About 100 and activists slept over at Wheeler Hall at the University of California at Berkeley Wednesday night following an earlier vote by a University of California Board of Regent committee supporting a tuition increase.
On Thursday, the hall was full of sleeping bags and drowsy 20-somethings who wanted their message to be heard. One of the organzing groups was "By Any Means Necessary."
The students are critical of a 7-2 UC Regents committee vote on Wednesday in favor of a tuition hike of as much as 5 percent annually for the next five years today despite opposition from figures including Gov. Jerry Brown and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom and UC student regent Sadia Saifuddin cast the two dissenting votes Wednesday afternoon.
Students also protested at the meeting at the University of California at San Francisco's Mission Bay campus today, linking arms and attempting to block UC regents from entering the meeting.
University police arrested one protester who allegedly broke a glass door to the building. The protester's name was not immediately being released.
The full board is scheduled to vote on the tuition hike proposal bundled inside the complete UC budget on Thursday.
After the vote, Saifuddin said students are feeling that the priorities of the state are not representing their interests or that of Californians.
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She said she wants to see the state have incremental increases in its funding higher education.
Saifuddin said a new statewide proposition might be needed to raise funding for higher education. She suggested an oil severance tax, but said she was open to discussing other possible funding sources.
Newsom said he supports Brown's proposal that the governor shared with the UC regents and the public today, which would create a new subcommittee to develop proposals to reduce the university's costs while increasing quality and access.
Brown suggested that the new subcommittee consider five major initiatives, including identification of pathways for undergraduate students to complete their degrees in under three years, instead of four.
Brown's other initiatives include implementation of more consistent requirements for undergraduate majors, offering a wide range of online courses, giving credits through non-classroom activities such as work experience and delineating campus-specific specialization, as well as cross-campus collaborations.
UC president Janet Napolitano proposed the tuition increase earlier this month.
Napolitano said the university's revenue issue was a result of public disinvestments, not university budget allocations. She said unless the state increased its funding for the universities, a tuition hike was the only foreseeable option.
Under the tuition increase, a 5 percent hike would raise tuition for in-state students by $612 to $12,804 in the 2015-16 school year, according to Napolitano's office. Tuition for out-of-state students would increase by more than $1,700 to about $36,820.
Following Napolitano's comments, the crowd chanted, "Hey ho, Napolitano has got to go."
