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As readers of this blog will know, UC-Berkeley and UC-San Francisco have been calling for more autonomy from the overall UC system, including the right to set tuition at the campus level.  (UCLA has been strangely silent about the proposal, pro or con. Can there really be no opinion on this matter in Murphy Hall?)  Yours truly somehow missed the item below from May 3: Ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service applauded a new University of California, Berkeley proposal to give each UC campus more autonomy, particularly when it comes to setting tuition rates. Because its seats are so coveted, Berkeley…

Sometimes this blog posts items relevant to holidays of the day and today is Cinco de Mayo.  On May 3, 2012, UCLA Professor David Hayes-Bautista was interviewed by Warren Olney on KCRW radio’s Which Way LA? about the history of Cinco de Mayo.  He was also interviewed on the UCLA Newsroom blog on the same topic and recorded a YouTube video for that blog on the subject of Cinco de Mayo (link to that video and text at http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/uncovering-the-origins-of-the-232941.aspx). Prof. Hayes-Bautista notes that the celebration of the holiday has much to do with the American Civil War.  On the radio…

The Beverly Hills Courier published an interesting history of the Japanese Garden and its proposed sale by UCLA in its May 4 issue.  Links to just that article and to the paper as a whole are below.  It contains an interesting statement by former Dean Fred Eiserling on p. 10: Using a letter written by Dean of Life Sciences Fred Eiserling in June 1993 to Vice Chancellor Alan Charles, UCLA partially based its argument to sell the gardens on Eiserling’s assertion that it did research purpose and would be better suited for another use within the University. In 1965, the…

Inside Higher Ed pointed me to a UC notice dated 5-3-12 in which it was announced that certain UC human resource functions will be consolidated at UC-Riverside.  UCLA will be among the first set of campuses (“Wave #1”) to make the transition. UC RIVERSIDE SELECTED TO HOST NEW EMPLOYEE SERVICE CENTER   After a thorough review and analysis, UCPath executive sponsors Peter Taylor, chief financial officer, and Nathan Brostrom, executive vice president of business operations, have selected UC Riverside as the host location for the UCPath Center, the new systemwide shared service center.  The UCPath Center will process routine transactions related…

According to the Daily Bruin, rent-a-bikes will be joining Zipcars in Westwood soon.   Bicycle rental kiosks will soon populate Westwood, once a city-wide bike-sharing program launches this fall. The private venture is being funded by Bike Nation, a bike-share service provider that plans to install 4,000 bicycles at 400 rental kiosks throughout communities in Los Angeles… Full story at: http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/04/bike_nation_to_bring_bicycle_rental_kiosks_to_westwood_in_the_fall [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GugsCdLHm-Q&w=320&h=195]

In an earlier post, we noted a bill in the state legislature that would limit pay of state employees to the salary of the governor, about $174,000.  The bill exempts UC because of its constitutional position.  Nonetheless, should such a bill be passed, it would create difficulties for UC as an outlier.  The bill advanced in committee yesterday. State employees — even university presidents and top medical doctors — should not bring home more than Gov. Jerry Brown, a Senate Committee agreed Wednesday.  “This is a good first step to reining in the outrageous state salaries that Californians keep hearing…

We continue to report on the UCLA hotel/conference center project which the Regents found questionable in their March meeting and refused to endorse.  Earlier, we noted threehotel projects being planned for Santa Monica.  It is useful to look at a rendering of one of them which has 138 rooms and would be at 5th Street and Colorado.   It’s pretty massive and useful to look at.  Now consider that the 250-room proposed UCLA hotel would have over 80% more rooms and you get a sense of the scale of the UCLA project.  The Santa Monica project shown above is described as follows:…

…In an email about financial aid awards, UCLA told 894 high school seniors last weekend that they were admitted to the highly competitive campus. Those students actually remain on the waiting list for the Westwood school. UCLA is apologizing for the error. Officials, however, are not yet moving anyone into the admitted category. “We realize this is a particularly anxious and stressful time for students and their families as they try to make decisions about college admissions. We sincerely apologize for this mistake that may have led some of them to think they were admitted when they remain on the waiting…

The UCLA Academic Senate Committee on Planning and Budget (CPB) endorsed the hotel project on 3-22-12.  A link to the Committee’s report is below.  Pity it went that route, particularly the light of what went on at the Regents earlier this week.  Essentially, what went wrong began with the UCLA administration’s misdiagnosis of the problem during the past summer. When the original grand plan to build the hotel/conference center had to be halted in spring 2011, the administration apparently concluded that the problem was not the scale of the project but the process by which it was unveiled.  That is,…

With the subway supposed to arrive in Westwood (someday), apparently some planners and architects have been imagining the area with not many cars. The story is athttp://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/03/2_radical_plans_for_turning_westwood_village_around.php As for the subway, below is a sketch from the MTA of the proposed Westwood station: Source: http://www.metro.net/projects_studies/westside/images/final_eir-eis/49.%20Station%20Entrance%20Location%20Report%20and%20Recommendations.pdf