News

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HathiTrust

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today carries a story* indicating that the American Library Assn. is supporting various universities (including UC) and their position in the HathiTrust case.  “HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.”  [See http://www.hathitrust.org/ ] This is a case involving charges of copyright infringement by an organization called the Authors Guild.  We have posted entries about this case before.  The purpose of the HathiTrust is said to be “preserving and providing access to digitized book and journal content from the partner library collections. This…

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Rush, Rush: The Grand Hotel Can’t Wait!!

Byuclafaculty

UCLA seems to be in a big rush to create “facts on the ground” by demolishing parking structure #6, the site of the planned Grand Hotel.  The powers-that-be certainly apparently don’t want to wait for the various lawsuits to play out. From the Daily Bruin today: …Demolition of Parking Structure 6 will begin in early July. Construction crews will remove the structure in preparation for building the Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference and Guest Center, which will be built in Parking Structure 6’s current location… Full story at http://dailybruin.com/2013/06/03/luskin-center-construction-to-demolish-parking-structure-6-relocate-drivers/ Some folks just have to hurry:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbhvZ2y1V80?feature=player_detailpage]

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The Three State Budgets

Byuclafaculty

Last Friday, there was a legislative hearing on the current three versions of the state budget for 2013-14.  There is the governor’s “May Revise” proposal and two separate proposals by the state assembly and the state senate.  The two legislative versions rely on a revenue forecast by the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) which projects higher tax receipts than the governor’s Dept. of Finance (DOF).  However, the two legislative proposals use the extra revenue differently. From the UC perspective, there is no significant direct effect on the operating budget regardless of which budget is enacted.  However, the assembly version provides for…

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Less of a There in Oakland?

Byuclafaculty

You may have missed the op ed by Prof. David Myers, chair of the UCLA History Dept. in yesterday’s LA Times.  In it, he took note of the imminent departure of UC president Yudof to call for a substantial scaling back of UC’s headquarters operation in Oakland and more campus-level autonomy.  He also called for local boards of oversight for the resulting more-autonomous campuses.  Excerpt: As the University of California regents get down to the hard work of recruiting a new president before Mark G. Yudof retires in August, they might consider an even bolder move: a dramatic downsizing of…

Surprise!

Byuclafaculty

As a follow-up to yesterday’s story about the announcement of deals with MOOC suppliers by various state university systems across the nation, Inside Higher Ed reports today that for many faculty, at those systems it was a surprise: Some faculty leaders were surprised this week when state systems and flagship universities in nine states announced a series of new business partnerships with Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based ed tech company. The universities plan to work with Coursera  a provider of massive open online courses, to try out a variety of new teaching methods and business models, including MOOCs and things that…

It’s getting hard to turn your back on the MOOc stampede

Byuclafaculty

No one wants to be BEHIND the times. The latest entries in the stampede to MOOCs: From the San Jose Mercury-News: Coursera strikes huge online-education deal with state university systems  The movement of “massive online open courses,” which began with elite universities making their courses available online to the masses, is rapidly moving into the trenches of public higher education. On Thursday, 10 large public university systems — including the giant state systems of New York, Tennessee, Colorado and the University of Houston — will announce plans to incorporate MOOCs and platforms offered through for-profit Coursera of Mountain View into…

Evaluation

Byuclafaculty

On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate this instructor? Exodus 4:10: Then Moses said to the Lord, “Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.”  We don’t know how the Israelites evaluated what Moses had to say on a scale from 1 to 10 – ten is the obvious upper bound in his case – but those who are non-eloquent might take comfort from today’s Inside Higher Ed: Imagine you receive the same lecture twice:…

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Those Empty Westwood Stores

Byuclafaculty

Despite efforts to revitalize Westwood, there remain all of those empty storefronts up and down Westwood Boulevard between campus and Wilshire. Yet there is lots of foot traffic related to the university in Westwood and the proximity of a large student community. So why the empty stores despite all of those students? The LA Weekly thinks it has the answer: Living in Westwood is like being trapped in Footloose’s Bomont, Georgia.* There are no clubs, no open mics, no student centers, no anything. It’s bad. They’re even shutting down one of the only two bars students go to with much…

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Harvard Was Shocked and Appalled that Emails Weren’t Private: Now Comes the Aftershock

Byuclafaculty

In an earlier post, we noted a brouhaha at Harvard in which a dean authorized a search of other deans’ emails to determine if any of them had leaked some information about a cheating scandal. Faculty at Harvard were shocked and appalled that such a search could occur. We noted that at public universities, emails you may think of as private really aren’t.  Apparently even at private institutions, the same cautionary note applies, although for other reasons. Even if you use a private email account such as gmail to send messages to recipients at UCLA or any public university, the…