Uncool

See the information from an email received yesterday below. No, I don't know what the problem is (was). I don't know which facilities on campus are (were) affected. And I don't know if the problem was fixed. But if you're coming to campus, you might want to find out.

We want to inform you that campus has run out of chilled water, which provides A/C and cooling. Any available cooling is being prioritized to UCLA’s medical facilities.

 

This means that we will have limited air flow and increased temperatures. We also won’t be able to adjust the temperature or maintain the usual comfort level until the system is back up and running.

 

The campus is actively working on this to be fixed by Monday.

 

We will update this thread if the outage is extended or if there are any additional updates.

As of Monday, 7:20 AM, I have not received any updates.

Lawrence Kruger

From the Daily Bruin (7-30-23): Lawrence Kruger, an emeritus distinguished professor of neurobiology and supporter of the performing arts, died July 12 in Los Angeles. He was 93 years old. He is survived by his wife Virginia, two daughters and three grandchildren.

Kruger studied at Wagner College and received a doctorate from Yale University before being appointed to the UCLA anatomy department in 1959, according to the book “The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography.” He was also appointed as a professor in the UCLA anaesthesiology department in 1976.

In addition, Kruger was a founding member of the Society for Neuroscience and the International Association for the Study of Pain. He also won several financial grants, including the prestigious Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award. Paula Henson, Kruger’s daughter, said he enjoyed being at UCLA after growing up in New York because of the art and culture the city had to offer. She added that her family spent considerable time on campus, recalling that she and her sister would play in the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden as children before both eventually attending the university.

“As soon as he got to Southern California, he just loved being there,” she said. “He loved UCLA so much that he never considered going anywhere else.”

Adrian Harris, who served as UCLA’s vice chancellor for planning from 1984 until 1991 and was a friend of Kruger’s, said he enjoyed Kruger coming into his office to talk socially in the middle of his work day. “I found him to be one of the kindest individuals I’ve ever met (and) a pleasure to talk to on any topic,” he said.

Tom Otis, chief scientific officer at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center at University College London, who worked with Kruger in the UCLA Department of Neurobiology, said he remembers being welcomed to the university by Kruger. He added that when he first moved to LA, Kruger showed him around tourist sites, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall and key museums.

Otis added that in addition to being a welcoming presence, Kruger also had a significant impact on the field of neurobiology. Henson said she was amazed as a child when a visiting scholar from Japan told her that her father was well-known there. She added that he always took care to welcome visiting scholars and the students he worked with into their family life.

Kruger’s work on brain circuits involved in slow pain and dull ache was key to identifying the specific neuron types associated with the transmission of pain, Otis said. “He was one of the top neuroanatomists in unraveling how pain transmission worked,” Otis said. “He was one of those people, with a few others, that really set the groundwork that allows for such a vibrant field as neuroscience right now.”

Additionally, by being one of the first professors to hold dual appointments in anatomy and neurobiology at UCLA, Kruger helped bridge the two disciplines, Otis said. Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the LA Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said in an emailed statement that he first got to know Kruger through the latter’s wife, who worked for Yaroslavsky. He added that he felt privileged to have learned from Kruger.

“Larry had an encyclopedic knowledge on so many things: new medical technologies, neurology, the arts and more,” said Yaroslavsky, who served as a LA County Supervisor for 20 years. “Our conversations were often the equivalent of graduate college courses in one or more of those subjects.”

Kruger’s love of music was also an important part of his time at UCLA, Henson said. She added that he learned to play cello as a child, and after moving to LA, meeting people involved in music and continuing his own art was important to him.

While at UCLA, Kruger also served as the chair of the Chancellor’s Committee on Fine Arts Productions. Pebbles Wadsworth, who was director of the performing arts center while Kruger was on the committee, said Kruger was always passionate about sharing his love of music with students. She added that he was instrumental in expanding the audience of Royce Hall concerts beyond the faculty community to UCLA students.

Wadsworth also said Kruger campaigned for the university to commission works of performing art in addition to physical artwork. She added that while Kruger was on the committee, the university attracted top performers, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and dancer Alvin Ailey. “I think (Kruger) turned the performing arts center at UCLA into the strongest on any campus,” she said.

Yaroslavsky said that Kruger will be remembered for both his impact on research and on promoting the arts on campus.

“Aside from Larry’s academic responsibilities, he was an important part of the cultural arts landscape on our campus,” he said. “His fingerprints can be found throughout the UCLA campus, and he will be sorely missed.”

Source: https://dailybruin.com/2023/07/30/lawrence-kruger-ucla-professor-and-performing-arts-supporter-is-dead-at-93.

The Incentive to Cheat; the Incentive Not to Cheat

Easy to say.

How do you get people to do the right thing? One way is to hope that morality, religion, or some such concept will do the trick. In academia, however, the answer is often testing and measurement. Students take exams, faculty are evaluated by citations, number of publications, number of publications in journals somehow ranked by prestige, etc.

Unfortunately, all evaluation and incentive systems have flaws and create incentives to cheat. They also have costs of operation. Exams must be designed and scored. Journals depend on time-consuming peer reviews, editorial time, etc.

A recent scandal at Stanford illustrates the point. From the NY Times:

The Research Scandal at Stanford Is More Common Than You Think

July 30, 2023 (The original contains photos of manipulated images.)

By Theo Baker. Theo Baker is a rising sophomore at Stanford University. He is the son of Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times. At its daily student newspaper, he won a George Polk Award for investigating allegations of manipulated experimental data in scientific papers published by the university’s president.

===

There are many rabbit holes on the internet not worth going down. But a comment on an online science forum called PubPeer convinced me something might be at the bottom of this one. “This highly cited Science paper is riddled with problematic blot images,” it said. That anonymous 2015 observation helped spark a chain of events that led Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to announce his resignation this month.

Dr. Tessier-Lavigne made the announcement after a university investigation found that as a neuroscientist and biotechnology executive, he had fostered an environment that led to “unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices” across labs at multiple institutions. Stanford opened the investigation in response to reporting I published last autumn in The Stanford Daily, taking a closer look at scientific papers he published from 1999 to 2012.

The review focused on five major papers for which he was listed as a principal author, finding evidence of manipulation of research data in four of them and a lack of scientific rigor in the fifth, a famous study that he said would “turn our current understanding of Alzheimer’s on its head.” The investigation’s conclusions did not line up with my reporting on some key points, which may, in part, reflect the fact that several people with knowledge of the case would not participate in the university’s investigation because it declined to guarantee them anonymity. It did confirm issues in every one of the papers I reported on. (My team of editors, advisers and lawyers at The Stanford Daily stand by our work.)

In retrospect, much of the data manipulation is obvious. Although the report concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was unaware at the time of the manipulation that occurred in his labs, in papers on which he served as a principal author, images had been improperly copied and pasted or spliced; results had been duplicated and passed off as separate experiments; and in some instances — in which the report found an intention to hide the manipulation — panels had been stretched, flipped and doctored in ways that altered the published experimental data. All of this happened before he became Stanford’s president. Why, then, didn’t it come out sooner?

The answer is that people weren’t looking.

This year, a panel of scientists began reviewing the allegations against Marc Tessier-Lavigne, focusing on five papers for which he was a principal author.

In the earliest paper reviewed, a 1999 study about neural development, the panel found that an image from one experiment had been flipped, stretched and then presented as the result of a different experiment.

A 2004 paper contained similar manipulations, including an image that was reused to represent different experiments.

“Basic biostatistical computational errors” and “image anomalies” were found in a 2009 paper about Alzheimer’s that has been cited over 800 times, including the reuse of a control image with improper labeling.

At least four of the five papers appear to have manipulated data. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne has stated that he intends to retract three of the papers and correct the other two.

The report and its consequences are an unhappy outcome for a powerful, influential, wealthy scientist described by a colleague in a 2004 Nature Medicine profile as essentially “being perfect.” The first in his family to go to college, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne earned a Rhodes scholarship before establishing a lab at the University of California, San Francisco, in the 1990s and discovering netrins, the proteins responsible for guiding axon growth. “He’s one of those people for whom things always seemed to go just right,” an acquaintance recalled in the Nature Medicine article.

Anonymous sleuths had raised concerns of alteration in some of the papers on PubPeer, a web forum for discussing published scientific research, since at least 2015. These public questions remained hidden in plain sight even as Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was being vetted for the presidency of Stanford, an institution with a budget of $8.9 billion for next year — larger than that of the entire state of Iowa. Reporters did not pick up on the allegations, and journals did not correct the scientific record. Questions that should have been asked, weren’t.

Peer review, a process designed to ensure the quality of studies before publication, is based on a foundation of honesty between author and reviewer; that process has often failed to catch brazen image manipulation. And when concerns are raised after the fact, as they were in this case, they often fail to gain public attention or prompt correction of the scientific record.

This is a major issue, one that extends well beyond one man and his career. Absent public scrutiny, journals have been consistently slow to act on allegations of research falsification. In a field dependent on good faith cooperation, in which each contribution necessarily builds on the science that came before it, the consequences can compound for years.

When we first went to Dr. Tessier-Lavigne with questions in the fall, a Stanford spokeswoman responded instead, claiming the concerns raised about three of his publications “do not affect the data, results or interpretation of the papers.” But as the Stanford-sponsored investigation found and he eventually came to agree, that was not true.

Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s plan to retract or issue robust corrections for at least five papers for which he was a principal author is a rare act for a scientist of his stature. It seems unlikely this would have happened without the public pressure of the past eight months; in fact, the report concluded that “at various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged — in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-16 and March 2021 — Dr. Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.”

The Stanford investigation did not find that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne personally altered data or pasted pieces of experimental images together. Instead, it found that he had presided over a lab culture that “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that is, postdocs who were unable or struggled to generate such data).” In a statement, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said, “I can state categorically that I did not desire this dynamic. I have always treated all the scientists in my lab with the utmost respect, and I have endeavored to ensure that all members flourish as successful scientists.”

Winner-takes-all stakes are, unfortunately, an all-too-common occurrence in academic science, with postdoctoral researchers often subject to the intense pressure of the need to publish or perish. Having a paper with your name on it in Nature, Science or Cell, the high-profile journals in which many of the papers reviewed by the Stanford investigation appeared, can make or break young careers. Postdocs are underpaid; Stanford recently purchased housing that was intended to be affordable for them, then reportedly set minimum salary requirements for living there higher than their wages. They are also jockeying to stand out in a field with limited lab positions and professorship openings. And senior researchers sometimes take credit for their postdocs’ work and ideas but brush off responsibility should errors or mistakes arise.

What isn’t common, of course, is the “frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices” in the labs Dr. Tessier-Lavigne ran, the Stanford report concluded. Falsification, the technical term for much of this conduct, involves “violating fundamental research standards and basic societal values,” according to the National Academy of Sciences. In his statement, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said that he has “always sought to model the highest values of the profession, both in terms of rigor and of integrity, and I have worked diligently to promote a positive culture in my lab.” Despite the report’s characterization of what went on in his labs as rare and irregular, lessons from this case apply across the field, especially regarding the importance of correcting the scientific record.

A 2016 study by a handful of prominent research misconduct investigators — including the well-known image analyst and microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, who helped identify a number of the manipulations in the work coming out of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs — showed that around 3.8 percent of published studies include “problematic figures,” with at least half of those showing signs of “deliberate manipulation.” But only approximately 0.04 percent of published studies are retracted. That gap, which shows a lack of accountability among both individual researchers and the scientific journals, is a profoundly unfortunate sign of a culture in which admitting failures has been stigmatized, rather than encouraged.

“My lab management style has been centered on trust in my trainees,” Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said in his statement. “I have always looked at their science very critically, for example to ensure that experiments are properly controlled and conclusions are properly drawn. But I also have trusted that the data they present to me are real and accurate,” he wrote.

Science is a team sport, but as the report concluded, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, a principal author with final authority over the data, was responsible for addressing the issues in his research when they were brought to his attention. In the judgment of the Stanford investigation, he “could not provide an adequate explanation” for why he had not done so.

To his credit, he began the correction process for a few of these examples of data manipulation in 2015, when the first allegations were made publicly. But when Science failed to publish the corrections for two of those papers, the report found that after “a final inquiry on June 22, 2016, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne ceased to follow up.” He was made aware of the allegations once more when public discussion resumed in 2021. The report found that he drafted an email inquiring about the unpublished corrections but did not send it. He will now retract both those papers.

In another case — in which there was no public pressure to act — he was made aware “within weeks” of an error in a 2001 paper, according to the Stanford report. Although he wrote to a colleague that he would correct the scientific record, “he did not contact the journal, and he did not attempt to issue an erratum, which is inadequate,” the report concluded.

In the past few years, the field has made great strides to combat image manipulation, including the use of resources like PubPeer, better software detection tools and the prevalence of preprints that allow research to be discussed before it is published. Sites like Retraction Watch have also furthered awareness of the problem of research misconduct. But clearly, there is still progress to be made.

The shake-up at Stanford has already prompted conversations across the scientific community about its ramifications. Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science, concluded that the “Tessier-Lavigne matter shows why running a lab is a full-time job,” questioning the ability of researchers to ensure a rigorous research environment while taking on increasing outside responsibilities. An article in Nature examined “what the Stanford president’s resignation can teach lab leaders,” concluding that the case was “reinvigorating conversations about lab culture and the responsibilities of senior investigators.”

This self-reflection in the scientific research community is important. To address research misconduct, it must first be brought into the light and examined in the open. The underlying reasons scientists might feel tempted to cheat must be thoroughly understood. Journals, scientists, academic institutions and the reporters who write about them have been too slow to open these difficult conversations.

Seeking the truth is a shared obligation. It is incumbent on all those involved in the scientific method to focus more vigorously on challenging and reproducing findings and ensuring that substantiated allegations of data manipulation are not ignored or forgotten — whether you’re a part-time research assistant or the president of an elite university. In a cultural moment when science needs all the credibility it can muster, ensuring scientific integrity and earning public trust should be the highest priority.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/stanford-president-student-journalist.html.

===

Note that the last paragraph gets to the heart of the problem, but not necessarily in the way the author intended. He calls upon a "shared obligation" to prevent cheating. But a "shared obligation" is inherently a weak incentive. What is the cost to you as an individual scientist/academic of not doing your "share"? Even if you argue that science or academia as a whole would be better off if such scandals were prevented - if everyone did their share - you have a classic potential collective action failure here. 

Changing technology has made it easier to look for cheating in this particular case. But the incentives to investigate were still largely directed toward someone outside the system (i.e., someone at the college newspaper). Moreover, it was the fact that the cheating involved the president of Stanford that provided sufficient incentive for the investigation. Most cheaters are not presidents of universities. And there is much less incentive to investigate cheating in articles that appear in less prestigious journals or which make only marginal contributions.

Note also that in the case of programs such as chatGPT writing student essays, technology can change in ways that make cheating easier. In short, honesty is not always perceived as being the best policy.

Time for Establishing a Master Plan Process - Part 2

UC President Clark Kerr hands
Master Plan to Gov. Pat Brown

As we noted in a prior recent post, although reference is often made to the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, the Plan is essentially dead.*

The result is a lack of division of labor between the three segments of higher ed - UC, CSU, and the community colleges - and a tendency toward ad hoc intervention by the legislature.

Here is another example from EdSource:

Seven bachelor’s degrees proposed by California community colleges have been flagged by the California State University as duplicating programs offered by CSU campuses, according to a report presented Monday to the community college system’s board of governors. That could put those programs at risk of being approved.

Under Assembly Bill 927, the community college system can approve up to 30 bachelor’s degrees annually, across two cycles each year. In the latest cycle, the system received applications for 29 different programs and 14 of them advanced to intersegmental review, a process during which the degrees are reviewed by CSU, the University of California and the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. As part of the review progress, those university systems can flag proposed programs as duplicating programs that they offer.

In the latest cycle, CSU flagged the following seven programs as having duplication concerns:

• Sustainable Architecture at College of the Canyons
• Biomanufacturing at Los Angeles Mission College
• Applied Cybersecurity and Network Operations at Moorpark College
• Stem Cell and Gene Technologies at Pasadena City College
• Performance and Production of Electronic Popular Music at Rio Hondo College
• Public Safety Management at San Diego Miramar College
• Cloud Computing at Santa Monica College

CSU raising concerns about those programs doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t ultimately be approved. Earlier this year, CSU said it had duplication concerns about a degree in applied fire management being offered at Feather River College, but that program was ultimately approved anyway...

Full story at https://edsource.org/2023/seven-proposed-community-college-bachelors-degrees-flagged-by-csu-as-being-duplicative/694805.

Similar issues arise when CSU campuses come up with creative ways of offering PhDs, upsetting the Master Plan's division of labor. It was precisely this sort of competition for everyone to do everything that led to the process that produced the Master Plan to rationalize the overall system. It is becoming clear that a similar process is again needed.http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/time-for-establishing-master-plan.html. 

Can We Declare Victory?

Our weekly look at new California weekly claims for unemployment insurance again reveals no sign of recession. The labor market continues to remain in the pre-pandemic (boom) range. And - see below - Fed chair Powell seems to think a recession isn't likely.

As always, the latest claims data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.

Doesn't pass the sniff test

From EdSource: The California Department of Education [CDE] has threatened to sue two prominent Stanford University education professors to prevent them from testifying in a lawsuit against the department — actions the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California calls an attempt to muzzle them. The ACLU, in turn, is threatening a lawsuit of its own — against CDE for infringing their and other researchers’ First Amendment rights. Observers say the dispute has the potential to limit who conducts education research in California and what they are able to study because CDE controls the sharing of data that is not available to the public.

At issue is a restriction that CDE requires researchers to sign as a condition for their gaining access to nonpublic K-12 data. The clause, which CDE is interpreting broadly, prohibits the researcher from participating in any litigation against the department, even in cases unrelated to the research they were doing through CDE.  “It keeps education researchers from weighing in on the side of parties who are adverse to the California Department of Education. So it’s really skewing the information and expertise that can come into courts,” said Alyssa Morones, an ACLU attorney involved with the case. “Individuals and students seeking to vindicate their rights no longer will have access to these education experts, and the court can no longer hear what they have to say.”

Professors Sean Reardon and Thomas Dee had signed separate and unrelated data-partnership agreements with the department, and both were asked by attorneys in an ongoing lawsuit, Cayla J. v. State of California, to testify on behalf of students filing the case. The lawsuit, against the California Department of Education, the State Board of Education and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, charges the state with failing to prevent the deep learning loss imposed by the pandemic on low-income students and other high-needs students. 

Reardon, who had co-authored landmark nationwide research on pandemic learning, said he would have considered providing expert testimony. But warned this month by CDE that he’d be breaching his contract, Reardon declined — even though his learning loss research did not involve the data obtained through his agreement with CDE.

Dee, a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, agreed to serve as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Cayla J. case on the effects of Covid-19 on enrollment, chronic absenteeism and student engagement in California. This month, he was one of a half-dozen nationally prominent education professors who filed briefs in the case. 

In it, Dee cited data on enrollment declines and chronic absenteeism. He concluded, “Because of both its comprehensive data systems and its powerful fiscal and operational capacities, the state of California is in a unique position to provide leadership in better understanding and meeting the serious challenges of academic recovery. However, to date, the state has not clearly demonstrated such leadership, instead emphasizing responses by local school districts.”

CDE moved against Dee even though the data contract he had signed on behalf of a Stanford program was for research unrelated to the Cayla J. case. 

On Feb.24, after CDE discovered that Dee had filed the brief, the department warned Dee that he had violated the contract he had signed in February 2022 as the chief investigator for the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford. As a result, the letter said, CDE was suspending the data partnership and demanding that Dee “mitigate further damage.” The department would consider seeking an injunction to prevent him from participating in the Cayla J. case along with a $50,000 fine. 

“Also, be aware,” wrote Cindy Kazanis, the director of CDE’s Analysis, Measurement, and Accountability Reporting Division, “that your actions have adversely impacted your working relationship with CDE, and your response to this letter is critically important to existing and future collaborations between us.” The letter was copied to Stanford. 

The contract that Dee signed with CDE is to examine how the California School Dashboard was affecting alternative schools serving those at risk of dropping out and those with motivation and behavior issues. He said he signed the contract in his capacity as faculty director of the Gardner Center, but had not actually looked at any of the data. Dee said he relied on publicly available data in writing his brief for the Cayla J. case. He declined to comment further on the case. 

The dispute is now in the courts. The plaintiffs’ attorneys in Cayla J., the public interest law firm Public Counsel and Morrison Foerster, a San Francisco-based law firm doing pro bono work, are asking a Superior Court judge to allow Dee’s participation in this case and protect him from CDE’s penalties — but only in this particular lawsuit. A hearing is scheduled early next week in Alameda Superior Court. The ACLU filed a brief on Feb. 27 supporting Dee’s participation in the Cayla J. case. But meanwhile, it took the first steps toward a larger lawsuit to eliminate CDE’s litigation prohibition...

Full story at https://edsource.org/2023/california-moves-to-silence-stanford-researchers-who-got-state-data-to-study-education-issues/694920.

====

Yours truly hasn't signed any contracts with CDE. So, he is free to point out that California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, CDE head, and ex officio Regent Tony Thurmond will be termed out at the end of his current term. Should he choose to run for some other office in 2024, blog readers might want to contemplate the issues above.

New Faculty Club Manager

Andrea Curthoys

Blog readers will recall that the previous Faculty Club manager suddenly was gone under somewhat mysterious circumstances. But, according to an email yesterday, we now have a new manager:

The Board of Governors is pleased to announce Andrea Curthoys will become the UCLA Faculty Club’s General Manager effective August 1, 2023.

 

Andrea Curthoys, CCM, comes to the UCLA Faculty Club with over thirty years of Private Club management experience.  While this is her first General Manager position, her pedigree of experience as Assistant General Manager at The California Club in Downtown Los Angeles and The Beach Club in Santa Monica has prepared her to lead our Club into the future.

 

If you viewed her presentation during the vetting process, you will know that Andrea works with a greater purpose and seeks a more profound meaning of service through leadership principles and philosophies. Organizational Culture, Learning & Development, and Talent Management impassion her. She believes the Club’s success is a tribute to the employees who embody the Club’s Mission and provide excellent service from the heart.

 

Andrea is excited to join the team and lead the Faculty Club through genuine employee relations, engaged member relations, dynamic programming and events, and excellent service experiences.

 

Earning a BA in Cultural Anthropology, Andrea is a ’92 UCLA Bruin Alumnus.  She will receive her MS in Human Resources Management from Bovard College, USC, in May 2024.

 

Beginning September 19 through October 26, 2023, Andrea will be eating lunch every Tuesday and Thursday from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. at the Communal Table in the Main Dining Room. Please join her to discuss what you love about the Faculty Club and provide feedback on your wants and needs.

====

Sounds good to us!

====

Photo from LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-curthoys-ccm-5042345/.

Student-Worker Strike Repercussions - Part 20 (Back pay at Berkeley)

Grievance processes seem to have worked more effectively at Berkeley than at San Diego. From Inside Higher Ed:

University of California, Berkeley, graduate student researchers have received around $600,000 in back pay, their union announced Wednesday. The payouts, which go as high as $10,000 for individual workers, came in response to a union grievance about the university’s “arbitrary” appointment levels for employees, UAW 2865 said in its news release.

This allowed administrators to circumvent the nominal GSR [graduate student researcher] salary scale and underpay thousands of workers,” the release said. “The 2022–2025 GSR union contract ended this system on paper, but ending it in practice in the face of UC’s inertia took months of determined organizing.”

In an email, a UC system spokesman wrote that UC “negotiated historic agreements with the United Auto Workers (UAW) last year and has worked diligently to implement the contract in good faith as per the agreements.”

“Any back pay and retroactive benefits received by individual GSRs related to their Spring 2023 appointments at UCB was related to specific appointments at UCB, and is not an admission of agreement by the university to the UAW’s position on the specific grievance or other similar grievances,” the spokesman wrote.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/07/28/union-uc-berkeley-graduate-student-researchers-get-back-pay.

The Saga of UC-Santa Barbara's Dormzilla Continues - Part 2

It's been awhile since we have revisited UC-Santa Barbara's plans for Munger Hall, aka Dormzilla.* Campus authorities when last we looked in, were making some cosmetic modifications of the plan. We even made a little musical video about it.** The essence of the problem is that billionaire Charles Munger was willing to donate for the dorm, but only if it was done according to his design.

It now seems that the campus is following a two-track policy in which somehow it proceeds with Dormzilla but also plans an alternative which, of course, would require funding from somewhere. From the San Luis Obispo Tribune:

UC Santa Barbara says it will spend more than a half-billion dollars to construct new student dorms at the site it had set aside for Munger Hall, signaling a shift away from the contentious student dormitory that has seen extensive development delays and widespread backlash. The new housing plans were detailed in a request-for-qualifications posting by the university seeking an executive architect to help construct 3,500 new bed spaces. The description echoes a 2006 proposal to build traditional housing at the site, which was later scrapped in favor of Munger Hall.

UCSB sunk millions of dollars into the covert planning of Munger Hall, refining its unique, largely windowless design over the years with the assistance of private companies and architecture firms. The building plans included small bedrooms with artificial lights in lieu of windows, common areas, shared bathrooms and communal kitchens.

It’s unclear whether the efforts will amount to anything as UCSB apparently plans to invest as much as $750 million in the new housing endeavor...

When asked about the apparent change in housing development plans, UCSB spokeswoman Kiki Reyes said the campus will “continue to work on the planning and consultation process for Munger Hall with members of our campus community, donors and stakeholders.”

“The university is also actively moving forward simultaneously with plans to develop (the new housing),” she added.

Noozhawk reached out to 15 campus executives, vice chancellors, directors and analysts involved in the planning of Munger Hall, and none had any comment as of Tuesday...

Full story at https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/education/article277676858.html.

If all this seems amorphous, that's only because it is.

===

*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-saga-of-uc-santa-barbaras-dormzilla.html.

**Check out:

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53qlO9TH8gg.

Blackstone-REIT Still Draining - Part 6 (more assets sold to fund the run)

As blog readers will know, the Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust (BREIT) - to which UC provided a $4.5 billion bailout - has continued to experience a slow motion run, with investors trying to pull more money out than BREIT will give them. Our prior post on this matter noted that BREIT was selling off assets to fund the run.* According to Bloomberg, now more assets have been sold:

Blackstone Inc.’s $68 billion real estate trust agreed to sell Simply Self Storage to Public Storage for $2.2 billion as the property vehicle grapples with investor withdrawals and upheaval in the commercial-property sector. Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust will sell the self-storage business, the companies said Monday in a statement. The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, will result in more than $600 million in profit for BREIT, Blackstone said.

Blackstone built BREIT into a massive player in the real estate industry, attracting investors as it snapped up properties from student housing to data centers across the US. The trust started to come under pressure last year as more investors sought to pull money amid the shift in markets. BREIT has limited withdrawals for eight straight months, although requests eased in June from a month earlier and are down from a peak in January...

Full story at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-24/blackstone-to-sell-a-self-storage-business-for-2-2-billion or https://archive.is/t1Ecn#selection-4653.0-4689.129.

As we have also noted, only one Regent on the Investments Committee raised any significant concerns about UC's bailout (which included a "guaranteed" very high return in exchange for UC's funds). Since there appear to be appreciable financial risk involved (and perhaps legal risk), one might have expected more regental curiosity. (Most of the questioning has come in the form of public comments, but these comments focus on landlord-tenant matters at BREIT properties.)

We are not saying that the bailout will turn out to be a bad deal for UC. We are saying that the process involved - which appears to be an initiative of the chief investment officer without other input - and the lack of scrutiny by Regents who are supposed to be trustees of UC funds - raise questions.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/blackstone-reit-still-draining-part-5.html.

Premonition of UC Health Insurance Costs Next Year? - Part 2

We noted in a prior post that CalPERS was announcing big health insurance cost increases - which suggests that UC might be doing the same this year.* Now there is more evidence. From CalMatters:

Premiums for health insurance sold through the state marketplace will increase by nearly 10% next year, the highest rate hike since 2018, Covered California officials announced Tuesday. The projected 9.6% hike is the result of a “complicated time for health care,” Covered California Executive Director Jessica Altman said during a media briefing, but many Californians will be shielded from the increases as a result of federal and state financial assistance. 

About 90% of enrollees qualify for some type of federal or state financial aid and 20% will see no change in their monthly premium, officials said. About 1.6 million Californians turn to the marketplace for health insurance, which offers plans that cost as little as $10 a month. The rate increase, however, represents the return of a troubling trend: runaway health care costs, experts said...

Full article at https://calmatters.org/health/2023/07/covered-california-2024-health-rates/.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/premonition-of-uc-health-insurance.html.

Special Libraries at Berkeley: Going! Going! Gone? - Part 5 (The End)

It appears the UC-Berkeley occupation/protest regarding the anthropology library has ended with a settlement that sort of retains something. From Inside Higher Ed yesterday:

Students’ nearly three-month-long University of California, Berkeley, anthropology library occupation ended in some concessions from the university, despite dwindling protester numbers and a lack of faculty support...

On July 15, the Anthropology Library Occupation announced on Instagram it had “won an open public UC Berkeley Anthropology Library.”

“The strength of our occupation forced the university to negotiate directly with us, rather than leaving the library as an issue for the department to resolve,” the group’s statement said. “Our occupation has shown that we do not need to accept administrative ‘final decisions’ or ‘budget cuts’—we know that these are choices, and that these choices can be made to represent the will of the people.”

But the surviving library, which people won’t be able to check out books from, won’t be quite the same. The university and department are calling it a “reading room,” not a library. According to a document provided by occupier Aidan Kelley, on June 20, Raka Ray, dean of the Division of Social Sciences, wrote that the Anthropology Department would be allowed “to retain duplicate and non-library materials, estimated at about 20,000 books at present or approximately 40 percent of the current collection.”

Ray also wrote that the department would receive, and match, “$45,000 in one-time transitional funds” and would have “creative and intellectual control of the future of the library and space.” Ray’s letter referenced “implementing the plan proposed by the Anthropology Department.” ...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2023/07/25/berkeley-student-protest-keeps-anthro-library-open-kind.

Nondetection

As we have noted in the past, efforts to detect cheating via artificial intelligence programs such as chatGPT often produce false positives, i.e., they indicate a document was written by AI when it wasn't. 

UCLA has discouraged use of such programs precisely because of the false positive danger, which  could result in a student being incorrectly charged with cheating.

Now, OpenAI has admitted that its detection program is useless. The notice below comes from its website:

For more information (but no solution), check out:

https://decrypt.co/149826/openai-quietly-shutters-its-ai-detection-tool.

There are clues that cheating might be occurring. Perfect grammar is one, although a smart student could stick in a few errors. Another clue is references that turn out to be invalid or information that you know to be incorrect - since the programs may invent stuff, a phenomenon now termed "hallucinations."

Time for Establishing a Master Plan Process

UC President Clark Kerr hands
Master Plan to Gov. Pat Brown

From time to time, we have noted the gradual erosion of the Master Plan's division of labor between UC, CSU, and the community colleges. Recently, community colleges have been active in pushing to offer bachelor's degrees, a development that mainly impinges on CSU rather than UC. Below is an example from EdSource:

Hayden Lampe’s dream of getting a bachelor’s degree felt out of reach after she graduated with an associate degree at Feather River College in Quincy — that is, until the community college in rural Northern California won approval to offer a baccalaureate degree. The nearest university to Quincy is 80 miles away, so getting a degree would have meant moving. Lampe put her higher education plans on hold when she found out that rent near the universities she was considering in Reno, Colorado or Oregon was unaffordable. So when Feather River College announced it would be offering a bachelor of science program in her field — ecosystem restoration and applied fire management — she realized she didn’t have to give up on her dream or move from the community she loves.

“All of my enthusiasm I lost came back with a vengeance,” Lampe said. “The approval of this program allows me to stay in this community that I love and I have deep roots in.” Lampe was part of a panel of experts who discussed the promise of community college baccalaureates and the barriers to expanding these programs in California in a roundtable hosted by EdSource on July 19.

California has begun offering baccalaureate degrees at the community college as a way to make higher education more attainable for students while also helping the state meet its growing workforce demands. The state began piloting programs in 2014 before its expansion was permanently enshrined in state law by Assembly Bill 927 in 2021. Feather River College’s plan to offer a baccalaureate doesn’t just help students like Lampe who would have given up on finishing their degrees. It’s a boon to the rural community wrestling with the destruction of the 2021 Dixie Fire without enough qualified conservation workers...

Full story at https://edsource.org/2023/community-college-baccalaureate-degrees-are-key-to-expanding-college-access-panel-says/694380.

Of course, the old Master Plan of 1960 is fading from memory. But ad hoc legislative action may not be the best way of organizing California's higher ed resources. That's why we have called, from time to time, for the establishment of a process similar to what created the old Plan that would come up with a new one.

Checking in on TMT

Few Regents meetings go by without the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii being brought up in public comments. UC is one of the partners in the TMMT project. Last week was no exception. So, from time to time, we check in on TMT developments. Here's the latest from Big Island Video News:

Oral arguments concerning the Thirty Meter Telescope, scheduled to take place next week, have been delayed. A petition from the Mauna Kea Hui for a declaratory ruling concerning the TMT, set to go before the Board of Land and Natural Resources on July 28, was deferred on Wednesday.

Back in May 2021, the Mauna Kea Hui – comprised of various groups and individuals opposed to the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Maunakea – made a motion to reopen a previous contested case hearing, in order to hear a motion to “confirm non-compliance with condition no. 4, or, alternatively, petition for declaratory orders concerning the same.” Condition 4, part of the Conservation District Use Permit for the project granted by the land board in September 2017, stipulates “any work done or construction to be done on the land shall be initiated within two (2) years of the approval of such use.” A two-year extension on the deadline to meet Condition 4 was granted by the land board in July 2019. That same month, opposition to the TMT project gathered at the base of the Mauna Kea Access Road, leading to a standoff with authorities that resulted in further project delays. 

From the May 2021 petition by the Mauna Kea Hui:

---

By letter dated April 28, 2021, UHH wrote to the Administrator of the Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands (OCCL) to notify him of “initiation of work and/ or construction” for the TMT in compliance with General Condition No. 4. Ching Decl. ¶3; Exh. 03. In support of their assertion that construction had initiated, UHH cited activities taking place between June 20, 2019 and July 16, 2019, prior to the Board Chair’s July 30, 2019 letter granting UHH’s extension request. Exh. 03 at 2. In addition to the June 25, 2019 and July 12, 2019 actions, UHH cited inspections for invasive species on July 15, 2019, a “Kick-Off Meeting” between TMT and its contractors to discuss construction on July 8, 2019, and removal of an ahu on June 20, 2019. 

---

The April 28, 2021 letter posted to the DLNR website has a stamp stating “approved”, signed by Suzanne Case and dated May 4, 2021. The Mauna Kea Hui says “no construction or work on land was initiated under the plain and ordinary meaning of the terms.” Just under two years later, in February 2023, an attorney for the Mauna Kea Hui made a second written request for ruling or hearing on the motion.

In July 2023, the land board scheduled arguments on the motion to be heard at the regular BLNR meeting on July 28. The present land board chair, Dawn Chang, also filed a disclosure detailing her past history as principal of Hoʻakea LLC dba Kuʻiwalu, which was contracted by the University of Hawaiʻi back in 2007 to prepare a comprehensive management plan for the state leased Maunakea lands, managed by UH. “I do not believe that my previous work as a consultant in preparing the CMP or independently evaluating UH’s compliance with the CMP will affect my ability to be fair and objective in weighing the evidence and arguments fairly,” Chang stated.

The deferred hearing will be scheduled at a later date, the land board says.

Source: https://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2023/07/22/latest-round-of-tmt-arguments-delayed-by-land-board/.

In short, more legal procedings to come and more delays.

Another Reason to Avoid Wilshire

From LA Metro: UCLA Lot 36 Near the Geffen Academy: Banner Installation  Summary Metro contractors will replace banners on the construction wall north of the Metro staging yard at UCLA Lot 36, facing the Geffen Academy.  A mechanical lift will be used during the banner installation.  Street closures are not expected for work near the Geffen Academy.   Date: July 24 to 28  Work hours: 7 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday  Traffic Control:  No traffic impacts anticipated for this work.  A temporary lane reduction in UCLA Lot 36 may be implemented as needed.   Noteworthy:  All work will receive the necessary permits and approvals.  Access to driveways, residences & businesses will be maintained, unless prior notification is provided.  Access for pedestrians will be maintained outside of construction zones.  Access for the Fire Department and emergency responders will be maintained.  Parking restrictions will be implemented in the immediate area of the work zone.  Construction is dynamic and schedules are subject to change.  24/7 Hotline: 213-922-6934

 

Watch the Regents Afternoon Meetings of July 19, 2023

We complete our coverage of last week's Regents meetings with this posting. 

Several Regental committees met last Wednesday afternoon. Compliance and Audit approved the annual plan for audits without discussion in a brief session. Health Services approved a plan for UC-San Francisco to acquire and operate two Dignity Health (Catholic) hospitals in San Francisco. The two hospitals were said to be losing money and operating at 25% capacity while it was suggested that existing UC-SF hospitals were running over their capacity. 

Still, it was unclear exactly how the low capacity hospitals could be raised to sufficient levels of operation to be profitable. Representatives of UC-SF said that the existing workforces and wages and benefits would be retained. It was noted that several UC-SF doctors are already working at the Dignity hospitals. (As we have noted in prior postings, the controversy over limits on UC-SF doctors at such hospitals to provide services such as abortion would evaporate once the religious affiliation was dropped.)

A short session of the National Labs committee approved a budget plan for the labs. It might be noted that with all the buzz surrounding the new Oppenheimer movie, the current structure of the Labs grew out of the World War II Manhattan Project. 

At Public Engagement and Development, there was a half hour presentation (starting at around minute 9) by CUCEA on the most recent survey of emeriti activities, A Virtual 11th Campus." CUCEA president Jo Anne Boorkman (UC-Davis) introduced two emeriti - Ellen Weber, MD (UC-San Francisco) and Jim Danziger (UC-Irvine Poli Sci) - who described their post-retirement teaching, research, and service activities. 

Finally, there was a report on Sacramento affairs. As is always the case, the budget outcome for UC was described as "great" which really translated as being as good as possible given fiscal stringency. Various bills now before the legislature were described. UC is supporting a bill that would remove the noisy-student issue from CEQA which has blocked the Berkeley People's Park project. A bill that would require revenue sharing with student-athletes was put off until next year. Negotiations are going on over a bill that in its present form would have a uniform standard for community college transfers to either UC or CSU. UC opposes the current version of the bill because requirements for majors differ across the two systems. 

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As always, we preserve recordings of Regents meetings because the Regents have no set policy regarding retention. The link for the full afternoon session of July 19 is at:

https://archive.org/details/public-engagement-and-development-committee-7-19-23-pm.

Compliance and Audit is at:

https://ia902707.us.archive.org/0/items/public-engagement-and-development-committee-7-19-23-pm/Compliance%20and%20Audit%20Committee%207-19-23%20PM.mp4.

Health Services and National Labs:

https://ia902707.us.archive.org/0/items/public-engagement-and-development-committee-7-19-23-pm/Health%20Services%20Committee%2C%20National%20Laboratories%20Committee%207-19-23%20PM.mp4.

Public Engagement and Development:

https://ia802707.us.archive.org/0/items/public-engagement-and-development-committee-7-19-23-pm/Public%20Engagement%20and%20Development%20Committee%207-19-23%20PM.mp4.

Still going nowhere in particular

Our weekly look at new weekly California claims for unemployment benefits still fails to provide any definitive sign of the long-anticipated recession. We're still operating in the pre-pandemic boom range for that series. 

Even those folks who claim to know everything and who have long forecast a recession are beginning to have doubts, as the picture below illustrates:

As always, the latest new claims data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.

Watch the Regents Morning Meetings of July 19, 2023

The morning meetings of the Regents last Wednesday began with public comments. These comments touched on co-generation at UC-Berkeley, the current hotel strike and UC investment in hotels via Blackstone, hiring by UC of undocumented students, the UAW dispute related to arrests at UC-San Diego, acquisition of St. Mary's hospital by UC-San Francisco, voting rights of students at UC-Merced if the campus is annexed by the City of Merced, transfer student issues, the Hawaiian telescope, repatriation of human remains, delays in receiving medical licenses, and a minimum wage at UC. Members of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco appeared at the public comment session.

President Drake then spoke about the various U.S. Supreme Court decisions, notably on affirmative action and student aid. On the former, he offered UC's expertise in operating under Prop 209's ban on affirmative action. The new student regent-designate was introduced: Josiah Beharry of UC-Merced. 

At Finance and Capital Strategies, there was discussion of plans for the City of Merced to annex the campus. The discussion with city officials focused on charges for city services.

As we noted when the Regents' agenda was first announced, there was discussion of new actuarial assumptions of the pension plan was announced. In fact, about an hour was spent on this matter, even  though the real action item is to occur in November when the discussion will turn to funding the pension and its estimated unfunded liability. As we previously noted, the big drivers of the estimate of the unfunded liability - projected inflation and assumed rate of return over the long run - were unchanged. There was a small increases - relative to the size of the fund - in the unfunded liability, due it seems to assumed behavioral changes in employee retirement, etc. On the other hand, the normal cost of the plan - the amount of liability attributed to each year's operation - declined. (It appears that the decline is occurring because there are more people in the less-generous new tiers and fewer in the older tiers.)

The discussion of the pension assumptions was disappointing, in part because the discussion was siloed from the larger issue of total compensation. Regent Pérez went on about it being unfair that the people under the old tier had a contribution holiday and the more recent folks don't. But economic analysis would suggest that other elements of compensation would tend to adjust for that effect. 

Regent Makarechian seemed to want a "fix" for the unfunded liability (100% funding?) by November. That isn't going to happen. Regent Matosantos wanted a sensitivity analysis with higher rates of inflation. When it was pointed out to her that if you vary the assumption of inflation, you presumbably would want to account for inflation's effects on the long run rate of return and on assumed nominal salary growth. She seemed to want just a higher assumption of inflation with no effect on other variables. And Regent Pérez wanted an undefined discussion of fairness in November. In short, I am not looking forward to the November session.

When the discussion turned to the state budget, everything was said to be great. Now you could say that UC got as much as could be expected during a period of budget tightening. But that is not the same as great.

Finally, there was discussionn of UCPath. Both Pérez and Makarechian were unhappy with the report. The staff representative to the Regents noted that while increased measures of "satisfaction" were cited, that measure seemed to refer to individual employees who, say, were requesting a W-2 form. Middle managers who have to work with the system are still reporting "frictions." There was no clear answer given to the question as to whether UCPath is saving the promised amounts of money that were originally projected. Makarechian suggested looking at commercial payroll firms such as ADP that do payrolls for large employers for benchmarks. But there was no promise to do so. There was some clarifying discussion that pension administration was handled in another unit separate from RASC and a hint that RASC had problems. But it went no further than that.

Academic and Student Affairs began with discussion of various research institutes at UC, such as the California Policy Lab at UCLA and Berkeley. Basically, it was a show-and-tell session. The discussion then turned to the need to get out offers of financial aid quickly to accepted students. Finally, there was discussion of transfer students. It was noted that the decline in enrollment in community colleges resulting from the pandemic has made it more challenging for UC to admit and enroll targeted numbers of transfer students. 

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We continue to preserve recordings of the Regents since the Regents have no policy in place concerning length of preservation. The general web address for the morning of July 19 can be found at:

https://archive.org/details/board-finance-and-capital-strategies-committee-7-19-23-am.

The board and finance and capital strategies is at:

https://ia802709.us.archive.org/2/items/board-finance-and-capital-strategies-committee-7-19-23-am/Board%2C%20Finance%20and%20Capital%20Strategies%20Committee%207-19-23%20am.mp4.

Academic and Student Affairs is at:

https://ia802709.us.archive.org/2/items/board-finance-and-capital-strategies-committee-7-19-23-am/Academic%20and%20Student%20Affairs%20Committee%207-19-23%20AM.mp4.

Time Is Money - But How Much?

Yours truly is catching up with an item updated on July 16 in the Bruin:

A University exemption to California labor law has caused academic and mental stress for student sound technicians employed by Associated Students UCLA, echoing concerns other UC workers have brought forth in lawsuits. The University is not required to pay the standard overtime required of labor laws in California. Instead, the University must only pay for time worked in excess of 40 hours in a week, not the standard requirement of overtime pay for time worked in excess of eight hours in a day.

Although ASCULA operates as a separate, nonprofit entity, ASUCLA social media manager Christian Manuel claimed in an emailed statement that the UC policies are still applicable for ASUCLA and it falls under the same labor law exemption. “ASUCLA is a tax-exempt, nonprofit public benefit unincorporated Association and is a separate and distinct legal entity,” Manuel said in the statement. “At the same time, it is a unit of the University of California and subject to all applicable UC policies.”

Student sound technicians, who work for ASUCLA Event Services, are responsible for assisting with the audio visual technology used in events hosted by ASUCLA or student groups that reserve campus venues. Many are part-time employees on top of being full-time students and are only supposed to work a maximum of 20 hours a week, ASUCLA said in an emailed statement.

The standard California overtime rate is 1.5 times the base salary after the first eight hours and double after 12 hours, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations. However, when asked about providing overtime pay for 13-hour shifts, Marisa Osborne, the ASUCLA senior division manager, and Janelle Marcus, the ASUCLA payroll division manager, repeatedly said in emails to student workers that the UC is exempt from California overtime pay laws.

In April, ASUCLA student sound technicians were assigned up to 16-hour shifts without overtime pay, according to schedules provided by the sound technicians.

Some students said the long shifts have taken away from other aspects of their lives, such as school. A sound technician who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of losing their job said they have missed classes to work assigned shifts – which caused their grades to fall lower than in any other quarter they had completed at UCLA...

Tobias Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies, said that even though workers being forced to take on excessive hours and being improperly compensated is not uncommon, he is surprised that such an exemption to California labor law exists...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2023/07/09/uc-exemption-from-state-labor-law-allows-asucla-misconduct-student-workers-allege.

It might be noted that UC and UCLA sometimes follow state and local rules, even though they are exempt. For example, UCLA followed LA County's COVID restrictions.

Toxic Econ

A paper was recently presented at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private research institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dealing with a website called Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR).* Anyone can post there anonymously. Although the postings do deal with economics-related topics, and although the website posts a long list of good behavior rules (perhaps to reassure advertisers), the fact that the postings are anonymous allows "toxic" comments featuring racism, misogyny, etc.

Three economists reported a technique for identifying IP addresses from which particular comments come at the conference, i.e., they report that while using public data from the website - sifting through a vast data set - they can identify particular computers (each computer has a unique IP address) from which particular comments come. Computers, of course, are not the same as individuals; individuals may use more than one computer and more than one person may use a particular computer. And there are other caveats regarding the statistical techniques used. Nonetheless, the paper suggests that there are many toxic comments coming from top university economics departments. As the buzz around the paper spread, the outside world became interested. A reporter from the New York Times attended the presentation.**

When advanced copies of the paper began to circulate, users of EJMR began to speculate as to whether they would be "doxxed" (exposed as individuals). In fact, the paper does not purport to identify individuals. There was also grumbling about whether what the authors did was somehow illegal, improper, a violation of "free speech," etc. And toxic comments were made about at least one of the paper's authors, as shown below:

Note that the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills would probably not want its ad running on this site if it knew about the toxicity. But, as noted above, the ostensible statement about bad behavior on the site may suggest to advertisers that their content is protected.

Inside Higher Ed ran a lengthy story on the paper yesterday: [Excerpt]

Researchers looking into online toxicity found a way to connect supposedly anonymous posts on the site Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) to IP addresses over the past dozen years, according to a draft paper leaked early online.

While EJMR is an academic jobs forum, it “also includes much content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic or otherwise ‘toxic,’” the paper says.

“EJMR is sometimes dismissed as not being representative of the economics profession, including claims that the most frequent users on the platform are not actually economists,” the paper says. “However, our analysis reveals that the users who post on EJMR are predominantly economists, including those working in the upper echelons of academia, government and the private sector. In this paper, we identify the scheme used to assign usernames for each post written by an anonymous user on EJMR. We show how the statistical properties of that algorithm do not anonymize posts, but instead allows the IP address from which each post was made to be determined with high probability.” ...

[EJMR] sent this email [to Inside Higher Ed]: "It is essential to maintain an anonymous forum in the economics profession. EJMR has been used to expose multiple counts of plagiarism, corruption and serious professional misconduct that would not likely have been shared for fear of retaliation by their higher ups or colleagues. Indeed one of the co-authors of the paper had their own likely plagiarism exposed by anonymous EJMR users, calling into question the motivation for the study.  This paper’s attempt to expose the identities of the vast majority of good natured users, using the excuse of there being a very small number of toxic posts on the site, is something that many people find troubling, deeply unethical, and may well be illegal." ...

The draft paper does include a chart showing, for each of the top 25 U.S. News–ranked economics departments, the percentage of total posts labeled toxic. The University of California, Los Angeles, at nearly 15 percent toxic, ranked No. 1, followed by Yale and the University of California, San Diego, both above 10 percent...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/07/20/study-says-it-found-ip-addresses-anonymous-ejmr.

The article included a link to the paper at:

https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/files/2023-07/ejmr_paper_nber(1).pdf.

The chart referred to above is below:

Below is the abstract of the paper:

Anonymity and Identity Online
Florian Ederer (Boston U), Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (Yale School of Management), and Kyle Jensen (Yale School of Management)

July 17, 2023

Abstract: Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an online forum and clearinghouse for information about the academic job market for economists. It also includes much content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic, or otherwise “toxic.” Almost all of this content is created anonymously by contributors who receive a four-character username when posting on EJMR. Using only publicly available data we show that the statistical properties of the scheme by which these usernames were generated allows the IP addresses from which most posts were made to be determined with high probability. We recover 47,630 distinct IP addresses of EJMR posters and match these to 66.1% of the roughly 7 million posts made over the past 12 years. We geolocate posts and describe aggregated cross-sectional variation—particularly regarding toxic speech—across sub-forums, geographies, institutions, and contributors.

The conference presentation of the paper on EJMR can be seen at:

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCApVPawI4&t=27345s. This link is set to start at time 7:36:16. If you get lost, start at that time.

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*https://www.econjobrumors.com/.

**I did not find anything in the NY Times as of this morning about the paper.