$605 Increase in UC Fees Gets Tentative OK : Education: Angry students disrupt meeting of regents, who are expected to ratify 20% hike today. Basic cost reaches $3,650 for next year.

At a meeting interrupted by protests, the UC Board of Regents moved Thursday toward raising undergraduate student fees higher than expected, for a total annual increase of $605, or 20%.

The hike was $55 more than requested by UC President Jack W. Peltason because a regents committee decided to at least temporarily forgo a proposed $1,000 surcharge for graduate students in professional programs. The cost of forgoing the surcharge would be borne by all students, bringing basic costs for undergraduate Californians to about $3,650 next year, not including room, board and books.

UC officials also warned that fees probably will go higher before next fall if the state does not provide enough funds for the nine-campus system, which has about 162,000 students. “We are not optimistic,” said William B. Baker, UC vice president for budget and university relations.

The regents’ Finance Committee voted 9 to 1 for the $605 fee increase and the full board is expected to ratify the proposal today. The only opposing vote was cast by Regent Jeremiah F. Hallisey, the San Francisco lawyer who has been a vocal dissident. Hallisey said he wanted more inquiry into raising professors’ teaching loads as a way to ease the fee increase.

In a speech to regents, UC Student Assn. President Tobin Freid denounced the fee increase as an outrage and noted that fees will have doubled since 1990. She suggested that UC ease the increase by cutting more administrative jobs and by asking professors to teach one more course a year.

“In the long run, the university must re-prioritize its functions. Students are paying a larger and larger portion of the total cost of education, yet are getting less and less,” Freid said.

About 60 students, mostly from the Santa Cruz and Berkeley campuses, hissed, heckled and shouted their protests, interrupting the meeting for a few minutes until security guards threatened them with arrest. The protesters peacefully dispersed after being hustled outside the auditorium at UC San Francisco’s Laurel Heights campus. No one was arrested, police said.

Katie Dinneen, a UC Santa Cruz junior, accused the regents, many of whom are wealthy, of being out of touch. “They live in a different world and can’t even conceive what life is like for students,” she said.

At $3,650, UC basic fees are expected to be lower than only a handful of other prestigious public universities, such as Penn State and the University of Michigan. UC charges just about the average fees of 23 schools surveyed.

Peltason said the fee increases are needed to help make up a quarter of the $224-million decrease in state general revenue funds UC suffered this year. As a result of that 10.5% budget cut, UC is planning to cut enrollment by about 2,000 students through slightly higher admissions standards and other measures. An estimated 3,500 jobs will eliminated, mainly through attrition, early retirement programs and layoffs.

However, the regents are expected to ask Sacramento to fund 5% faculty pay raises for 1993-94, a proposal that has angered students. Although some merit raises for faculty were paid this year, no cost of living increases have been given recently, putting UC at a competitive disadvantage, officials said.

Peltason at first advocated $1,000 surcharges for medical, dental, law, veterinary and graduate business students, saying their fees were much lower than at most U.S. schools. Some regents wanted further study, with the likely intent of higher increases ahead. So to compensate, in the last minutes of a meeting that lasted 10 hours, $55 was added to an anticipated $550 increase of all UC student fees and the percentage increase went from 18% to 20%.

In other business Thursday, a regents committee kept alive the idea of a 10th UC campus on one of three possible sites in the San Joaquin Valley. But because of financial problems, UC will ask property owners for the right to postpone any construction decision for 10 years. Environmental impact studies, expected to cost $1.5 million, are to begin this spring and a site is to be selected within two years.

Some regents pushed for the communities in Fresno, Merced and Madera counties to pay for the studies. In the end, it was believed that such payments might create a conflict of interest and be unfair to less affluent communities.