Missing

From the Sacramento Bee: Two professors at the University of California, Davis are among the thousands still missing after catastrophic flash floods swept through parts of Nepal on Aug. 26. Nearly 1,300 people have been killed in the disaster and more than 5,000 remain missing, according to Nepal’s disaster management agency. Rao and Vasu Unnava, both professors at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, were staying in a hotel in Timure, Nepal, when the flash floods occurred, according to a message from the university’s chancellor and provost. Only a few kilometers from the border of Nepal and Tibet, they have not been located or heard from since then...

Rao Unnava stepped down as dean of the Graduate School of Management on July 1 after serving in that position for a decade... Vasu Unnava is an adjunct associate professor at the same school, where she teaches marketing and studies consumer behavior...

Full story at https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article317131341.html. 

Will a Retreat Solve the Budget Problem?

From time to time on this blog, we have taken note of UCLA's budget travails and the absence of up-to-date budget documentation. We have noted that while UCLA at one time published annual budgets on a regular basis, that practice seemed to stop. A new CFO, under pressure from the Academic Senate, finally published a budget book which we subsequently analyzed. But then he said Very Bad Things about the older budget documents which got him fired. We now have a new interim CFO and a pledge by the administration to be "transparent" about budgetary matters:

https://dn720904.ca.archive.org/0/items/ucla-budget-book-v-final-feb-2026/Budget%20Transparency%20Protocol%204-21-2026.pdf.

The pledge includes a schedule of budgetary reveals, starting with a "retreat" that will take place this month. (We already noted this retreat in our Sept. 1 post about the new Athletics Director.)

Sitting in the background is ongoing concern about a deficit in the Athletics Department which is not supposed to be a cost to the university:

https://dn720904.ca.archive.org/0/items/ucla-budget-book-v-final-feb-2026/UCLA%20Athletics%20Department%20Deficit%206-10-2026.pdf.

In her final report to the Academic Senate and community, outgoing Senate Chair McAvoy included this message about budgetary matters:

Budget: Over the course of the academic year, Administration shared more budgetary information with the Council on Planning and Budget (CPB). This information has included both written documents (overall budget pictures, unit level budgetary information, etc.) and productive conversations with interim VC/CFO Reem Hanna-Harwell and others. Senate Leadership and EVCP Hunt developed a Budget Transparency Protocol that describes expectations for sharing budget information to support Senate consultation. An inaugural annual budget retreat with Senior Administrators and CPB/Senate leadership is scheduled for September that will allow a retrospective of the past year and to plan for a productive year ahead. In these times of fiscal strain, it is imperative that the CPB is engaged in these difficult deliberations to fulfill its advisory role, which we will continue to emphasize.

Full report at https://senate.ucla.edu/news/august-2026-ucla-academic-senate-updates.

While we await the retreat, we note that there is no actual budget information in the statement above or the earlier documents. As blog readers will know, we have been retaining budget information in a page on the Internet Archive so that nothing gets lost or disappears:

https://archive.org/details/ucla-budget-book-v-final-feb-2026.

Yours truly is aware of a longstanding Public Documents request for budgetary information from UCLA that keeps being met with apologies for delay, but no documents. This could be the result of stalling, or it could be that Murphy Hall really can't readily produce the numbers. So there remains the question of just how much information Murphy Hall has about the budget, a large portion of which is in the health enterprise. (The Health Enterprise seems to have its own CFO and more command of its own information.) In this age of computerization and AI, one might think that a simple command would produce estimated income statements and balance sheets, historical, present, and projections of the future. However, there is the possibility that although one might reasonably think that is the case, one might be wrong.

At the retreat, Senate representatives might want to look at the accounting system as well as whatever accounting numbers are presented. If the system can't produce timely estimates on command, being transparent about unavailable information won't be helpful.

Maybe the ultimate question is whether we have a retreat or an advance.

Straws in the Wind - Part 455

From the NY Times: After 17 years of teaching science at West Point, Dr. Adam Kalkstein says he was suddenly ordered last year to cut from his curriculum information about the human causes of climate change, according to a new lawsuit filed against the U.S. Military Academy. The change was immoral and potentially illegal, Dr. Kalkstein says he told Brig. Gen. Shane R. Reeves, who at the time was dean of West Point. Instead of upholding Army values, Dr. Kalkstein said he felt like a liar and a fraud. General Reeves stormed out of the room when Dr. Kalkstein declined a suggestion that he resign, according to the lawsuit. Six months later, the tenured professor was told his contract would not be renewed.

Filed in the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit accuses West Point of breaking the law by violating Dr. Kalkstein’s First Amendment rights by forbidding him from teaching about human-driven climate change, an order that required him “to omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the court and to defy science,” according to the suit...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/us/politics/west-point-climate-professor-lawsuit.html.

Quantum

Some funding is flowing from the feds. From the Daily Californian:

The U.S. National Science Foundation renewed its support for the UC Berkeley-led NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation, awarding the initiative $37.5 million. For the next five years, the funding will help the institute build quantum technologies, explore their applications and discover new ways quantum computing can be used to better understand nature. The initiative spans across California, encompassing research at UC Berkeley as well as at universities such as Caltech, UCLA and Stanford.

“The idea behind a quantum computer is to build a computer that takes advantage of some of those weirder, strange aspects of quantum mechanics to do computations that are hard or impossible on the computers that we have today,” said UC Berkeley associate professor of physics Shimon Kolkowitz, who is conducting research on atomic clocks for the institute. Kolkowitz expressed his hopes for future applications of quantum computing, including its use in the discovery of new materials and drugs, as well as in the improvement of chemical reactions’ energy efficiency. Kolkowitz described the institute’s research as interdisciplinary, spanning many departments including chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, computer science and material science...

Full story at https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/research-and-ideas/nsf-awards-37m-to-its-uc-berkeley-led-quantum-computing-research/article_0ef2bbde-c234-42ee-bb33-c7f4963f87e6.html.

Tempest in a Teapot?

From L.A. Material: For nearly seven years, UCLA Vice Chancellor Mary Osako has led communications and marketing for the University of California, Los Angeles. She is, in essence, the top person in charge of safeguarding the highly-ranked public university’s reputation. But as of this week, she is also waging a legal battle against her employer to stop them from releasing a report she says would cause her “irreparable reputational harm.” ...Osako’s lawyers asked for an urgent temporary restraining order and an injunction against the Regents of the University of California to prevent the university system from releasing an investigatory report involving Osako. Her lawyers argue that the December 2025 report — which was created by an outside law firm that specializes in workplace investigations — contains “sensitive personal information, anonymous accusations, and unsubstantiated allegations.”

University leadership had notified Osako in late July that they planned to release the report in response to seven requests made under the California Public Records Act, according to the filing... Osako’s lawyers argue that disagreement between the vice chancellor and this group of employees motivated the employees to file public records requests for the investigatory report. The filing also suggests that these employees “may be prospective plaintiffs in anticipated litigation against the university,” arguing that they are seeking the report to secure early access to evidence ahead of their potential lawsuit and generally further their personal disagreements with Osako.  

...UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk lauded Osako in a statement to L.A. Material.

...The court granted Osako’s temporary restraining order... and set a hearing on the preliminary injunction for late September, meaning that UCLA is barred from releasing the report in the interim.

Full story at https://lamaterial.com/p/ucla-mary-osako-lawsuit-regents.

Straws in the Wind - Part 454

From the Columbia Daily Spectator: University President Jennifer Mnookin announced the members of the presidential task force on shared governance..., providing updates on the body charged with evaluating “the duties and powers of the University Senate.” The task force is expected to deliver its “findings and recommendations” about changes to the senate’s powers in a report to Mnookin by spring 2027. Recommended in April by the board of trustees’ senate review committee, the task force is charged with reexamining the structure and power of the senate. The move has drawn criticism from student senators who question its purpose and legitimacy as a presidentially appointed group reviewing the University’s largest democratically elected governing body. The University Senate is made up of 111 elected faculty members, students, and staff who set policy and advise administrators and trustees on University issues.

...The University Senate released its own report, called the “Sundial Report,” in March 2025, alleging Columbia had a “lack of transparency and disregard for democratic processes and shared governance” following campus protests between October 2023 and December 2024...

Full story at https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/08/26/mnookin-appoints-presidential-task-force-to-review-university-senate/.

Admissions

From the California Post: A father in Palo Alto, California, is declaring a victory in court after a federal judge allowed a civil rights lawsuit alleging anti-Asian bias in college admissions to move forward. Nan Zhong and his son, Stanley Zhong, filed federal lawsuits against several elite institutions, including the University of California system, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan and Cornell University. The complaints allege the universities engaged in “racially discriminatory admissions practices that disadvantage highly qualified Asian-American applicants.”

One of their cases will now proceed in part against the University of Washington after a federal judge granted the university defendants’ motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part...

A 2023 graduate of Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Stanley scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT (99th percentile), held a 4.42 weighted GPA, ranked in the top 9% of his graduating class and had launched a free e-signing startup featured by Amazon Web Services. Shortly after the college rejections, Google hired Stanley as a full-time software engineer in a position that his family’s court filing says typically requires a Ph.D. or equivalent practical experience...

Spokespersons for the University of California system have previously denied the allegations, maintaining that its admissions policies strictly comply with state and federal laws prohibiting race-conscious decisions...

Full story at https://nypost.com/2026/08/30/us-news/california-student-stanley-zhong-gets-legal-win-in-racial-discrimination-against-colleges/.

Note: It is unclear what the status of the UC element in the lawsuit is. But the point of the suit seems to be to open the door to "discovery" of internal documents pertaining to admissions. Such discovery will now go forward with regard to the U of Washington. For UC, it touches on the SAT issue and other admissions matters currently under review.