Did Wiseman Catch This? (Check Prior Post)

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 SAT college admissions test. While most applicants with low scores are turned away, athletes who average just 370 out of a possible 800 in each subject – math, critical reading and writing – are invited to enroll…

Full story at http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Cal-s-shockingly-low-athletic-admission-standards-4984721.php

Well, they have to fill that new black-hole-for-money stadium somehow. Yet another grand capital project for UC. Luckily, we have no grand capital projects at UCLA. (Or do we?)

Shocking!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gf8NK1WAOc?feature=player_detailpage]

“At Berkeley” Opens

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 “Public Housing” and “Boxing Gym” indicate, examines a different institution. “As in all my documentaries,” Wiseman writes in “Director’s Notes” for his new film, “I had no idea of the themes or structure until I was well advanced in the editing.” Similarly, audiences won’t fully understand the themes of this long and thoughtful film until they’ve experienced it for themselves. Wiseman and his two-person crew spent 12 weeks at UC Berkeley in fall 2010. With the university’s full cooperation (only tenure decisions were put off-limits), they shot 250 hours of footage, which took 14 months to edit to 4 hours, 4 minutes… What gives “At Berkeley” special interest is that it was filmed at a time when the university was figuring out how to deal with a particularly difficult fiscal situation. California, which at one point in time paid upward of 40% to 50% of the school’s expenses, has dropped its share to 16%. Coping with that loss of revenue without loss of academic excellence would be challenge enough without the school’s determination to continue to attract as diverse a student body as possible and keep itself affordable not only to low-income students but also to the children of the ever-imperiled middle class as well…

Full review at www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-at-berkeley-20131115,0,7412470.story

Movie trailer below:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1y7AujyWFs?feature=player_detailpage]

Just saying no

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 college; and outcomes, including graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings and the number of advanced degrees earned by a given college’s graduates.

Many higher education leaders have mixed feelings about Obama’s initiative. Dirks is no exception. But he said that it’s better for universities to participate in the discussion than to boycott it. “We don’t have an option but to engage,” he said. One of his bottom lines: Dirks is adamant that schools should not be rated based on the earnings of their graduates. “No. No prevarication. Just n-o,” Dirks said when asked whether it would be a good idea to factor earnings into a college rating system…

Full story at http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/new-uc-berkeley-chancellor-is-against-rating-colleges-based-on-graduate-earnings/2013/10/28/9732f856-3ff4-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html

More Waiting

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 that the university was “investigating the legal and ethical constraints” of releasing preliminary research data. He did not agree to release the list. Researchers led by Moehle have compiled a database of about 1,500 concrete structures in Los Angeles built before 1980 that may be at risk of collapse in an earthquake. Seismic experts say obtaining the list is critical for the city to begin tackling the problem. Structural engineers have said hundreds could die if even only one concrete building collapsed…

Full article at www.latimes.com/local/la-me-earthquake-concrete-20131025,0,4904899.story

No rush. We can wait:

Report: Berkeley drops ball on athlete graduation rate

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 — the fourth-lowest among teams in the major conferences…

Full story at http://www.mercurynews.com/sports/ci_24383075/cal-football-team-struggling-classroom-too

Wiseman at Berkeley

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]

Nobel Sharing

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 alumnus to win the Nobel Prize, and the first to receive the prize in physiology or medicine. “UCLA students, alumni and faculty are leaders in their fields, and their contributions have bettered society in innumerable ways,” said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. “Our legacy of Nobel laureates reflects our university’s role at the forefront of discovery, and we congratulate Professor Schekman and his fellow Nobel Prize winners on this extraordinary honor.”…

Full media release at http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/randy-schekman-molecular-biologist-248784.aspx

It’s nice for UCLA to share with Berkeley. We’ve all been taught to share from an early age:

UC-Berkeley Explosion Linked to Electrical Copper Theft

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 by 9 p.m., Mogulof said. The explosion appears to be related to vandalism discovered by the campus late last week, Mogulof said. Vandals were stealing or attempting to steal copper grounding wire from an electrical system not readily visible, and the damage appears to be more extensive than initially believed. The explosion occurred as engineers were restoring power after a campuswide outage about 4:45 p.m., Mogulof said…

Full story at http://www.dailycal.org/2013/09/30/campus-wide-power-outage-disrupts-classes-early-monday-evening/

Various short videos are available from the YouTube website of the Daily Californian:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDl0OqRZ99o?feature=player_detailpage]

Department of Bad Timing

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 highly coveted, $1.5 billion contract to build the world’s most sophisticated super X-ray microscope – and that could spell trouble for the lab’s planned expansion to a second campus in Richmond… The University of California-managed lab was so confident of winning the laser contract from the feds that it set aside a large chunk of its 200-acre campus in the Berkeley hills to accommodate it. But then a July 25 report by a federal Department of Energy scientific advisory committee concluded that the Berkeley lab did not meet the criteria needed for building the new laser…

Full story at http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Berkeley-lab-s-contract-loss-threatens-Richmond-4816913.php#photo-2153088

PS: Stanford may get the contract.

UCLA’s Ziman Center Weighs in on Chairing the Fed

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 said to be” doesn’t necessarily mean “are.”) The op ed comes out for Yellen, currently vice chair of the Fed, who earlier in her career was a professor at UC-Berkeley. You can read it at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/Documents/areas/ctr/ziman/UCLA_Economic_Letter_Oliner_9-04-13.pdf.