Staff leaders pushes for fee waivers
BY Cynthia Lee
Today Staff writer
Fee discounts or waivers for the dependents of UC employees, a proposal that has been floated several times in different forms over the last decade by staff and faculty leaders, may resurface as soon as next year, predicted the head of the Council of University of California Staff Assemblies (CUCSA).
“It’s one of our top priorities,” said Rosemary Anderson, chair of CUCSA. “In 2002, the Academic Council took its proposal to the regents. But it wasn’t put forward because of financial implications. [UC] President [Richard C.] Atkinson felt the board could not look at it, due to budgetary concerns. I don’t think that that would be used as an argument in today’s climate.”
Anderson, an executive assistant at UC Santa Cruz, said she hopes that the Academic Council, leaders of the Universitywide Academic Senate, will feel the time is right to try again and join CUCSA to develop a joint proposal to submit to the regents.
But Clifford Brunk, chair of the Universitywide Academic Senate and a UCLA professor, said that while there’s a great deal of sympathy for the idea in the Senate and among faculty, “it’s a difficult sell” because of competing needs. Faculty salaries, for example, now lag significantly behind those paid by UC’s comparative institutions. “It’s a matter of where you want to spend your resources,” Brunk said.
Some critics of the proposal maintain it would benefit only a select number of employees.
The proposal submitted by the Academic Council in January 2000 and updated in 2002 called for providing an education fee waiver for UC students who are dependents of vested UC career employees. A later proposal, in 2004, called for phased-i n discounts on fees.
In a letter to the Academic Council in 2002, Atkinson acknowledged broad support for the concept among faculty and staff, but noted concern over funding this benefit instead of allocating more money to salaries or health benefits, according to a CUCSA report.
Currently, only UC employees are entitled to discounts on educational fees. With departmental approval, regular-status career employees are entitled to receive a two-thirds reduction in both the university registration fee and the educational fee if they are admitted to a UC campus. |
