The Sacramento Bee has complaints about UC administrator pay and travel expenses. (Of course, we never read in the Bee about pay and travel expenses of the Bee‘s employees or executives – or those of its parent company – which are not available online or through public records requests.) You can read the Bee‘s editorial at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/07/5629077/uc-cant-gripe-about-cuts-while.html
Articles published in professional journals are often not readily available online, particularly as journal publication has been taken over by commercial publishers. Many blog readers will undoubtedly have looked for an article and found only an abstract online, as per the accompanying picture. But change is (hopefully) coming: MEDIA RELEASEFriday, August 2, 2013UC Office of the Academic Senate The Academic Senate of the University of California has passed an Open Access Policy, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge. “The Academic Council’s adoption…
So reports today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed about state senate leader Darrell Steinberg’s bill to mandate MOOCs at UC, CSU, and the community colleges. You can find the article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/01/controversial-california-bill-outsource-student-learning-dead-until-2014-or-later
You can find the data for calendar year 2012, including the chart above, at http://compensation.universityofcalifornia.edu/payroll2012/. [Click on the chart to enlarge it.] Among the interesting figures is that about one eighth of payroll goes to ladder faculty, another eighth to other instructors, and about 6% to TAs. By the way, if you don’t want to be in the database, apparently you need to become a student for part of the year: Pursuant to federal student privacy laws, the names of all employees who were UC students (including medical residents) at any point during a given calendar year have been redacted…
From time to time on this blog, we have pointed to the issue of privacy and potential ID theft posed by the practice of certain newspapers posting public employee and pensions by name. While courts have seemed to see the handing over of raw payroll data as a required public disclosure, we have noted that whatever purposes such posting has – ostensibly “good government” – could be accomplished using job titles without names, statistical distributions, etc. It may seem at this point that nothing more could be said or done about the impact on UC. Note that private universities face…
Although UC and AFSCME 3299 – the union that called the recent 2-day hospital strike (including at UCLA) – seem to have gone their separate ways, it appears the dispute is over for now. The Daily Bruin carries a report that UC has unilaterally implemented its last offer. Under state labor law, an employer can implement its offer unilaterally if negotiations have reached an “impasse.” In such instances, the union might challenge the implementation before PERB on grounds that an impasse had not been reached. Or it could threaten or undertake a strike. However, the media release by the union…
Bloomberg and other sources are reporting that UC and a firm described in the news media – particularly news media sympathetic to the high-tech sector – as a patent troll have lost an appeal concerning an internet patent. On the other side of the appeal were Amazon and Google. In an earlier trial in a lower court, the patent was invalidated. Yahoo and J.C. Penney were also involved in the lower court case. [“Patent trolls” are companies that acquire patents – particularly patents that seem to involve a broad range of activities – and then sue firms that use the…
An alternative seal? There seems to be a controversy simmering in the Daily Bruin about the UC seal. No, it’s not quite as hot a controversy as the one that arose over the attempt to create a modern replacement for the seal last year. Blog readers may recall that the proposal back then, when inverted, looked like the hindquarters of an elephant and was eventually dropped. A graduating student complained that the seal, with “let there be light” from Genesis, was insufficiently secular. He also objected to the star and the book on similar, too-religious grounds. See http://dailybruin.com/2013/06/24/seal-does-not-reflect-academia-the-student-body/ To the defense…
UCLA student at the Sphinx From the LA Times: Worried about student safety amid the political violence in Egypt, the University of California has suspended its fall semester program in Cairo, officials said Monday. The move affects 22 students who had signed up to study advanced Arabic and other classes at the American University in Cairo… Those students can enroll instead in UC programs in Jordan, Turkey, Morocco and Israel that also offer Arabic classes… The move comes a few days after the safe evacuation of 10 UC students from a UC Davis-sponsored summer program in Egypt and the worsening…
Apparently, M-I-D-D-L-E C-L-A-S-S S-C-H-O-L-A-R-S-H-I-P: From the Contra Costa Times: With the governor’s signature this week, California college students from middle-income families will soon be in line for a tuition discount. The state-funded Middle Class Scholarship will buffer tens of thousands of students from UC’s and Cal State’s frequent and unpredictable fee hikes… When the program begins in 2014 it will bring some relief to California’s middle-class families who have watched helplessly in recent years as public tuition and fees have nearly doubled since 2007. It will offer sliding-scale discounts of up to 40 percent for families who earn $150,000 or…
