Cal-Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, who had hoped the Regents would block U.C.L.A.’s move, brushed past a reporter as she left the meeting immediately after it ended. “I’ve got nothing to say,” she said.
Lark Park, one of the five regents who voted against the approval, said “it wasn’t there for me,” but declined to elaborate. Leib believed that those who opposed the deal did so for philosophical reasons. “Some people felt it would be better to put the genie back in the bottle and try to get U.C.L.A. back to the Pac-12 is my guess,” he said.
That the vote took place on U.C.L.A.’s campus, in the Luskin Center, which is tucked beside the football team’s practice fields and the basketball arena, the historic Pauley Pavilion, may have seemed symbolic — but it was coincidental. A special meeting to address health services committee matters had been previously scheduled for Wednesday.
For a process that dragged on longer than many regents — and U.C.L.A., Pac-12 and Big Ten officials — had expected, it was fitting that Wednesday’s meeting had to overcome its own unexpected hurdles.
The meeting was delayed for two hours by protesters representing striking academic workers, who twice interrupted it by chanting, sitting on the floor and refusing to leave until police handcuffed them and led them out. Wednesday marked one month since the start of the strike, which has affected about 48,000 workers throughout the sprawling university system.
In all, 14 protesters were arrested for trespassing on Wednesday.
Several hundred protesters, including a man playing an accordion, carried picket signs, chanted and paraded around the Luskin Center, which was encircled by a temporary chain-link fence and fortified by police and campus security guards.
The regents’ decision brings to a close a drama that began on June 30, when the U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. sent shock waves through the college sports landscape by announcing they were bolting the Pac-12 for the Big Ten.
