Facing rising rents that are outstripping their pay, a group of Teaching Assistants at UC Santa Cruz launched a grade strike and are demanding a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). Predictably, UCOP has been unsympathetic, and disciplinary actions may come soon. An array of UCSC departments, student organizations, and community groups have
Inside Higher Ed reported yesterday that UC campuses at Berkeley and Santa Cruz had been cleared of charges of allowing an anti-Semitic atmosphere due to anti-Israel student activities. The campuses received letters from the US Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) clearing them on free speech grounds. An article appeared later in the LA Times indicating the same conclusion was reached for UC-Irvine. The Inside Higher Ed article is at http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/08/28/education-dept-rejects-charges-anti-jewish-bias-u-calif-campuses The LA Times article is at http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-uc-fed-probe-20130829,0,936811.story You can find an official letter to one of the campuses from OCR through the first link. But the unofficial…
A giant odorous cloud billowed over UC Santa Cruz’s Porter Meadow on Saturday as a few thousand people took a bong hit or two or three during an event that’s evolved into an international holiday for marijuana smokers. Hoards of mostly college-aged men and women streamed into the grass field in a valley near College Eight throughout the day to celebrate and consume copious amounts of marijuana on April 20 — a date some call “Weed Day” that has come to symbolize a free-for-all smokefest… Full story at http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_23072047/thousands-light-up-at-uc-santa-cruz-celebrate There definitely seems to be something in the air:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5oVzbwYWpg?feature=player_detailpage] Or maybe…
Inside Higher Ed today carries a story about concerns at UC-Santa Cruz about the ownership of MOOCs. UC-Santa Cruz is the one UC campus at which the local faculty association has collective bargaining rights: Faculty union officials in California worry professors who agree to teach free online classes could undermine faculty intellectual property rights and collective bargaining agreements. The union for faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz said earlier this month it could seek a new round of collective bargaining after several professors agreed to teach classes on Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based provider of popular massive open…
From the Contra Costa Times: UC Santa Cruz graduate student Micha Rahder suffers from a rare disorder that requires her to be hooked up to an IV over two days, five to eight hours at a time, every four weeks… In November, she got a letter from the university saying she had used $378,000 of the $400,000 lifetime limit for students on the University of California student health insurance plan (also known as UC SHIP), Radner said. In early January, a little more three years after her first treatment, she received another letter. “It comes from the Office of the…
Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/20/12 UCLA Faculty Leader Found to Have Wronged Professor to Appease Jewish Group By Peter Schmidt A faculty panel at the University of California at Los Angeles has admonished the chairman of the university’s Academic Senate for violating the rights of an associate professor who had been accused by an outside advocacy group of misusing his position to call for a boycott of Israel. In a letter issued this month, the UCLA Academic Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom held that the Senate’s chairman, Andrew F. Leuchter, was wrong to have told the advocacy group and the…
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…
Apparently not at UC-Santa Cruz tomorrow. Organizers of the group that aims to shut down UC Santa Cruz will hold rallies at 4:30 a.m., noon and 5 p.m. Thursday at UCSC, according to a release from Occupy Education. The release said a group of UCSC students, workers and community members have decided on a strike to shut down the campus starting at 4:30 a.m. Other that emergency vehicles, residents on campus and necessary exceptions, all traffic onto campus will be blocked, the release continued… Full story at http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_20066765 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qslQJLnk0qw&w=320&h=195]Update: Car plows through Occupy Education demonstrators blocking entrance to UCSC campushttp://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_20078788
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…
UC-Santa Cruz’s Academic Senate presented its program on the recommendations of the Post-Employment Benefits (PEB) Task Force. As noted in a prior posting, UCLA has its session scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 14, 10 AM, Royce Hall. The Santa Cruz program apparently featured a detailed and extensive set of slides, available at http://senate.ucsc.edu/PEB/CFW%20PEB%2017CFWslides0920.pdf If you click on that link, you will see that the slides are complicated as they work through the implications of the various pension options. They could not have been presented in a brief time period and must have been accompanied by a detailed oral narration. It is…
