BY MARINA DUNDJERSKI
UCLA Today Staff
Now that the November elections — in which
Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate and increased
their margin of control in the House of Representatives —
are over, the university is working hard to keep education on
legislators’ priority list, Assistant Vice Chancellor
Keith Parker of Government and Community Relations told those
attending a Staff Assembly event Dec. 4 in Kinsey Hall.
Parker, who discussed the consequences of the
vote on the federal, state and local levels, said that the elections
brought mixed news for the university.
For the first time since 1902, the party of
an incumbent president in his first term added seats in a midterm
election. “Clearly, President Bush was a big winner,”
Parker said. “What that means is that the Republican agenda
will be able to move through Congress. The issues that are most
important to the president are homeland security and the war
against terrorism. I’m not sure education will have the
same priority that it had earlier in the Bush administration.”
While all incumbent California congressional
members won back their seats by comfortable margins, California
Demo-cratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer will lose
chairmanship of several subcommittees. On the other hand, Sen.
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), a UCLA alumnus, will regain the chairmanship
of the full Senate Appropriations Committee. “That is
probably the third or fourth most powerful position in the Senate,”
Parker said. “Ted Stevens is someone who has supported
basic research, higher education and nanotechnology, and is
one of the real champions of the PET technology that Michael
Phelps developed here at UCLA.”
A major challenge for UCLA will be establishing
relationships with new state legislators. Because of term limits,
about one-third of the Legislature — 32 of the 80 Assembly
seats and seven of the 40 Senate seats — are newly elected.
“People in California support term limits, so we are in
a constant cultivation mode,” Parker said.
The good news statewide was passage of Proposition
47, the capital bond measure that will support such projects
as seismic correction of UCLA’s Engineering I building.
The measure passed with a good margin, receiving 400,000 more
votes than any statewide candidate running. That shows strong
public support for education, Parker said. The second installment
of the bond package will be on the ballot in March 2004.
In L.A. County, voters passed Measure B, aiding
the trauma and emergency network. Without passage, many more
patients would have been routed to the UCLA Medical Center,
possibly overwhelming its capacity, Parker said. The vote also
helps keep alive the medical school’s training programs
at Olive View and Harbor/UCLA.
But Parker cautioned there is much work to do.
Despite UCLA’s more than 200 community programs throughout
Los Angeles, information gleaned from focus groups shows that
some of the public view UCLA as elitist and only concerned about
the Westside, he said. “We have to fight that perception.
“You are, in fact, ambassadors,”
Parker continued. “Each of you has messages that you carry
about the university — about its deeds and its contributions
— so you can be an ambassador on behalf of UCLA and the
University of California with your neighbors, in your community.”
For details on UCLA’s volunteer advocacy
group, Bruin Caucus, visit: www.advocacy.ucla.edu/advocacy/BruinCaucus.asp.
