Updated January 24, 2008

(The following is a collective statement from the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC written for the regents' meeting on January 17, 2008.)

To the Regents of the University of California:

Let us assume, for a moment, that every one of you has taken your position on the board of regents as a measure of public service. Since most of you have a background in business, rather than education, let us assume that you take time out of your normal schedule as executives and board members on major corporations to act, unpaid, as UC regents out of a sense of service to the public, and not to benefit from the resulting business connections that today will land regent Norman Pattiz, founder of Westwood One, a position as chairman of the board of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Security Corporations, and compensate him accordingly. Public service, we will assume, is your cause instead. Public service also happens to be the board of regents’ excuse across the last six decades for its continued management of the heart of the US nuclear weapons complex: the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories.

We, as students of the University of California, demand that our university ends its management of the research and design of nuclear weapons and concentrates instead on an undertaking which is not only more befitting of the nation’s greatest public university system, but which actually constitutes a public service: use the University of California to provide the public the most accessible, highest quality of education possible. We point to a report this board commissioned from a body of UC

The students held signs asking what the UC's budget priorities were, with space beneath for various answers. Conspicuously absent was affordable and diverse quality undergraduate education.

faculty known as the University Committee on Research Policy on the University's Relations with the Department of Energy Laboratories, (UCORP) which concluded that, quote, “the University's management of the LANL and LLNL does not, on balance, fulfill… conditions of appropriate public service,” end quote, and called for, like we do today, UC to sever its management ties of the nuclear weapons laboratories. These same faculty have also presented studies time and time again that higher student fees leave university education less and less accessible to the general public, and are generally unable to offset the dips in the quality of education that result from shrinking public funds.

If you truly want to perform a public service to the state of California, to the United States, use your position as UC regents and vote to end student fee increases, and instead push fellow regent Schwarzenegger for increased state funding for education. If you truly want to perform a public a public service to the nation, to the world as a whole, use your position as UC regents and vote to withdraw from the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC’s, end the charade of academic legitimacy our management affords them, and set a precedent that public education serves the public, not the engines of nuclear war. Last May, during our hunger strike, a few of you expressed sympathy towards the cause of nuclear disarmament, as did Governor Schwarzenegger at a colloquium in Stanford in November. If nuclear disarmament is truly a cause you believe in, you have the opportunity to be the regents who played a critical in the efforts towards its realization: by delegitimizing nuclear weapons at their source, by ending the good graces our University’s name lends to their research, development, and pit production, by ending management of the labs today.

At a press conference held by UCSA, students air their grievances with the board of regents over the anti-democratic and unaccountable governance of the UC.