UCLA

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Another item to keep an eye on when the business plan for the UCLA hotel/conference center is released: Non-commercial use

Byuclafaculty

A post on this blog yesterday noted that with the upcoming Regents meeting in late March, UCLA will soon have to release its business plan for the proposed hotel/conference center if it wants to get it on the agenda. So far, no plan has been released despite an official public records request for a copy from the UCLA Faculty Association. The preliminary description of the proposal indicated that the hotel/conference center would take only non-commercial business.  An example could be a campus-sponsored research conference and participants in such events.  The non-commercial limitation allows for tax-exempt financing but limits the potential…

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One Element to Keep Your Eye on When the Business Plan for the UCLA Hotel/Conference Center is Revealed: Parking

Byuclafaculty

The next Regents meeting is scheduled for March 27-29.  If UCLA wants to get its hotel/conference center proposal on the agenda – which is typically published online by the Regents about two weeks before each meeting – it will soon have to unveil its business plan.  The UCLA Faculty Association has been requesting that plan for months, so far without results. There are many elements of the new plan to consider.  One difference between the original plan, which would have been constructed on the Faculty Center site, is replacement parking.  The original site would have displaced some ground-level parking next…

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More Bad 405 Traffic News for UCLA Night Owls

Byuclafaculty

…The northbound 405 will be closed from Getty Center Drive to Ventura Boulevard Saturday night as crews continue to work on rebuilding the Mulholland bridge over the freeway. Some freeway ramps in the area could begin closing as early as 7 p.m. and some lanes could be blocked beginning at 10 p.m. All northbound lanes will be closed at midnight, but the closures should be lifted by 5 a.m.   The southbound lanes between the Ventura (101) Freeway and Getty Center Drive will be closed Monday and Tuesday nights. Southbound closures are also planned on the nights of March 12 and…

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UCLA History: Angela Davis

Byuclafaculty

A report in today’s LA Times on the Occupy protests at several CSU and UC campuses (including one at UCLA) reported the following: …Turnout was small at UCLA. Occupy protesters set up eight or so tents on Wilson Plaza, which the demonstrators said they renamed after Angela Davis, the politically radical professor who taught at UCLA. The group said they intended to keep the tents up through the night, and campus authorities said they were undecided if that would be allowed… Full story at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-student-protests-20120302,0,3924235.story Why Angela Davis?   A newscast from October 1969 deals with the Angela Davis controversy at UCLA…

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DA Overreaching?

Byuclafaculty

In 2008, a fire resulted from a chemical reaction and a student lab assistant was killed.  Some time later, a UCLA chemistry professor was indicted, along with the Regents, by the Los Angeles District Attorney.  UCLA asserts that there was no willful crime committed and is providing for the defense of the professor. In that case, there was substantial outside publicity and investigations by workplace safety authorities.  The matter was widely reported in the Los Angeles Times and other sources. You may have seen yesterday’s Daily Bruin which carried a front page headline about the indictment by the DA of…

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House For Sale at $9 Million

Byuclafaculty

Regent Emerita Velma Montoya alerted me to the putting up for sale of the Carter residence in Bel Air for $9 million by UCLA which is reported in Curbed LA.  Readers of this blog will know that UCLA is proposing to sell the adjacent Japanese Garden as well as the house with much controversy about the latter.  She also gave me a UCOP analysis of the sale which can be read at the link below. The Curbed LA article reporting the sale is at http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/02/ucla_lists_japanese_gardenadjacent_carter_house_for_9mm_1.php The UCOP analysis is largely narrative although in the second to last paragraph, the anonymous…

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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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Seeds of a New Solution for the Japanese Garden?

Byuclafaculty

In case you missed it, on Feb. 21, the Daily Bruin ran an offer to UCLA from a coalition of groups to maintain the Japanese Garden that UCLA controversially proposes to sell.  Excerpts: On Feb. 9, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block wrote a piece in the Daily Bruin stating that the sale of the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden is in the university’s best interests.  The organizations and the family of Hannah Carter who have formed the Coalition to Save the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden respectfully submit that other options are possible, and, indeed, preferable. …On Jan. 31, the coalition convened a public informational…