The Complete Regents Meeting for Your Listening Enjoyment AND a Note About the Governor's Legitimate Question and the Absurd UC Response

We have given you sections of last week's Regents meeting in various postings.  And we have noted that the archiving policy of the Regents is a problem.  According to the Regents website, "Video files for past open session meetings of The University of California Regents and its Committees are available for one year after the dates of the meetings."  So the files apparently vanish.  Prior to 2013, the Regents provided no archiving at all, just a live stream of the audio.  We would then request the audio files and archive them elsewhere.  Since it appears that files will eventually vanish, we have preserved audios of the most recent meeting as follows:

Morning of May 15 prior to demonstration which caused the meeting to be suspended:


Morning of May 15 after the demonstration ended and the session resumed:


Afternoon of May 15 including comments and questions by Gov. Brown:


And by the way, in the session above, the governor asked the right question and got the wrong answer.  He had been given data and charts on time to graduation across campuses.  There was considerable variation, both over time and cross-sectionally.  The governor essentially asked whether a multivariate analysis might be undertaken that would illuminate the factors behind the variation.  The right answer from UC officials should have been, "yes, but we haven't done it - and now that you have pointed it out, we will do it."  Instead, there was an evasive answer that came down to saying that it is all very complicated, maybe we should ask the local officials for anecdotal evidence, and despite all of our data you can't get any insights from an analytical statistical approach."  That response, my friends, is totally absurd.  There are plenty of faculty at UC who could conduct a meaningful statistical analysis, given the data and necessary support.  To the extent that additional data are needed, they could be collected.  If we don't like the governor and legislature coming in and micro-managing (which is what is happening with regard to online education), we need to do the micro-management in-house!  [To hear the back-and-forth with the governor, start at about minute 38.]

Session of May 16:


A link to the agenda for the sessions is at:
http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may13.html

===
Note that there is an upcoming meeting of the Committee on Investments of the Regents on Tuesday, May 21.  A link to the agenda can be found at:
http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may13/invest.pdf

UPDATE: President Yudof's State of the University report to the Regents is at:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/documents/yudof_white_paper_0513.pdf