Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

UC President Mark Yudof addresses criticisms, explains the situation:

I actually think the students ought to be angry about the fee increase proposal. I mean, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be. They are going up by tens and tens of percents. I’m angry about it too. I liked the old system. The closer it was to being free the happier I was. But that’s not the world I live in. And that’s not the world the Board of Regents lives in. And you could have 18 or 26 new board members and a new president and 10 new chancellors. But unless President Obama gives them a printing press, they are going to have much the same sort of decisions. Maybe some nuanced differences, but there aren’t many choices.

No one is happy about the fee increases (perhaps the one thing students, especially those from middle class who actually pay tuition, unlike graduate students or students from families earning under $60,000, might really be angry about). Everyone has done everything, except for relying on “faith-based budgeting”, to avoid that, and now it has to be done as a measure of last resort.

I’d recommend you to listen to the whole video (or read the whole transcript, as I did). I myself am personally taking this as the true account of our situation that hasn’t been muddled and corrupted by unions and other special interests. But even if you do not have the same faith in the university administration as I do (to me, the University is mother and father; nothing I have today has come from anywhere but from the University, so I am not an impartial judge of what the University does), the least you can do, if you are fair-minded and open-minded as so many college students claim to be, is listen to both sides.

Weigh the evidences they present, not the rhetorics or publicity stunts, and decide for yourself: how will my walking out on the 24th improve the situation? Whom and whose policies are you really protesting, and do you really have any other alternative (this is Alinsky’s rule #11, by the way)?

Well, so the GSI union held a “no confidence vote” over last couple weeks. I didn’t vote because: 1) we are not in a parliamentary system with a responsible government; “no confidence vote” is as meaningless as non-binding ASUC resolution condemning Israel; 2) the voting times were not convenient or even easy to understand.

Daily Cal now reports on how that extra-legal vote turned out:

More than 10,000 ballots—1,300 on the UC Berkeley campus-were tallied in the vote questioning Yudof’s handling of the UC system’s financial dilemma, with the measure of no confidence passing with an overwhelming 96 percent of the votes.

Great. 96 percent of people voting agreeing with each other. So, to make the numbers easy, let’s say it was 100 percent, like the percentage of North Korean voters supporting Secretary Kim. The report also says 1,300 people voted on UC Berkeley campus. I don’t really care about other UC campuses, so I’ll just work with that number.

How many are exactly 1,300 people, given the size of UC Berkeley campus? Well, we have about 10,000 graduate students, a good majority of which have been a GSI at one point or another. So, I will assume that there are 5,000 members of the GSI union (who are currently on UC Berkeley campus) who got the same email I did. Assuming that the 1,300 voters were coming from this 5,000-member pool, we have a turnout ratio of approximately 25% supposedly expressing disapproval.

So, if we assume that people who didn’t vote, like myself, didn’t really have an opinion on Yudof, what’s his actual disapproval rate? Well, so he has 25% people who “strongly disagree” with his policies (that may sound high, but Obama has 40% of American voters strongly disagreeing with his policies, so it’s not so high compared to some other miserable failure). If we split the people who didn’t vote in half, then UC President Yudof has 62.5% disapproval rate and 37.5% approval rate. I’d say that’s decent, considering that it’s in the middle of a supposedly the worst recession since the Great Depression and that the State of California, the primary funding source for UC, has been broke for some time. And remember: this estimate is based on the assumption that those eligible for voting in this farce was just the members of the GSI union. If we assume that the vote represents all UC Berkeley affiliates, as the article suggests, then it’s 1,300 voters out of 30,000-member community, giving us a whopping 4.3% turn-out rate, and corresponding 52.2% disapproval of Yudof and 47.8% approval.

So, while I have no particular opinion on UC President Yudof (that’s why I didn’t vote), you can see how ineffectual and unrepresentative this union vote is. And there is a good reason. According to the email I received on Aug. 26th, following were the voting times and places:

Thu, 8/27
Bancroft/Telegraph, 11:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
University Village, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Dwinelle Hall, 8:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.

Thu, 8/27 thru Wed, 9/2
Moffitt Library/Free Speech Movement Café, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Northgate (Hearst/Euclid), 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Westgate (Center/Oxford), 7:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.

Fri, 8/28 thru Wed, 9/2
Bancroft & Telegraph, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Tue, 9/1 thru Wed, 9/2
Yali’s/Stanley Hall, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Lawrence Hall of Science, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
1111 Franklin (UCOP), 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Richmond Field Station, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Wed, 9/2
College/Bancroft, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

So, unless you reacted to this email with less than 24 hour turn-around time, you had to find one of those 1-hr blocks at various, unpredictable locations in order to vote at all. While I don’t have any data on how the votes were distributed in time, it wouldn’t be surprising if a majority of voters voted on Aug. 27, at Bancroft/Telegraph during the only 6-hr block. And it wouldn’t be surprising if a majority of voters were union insiders who knew about this vote long, long before this email was ever sent out.

This isn’t so different from how the union is usually run: pretty much like Venezuela. Votes are held, for ratification of contract negotiations and such, but the times for votes are carefully chosen to minimize the voter turn-out as much as possible, which ensures that only the hardcore members of the union, i.e. those who wrote up those proposals in the first place, get to vote, so they ensure their 100% “voter approval”.

So, one might ask: why am I a member of this undemocratic union? Well, the fact of the matter is, it matters very little to them whether I am a member or not. As long as I teach at Berkeley, they collect their “fair share” from my paycheck, if I am not a union member, I think around $8 per month when I’m teach 10-hrs per week. As a member of the union, I pay around $9 per month as “union due”. While I am not sure if $1/month is worth my money, in terms of the only thing I get is updates to union’s usual nefarious tactics, there isn’t exactly a way for me to vote with my feet, so, for the moment, I just remain a disgruntled member who will be ready to cross the picket line if and when the union declares a strike.