Porter Quad is a common place for people to smoke on campus. After the implementation of the tobacco ban, this will no longer be an option. Photo by Daniel Green.

Chancellor George Blumenthal reminded the campus community in an e-mail on March 25 tobacco will soon be banned from UC campuses. Come Jan. 1, 2014 the 8 percent of students who smoke on UC campuses and the 10 percent of UC employees who smoke will have to take their cigarettes, cigars and all other tobacco products off campus and off all UC properties.

“We cannot be on the forefront of healthcare if we cannot ask ourselves to eliminate, at least attempt to eliminate, these types of behaviors on our campuses and in our medical center,” said Steven Gest, medical director of Santa Cruz’s Occupational Medical Center and assistant clinical professor at UCSF.

According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, 1,129 college campuses are currently 100 percent smoke free and 766 of these have a 100 percent tobacco-free policy. This is a marked increase from the 290 college campuses that were 100 percent tobacco-free, according to the American Lung Association, as of November of 2012.

“It’s really a bit of a tidal wave,” said Saladin Sale, the UCSC director of Risk Services and co-chair of the campus committee to oversee the implementation of the policy.

System-wide, Kevin Confetti, the director of workers’ compensation for University of California Office of the President, is co-leading the tobacco-free policy implementation. Confetti said a 100 percent tobacco-free campus will be difficult to achieve.

“There are a lot of nooks and crannies on our campuses,” Confetti said. “Our campuses are very, very large.”

Because implementers of the policy cannot be everywhere all the time, the policy will be primarily enforced “educationally.”

“The first 12–24 months of the policy … we’re hoping that, instead of using a stick, for lack of the better word, that we can help educate folks and get them to appreciate and understand the benefits of tobacco cessation,” Confetti said.

UC plans to educate smokers and nonsmokers within the UC community by offering cessation education, referral and resources, over-the-counter and prescription tobacco cessation medications, telephone, individual or group counseling and on-site individual and group support as educational outlets.

Steven Gest said that smoking does not only affect smokers.

“There’s been a recent uptake in the incidence and severity of asthma, and we’ve been searching for the root cause of that,” Gest said. “Second hand smoke has been allocated as one of the partial root causes.”

UCSC students and faculty consistently complain about secondhand smoke, said Jean Marie Scott, associate vice chancellor of risk and safety services and co-chair of the committee that oversees the implementation of the tobacco ban with Saldin Sale.

“We have quite a few faculty and students, and staff members, in any given year who are very much impacted from secondhand smoke,” said Scott, who said she has worked at UCSC for over 20 years. “With the new policy going into effect, I’m hopeful that we’re better able to mitigate and have people cooperate in a way that they’re not impacting folks across the campus with secondhand smoke.”

This new policy will also reduce the amount of litter on UCSC’s campus, Scott said, after reporting the huge volumes of cigarette butts that currently litter UCSC’s campus.

It also invokes the question of whether smoking is a right or a privilege, said Steven Gest. He said it is a right in the privacy of an individual’s own environment, but it is also a privilege that should be restricted when it negatively influences and infringes upon others.

“The greater society is not willing to absorb the cost of your decision,” Gest said.

Sale hopes a dialogue regarding the ban will continue within UCSC communities.

“In the months to come, we’re going to be having a very open campus discussion around these issues,” Sale said. “Hopefully we can really model a very positive thing for the rest of California society.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp

Jan. 18 marked the end of an era. After nearly five turbulent years on the job, Mark Yudof announced he’ll be stepping down as UC President this August. With the regents currently in the midst of a nationwide talent search to find his successor, it’s high time that we as students reflect on what direction the UC system should be moving in.

The last five years have not been kind to higher education, and UC is no exception. Yudof began his term in 2008 at a time of unprecedented cuts to UC’s state funding and general financial turmoil. Since then tuition has nearly tripled while faculty and program budgets have been slashed.

Yudof undeniably faced an uphill battle from the moment he took office, and the responses of the UC system to its fiscal woes cannot be attributed solely to him. Some of those responses are commendable and should be continued in the future. The Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan, which extends grants to students of families making less than $80,000 a year, is perhaps the best such example.

In other ways however, the direction that the UC system has taken in the last five years is less hopeful. For the first time since its creation, we now receive more money from student tuition than from state funding. Yudof also launched “Project You Can”, which seeks to raise a billion dollars in private donations to supplement losses in state funding.

Over the last 10 years, the UC has also become increasingly reliant on construction bonds backed by student tuition as a way to continue expansion despite falling state funding. At the same time, the hiring of administrative staff has skyrocketed relative to the hiring of instructors and other staff.

This increasing privatization of the UC system must be examined closely and critically by the next president.

When the Master Plan that created the UCs was enacted in 1960, it envisioned a system of universities and community colleges that would function as a public good, not as an enterprise that exists solely to turn a profit. Furthermore, the increasing privatization of the UC system has also paralleled what many students and faculty see as an increasing lack of transparency.

If the UC is ever going to achieve its full potential as public center of higher education, it is imperative that students, faculty and the public at large have a voice in the UC’s decision making process.

California’s recent passage of Prop 30, which avoided a $250 million cut to the UC system and prevented a potential mid-year tuition hike of 20 percent, can be taken as a sign that the public is beginning to appreciate how important our university system is to a healthy state. That sentiment, however, will be squandered if the UC system continues to transform itself into a private institution.

No one will deny that the UC system must continue making changes in the years to come. Although California’s budget crisis looks like it has almost abated, alleviating one major source of concern, the UCs and higher education as a whole are in a transitional period.

The next president of the UC system will be responsible for bringing us into the era of online education, and must do so in a way that embraces these new technological opportunities, but not at the expense of the quality of a UC education. Doubtless the input of students and teachers will be instrumental in achieving that goal.

As the UCs move past the worst of their financial woes, it will be more important than ever for their next president to remember the values of the Master Plan, which stressed quality, affordability, accessibility and innovation, but not profit for profit’s sake. During this time of uncertainty, the UC’s next president would do well to remember that a public education means just that.

Illustration by Christine Hipp

The University of California isn’t an equal system, and it never has been. The system’s growth since first establishing UC Berkeley in 1868 to 10 campuses statewide by 2005 has exponentially increased enrollment and tuition. But calling the UC a well-oiled machine simply due to its autonomy from the state and highly-regarded reputation is far from accurate.

When Chancellor Blumenthal assumed his position at UC Santa Cruz in 2007, he found that the school was distributed 67 cents on the dollar for its collected tuition funds.

The rebenching committee, formed only a year ago, would reevaluate how state funds are allocated toward UC campuses. Additionally, the committee would also grant more autonomy to each school.

The problem is, nothing has happened yet.

The California state budget crisis and the consequent funding cuts directed toward education and the UC have triggered a systemwide cry for greater autonomy and more money for individual schools.

The redistribution of enrollment funds back to the campuses from which they originated has long been carried out through a bottleneck process for schools that tend to not only be smaller and less regarded, but newer to the system as a whole.

Higher education shouldn’t be a prize wall priced at low, middle and high tiers — and the UC system doesn’t do this, as everyone pays the same tuition. However, the stereotype that the system is composed of low-, middle- and high-tier quality schools is largely a product of such funding disparities.

Increased funding for “high-tier” schools at the expense of other institutions within the system only perpetuate a precedent of a lack of opportunities and development space for smaller and usually newer schools to improve.

When smaller UC schools are already fighting a funding disadvantage, greater autonomy is the first step to leveling the playing field.

A proposal released in April by UC Berkeley leaders outlined a plan that would give more power to individual UC schools to govern themselves. The proposal called for a reduction of duties for the central Board of Regents, limiting their duties mainly to admission standards, state funding and top appointments.

UC Berkeley leaders claimed that the UC system has become so complex that autonomous campus governing boards must be formed in order to sort out such policies on an individual need basis.

Under the proposal, individual UC schools would be able to set their own tuition and decide out-of-state enrollment numbers. The proposal would also gives schools the power to approve construction projects and gain control of institutional investments.

Through the formation of campus governing boards, which would each include two regents, schools would be granted the power to set undergraduate tuition within ranges established by the regents and charge out-of-state and graduate students accordingly. Additionally, campuses would also have more say in the salaries of faculty and nonunionized staff.

Even with the proposal in negotiations — like many other efforts of greater institutional reform — the UC continues to teeter in the midst of the waiting game necessary to implement new budgetary and redistributive policies within the system.

Both rebenching efforts and greater autonomy aren’t just about making sure everyone has an equal slice of the pie. They’re about ensuring that the UC system as a whole, and specifically its smaller institutions, can be on the same page as its larger, more reputable counterparts — or at least have the resources to do so.

Growing funding disparities have only further defined the systemwide inequalities that have catalyzed the call for greater autonomy among individual schools.

UC Berkeley’s proposal highlights the need for “transparency, accountability and flexibility,” within the governance of the UC system. In a UC report, officials claimed that the fundamental objective in evaluating budgetary reform, enrollment plans and other policies should be to preserve UC’s “excellence in research” and to put “quality before access and affordability.”

Leading research institutions such as UC Berkeley, UC Los Angeles and UC San Diego are undoubtedly valuable assets to the UC system, but unless smaller and newer institutions are given the necessary funds and resources for greater research mobility, the system will continue to stagnate in its current,
disparate mold.