Category: UC-San Diego

UC-SD Chancellor’s Statement on American Studies Association Israel Boycott

Khosla

From Inside Higher Ed today:

The chancellor of the University of California at San Diego has issued a statement in opposition to the American Studies Association’s resolution which backed the boycott of Israeli higher education institutions. 

“We affirm the right of the faculty to advance their scholarship and research through open dialogue with academic colleagues in all countries,” Pradeep K. Khosla said. “UC San Diego faculty collaborations draw on richly diverse ideas and views around the globe, including in the Middle East. Excluding scholars limits discussion and conflicts with the University of California’s highest aspirations.”

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/12/20/chancellor-reacts-american-studies-boycott

The official statement is at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/chancellors_statement_re_american_studies_association_resolution

It is likely that the Khosla statement will lead to responses from other UC chancellors and UC president Napolitano.  Or at least they will be asked.  Conceivably, it could be raised at the January Regents meeting.

Further background:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/17/american-studies-association-backs-boycott-israeli-universities

Golden Goose

Inside Higher Ed pointed me today to the “Golden Goose” awards established by some folks in Congress and in major educational groups as an antidote to other listings that are made to put research in a bad light.  Old timers will remember the Golden Fleece awards of Senator William Proxmire – back in the day –  which made fun of research that seemed silly.  From time to time, such seemingly-silly research continues to be highlighted by Proxmire’s successors.   
Of course, there is silly research and there are silly academics.  But not everything that seems silly, or abstract, or just not easy to understand turns out to be so.  
As it turns out, one of the folks on the Golden Goose list for this year is UCLA’s Nobelist Lloyd Shapely.  See, for example,
http://magazine.ucla.edu/exclusives/lloyd-shapely-uclas-newest-nobel-laureate/.   
A media release on the awards for this year is at http://www.goldengooseaward.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Golden-Goose-Awards-Ceremony-Honors-Seven-Researchers-9-19-13.pdf. 
Another honoree is Adjunct Prof. Hudson Freeze of UC-SD.  See
http://biomedsci.ucsd.edu/faculty/faculty_descrip.aspx?id=202.   
And the Inside Higher Ed story is at http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/09/20/scientists-honored-studies-might-once-have-seemed-negligible.  

Listen to the Second Half of the Regents Meeting of 9-17-2013

Our earlier post had the Regents audio for the first part of the meeting of 9-17-13.  There was then a closed session.  The audio link below picks up the meeting again when the public component resumed.  We also noted in the previous post that there was a inadvertent hot mike at the beginning of the meeting in a supposedly closed session which transmitted sensitive material online.  We have not archived that portion.  However, when the meeting reopened in a public session, apparently some Regents were not sensitive to what was going out.  The audio begins with one Regent telling another that he let Nathan off easy on Blake House.  Blake House is the possible residence of the incoming UC president that would require renovations and repair.  There is more of that in the link below towards the end.

In this session, there was discussion of installation of solar panels at two campuses: Davis and Riverside.  Both campuses indicated that the electricity cost – after various govt. subsidies – would be comparable to the cost from outside sources.  An interesting point was that having solar installations would not help were there to be an external power failure.  The solar component would shut down in such events to prevent damage.  UC-San Francisco presented an upgrade and construction plan involving seismic work, among other elements.  There was discussion of a new ocean pier for Scripps/UC-San Diego. UCLA sought authorization for design of a new engineering building.  A question was raised about how, given that this was the design phase only, UCLA somehow had rather precise estimates of construction costs.  It was noted also that because of the release of such advance estimates, it would be unlikely that UCLA’s prospective contractors would come in with lower bids, even if costs were actually lower.  Lt. Gov. Newsom asked what was really being committed here.  If you start down the road of just approving design costs, doesn’t that effectively commit you to the entire project?  He was assured that the costs approved were just for design.  Good question, Mr. Lt. Governor.  The answer was not so good.  In fact, once you get a train rolling at the Regents, it does leave the station.

Then we come to the Blake House discussion for which Nathan was let easily off the hook, as per above.  Apparently, the house is not in good shape and has a leaky roof and related damage.  The approval sought was to do repairs.  There were questions about whether UC could just sell the building and land and use the proceeds for something else.  It was noted that the location, 4 miles from Berkeley, was not ideal for a president’s residence or other uses.  Nonetheless, repairs were authorized with promises from UCOP that there would be a more thorough evaluation forthcoming in the future.

You can hear the audio at the link below:

Not a thumbs up moment for Janet in her new job

The University of Michigan has raided UC San Diego, hiring a pair of young computer scientists who’ve been drawing attention for their efforts to help Google find better ways to operate online. Jason Mars, an assistant professor, and Lingjia Tang, a member of the research faculty, decided to leave UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering only a year after they arrived. Mars is the first African American in the department’s history to hold a tenure track position.
“They’re both excellent researchers. This is the single biggest setback I’ve had as chair,” said Rajesh Gupta, who took over the fast growing department in 2010, and who made headlines in June when he negotiated an $18.5 million gift from an anonymous donor. Mars and Tang, who are married, have joined Michigan’s computer science department which, like UCSD’s, is ranked among the 20 best in the country by US News and World Report. The department hired the couple last year, naming Mars to a tenure track position and Tang to a researcher’s post. Michigan offered both of them tenure track jobs, an offer that UCSD later exceeded, Gupta said. Mars also has family ties to Michigan. The raid occurred in the spring as UCSD was preparing to expand faculty hiring…
Full story from the San Diego Union-Tribune at http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/sep/02/ucsd-michigan/

Alternative Rankings

The Washington Monthly publishes a “social” ranking of universities on the basis of affordability, access by lower-income students, “service” to the society, as well as research.  UC comes in very well in that ranking with UC-San Diego on top and Riverside is second.  Berkeley is fifth and UCLA is tenth.  The introductory article to the ranking concludes with the following statement: 

…State lawmakers, meanwhile, must be told that the free ride of college budget cutting is over. The U.S. Department of Education should establish new standards of state support for higher learning, and set deadlines for states that don’t meet them. The prospect of losing federal student aid and research money would galvanize state business leaders and college officials to fight budget cuts that are currently being passed along to families who can ill afford them. It would be easy to let the great American higher education compact gradually crumble under the weight of expediency and institutional ambition. We know this because the process is already under way. But that kind of shortsighted thinking isn’t what built America’s best colleges, and it won’t give us all the system of higher learning we badly need. 

Full article at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september_october_2013/features/introduction_a_different_kind046446.php?page=all. 

Now with all that said, I am generally skeptical of such rankings and, although a methodological statement is included, I am not sure exactly what gets rewarded how.  The purpose of such rankings is mainly to attract readers to the magazines that publish them (You didn’t know that?) more than to achieve any other goals.  Absent an actual database, it is hard to know what is going on.   And the weighting schemes tend to be subjective (arbitrary?). But the methodological statement is at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september_october_2013/features/a_note_on_methodology_4year_co_2046455.php.

The rankings are at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2013/national_university_rank.php.

Emisions Remissions?

UCLA co-generation plant

California’s cash-strapped public universities would save millions of dollars under legislation by Orange County state Sen. Mimi Walters, but the bill’s prospects are uncertain because it would alter a landmark global warming law beloved by environmentalists. Walters’ proposal seeks to exempt University of California and California State University campuses from the new cap-and-trade program established under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, otherwise known as Assembly Bill 32 or AB32, one of the nation’s most ambitious environmental laws…

At least five UC campuses, including Irvine, UCLA and San Diego, qualify for the cap-and-trade program in 2013…

The UC system has budgeted $8 million to comply with AB32 – for just the next fiscal year.
For that much money, the UC system could accommodate another 800 students, UC Vice President Patrick Lenz told members of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee last month. He and the system later backed off those comments, saying there is “not a direct correlation” between student enrollment and the money for cap-and-trade. He also later noted in a letter to committee chairman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, that it’s possible the system won’t have to buy any credits to cover its 2014 emissions…

Full story at http://www.ocregister.com/news/trade-501273-cap-emissions.html

The following is the amount of greenhouse gases emitted in 2011 by UC campuses covered under the AB32 cap-and-trade program. The emissions are displayed in units of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

UCLA – 205,299
UC San Diego – 160,579
UC Irvine – 69,979
UC San Francisco – 68,566
UC Davis Medical Center – 63,693
UC Davis – 62,259

Well, the emissions could be worse:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaN7xuAIjXI?feature=player_detailpage]

Note: Not everyone loves us

The conservative/libertarian City Journal complains about a UC-San Diego diversity executive appointment in its latest issue (and about the Regents’ endorsement of Prop 30). Excerpts:

The University of California, San Diego has done it again. Last year, it announced the creation of a new diversity sinecure: a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Campus leaders established this post even as state budget cuts resulted in the loss of star scientists to competing universities, as humanities classes and degree programs were eliminated to save money, and as tuition continued its nearly 75 percent, five-year rise. The new vice chancellorship was wildly redundant with UCSD’s already-existing diversity infrastructure…  Since this summer, the regents have been shilling for Governor Jerry Brown’s $8 billion November tax initiative, arguing that the only way to save the university from financial and academic ruin is to jack up the state’s upper-bracket income and sales taxes. Their rubber-stamp approval of UCSD’s senseless new appointment, with its sky-high salary, shreds whatever remaining budgetary credibility they may have had…

From: http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0920hm.html

With Prop 30 polling just over a majority (see earlier posts on this blog), such critiques can pull it below 50%.  Is UCOP monitoring and responding to more than the major news outlets?  How about AM talk radio which reaches a much larger audience than the City Journal?  Here is a recent excerpt from the John and Ken show – which reaches over a million listeners in the southern California area – on Prop 30:

 
Here is another excerpt from the Fox and Hounds listserve that goes to small business (and others) in California:

Higher education institutions in California are involving themselves in the campaign for Proposition 30, quite possibly illegally, as they claim to spread information about the initiative. Cal State universities are sending out letters to prospective students suggesting there may not be room for them if the measure fails. Cal State Monterey has a mandatory meeting of freshman to hear a discussion on Prop 30. The University of California at Berkeley has a social network experiment based on the measure, which the official school release claims is unbiased, even though one of the directors of the experiment notes the “enormous potential impact on students, alumni, teachers, parents and employers.”…

Full article at http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2012/09/public-ed-involvement-in-prop-30-trigger-cuts-reminiscent-of-prop-13-campaign/

Of course, there may not be love out there to be gotten:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu9P-V29Bgs?feature=player_detailpage]

Harder to Get In at UC-San Diego?

Excerpt from North County Times:

In a move that narrows the college transfer pathway for students at Palomar, MiraCosta and other community colleges, UC San Diego is winding down an agreement that guarantees transfers to community college students who meet set requirements. The transfer admission guarantee, or “TAG” agreement, allows community college students with grade point averages of 3.5 or better to secure guaranteed admission to UCSD, as long as they meet certain deadlines and coursework requirements.
However, citing increased competition among transfers and a funding shortfall, university officials said they will discontinue the agreement in 2014. Community college students can still apply to transfer to the university, but won’t receive guaranteed admission through the program after that year…
Full story at

UC-San Diego Community College Transfer Guarantee to End

The UC San Diego program that guarantees transfer admission to community college students who meet certain requirements will come to an end in 2014, campus officials have decided.  They said explosive growth in the number applications under the program, coupled with sharp cuts in state funding for the University of California, have threatened to swamp the campus. Administrators and students at area community colleges said the decision will disproportionately harm disadvantaged students…


UC San Diego’s Transfer Admissions Guarantee, or TAG, program began in the early 1980s. Students from the six regional districts who took specific required courses and earned a 3.0 grade-point average were guaranteed admission to the La Jolla university. Later, UC San Diego entered TAG agreements with 33 colleges around the state. And, since 2009, the program has been open to students from all 112 California community colleges, in accord with a UC policy that prohibits local preferences in such arrangements. 


 “We are overwhelmed by the numbers,” said Penny Rue, vice chancellor for student affairs.  TAG applications to UC San Diego grew from 408 in 2008 to 8,715 in 2011… Rue insisted that only real consequence of eliminating TAG is that the academic qualifications of transfer students will be higher. “This will in no way reduce the number of California community college transfer students,” she said…


Full article at http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/may/01/ucsd-ends-community-college-transfer-program/

UCLA Among Top 10 Universities in R&D Spending in Fiscal Year 2010

Inside Higher Ed reports that UCLA is among the top ten universities in research and development spending.  It has been in that group for some time.  Basically, the key determinants are having a med school and getting a lot of federal research funding.

The top ten are:

Johns Hopkins
U of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
U of Wisconsin (Madison)
U of Washington (Seattle)
Duke
UC-San Diego
UCLA
UC-San Francisco
Stanford
U of Pennsylvania

Data from http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/02/hopkins-again-leads-rd-spending.  There is a link in this article to NSF data.  When you click on the link to the article, go to Table 5.

It’s good to be among the tops:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6oGytt0Hiw&w=320&h=195]