News

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    DA Overreaching?

    Byadmin

    In 2008, a fire resulted from a chemical reaction and a student lab assistant was killed.  Some time later, a UCLA chemistry professor was indicted, along with the Regents, by the Los Angeles District Attorney.  UCLA asserts that there was no willful crime committed and is providing for the defense of the professor. In that case, there was substantial outside publicity and investigations by workplace safety authorities.  The matter was widely reported in the Los Angeles Times and other sources. You may have seen yesterday’s Daily Bruin which carried a front page headline about the indictment by the DA of…

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    House For Sale at $9 Million

    Byadmin

    Regent Emerita Velma Montoya alerted me to the putting up for sale of the Carter residence in Bel Air for $9 million by UCLA which is reported in Curbed LA.  Readers of this blog will know that UCLA is proposing to sell the adjacent Japanese Garden as well as the house with much controversy about the latter.  She also gave me a UCOP analysis of the sale which can be read at the link below. The Curbed LA article reporting the sale is at http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/02/ucla_lists_japanese_gardenadjacent_carter_house_for_9mm_1.php The UCOP analysis is largely narrative although in the second to last paragraph, the anonymous…

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    More and More Getting Off Scale

    Byadmin

    The Daily Bruin today has a piece on proposals for dealing with faculty salary scales which have grown increasingly outmoded.  As the table, based on a graphic in the Bruin, illustrates, most faculty at UCLA are paid off-scale.  The University, for recruitment and retention purposes, tries to meet the external academic labor market.  In effect, since there are only so many dollars to go around, paying more than the official scale has to mean a higher student/teacher ratio than would otherwise prevail. Percent of faculty off scale as of 10/2010:Merced 88%UCLA 80%Santa Cruz 73%Berkeley 72%Irvine 66%Santa Barbara 66%San Diego 64%Riverside…

  • Unlimited Access?

    Byadmin

    Apparently not at UC-Santa Cruz tomorrow. Organizers of the group that aims to shut down UC Santa Cruz will hold rallies at 4:30 a.m., noon and 5 p.m. Thursday at UCSC, according to a release from Occupy Education. The release said a group of UCSC students, workers and community members have decided on a strike to shut down the campus starting at 4:30 a.m. Other that emergency vehicles, residents on campus and necessary exceptions, all traffic onto campus will be blocked, the release continued…   Full story at http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_20066765 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qslQJLnk0qw&w=320&h=195]Update: Car plows through Occupy Education demonstrators blocking entrance to UCSC campushttp://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_20078788

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    Legislative Analyst Forecasts Less Revenue than Governor

    Byadmin

    The Legislative Analyst has issued a new report on the outlook for state revenue.  It is less optimistic than the forecast contained in the governor’s budget proposal of January. Both the LAO and the governor assume that the governor’s tax measure slated for the November ballot will pass.  Forecasting involves much uncertainty and in the case of budgeting, the economic forecast must be linked to specific taxes, another possible source of error.  Nonetheless, ultimately the legislature has to go with some forecast and, as we saw last June, it can assume phantom revenue and pass a budget on that basis…

  • Beware! The devil’s not just in the details

    Byadmin

    From Inside Higher Ed: …The Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact news service is reporting that (Rick) Santorum — since 2008 — has linked higher education to the work of Satan. In a 2008 talk at Ave Maria University, Santorum discussed the way Satan has attacked “great institutions of America.”  Where did Satan start? According to Santorum, “The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first — first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something…

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    Ah Ha! State Beginning to Acknowledge UC Pension Liability Claim

    Byadmin

    The State of California is about to sell $2 billion in general obligation bonds.  To do so, it must issue a prospectus detailing the terms of the bond but also the fiscal condition of the state.  The prospectus that has been issued on a preliminary basis includes information on other state liabilities including pensions.  Much of the information is about CalPERS and CalSTRS.  However, the disclosure contains the following statement on page A-82 (which is pdf page 122 at the link towards the bottom of this blog entry): “The University of California maintains a separate retirement system. The state’s General…