Issue Heating Up

We noted in yesterday’s posting (in the update portion) on the Regents public comment session that there were spokespeople complaining about anti-Israel activities on UC campuses including course credit on one campus, pushes for divestment, etc. Earlier postings noted statements by the UC prez and several chancellors (including Block) opposing an academic boycott of Israel by several academic societies. Today, the LA Times reports:

A group of lawmakers has formed the California Legislative Jewish Caucus to weigh in on issues of priority to members, including immigration, civil rights and Israel, according to its chairman, state Sen. Marty Block (D-San Diego)… So far, the new caucus has nine full members, including Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento)…

Among the issues the group will address: In the last two years, some University of California student organizations and governments have approved resolutions urging the U.C. Board of Regents to divest from companies linked to the Israeli military. Block said there was also concern about incidents of anti-Semitism on California university campuses and cases in which professors have taught anti-Israel lessons…

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-lawmakers-form-new-california-legislative-jewish-caucus-20140122,0,7883863.story

We have also noted on this blog the progress being made in getting the state to assume responsibility for the UC pension. [Indeed, the UCLA Faculty Assn. made the first break-through with the Legislative Analyst’s Office on that issue.] The Regents also noted the progress so far and also the need for UC to be treated the same as CSU regarding pension funding. (CSU is part of CalPERS for which the state assumes liability.) Thus, calls for political use of pension and other UC funds (including continued calls on the Regents to divest from fossil fuels) could end up being costly for UC by undermining that progress. At present, UC gets about the same funding as CSU, but UC has to make pension contributions out of its state funding while CSU does not. As time goes on, and pension contributions have to be ramped up, this difference – if it persists – will be a source of an ongoing budgetary squeeze of UC and upward pressure on tuition.

Thus far, no one seems to have noted the interconnection between these various issues. So you read it here first.

UC Is Drying Up

You’ve probably heard that Gov. Brown has declared a drought emergency. So UC is there – Johnny on the spot – with a pledge to save water for the guv:

University of California President Janet Napolitano today (Jan. 16) announced a goal of reducing per capita water use by 20 percent throughout the UC system by the year 2020. As California experiences some of its driest weather on record, Napolitano said the university must step up and contribute to the preservation of the state’s most precious resource. “The University of California has long been a leader in conservation efforts,” she said. “This new 2020 goal complements the university’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative and its broader award-winning sustainability efforts. UC is prepared to play a leadership role in response to California’s current water crisis by demonstrating water sustainability solutions to the rest of the state.” Every UC campus already has established its water usage baseline against a three-year average, and the 20 percent reduction goal will be pegged to each campus’s baseline…

Full media release at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/30584 Inside Higher Ed pointed yours truly to the story at http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/01/21/u-california-pledges-20-reduction-water-use-2020

Anyway, it’s going to be tough:

Demographic Shift

News accounts have focused on this chart in Gov. Brown’s recent budget proposal which shows the Latino/Hispanic state population exceeding the white-Anglo population by July. That the shift would occur sometime this decade was obvious from the 2010 Census. A news account indicates that the shift will occur in March. Clearly, putting an exact date on the shift is not really possible. But the change will definitely have occurred by the next Census. (Official state estimates for the California population at the time of the 2010 Census were way off. So interim estimates between Census years always have a significant chance of error.)

In terms of voting, the Latino/Hispanic share of likely voters was about half their share of the population in 2010 due to citizenship and voting propensities. But that, too, is changing.

A recent news account on this issue is at http://www.ibtimes.com/latinos-set-outnumber-whites-california-what-does-it-mean-economy-1543404

New and Old at the UC Regents

The Regents in 1964

1-17-2014

SACRAMENTO – Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today announced the following appointments.

Richard C. Blum, 78, of San Francisco, has been appointed to the University of California Board of Regents effective March 2, 2014, where he has served since 2002 and was chair from 2007 to 2009. Blum founded Blum Capital Partners L.P. in 1975 and serves as chairman and president. He has been chairman of the CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. Board of Directors since 2001. Blum has been a member of the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business Advisory Board since 1984 and was chair from 2012 to 2013. He is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank Economic Advisory Council and the National Democratic Institute’s Board of Directors and an appointee to the President’s Global Development Council. Blum is a founding member of National Geographic’s International Council of Advisors and founder of the American Himalayan Foundation and the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Honorary Consul of Nepal and a member of the board of trustees at the Brookings Institution, the California Academy of Sciences, the Carter Center, the Glide Foundation, the Wilderness Society and Central European University. Blum earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of California, Berkeley. This position requires Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Blum is a Democrat.

Monica Lozano, 57, of Los Angeles, has been appointed to the University of California Board of Regents effective March 2, 2014, where she served from 2001 to 2013. Lozano has held multiple positions at ImpreMedia LLC since 2004, including chief executive officer, chair of the board and senior vice president of newspapers. She has held multiple positions at La Opinion L.P. since 1985, including owner, chief executive officer and publisher. She was a member of the California State Board of Education from 1998 to 2001. Lozano is a director at the Bank of America Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Weingart Foundation. This position requires Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Lozano is a Democrat.

Norman Pattiz, 70, of Beverly Hills, has been appointed to the University of California Board of Regents effective March 2, 2014, where he has served since 2001. Pattiz has been chief executive officer of Courtside Entertainment Group since 2011. He held multiple positions at Westwood One from 1976 to 2010, including founder and chairman. Pattiz was an appointee to the Broadcasting Board of Governors of the United States of America from 2000 to 2006. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Relations. This position requires Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Pattiz is a Democrat.

Richard Sherman, 61, of Pacific Palisades, has been appointed to the University of California Board of Regents. Sherman has been chief executive officer at the David Geffen Company since 1992. He was a partner at Breslauer Jacobson Rutman and Sherman from 1977 to 1992 and a senior accountant at Peat Marwick and Mitchell from 1973 to 1977. Sherman is a member of the Aviva Family and Children’s Services Board of Directors, the Geffen Playhouse Board of Directors and the David Geffen Foundation Board of Directors. He was a member of the Dreamworks Animation SKG Inc. Board of Directors from 2008 to 2013. Sherman earned a Master of Business Taxation degree from the University of Southern California. This position requires Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Sherman is a Democrat.

From http://www.gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18369

New appointment is in italics. Lozano was on the Regents before but her appointment expired in 2013. So she is being returned after a hiatus. Blum is husband of U.S. Senator Feinstein.

The LA Times has the story at http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-uc-regents-20140118,0,3872109.story

Someone may want to see what you are doing

Faculty should have received the email from Chancellor Block below regarding public documents requests for such things as emails. The statement is good. The two links provided are also useful. But when you get through reading them, you should still regard virtually anything you email or write as potentially a public document. Yes, various exemptions exist. But there are gray areas. In addition, an email you sent to someone else at another public institution – maybe in another state – might be made public there. Even if you deleted it, the recipient may have it. That is the reality.
============

Dear Colleagues:

In recent years a number of universities including UCLA have received public records requests seeking disclosure of faculty members’ scholarly communications. The potential chilling effect of these requests has raised new questions about academic freedom and its intersection with public institutions’ legal obligations to conduct business transparently.

UCLA’s joint Administration–Senate Academic Freedom Task Force, charged with helping our campus prepare to respond to such requests, recently published its Statement on the Principles of Scholarly Research and Public Records Requests. The statement is a compelling affirmation of our peer review system and the right of faculty to conduct research and scholarship on controversial topics free from political interference. I wholeheartedly endorse it, as do the Academic Senate, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh, and other UCLA academic and administrative leadership. I urge you to read it.

The statement stands as the guiding principles for UCLA’s response to requests for disclosure of faculty members’ scholarly communications. The task force also developed a Faculty Resource Guide for California Public Records Requests that explains how UCLA faculty should respond to requests for records and manage electronic records in light of the California Public Records Request Act.

UCLA is among the first universities to consider this issue systematically, and the result is a set of guiding principles based on our core values. Please join me in expressing appreciation for the outstanding work by the task force, which was co-chaired by Vice Chancellor for Academic Personnel Carole Goldberg and Professor David Teplow, chair of the academic freedom committee of the Academic Senate. Other members were Senior Campus Counsel Amy Blum and professors Barbara Herman, Matthew Kahn, Ann Karagozian, Christopher Kelty and Mark Sawyer.

Sincerely,

Gene D. Block

Neutral

Proponents of the proposed pension/retiree health care initiative (that would cover UC) were afraid the attorney general would come up with a nasty title and summary. It doesn’t seem to have happened, however. Other than the references to teachers, nurses, and peace officers (the public’s favorite public employees), it is pretty neutral. To the extent there is mention of costs, the references come from the earlier Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) report. Below is the title and summary:

January 6, 2014

Initiative 13-0043

The Attorney General of California has prepared the following title and summary of the chief purpose and points of the proposed measure:

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES. PENSION AND RETIREE HEALTHCARE BENEFITS. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

Eliminates constitutional protections for vested pension and retiree healthcare benefits for current public employees, including teachers, nurses, and peace officers, for future work performed. Permits government employers to reduce employee benefits and increase employee contributions for future work if retirement plans are substantially underfunded or government employer declares fiscal emergency. Requires government employers whose pension or retiree healthcare plans are less than 80 percent funded to prepare a stabilization report specifying non-binding actions designed to achieve 100 percent funding within 15 years.

Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: Potential net reduction of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year in state and local government costs. Net savings—emerging over time—would depend on how much governments reduce retirement benefits and increase salary and other benefits. Increased annual costs—potentially in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars—over the next two decades for those state and local governments choosing to increase contributions for unfunded liabilities, more than offset by retirement cost savings in future decades. Increased annual costs to state and local governments to develop retirement system funding reports and to modify procedures and information technology. Costs could exceed tens of millions of dollars initially, but would decline in future years.

Source: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/Title%20and%20Summary%20%2813-0043%29.pdf

Does this official summary mean that the governor is going to be neutral? Who knows? One member of the anti-pension crowd managed to slam the governor’s high-speed train today in the NY Times – which might not endear him to Brown:

High-Speed Train in California Is Caught in a Political Storm

By Adam Nagourney

…Joe Nation, a professor of public policy at Stanford University and a critic of the plan, said Mr. Brown would have to grapple with this decline in support, which he argued reflected voters’ growing doubts about the basic competence of government. “Obamacare has leached over into this,” Mr. Nation said. “You have people saying, ‘The federal government that can’t build a website — how can we expect them to build a multibillion-dollar train?’ ”…

Full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/high-speed-train-in-california-is-caught-in-a-political-storm.html

As we continue to note, UC’s interest is basically not to be included. So far, as per above, that hasn’t happened.

UPDATE: Mayor Reed of San Jose – the front man for the initiative – isn’t happy with the wording. The union group opposing the initiative isn’t completely happy, either. See http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/06/6051649/california-attorney-general-clears.html

Q&A

The Contra Costa Times ran an interview with UC president Napolitano that was published yesterday. But apparently the interview occurred in late 2013. Here are the questions:

Q: One of your first proposals was to make tuition rates more predictable. What might that look like?

Q: At the last UC regents meeting, Gov. Jerry Brown said UC had slim chances of securing additional state funding, with all of the competing needs in Sacramento. What did you make of that?

Q: Were you surprised by the low graduation rates for some student-athletes at Cal? (UC Berkeley’s football team had the lowest graduation rate of any major program in the NCAA.)

Q: One of your initiatives is to make it simpler for community college students to transfer to UC. What are your impressions of that system?

Q: I’ve read that you were surprised by the long-standing tension between UC and some labor groups… What have you done to change that?

Q: You’ve been back to Washington. What points are you trying to press with people there in terms of higher education policy or funding?

Q: Did you expect you would have protesters at your public appearances?

The answers can be found in http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_24850169/napolitano-uc-chief-eyes-tuition-sports-transfer-students

Follow Me, Says Crane

We have previously reported on a proposed ballot initiative on public pensions in California that, as written, would cover UC. There appears to be money behind the campaign for this initiative. Another indication of such money comes in the form of a letter by former UC Regent David Crane on CalSTRS. Crane was appointed by Gov. Schwarzenegger but the appointment was not endorsed by the state senate and thus ended.

In any event, the letter from Crane addressed to Gov. Brown – which his website says in today’s Sacramento Bee – seems to be part of the larger campaign for the initiative. It was circulated on the website of (and by emails from) a group associated with Crane – Govern for California: [excerpt]

…Governor, it’s long past time to act. By not addressing CalSTRS, California has already become the largest “deadbeat” state government, a term coined by The New Yorker to characterize governments not even paying minimally required pension contributions. Every day of additional delay adds millions of dollars to the next generation’s burden. If you don’t act, you are effectively defunding their classrooms, cutting their public services, and raising their taxes…

You can find the full letter at:
http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/990407/ff4a77211d/1660549029/358ab184e1/
or
http://www.governforcalifornia.org/an-open-letter-to-governor-jerry-brown/

Oddly, a search in today’s Bee (under Crane, CalSTRS, opinion, viewpoint, letters to the editor, etc.) did not find the letter. It did find other earlier Crane-related items. Among them was a recent article indicating Crane was involving himself in state legislative contests related to his pension interests. See:

http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/03/6045328/pension-activists-back-democrat.html

As we have noted in past postings, the chief UC interest in this matter is to be excluded from the proposed initiative and to leave funding of the UC pension to the university and (current) Regents.

UPDATE: Crane in a later post on Fox and Hounds no longer claims the letter appeared in the Bee. See http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2014/01/political-leaders-must-focus-calstrs-funding-crisis/

The First (and Only?) Budget Leak

Only a few days ago, we noted that it is traditional that as the date of the official unveiling of the governor’s budget proposal approaches, bits of it are leaked out. We noted that as of that time, there hadn’t been any leaks, so maybe we would depart from tradition. But now we have a leak. The governor wants a ballot proposition mandating a rainy day fund. From the LA Times:

Gov. Jerry Brown will join the push for a new ballot measure to help California stockpile cash as a buffer against future recessions, according to two Capitol officials. The proposed measure, which would need approval from two-thirds of the Legislature before it could be presented to voters in November, would siphon off some tax revenue and channel it into a special savings account. If successful, the account could mitigate the need for deep spending cuts during economic downturns and help California shed its reputation as a financial roller coaster.The plan, put forward by Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) last May, will be included in Brown’s upcoming budget proposal, the officials said. They declined to speak publicly before the governor’s announcement, scheduled for Friday… The measure proposed by Pérez would replace a plan supported by Republicans and passed by the Legislature in 2010 but delayed until next November’s ballot. Although that plan passed with bipartisan support three years ago, Democrats now say it is flawed because it would function as a spending cap, something they have opposed.

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-california-jerry-brown-budget-rainy-day-20140104,0,4066322.story

Note that as long as the Dems can hold on to their two-thirds representation in the legislature, they can put anything on the ballot they want. Republicans might be annoyed that a plan they agreed to in 2010 was being overridden. But they couldn’t prevent it. However, crafting a rainy day fund that can’t be evaded is trickier than it might seem. There have been various attempts over the years. Formulas are easy to propose, and easy to circumvent. Without any formula in place, Brown in his first iteration as governor had a huge reserve. But it was so big that it is often seen as a catalyst for Prop 13 of 1978. Property tax bills were shooting up and voters were angry about the state having a huge reserve at the same time (even though property taxes were local, not state, affairs). So inadvertent consequences can occur.

In any event, we now have a pre-budget leak. Will there be others?

UPDATE: Here is a second leak. (Cap-and-trade funds for high-speed rail)
http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-jerry-brown-budget-highspeed-rail-cap-and-trade-20140105,0,6294114.story

Upcoming Events in January

Under the state constitution, Governor Brown will release his budget proposal for 2014-15 at the end of next week. In the past, bits and pieces were often leaked to the news media ahead of the formal announcement. So far, that hasn’t happened – which might just mean that with the current budgetary calm, there is nothing shocking to leak, including about the UC budget. There will also be a “state of the state” address to the legislature by the governor which will touch on whatever the governor has in mind – who knows? – in this election year.

The UC Regents will be meeting Jan. 21-23. However, the agenda items are not yet posted and probably won’t be posted until a week or so before the meeting.

As we have noted in earlier posts, Chancellor Block will be under pressure to say something about the Israel boycott undertaken by a group called the American Studies Assn. Other UC chancellors and the UC prez have come out against the boycott as have heads of other universities. See http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2013/12/clock-is-ticking-towards-uclas.html. The latest news on all of that – as of today – is at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/02/presidents-denounce-academic-boycott-israel-some-campuses-faculty-and-presidents. One can imagine the issue coming up at the Regents since the student-regent-elect has pushed for Israel divestment (not the same thing as an academic boycott).

That’s the outlook but you never know what can happen:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsSbhdo0kQI?feature=player_detailpage]