The Regents began their three-day meeting yesterday afternoon via Zoom with a full-board public comments session. Topics covered in that session included lecturers' status and union issues, Berkeley's Peoples Park project, nurse staffing, and work-from-home for UC staff.
Public comments were followed by a meeting of the Investments Committee. As noted in a prior post, very positive returns were reported for the year ending June 30, 2021, so that the pension on a market basis was reported as 94% funded.* However, the third quarter of 2021 did not produce great returns and various uncertainties were cited, notably about the current inflation and how the Federal Reserve will respond. Berkeley Professor Christina Romer, acting as a consultant to the Committee, indicated that the Fed still attributed the recent inflationary burst as a temporary response to the pandemic but she was less certain that was entirely the case.
The National Labs committee reviewed the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). UC has had a managerial role in what were at one time referred to as the nuclear labs (also including Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley) with a history going back to the Manhattan Project. The new director of LLNL reported on Lab activity including work on fusion and recent experiments trying to create fusion energy as a viable energy source.
As always, we preserve the recording of Regents meetings indefinitely since the Regents "archive" their recordings for only one year. You can watch the Sept. 28th session at https://archive.org/details/regents-board-investments-national-labs-9-28-21.
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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/09/only-good-news-tomorrow.html.
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