Disappeared - Part 3

As blog readers will know, the individual convicted of child sex abuse as an employee in a UCLA child care center was convicted but disappeared while out on bail. Yours truly could find no news stories indicating that Christopher Rodriguez, the convicted former employee, has been found. In contrast, the lawsuit against UCLA has not disappeared. From the Daily Bruin:

Teachers at UCLA’s Early Care and Education centers told administrators in 2017 that they were struggling to meet teacher-student ratios and did not have enough supervision in their classrooms. Seven years later, their colleague of nearly 25 years was arrested for sexually abusing the children under his care. Twenty-five teachers from various ECE locations said they did not have enough staff to supervise their classrooms, according to a 2017 internal task force report obtained by the Daily Bruin. One teacher alleged in the report that their classroom did not have enough caretakers to meet legal supervision requirements at least 50% of the time due to staffing fluctuations...

One parent and UCLA faculty member whose child was in Rodriguez’s class when he worked at the Krieger Center said they pulled their child out of ECE because of what they saw as a lack of classroom management over a year before his arrest. Their child had experienced night terrors and behavioral issues throughout their time at Krieger, they added...

A spokesperson for UCLA ECE said in an emailed statement that they are committed to providing a safe environment for their community, but do not comment on pending legal matters...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2026/04/04/child-care-teachers-reported-understaffing-years-before-coworkers-arrest-document-shows.

As we have noted before, whatever happens in the litigation, this case seems like another Big Dollar settlement is brewing.

Straws in the Wind - Part 310

From CNN: At this point in her senior year at Yale University, Amanda knows that many of her classmates turn to AI chatbots to write papers and other homework assignments. But she started noticing something bizarre in her smaller seminar classes: Her classmates sit behind laptops with polished talking points and arguments, but the conversations that follow often fall flat across subjects. In one class, “the conversation came to a halt, and I looked to my left, and I saw someone typing ferociously on their laptop, asking (a chatbot) the question my professor just asked about the reading,” Amanda told CNN.

...Amanda said she was taken aback. Until that day, she didn’t realize that her peers were using chatbots in class and sharing what it spits out in the classroom. Now she notices the impact that tendency is having on class discussions. “Everyone now kind of sounds the same,” she said. “I feel like during my freshman year in college, I would sit in seminars where everyone had something different to contribute. Although people would piggyback off each other, they approached from different angles and offered different commentary.”

As AI becomes increasingly integrated with education, educators and researchers are finding that it may be eroding students’ capacity for original thought and expression. A paper published in March in Trends in Cognitive Sciences found that large language models are systematically homogenizing human expression and thought across three dimensions — language, perspective and reasoning — and students and educators say they are seeing the effects of that trend in their classrooms.

And that makes a lot of students sound the same...

Full story at https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/04/health/ai-impact-college-student-thinking-wellness.

More Conversations - Part 2

In a prior post, we provided the audio to UC CFO Jagdeep Bachhar recent "conversations" with several figures from the world of finance.* As we noted, they were all anxious to tell a story of not-to-worry about such developments as the Iran War and the related boost of energy prices. They all urged taking a long view in which these short term events won't matter. Bachhar indicated a similar view, i.e., we're in it for the long term with our pension and endowment. 

So here's an excerpt from a recent op ed in the NY Times:

Over the past few years, one of the signature funds at Blackstone, the private equity giant, has delivered, on average, 10 percent annual returns for its investors. The fund, which specializes in private credit, has lent money to more than 400 borrowers, who in turn have deployed those loans to become more profitable themselves. And yet, in the first quarter of this year, nearly 8 percent of the fund’s investors declared they wanted out. Something similar has happened at funds managed by Apollo (where redemption requests hit 11.2 percent), Ares (11.6 percent) and Blue Owl (21.9 percent).

When asked on CNBC to explain why his investors are asking for their cash back, the Blackstone president, Jonathan Gray, blamed “noise” — a “disjointed environment now between what’s happening on the ground with underlying portfolios and what’s happening in the news cycle.” He may well be right. Another explanation might be that we are witnessing a kind of slow-motion bank run. Investors, spooked by a litany of bad news, are rushing to pull their money out of private credit funds. If they all ask at once, these funds — and potentially the firms that manage them — could falter.

To quote the great Taylor Swift, “I think I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending.” ...

Full op ed at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/banking-crisis-private-credit.html.

Just saying...

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/04/more-conversations.html.

What Milliken said about AI, Trump administration, and TPM

On April 9th, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) held a lunch/conference on issues facing higher education.

The program was moderated by Tani Cantil-Sakauye, PPIC President and CEO (also former chief justice of the California Supreme Court). Guests were Sonya Christian, Chancellor, California Community Colleges, Mildred García, Chancellor, The California State University, James Milliken, President, University of California, and Kristen Soares, President, Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. 

In response to an initial question about the major challenges facing higher ed, Milliken said he told the Regents - when he was a candidate for his current position, that the two important challenges were the conflict with the Trump administration and adapting to AI. He said he now thinks the former is less an issue than the latter. 

Asked about campus free speech, he indicated that free speech had to be balanced against interference with the operation of the university, a point with which the moderator agreed.* You can hear what he said at the link below.

Or direct to https://ia601506.us.archive.org/0/items/newsom-03-04-2026/PPIC%20Higher%20Ed%20Event-Milliken%204-9-2026.mp4.

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*These conversations often focus on constitutional rights and other legalisms. The constitution, however, gives the same right to say that the Earth is flat as it does to say that the Earth is round. One of the values - not rights - of universities is that they are supposed to help you to know what you are talking about. It would have been nice if someone had pointed this out. So I just did.

Straws in the Wind - Part 309

From the Yale Daily News: More than 120 students and alumni recently signed a letter addressed to Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis to express “deep concern” after film studies lecturer Shakti Bhagchandani told her students that Yale would not renew her contract due to budget tightening measures. German lecturer Austen Hinkley spoke to his 72-person “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud” lecture about his contract non-renewal, which he also said was impacted by budget cuts. Lecturer Matthew Morrison, who teaches a course in medicine and the humanities, wrote in an email to his former students that “Yale has, as yet, not renewed my contract for next year, conceivably due to its newly straitened financial situation.”

Bhagchandi, Hinkley and Morrison are all part of the instructional faculty, a group that comprises the non-tenure track positions of lecturers and lectors, who have limited job security even under more normal budgetary circumstances. In an email to the News, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Steven Wilkinson acknowledged that recent pressure on Yale’s budget impacted contract decisions. It remains unclear how likely the contracts’ renewals would have been without the austerity measures caused by an impending endowment tax hike...

Full story at https://yaledailynews.com/articles/instructors-let-go-amid-budget-cuts-drawing-flak-on-yale-s-priorities.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 140

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard College Dean David J. Deming acknowledged that far more students are likely using artificial intelligence than the College’s disciplinary system has been able to detect, saying he hopes to “push harder” on the issue in the years ahead. Speaking at a fireside chat for Academic Integrity Week on Thursday and at an open forum earlier in the week, Deming described AI as an urgent challenge facing the College — but stopped short of proposing a standardized policy to govern its use, pointing to the difficulty of writing rules that work across courses as different as Computer Science 50 and an upper-level English seminar. “The biggest challenge, from my perspective, with AI is that it blurs the boundaries of what we would call cheating or academic integrity in ways that actually make it really hard to write policy around,” Deming said Thursday.

Deming said the clearest cases of AI misuse — students submitting AI-generated work with hallucinated citations or accidentally including the chatbot prompt in their submission — tend to be the ones that reach the Honor Council, the student and faculty body tasked with reviewing potential violations of academic integrity policies. “But for every one of those, there are many cases where students are using AI in a more subtle way,” he said.

...Assistant Dean of Harvard College Dwight Fee, who moderated the fireside chat and has served on the Honor Council, said the body requires clear evidence of AI misuse before pursuing a case. “If we have to get into guessing, it just doesn’t become a case,” Fee said. Asked to estimate how widespread AI misuse is among students, Deming cited a survey by the Harvard AI safety group that found 88 percent of students were using AI at least weekly. He said he expected the share to be higher now...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/3/deming-ai-usage-classroom/.

Coming April 24th - Part 2

Faithful blog readers may recall our post from last December reporting on a new policy that all course material had to be made accessible to disabled students as of April 24th.* It was unclear then what exactly is required and how course materials, which may be printed, video, or audio, would have to be adapted.

We are now two weeks from the deadline. EdSource is carrying an article, derived from a Daily Cal piece, describing problems at Berkeley in making the adaptation. The EdSource article doesn't seem to recognize that this is a systemwide challenge, not just a Berkeley issue:

UC Berkeley faculty are scrambling to meet changes to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, leaving them feeling both unsupported and concerned about revamping online materials, the Daily Californian reported. Professors have until April 24 to make digital course materials accessible online. Previously, according to the Daily Cal, online content accessibility standards for these materials were reserved for public resources. Additional measures to ensure accessibility have been implemented based on students’ accommodations. 

The U.S. Department of Justice sued the university in 2022 for allegedly failing to meet the standards. UC Berkeley was given 3 1/2 years to comply, the Daily Cal reported. Some professors, for example, noted that software designed to build websites — or format mathematical formulas — can’t be easily converted to compatible formats, including PDFs, or isn’t screen-reader accessible. Others have voiced concern that public materials may now be removed as a result, which happened after the 2022 lawsuit...

Full story at https://edsource.org/updates/uc-berkeley-faces-deadline-to-make-online-materials-ada-accessible.

There seems to be a UC-wide problem with not much time to fix it. 

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/12/coming-april-24th.html.