UC President Urges Regents to Delay Fee Hike

In the face of student protests, University of California President Jack W. Peltason recommended Thursday that the UC Board of Regents delay approval of a proposed 10% undergraduate fee hike in the hopes that the increase can be avoided.

Citing California’s improving economy, Peltason told the regents that he planned to urge Gov. Pete Wilson and the state Legislature to appropriate an additional $38 million for the nine-campus system, which has absorbed deep cuts in recent years.

“I have no inside information. No promises have been made,” Peltason said later, explaining that he has received no assurances that the Legislature will deliver. If it does not, Peltason said, he will return to the board no later than July 1 to seek approval of the 10% fee hike.

“Without additional state appropriations, anything less than a 10% fee increase would be disastrous,” he said, noting that even with such a hike, UC is anticipating $23 million in cuts. “Clearly we would prefer not to increase student fees and also to reduce the cuts we are planning to make. . . . We hope the Legislature and the governor will provide us the funds to do both.”

Peltason’s remarks seemed to signal a shift from a month ago, when regents received the UC budget plan and its proposed fee increase with a mixture of regret and resignation. In past years, the board has quickly approved UC’s budgets soon after they are proposed. On Thursday, however, several regents welcomed Peltason’s decision to wait, putting the ball back in the Legislature’s court.

“We should start a program of trying to convince the members of the Assembly to find $40 million someplace,” Regent S. Stephen Nakashima said. “This would show the students that maybe those people in Sacramento do care.”

Several students who addressed the board Thursday indicated that they would welcome such a sign. Naomi Falk, a third-year student at UC San Diego, told the regents that middle-income students were being “squeezed out” by rising fees. And the UC Student Assn., which has protested the fee hike since it was proposed last month, gave the regents a token of their esteem: a collection of students’ shirts.

“You can rip the shirts off our backs, but please don’t raise our fees,” said Erik Nielsen, a 22-year-old senior at UC San Diego who addressed the regents while carrying several of the more than 1,500 shirts donated by students to draw attention to their cause. Nielsen gave the shirts--which were emblazoned with slogans such as “Invest in Schools, Don’t Steal From Them”--to board Chairman Howard H. Leach, who jokingly urged each regent to take one home.

State Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), who has joined with 22 other senators to send letters to the governor opposing new fee increases, said Thursday that he believes Peltason’s strategy is appropriate.

“I do not think it is possible to pass a state budget that contains that kind of a tax increase on the middle-class,” said the Democratic leader, referring to the proposed fee hike. “We’ve done it too many times and we’re not going to do it again.”