Talking Back

From the Daily Bruin: The UC implemented a virtual language education initiative in January, sparking pushback from instructors amid language program cuts. The Global Language Network, which was designed by UC humanities deans, allows faculty from different UC campuses to provide digital foreign language instruction to all University students.* The program was first designed in May 2023 to address a major decline in language class enrollment since 2019, said Alexandra Minna Stern, the dean of UCLA’s division of humanities and the network’s leader.

The network will adapt a subset of UC language courses – focusing on less commonly taught languages – students can enroll in over UC Online, a virtual cross-campus platform, Stern said. However, the program is intended to eventually include all languages taught across the UC, totaling more than 100, according to the GLN website. UC language instructors and department leaders alleged that they were not consulted during GLN’s development, adding that they only found out about it years after its initiation, through word of mouth or by randomly accessing its website. Others said they only discovered its existence when they were asked to fill out a questionnaire on it in 2025, after the network proposal was submitted to UC Provost Katherine Newman...

Michael Cooperson, UCLA’s Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department chair, said a humanities dean told him that language classes with fewer than 15 students enrolled would eventually be cut and some would be moved online. However, these languages will only be taught by one campus each, as a result of GLN. He clarified in an email statement that Reem Hanna-Harwell, a senior associate dean in the division of humanities who is now UCLA’s interim CFO, said this to him at a meeting. Hanna-Harwell, who became UCLA’s interim chief financial officer in February, did not respond to a request for comment on the alleged statement...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2026/04/02/some-uc-language-programs-are-getting-moved-online-these-professors-arent-happy.

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How effective learning languages online is - particularly for languages not commonly spoken in the US - needs to be studied. It is easy to get carried away by technological possibilities. Consider this statement from 1935:

Radio broadcasting is one of the greatest educational tools which has ever been placed at the disposal of civilized man. It is an instantaneous, universal means of communication. It is not a new art, but is a means of multiplying the efficiency of oral communication just as the printing press multiplied the effectiveness of the written word. In addition to that, it has certain decided advantages over the printed page which it in part supplants and in part supplements.**

So maybe try it out in a limited way before making wholesale changes?

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*https://www.ucop.edu/uc-online/programs-and-initiatives/global-language-network/index.html.

**Tracy F. Tyler, "Radio and Education," The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Feb., 1935), pp. 115-117: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20258384.

Straws in the Wind - Part 313

From The Atlantic: The “demographic cliff” is upon us. The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year. It will begin declining this spring and keep falling steadily through at least 2041. The trend is more of a downward slope than an abrupt falloff, but the gradient is steep and represents a crisis to colleges dependent on filling classroom seats and dorm beds. The United States currently has about 4,000 colleges. According to a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, about 60 are closing on average each year; that number could double in any given year if the bottom falls out of enrollment.

If the harm were only to the institutions forced to close because they’re running out of customers, that would be unfortunate but not tragic. But the causality runs in the other direction too, as students who otherwise would have gone to college find themselves with no viable option in the place where they live. American higher education has long consisted of two markets: one where high-achieving, typically affluent students compete for seats at national universities, and one where mostly middle- and lower-income students stay closer to home. Members of the first group will be fine even as college closures accelerate. The second group will suffer. After many decades of democratization, higher education could once again become a luxury good.

Over the past half century, as more teenagers have enrolled in higher education, what was once mostly a local business has become national, especially for top students, whose sense of distance has gradually shifted. Campuses that once felt far away now seem closer, thanks first to interstate highways, then to discount airlines, and then to technology. Parents in the 1980s might have talked to their college kid on a dorm-floor pay phone once every few weeks, if they were lucky. Today’s parents can text and FaceTime their kids multiple times a day. Even so, roughly half of students at four-year colleges still attend one within 50 miles of home... 

Full story at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/college-enrollment-demographic-cliff/686750.

Heaps Again

From the LA Times: A former UCLA gynecologist pleaded guilty Tuesday to sexually abusing five of his patients during examinations, and the once-renowned cancer expert was sentenced to 11 years in state prison. James Heaps, 70, pleaded guilty to 13 felonies, including multiple counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person, and must register as a sex offender for life.

The plea came after a three-justice panel of the California 2nd District Court of Appeal overturned his conviction for sexual abuse of two patients with three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person. The court determined that the trial judge failed to inform his lawyers that some of the jurors raised questions about the English proficiency of one of the panel members and ordered a retrial...

[If there had been] a second trial, Heaps faced the prospect of more charges and a potential conviction with a longer sentence... Tuesday’s plea means Heaps will be eligible for parole in 2028 with time served...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-04-14/ex-ucla-doctor-admits-to-sexually-abusing-five-patients-after-previous-conviction-overturned.

As blog readers will know, UCLA paid out over $700 million to victims in a settlement. We have been separately posting from time to time about the university budget. Exactly where did that funding come from? Insurance? Someplace else? Even with insurance, premiums tend to rise after big payouts. Anybody asking? We'll be looking at the health enterprise budget in a future post.

Getting In - Part 6

 
In our last post in the Getting In series, we noted the issue of college admissions essays being written by AI and the difficulty in practice of detecting them.*  Here is another use of AI in admissions (to UC, among other universities):

From KGO-7-ABC: A Palo Alto father who has filed multiple lawsuits against major university systems over his son's college rejections says artificial intelligence has become the key to pursuing the cases after no law firm agreed to represent them. The legal fight stems from a 2023 ABC7 News story about Stanley Zhong, then an 18-year-old Gunn High School student with a 4.4 GPA and a near-perfect 1590 SAT score who was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to. Despite the rejections, he was later hired as a software engineer at Google. Two and a half years later, his father, Nan Zhong, says the family remains convinced racial discrimination played a role in those decisions... 

Zhong said Stanley, now 21, is happy and doing well in his job at Google. "In 2025, he received an outstanding impact performance rating, which is higher than majority of the Google engineers," he said. Zhong said the family spent a year in discussions with University of California officials after Stanley's rejections, but nothing changed. He said the turning point came when a UC admissions director emailed him, writing that his allegation of racial discrimination was unfounded because California law bans the practice.

"When I got that line, I kept scratching my head," Zhong said. "They're saying there cannot be any noncompliance if there's a law banning it, but we're exactly accusing them of breaking the law secretly. So that is the point where I realized there's nothing we can achieve by having a conversation with them." Zhong said conversations with state lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom also went nowhere, prompting the family to sue the University of California, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan and Cornell University.

He said they struggled to find legal representation. "We've been talking to local law firms, national law firms. By my account, we probably talked to dozens of legal organizations and law firms. None of them took it," Zhong said. With statutes of limitation approaching, he said the family decided to represent themselves. "Of course, being somebody with no legal experience at all, we naturally turned to AI," he said. "It turned out to be a boon that we never anticipated to be so effective."

Zhong said they use multiple AI models simultaneously to analyze legal questions, compare answers and prevent errors. "It's like having a team of deep lawyers, top lawyers, all working for you," he said. He pointed to a recent ruling in the University of Washington case, where a judge rejected the university's motion to stay the case. Zhong said the decision underscored a challenge in bringing admissions lawsuits: students often lose legal standing once they reach their junior year of college. "Here, Stanley has a unique advantage. He's not going to college yet. He may go at any time," Zhong said. "So, in some ways, he has evergreen legal standing that allows us to bring the lawsuit." ...

Full story at https://abc7news.com/post/google-engineer-rejected-colleges-uses-ai-sue-ucs-other-universities-racial-discrimination/18849388/.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/04/getting-in-part-5.html.

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If only he had known about this:

Or this:

Straws in the Wind - Part 312

From Bloomberg: President Donald Trump’s administration has opened a new front in its campaign to reshape US colleges, homing in on racial diversity at some of the top medical schools in the country. The Department of Justice has launched investigations into medical programs at Stanford, the University of California San Diego and Ohio State University, accusing them of giving a leg up to minority applicants. The administration has made similar claims about a swath of universities. But for medical schools, those accusations — and the accompanying risk to their federal funding — are an especially potent weapon.

Medical programs already took a hit last year when the president slashed billions in research grants, which disproportionately affects biomedical fields. The National Institutes of Health alone terminated nearly $2 billion in payments to medical schools as of last June. But even bigger sums could be at stake if the DOJ investigations widen beyond the initial slate of schools.

The NIH awarded over $19 billion to medical programs last year, and students rely on federal aid and loans to afford famously expensive medical degrees. If schools are found to be in violation of anti-discrimination law, they risk getting cut off from all this funding...

Full story at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/trump-targets-top-medical-schools-as-next-higher-ed-battleground.

Another One

The Regents are having another closed-door meeting about the conflict with the feds. The last such meeting was only a week ago. Is something up? Some new development?

TO THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Because the membership of the Advisory Group on Research and Programs Funding Legal Issues (“Advisory Group”) includes five members of the Regents’ Governance Committee, there exists the potential for having present a quorum of a Regents’ Committee when the advisory committee meets.

This notice of meeting is served in order to comply fully with pertinent open meeting laws.

On Tuesday, April 14, 2026, there will be a Closed Session, Special Meeting of the Regents’ Governance Committee concurrent with the Advisory Group to discuss Research and Programs Funding Legal Issues (Closed Session Statute Citation: Litigation [Education Code section 92032(b)(5)].)

The meeting will convene at 4:00 p.m. at 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland and adjourn at approximately 4:30 p.m.

(Advisory Group members: Regents Anguiano, Cohen, Hernandez, Matosantos, Milliken, Reilly, Robinson, Sarris, and Sures)

Source: https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/april26/meeting-notice_federal-april-14-2026.pdf.

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NOTE: Although UC maintains a website entitled "Federal Developments," the last posting there that directly dealt with the conflict with the feds was from October 2025. See:

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/federal-updates.

Agostini's Every Ship on Its Own Bottom - Part 2

In an earlier post, we noted - based on former UCLA VC & CFO Agostini's budget book - who were the Bad Guys, i.e., those running a deficit of at least 5% of expenditures for the current fiscal year, as projected in Sept. 2025.* We again emphasize the caveat that revenue at the unit level is often in whole or in part an allocation so a deficit could mean an insufficient allocation as opposed to improper overspending.

Agostini found a projected overall deficit in the units he identified. But some units ran surpluses (revenues > expenditures. So, who were the Good Guys in his calculation? We again use the arbitrary 5% figure and define Good Guys as those with projected surpluses of 5% or greater of expenditures. 

The list of Good Guys is below. It might not surprise you to know that the CFO's office is one of the Good Guys:

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/04/agostinis-every-ship-on-its-own-bottom.html. At this link you will also find links to past budget postings and sources.