Does the Barnum Rule Still Apply? - Part 2

From the Daily Bruin: Dozens of physicians protested on campus at noon Tuesday to denounce the termination of a Medi-Cal contract that allowed low-income patients to access UCLA Health services. Nine thousand patients lost access to UCLA Health providers after it did not renew its contract with Health Care LA, a non-profit group of doctors, on June 30... The Committee of Interns and Residents, a local affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, and Doctors United organized the protest, which coincided with a UC Board of Regents meeting, outside the Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2026/09/15/ucla-physicians-protest-end-of-contract-providing-free-care-for-low-income-patients.

Note: Absent other information, this appears to be a contract dispute between an outside healthcare provider* and UCLA Health. It's unclear from what has appeared in the news whether the termination is in some sense the "final" outcome or whether - as in other types of negotiations - the external publicity is being used as a negotiating tactic in a dispute that remain unresolved, but is ongoing.

Exactly what the contractual relationship with UCLA Health consisted of before the June 30 expiration is unclear. Yours truly used the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive to look for a reference to UCLA before that date. He found one for the previous June (2025) that lists contracts with various insurers but does not mention UCLA:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250613192011/https://healthcarela.org/our-health-plans

So it remains unclear what the relationship with UCLA was, even apart from the (unknown) monetary terms of the agreement.

He also used the Wayback Machine to look at hospitals that had contracts with Health Care LA as of Nov. 2025:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251118194049/https://healthcarela.org/contracted-hospitals

There is no listing of UCLA there, although other hospitals are listed. (Olive View-UCLA Medical Center was listed for "limited scope" - whatever that means. But it continues to be listed beyond June 30, 2026.)

===

*https://healthcarela.org/ 

Afterwords

Outgoing systemwide Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu wrote a long letter to UC President Milliken reflecting on shared governance.* It's too long to reproduce but the key points were listing areas in which there was lack of consultation. These included discontinuation of a fellowship program, creation of a program at two campuses which augment degrees with a paid internship, creation of a program to assist junior faculty which replaced a diversity program, and enhancement of a language program. 

Prof. Palazoglu then goes on to highlight two programs that, he said, developed without consultation and which directly affect the pay and working conditions of faculty. I will reproduce that segment:

Both the Total Remuneration Study (Deloitte) and the Systemwide Assessment of Online Education (Noodle/Huron) could have benefited from early Senate engagement. Both studies were developed and contracted without meaningful early consultation with Senate faculty with relevant expertise. When faculty were eventually given an opportunity to review the work, significant methodological and design concerns became apparent, but only after the scopes of work had been established and contracts executed. In both cases, earlier engagement with faculty experts would not simply have increased faculty confidence in these studies; it could have materially improved their design, methodology, and usefulness to the University.

The two programs involved bringing in outside consultants to do evaluations. "Total Remuneration" involves assessing the value of noncash benefits such as pensions and health care. Longstanding methodology has involved looking just at cash pay in comparison with other universities. The total remuneration approach looks at wider definition of compensation. Note that the direct cost of a benefit is not the same as its value to the recipient. To take an example, there was a long period in which no contributions were made to the pension plan because it was deemed overfunded. But clearly, having a pension during that period was not seen by pension participants as having no value. As regards online education, there are issues of cost, convenience, and assessment of actual learning.

Prof. Palazoglu notes issues related to litigation with the feds which are typically discussed at Regents meetings behind closed doors. He acknowledges a need for nonpublic discussion, and it is somewhat unclear what he proposes. He also points to the (huge) health enterprise that is growing somewhat autonomously on campuses with such activities and for which shared governance is "far less developed." Again, exactly how that issue should be addressed is unclear.

===

*https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/senate-chair-to-president-state-of-shared-governanace-report-9-10-26.docx.pdf.

Straws in the Wind - Part 466

From Inside Higher Ed: The Florida Board of Governors voted... to bar undocumented students from attending selective institutions in the state’s public university system. According to the new regulation, which passed the board unanimously and without discussion, starting next academic year, anyone “who is present in the United States unlawfully” cannot enroll in any of the state’s 12 public universities that “did not admit all academically qualified applicants” for the past two academic years. The move follows a similar vote in June by the Florida State Board of Education, which banned undocumented students from the state’s system of 28 colleges and adult education programs. Florida had already eliminated in-state tuition for undocumented students last year, before the Trump administration began suing states over the practice on the grounds that it discriminates against U.S. citizens from other states.

Florida now joins Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina in prohibiting any student without legal documentation from enrolling in a public institution. Florida Lt. Gov. Jay Collins celebrated the move on X, writing, “Florida’s public universities are for students who are here legally. Period … Florida taxpayers should not be expected to subsidize opportunities for people who broke our laws to come here.” ...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/09/06/florida-bars-undocumented-students-public-universities.

The Experiment

Announcement from American Economic Association: Recent feedback received from some AEA members and from the intersociety Report on Improving the Publication Process in Economics* raised concerns about the perceived unfairness of single-blind peer reviewing. In response to these concerns, the AEA will soon be launching a three-year randomized controlled trial of the effects of author-anonymized peer reviewing, commonly referred to as "double-blind."

Blank (1991) previously conducted a randomized evaluation of double-blind vs. single-blind peer reviewing at the American Economic Review (AER).** The current evaluation will involve the AER, AER: Insights, and the four American Economic Journals.

In the treatment group, information revealing author identities will be excluded from materials provided to reviewers, and reviewers will be asked to refrain from seeking them out through web searches or other means. The experiment will test the effects of removing author identities from the information routinely provided to reviewers, while recognizing that reviewers may become aware of author identities in other ways.

Key outcomes that will be examined include (1) author and reviewer perceptions of fairness, (2) reviewer awareness of author identities in the treatment (author-anonymized) group, and (3) differential impacts of author-anonymized review on manuscript decisions by characteristics of the authors and their papers.

The experimental design, implementation, and analysis are being conducted by Amy Finkelstein (MIT) and staff from J-PAL North America, in consultation with the AEA. J-PAL North America is a research center specializing in RCTs, where Finkelstein serves as co-scientific director. Finkelstein will not have access to identified information on individual manuscript submissions.

We expect the experiment to be launched in fall 2026...

===

Full announcement at https://www.aeaweb.org/news/member-announcements/2026-sept-10. 

===

*https://www.econometricsociety.org/uploads/documents/editorial/Improving%20Publication%20Process%20in%20Economics%20Report_2025.pdf.

**https://www.jstor.org/stable/2006906. Abstract: The results from a randomized experiment conducted at The American Economic Review on the effects of double-blind versus single-blind peer reviewing on acceptance rates and referee ratings indicate that acceptance rates are lower and referees are more critical when the reviewer is unaware of the author's identity. These patterns are not significantly different between female and male authors. Authors at top-ranked universities and at colleges and low-ranked universities are largely unaffected by the different reviewing practices, but authors at near-top-ranked universities and at nonacademic institutions have lower acceptance rates under double-blind reviewing.

What's Military?

The Regents in their current set of meetings will hear a review of the activities of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, run by UC:

https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/sept26/n1.pdf.

Edward Teller, the "father of the H-Bomb," was a co-founder of LLNL. And, of course, UC also has a management role in Los Alamos. Both units are outgrowths of the WW2 Manhattan Project. Although there have been calls to divest from "military" enterprises, yours truly hasn't heard any recent calls to shed either or both of these UC involvements.* One might think that nuclear weapons are inherently "military." Just an observation...

====

*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/03/watch-regents-meeting-of-march-17-2026.html.

Straws in the Wind - Part 465

From the Cincinnati Enquirer: Miami University's faculty union says administrators are preventing it from participating in a demonstration planned for Sept. 2. University officials, however, argue the event violates university policy and state law. The Faculty Alliance of Miami, which represents full-time continuing faculty and librarians, invited professors to teach their classes outside on the university quad for the day. Two days before the planned "Labor Day Teach-Out," Miami University's Office of the Provost sent an email to faculty, stating that all classes must meet at their scheduled times and locations unless a department chair approves a change. The email, which directly references the teach-out, said that the university and union's collective bargaining agreement and Ohio law mandate faculty "fulfill their assigned University responsibilities."

...Seth Bauguess, Miami University's senior director of communications, said the university's concern is not outdoor instruction but using "instructional time or activities to subject students to a concerted Union-organized labor action." ...Bauguess said that the teach-out violates Miami's Statement of Essential Teaching Practices and professional code of ethics, which "require faculty to maintain an effective learning environment, treat students with courtesy and respect and avoid exploiting students for private advantage." ...The university also cited Senate Bill 1, the sweeping and controversial Ohio higher education law enacted in 2025, in its opposition to the faculty union event...

Full story at https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2026/09/02/miami-university-faculty-union-cancel-labor-day-event/91577709007/.

Does UC want something from the governor?

Two things are clear:

1) Gov. Newsom is termed out.

2) Gov. Newsom is running for president. See:

https://ia902809.us.archive.org/1/items/newsom-7-1-2026-savings-accounts-for-kids/newsom%209-8-2026%20PBS%20segment.mp4

He says maybe he will/maybe he won't. But if it campaigns like a duck...

https://ia902809.us.archive.org/1/items/newsom-7-1-2026-savings-accounts-for-kids/newsom%209-8-2026%20full%20PBS%20interview.mp4

The next state budget will be proposed by the next governor, presumably Xavier Becerra. So Newsom can't deliver anything dramatic there (although his Dept. of Finance - given the timing - will put together at least the skeleton of the January proposal the next governor will present). But to the extent there is anything the governor can do for UC, the question is whether UC has something it can do for him that would help his campaign?