.C. Riverside on April 23, 2012 at the invitation of the UCR faculty association.

A text of his presentation can be found at  Nathan Brown at UC Riverside, April 2012

 

Nathan Brown at UCR, April 23, 2012

 

 

February 7, 2012
by Patricia
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“The Future of Public Education,” a talk by Jose Medina, February 8, 2012, 4 pm

The Riverside Faculty Association presents

“The Future of Public Education”

a talk by and discussion with

Jose Medina (B.A., M.A., UCR)

Member, Riverside Community College District Board of Trustees

Candidate for the 61st Assembly District

RUSD Teacher for nearly three decades

Date/Time/Location

Wednesday, February 8, 2012 @ 4:00 pm

INTS 1113 (CHASS Interdisciplinary Symposium Room)