UC-Irvine

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A Different Kind of Grade Inflation

Byuclafaculty

From the Orange County Register: When Jose Carrillo went through medical school at Dartmouth College a decade ago, students would have thick books weighing down their white coats with reference information in case they needed it while making rounds… Today, Carrillo is helping third-year medical students understand neurology at UCI Medical Center in Orange… (L)oaded on the iPads in the pockets of the medical students’ coats is every textbook, note, flash card and question from their first two years of medical school – so much information that its equal in printed copies once covered entire tables. All that information sits on…

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Someone Else, Not Me

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today carries a story about various institutions that are offering MOOCs (massive open online courses).  Some of these courses have been approved for college credit by the American Council on Education.  But the institutions offering the courses say they are for other universities; they won’t give credit for the courses to their own students.  Among these institutions is UC-Irvine. All the courses are in technical fields such as math.  …No students at Irvine… will be able to take any of these courses for credit, though. Gary Matkin, UC-Irvine’s dean of continuing education, distance learning and summer session…said…

Something to keep in mind from our colleagues at UC-Irvine

Byuclafaculty

People with exceptional memory recall, have different brains People who can easily recall every moment of their lives have different brains than others, a new study has claimed. University of California-Irvinescientists have found fascinating differences in the brains and mental processes of an extraordinary group of people who can effortlessly recall every moment of their lives since about age 10, the ‘Science Daily’ reported. The phenomenon of highly superior autobiographical memory first documented in 2006 by UCI neurobiologist James McGaugh and colleagues in a woman identified as “AJ” has been profiled on CBS’s ’60 Minutes’ and in hundreds of other…

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More and More Getting Off Scale

Byuclafaculty

The Daily Bruin today has a piece on proposals for dealing with faculty salary scales which have grown increasingly outmoded.  As the table, based on a graphic in the Bruin, illustrates, most faculty at UCLA are paid off-scale.  The University, for recruitment and retention purposes, tries to meet the external academic labor market.  In effect, since there are only so many dollars to go around, paying more than the official scale has to mean a higher student/teacher ratio than would otherwise prevail. Percent of faculty off scale as of 10/2010:Merced 88%UCLA 80%Santa Cruz 73%Berkeley 72%Irvine 66%Santa Barbara 66%San Diego 64%Riverside…

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UC students to protest at regents meeting (tomorrow)

Byuclafaculty

Lisa M. Krieger, San Jose Mercury-News 11-26-11 Student protesters with the Occupy movement will converge on four UC campuses Monday morning to vent their fury at a meeting of the regents, with demonstrators in Davis attempting a campuswide shutdown. The meeting, rescheduled after cancellation earlier this month because of threats of violence and vandalism, now includes a one-hour slot for student voices and other public comment, increased from the usual 20 minutes. The regents will be spread out in four locations — San Francisco, Davis, Los Angeles, and Merced — and conduct the meeting by teleconference… Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_19419961 Above: In…

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Doing Good

Byuclafaculty

The Washington Monthly has a ranking of national universities by “their contribution to the public good.” It looks at such things as students on Pell Grants. UC-San Diego comes in as #1, UCLA as #2, UC-Berkeley #3, UC-Riverside #5, UC-Davis #8, UC-Santa Barbara #13, UC-Irvine #60. The full listing is at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2011/national_university_rank.php

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Viewpoint from Irvine: Differential Tuition at UC Would Devalue Cheaper Campuses

Byuclafaculty

UC Irvine film studies professor Peter Krapp, the immediate past chairman of the UC system Academic Senate’s University Committee on Planning and Budget, responded to the LA Times’ May 9 article, “University of California weighs varying tuitions at its 10 campuses.” He argues differential tuition at UC would create or reinforce a hierarchy of academic prestige so that the more expensive campuses would be deemed better. Excerpts from his LA Times “blowback” online op ed: Proposing different tuition for each University of California campus is shortsighted and ill-considered… Stratification would fundamentally change the UC system. Each campus would need separate…

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Hot Potato?

Byuclafaculty

The Assn. of American Universities (AAU) is a organization with major research universities as its members including UCLA. Its current president, Robert Berdahl, is a past chancellor of UC-Berkeley. UC-Berkeley is a member. Davis, Irvine, San Diego, and Santa Barbara are also members. On March 31, the AAU issued the press release below with other organizations concerning the federal deficit. (This is not a timely piece of information; yours truly just stumbled on it, a month late.) Also a signatory to the document is the Assn. of Public and Land-Grant Universities which includes the UC campuses above plus Santa Cruz…

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Audio of Regents Meeting on Budget, 3-16-11, For Your Listening Pleasure

Byuclafaculty

The Regents meeting this morning dealt with budgetary issues. There were reports by three chancellors (from Santa Cruz, Irvine, and Berkeley) on the impact of the budget squeeze on their campuses. The Regents had various reactions to the situation. Plans were offered by Peter Taylor to generate more cash through portfolio management. He argued that even though somewhat more risk was entailed, the proposals were sufficiently conservative to insulate UC from a crisis. There was discussion of a new plan under which UCOP would pass state funding down to the campus level so that campuses would operate more autonomously. The…

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UC-Irvine Muslim Students Case: Radio Report

Byuclafaculty

For those interested in the so-called “Irvine 11” Muslim students case, you might be interested in the KPCC Airtalk program of Feb. 7. Below is the text that goes with the podcast. Below that is a link to a podcast of the program. The Orange County District Attorney has charged the so-called “Irvine 11” with conspiring to disrupt a speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine last year. In a statement, District Attorney Tony Rackauckas defended the misdemeanor charges against the Muslim students saying “we cannot tolerate a preplanned violation of the law, even if the crime takes…