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University of California Regents come to the UC Berkeley campus this week for a series of rare regular meetings, and unions and student activists have planned a traditional Berkeley-type welcome of protest demonstrations. 

On Wednesday at noon while rege nts are meeting on the Berkeley campus, university employees and student activists plan to hold a rally against the regents at Sproul Plaza, with a second rally by university students from across the state planned for Thursday, also at noon at Sproul Plaz a. 

The meetings will be held Wednesday and Thursday at the Clark Kerr campus, with regents tackling, among other things, the sensitive issue of raising student fees. The meetings are open to the public. 

Regents generally alternate their quarterly, two-d ay general meetings between northern and southern California, with the northern meetings usually held at UCSF-Laurel Heights. Situated far from downtown San Francisco and without Berkeley’s spacious plazas, UCSF is not the easiest location to hold a demon stration protesting regents’ actions. At the UCSF meetings, activists have been relegated to making short, timed presentations inside the regents’ meetings themselves, with strict access limits and under the watchful eye of campus police. 

The last four n orthern California regents meetings have been at UCSF, and all three northern California meetings for next year are scheduled at the campus. 

The Wednesday rally, co-sponsored by the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), which represents clerical worke rs at the nine UC campuses as well as the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, will protest what CUE representatives call low wages for university employees and “escalating tuitions” for students. 

“One reason we’re having a joint effort with students is to show that t here are common issues between the students and the workers,” said CUE representative Amatullah Alaji-Sabrie by telephone. “The regents keep telling the students that they have to raise student fees in order to pay staff, but that’s a bold lie. What the u niversity is actually doing is cutting operational services while they’re giving the extra money to high-level administrative officers.” 

Alaji-Sabrie said that university students “have always been supportive” of efforts by the union to increase worker p ay, and said that the Wednesday demonstration is “a joint effort by both groups to demand that the regents rethink their priorities.” 

Another purpose of the Wednesday rally, according to a CUE press release, will be to protest “the university’s bargaining demand that unions must agree to allow management to discipline or fire any worker who honors another union’s picket line.” 

The CUE release called that a “hypocritical and unconstitutional gag order” that “flies in the face of UC’s mission as a public institution and repeated claim to being a proponent of academic freedom and ‘Home of the Free Speech Movement.’” 

The Thursday protest is expected to address the regents’ plans to raise fees for undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students. T he university says the money is needed to offset the continuing state budget crisis, to put back into a financial aid fund for low-income students, and, at the professional school level, to make the university’s schools more competitive with private insti tutions. 

On Wednesday morning at 9 a.m., the Regents’ Committee on Finance is scheduled to discuss the recommendation by UC President Robert Dynes to raise undergraduate student fees by 8 percent and graduate student fees by 10 percent, as well as a 5 pe rcent increase for professional school students. 

That translates to a $462 increase for resident undergraduates, $504 for nonresident undergraduates, $660 for resident graduate students, and $684 for non-resident graduate students. 

For professional stud ents, the increases range from $545 for the UC Berkeley Public Health and Public Policy schools to $2,095 for the UCLA Business School, $1,993 for the UC Berkeley Business School, and $1,991 for Boalt Law School. 

If approved, the fee increases would take place beginning in the 2006-07 school year. 

The professional fee increase recommendation comes on top of a 10 percent increase in those fees approved by the regents last year. In addition, last July, the regents approved a temporary two-year professiona l fee increase totaling $1,800 to pay for an injunction granted by plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit filed in 2003 by professional school students protesting a previous fee increase. That lawsuit was filed by students who had enrolled in 2002 or previously. 

A second, similar lawsuit was filed earlier this year in Superior Court in San Francisco by UC professional school students enrolled in 2003. The students in both lawsuits alleged that their enrollment contracts with the university stipulated that their fees would not be increased while they attended professional school in the UC system.>s