About the Student Regent
The student Regent of the University of California is one of the 26 fudicary trustees of the University of California, and is a voting member of the UC Board of Regents. The position was established by the UC Board of Regents after years of tireless advocacy by the UC student body. The purpose of the student Regent is to bring a (vital) student perspective to the Board of Regents(!), as well as govern the University of California. While we do not represent all of the students of the UC, we keep student interests and issues at heart, and continually experience student life at the UC system.
It is exciting, tiring work. I would continue to speak about the position but I would veer dangerously off my zone of humility. Find out more about the student Regent position at the UC Regent website: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/studentreg.html.
About This Blog
This blog is meant to document the thoughts, comments, and day-to-day events of the student Regents, and to provide perspective on the latest challenges and events of the University of California. Please check the blog especially on UC Regent Meetings, Commission on the Future meetings, and University of California Student Association actions for liveblog action and unique Regental perspective.
About Jesse Cheng
Jesse Cheng is a fourth year Asian American Studies major, Education minor at University of California, Irvine. Out of all of the 26 voting Regents, he is the one with the shortest and unimpressive biography. He has worked extensively within the API community, where he was the chair of the Asian Pacific Student Association at UC Irvine, has worked with the Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community Alliance, and was an intern under the Asian Law Alliance in San Jose. He has also been active in the student government at UC Irvine – serving as the School of Humanities Representative, the Executive Vice President, and as a representative to UC Irvine’s Academic Senate. He is also obligated to tell you that at one point he was a chair of UC Irvine’s Student Fee Advocacy Committee. He is currently the Student Regent-designate, and is under the mentorship of the current Student Regent, Jesse Bernal.
UC Regent Live(blog) 
While the UC Regents are raising tuition and thereby shutting more of the public out of public higher education, UCLA is offering the public a lesson on how the University can weed students out once they’ve been admitted: ucla-weeding101.info
A few months back, I wrote to current Student Regent, Jesse Bernal, to bring the facts of this student termination at UCLA to his attention; I haven’t received a reply. But perhaps others can ask him about these facts.
Nonetheless, Weeding 101 at UCLA provides crucial lessons on how this public university operates—in the public’s name—while the UC is working to effectively more fully privatize higher education.
On April 14, 2010, UCLA issued a press release declaring that UCLA “remains the most popular campus in the nation.” Since about that same time, an Internet search with any of the three major search engines—Google, Bing, Yahoo—puts the website ucla-weeding101.info at the top of the first page of many thousands of results when “unethical UCLA” is typed into their search boxes (though Bing then prompts us to “show just the results for ‘unethical ucla'”).
The ucla-weeding101.info website offers the public (and UC students and faculty) University documents and UCLA faculty statements on a UCLA student termination, where the shortest of these faculty statements is: “This [termination] is a wrong to right.” The website also declares that this UCLA student termination is in fact unethical.
This ongoing event raises profoundly important questions, the most obvious of which is: How does “the most popular campus in the nation” terminate its students? In fact, given the ample news reports on how the University of California admits its students, we may easily conclude from this ongoing event that the seemingly total absence of UC student investigative reporting on UC student terminations raises still more crucial questions about how UCLA is actually operating behind its rapidly growing production of ultra-slick corporate-style marketing campaigns.
And given that these marketing campaigns rely heavily on UCLA’s trumpeting its commitment to the highest of academic and ethical standards, then how can it be that there is no UC student reporting on a story declaring that UCLA has terminated one of its students unethically, by dismissing facts and violating the University’s own academic and ethical codes?
UCLA’s own students’ silence on the facts of this student termination can allow UCLA to transform itself from a reputable public university into a quasi-private institution of quasi-religious status, wherein the University’s students do not speak out on how the University is operating on their classmates because these “True Bruins” are working instead to tie their own status to that of a “brand-name” university which provides diplomas for often significant material advancement.
I urge all UC students to carefully examine the documents, letters, and material on each of the site’s webpages. And I especially urge them to carefully consider the UCLA faculty members’ conclusive statements, found on the website’s homepage. For when UCLA faculty members make these statements on a student termination and this student nevertheless remains terminated, extremely serious questions arise about academic freedom at UCLA and how the public University of California is operating on all its students.