UC Berkeley

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Did Wiseman Catch This? (Check Prior Post)

Byuclafaculty

UC Berkeley, the world’s top-ranked public university, is admitting student athletes with shockingly low grades and scores if they show promise as revenue-generating football or basketball players, say two Cal scholars whose new study helps explain why athletes on campus have the worst graduation rates in the country. While the highly competitive university routinely turns away applicants who earn straight A’s in high school, it has also been admitting student athletes on full scholarship even if their average high school grade was a B-minus. Its policy, in fact, permits a C average.Also disparate is the way Cal evaluates students’ scores on the…

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“At Berkeley” Opens

Byuclafaculty

The Frederick Wiseman documentary, “At Berkeley,” opens at the Royal Theater in West LA.  Warning, it runs over four hours!  Yours truly suspects the theater opening is a prelude for a public TV showing later.  Running as a movie in a theater is probably to qualify for an Academy Award.  (That’s a guess!)  From the Kenneth Turan review in the LA Times: Master documentarian Frederick Wiseman makes his films his way, and the way he makes them is reflected in how we experience them. “At Berkeley” is Wiseman’s 38th doc in 43 years, and each of them, as titles like…

Just saying no

Byuclafaculty

Dirks agrees From the Washington Post: …What brought [UC-Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks] to Washington, among other business, was a meeting with top U.S. Education Department officials to discuss President Obama’s plan for the federal government to rate colleges on value by the start of the 2015-16 school year. Obama announced the plan in August, part of what was billed as an effort to increase college affordability. The rating system is still under design. Obama proposed that ratings should be based on measures such as the percentage of students receiving Pell grants; the average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt at a…

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More Waiting

Byuclafaculty

Our previous post involved waiting until Wednesday for a revelation about the future of UC. This post involves waiting for UC-Berkeley and LA City to reveal more about the earthquake safety survey in the LA area.  Blog readers will recall that at least one building in a related survey by the LA Times was UCLA-owned. Ending days of mixed messages, the city of Los Angeles sent a request Thursday formally asking a UC Berkeley engineering professor for a list of concrete buildings that could be at risk of collapsing in a major earthquake. The professor, Jack Moehle, responded quickly, saying…

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Report: Berkeley drops ball on athlete graduation rate

Byuclafaculty

From the San Jose Mercury-News: The No. 1 public university in the country has the least success graduating players among the 72 teams in the major football-playing conferences, according to NCAA data released Thursday. Just 44 percent of Cal’s football players graduated within the parameters established by the NCAA. For comparison, archrival Stanford is among the national leaders at 93 percent; state school neighbor San Jose State checked in at 51 percent.  Nor is football the only Cal team struggling to graduate players. While many sports are performing well, men’s basketball posted a Graduation Success Rate of 38 percent —…

Wiseman at Berkeley

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today alerted yours truly to a forthcoming Frederick Wiseman documentary on UC-Berkeley.  A lengthy article appears at:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/14/documentary-frederick-wiseman-portrays-uc-berkeley-fall-2010 In poking around on the web, I found earlier stories about the documentary such as this one from the NY Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/movies/moviesspecial/film-chronicles-the-inner-workings-of-berkeley.html If you are familiar with past Wiseman documentaries, they tend to be short on narration and long on meetings, interactions, etc.  “At Berkeley” will be released in November.  It takes place in 2010, i.e., during the budget crisis.  The film will be seen on PBS in early 2014. Excerpts can be seen below:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4nPs8iIo0?feature=player_detailpage]

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Nobel Sharing

Byuclafaculty

These days, Nobel prizes are often shared among researchers.  It’s interesting that those who win Nobel prizes are also shared among universities. From the UCLA Newsroom: UCLA alumnus Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, has won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his role in figuring out how proteins are secreted and transported in human cells. He shares the prize with James E. Rothman of Yale University and Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford University for solving the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system. Schekman became the seventh UCLA…

UC-Berkeley Explosion Linked to Electrical Copper Theft

Byuclafaculty

The UC-Berkeley student newspaper carries a story about last evenings explosion and fires on campus that led to an evacuation of the campus. An explosion on the UC Berkeley campus near California Hall injured several people, prompting officials to declare a state of emergency and order an evacuation of the campus about 6:40 p.m. Monday evening. Three people were treated on scene for injuries, and one was transported to a hospital with minor burn injuries, according to campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof. At least 20 people were stuck in elevators as a result of an earlier power outage but were freed…

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Department of Bad Timing

Byuclafaculty

On Thursday, the Regents meeting seems to consist of a PR tour of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab as part of a more general review of the different Dept. of Energy labs that continues from the last meeting [http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/jul13/o1.pdf]. As the screenshot above suggests, however, the timing is not so good for discussing the labs, at least for cousin lab, Lawrence Berkeley. [Three labs are managed by UC as descendants of the World War II Manhattan Project.]  From the website yesterday of the San Francisco Chronicle: After years of planning, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has just lost out on a…

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UCLA’s Ziman Center Weighs in on Chairing the Fed

Byuclafaculty

UCLA’s Ziman Center for Real Estate – a unit of the Anderson School – publishes an op ed on who should be the next chair of the Federal Reserve.  The author is Stephen Oliner, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a senior fellow at the Ziman Center, and formerly an associate director in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.If you have been following the issue in the popular news media, you know that the choices for President Obama are said to be Larry Summers and Janet Yellen. (“Are…