Yours truly will be traveling Aug. 9-15 so blogging may be limited. However, you may be interested in this program on California public pensions produced by the Maddy Institute at Cal State-Fresno. It includes an interview with the Legislative Analyst’s Office staffer who handles that topic: Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: Part 4: Part 5: The Maddy Institute’s home page is http://www.maddyinstitute.org/index.html
A straw in the wind about the Estancia Hotel in La Jolla next to UC-San Diego: The seven-year-old, 210-room Estancia La Jolla Hotel and Spa, located adjacent to UC San Diego, has been put up for sale. The owner, Los Angeles-based Lowe Enterprises, is not saying why it’s marketing the property nor did it divulge an asking price, but an online real estate publication estimates the luxury property could fetch more than $60 million. The hotel and conference center, which sits on a nine-acre site known at one time as the Black Family La Jolla Stables, was developed at a…
Yesterday’s blog entry reminded you of the unpleasant “trigger” built into the California state budget which is aimed (in part) at UC. If you would like to relive the formulation of that budget, here is a write-up (warning 60+ pages) from a draft chapter for California Policy Options 2012 by yours truly. You can read it below: Open publication – Free publishing – More california If the above causes problems with your computer, you can download the pdf file at: http://issuu.com/danieljbmitchell/docs/reallynomentalreservations
Just a reminder – as you are perusing news about current economic trends – that the California state budget signed last June with smiles all around has a “trigger” formula. If tax revenue falls short of its (relatively optimistic) projections by specified amounts, further cuts occur – including cuts to UC. Sagging economies are not good at producing a lot of tax revenue. Perhaps this old clip from the 1970s has some relevance as you cogitate on that fact and the more general scene:
As the 1951 fundraising letter above indicates, the UCLA Faculty Center began with contributions from various sources. (Click on the image for a clearer look.) The Regents apparently contributed less than half, perhaps a third, of the original funding. However, documents available do not make it clear who owns the building (as opposed to the land under it which clearly is university property). What is known is that over the years, there were discussions of a formal contract (Memorandum of Understanding – MOU) between UCLA and the Board of the Faculty Center. Below you can find a draft of an…
Jackie Robinson at UCLA in 1941. “At UCLA, Jackie became the first athlete to win varsity letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football and track. In 1941, he was named to the All-American football team. Due to financial difficulties, he was forced to leave college, and eventually decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.” Source: http://www.jackierobinson.com/about/bio.html
From LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky: Sometime this fall, two Wilshire on- and off-ramps to the 405 Freeway will be closed for 90 days. That work will be followed by a series of closures of the other Wilshire ramps, each expected to last from 14 to 90 days. (There are eight ramps in all, and they will be worked on two at a time.) The end result should be sweet: modern, swooping flyover ramps that will make it easier to navigate the notoriously jammed intersection. But getting to that point may be considerably less so, in the view of residents…
As a follow up, readers of this blog will recall an earlier entry about the 2-day Governor’s Conference on Local Renewable Energy Resources which was held at UCLA recently without the need for a new hotel/conference center. If you don’t recall it, check out http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/07/rooms-at-inns.html The first day of the governor’s conference was held at Covel and the second at the Faculty Center, the very Faculty Center that was slated to be demolished for the hotel/conference center. For a more complete photo montage, below is a full collection of pictures of the event. Click on the arrow to start the…
Inside Higher Ed today notes that various universities, public and private, have formed the Coalition of Open Access Policies. Among the members are such institutions as MIT, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford. But no UCs are listed, although – as noted above – public universities in other states are members. Apparently, the Coalition was started at the U of Kansas. If you click on the link at the end of this entry, it will in turn send you to a link to a press release at that university which says: In 2009, KU was the first public university in the United…
Moving day to new Westwood campus of UCLA in 1929
