The 15% Cap - Part 5

From an email received earlier today:

To: Faculty, Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Scholars and Staff

Dear Colleagues:

As you may have already read, the Federal Court in Massachusetts acted quickly to issue a temporary restraining order in the lawsuit that California joined as one of 22 states seeking to stop the National Institutes of Health from reducing their Facilities and Administration (also known as Indirect Cost (IDC)) rates to 15%. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) along with the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals, and Greater New York Hospital Association took similar steps today and that restraining order was approved by the Massachusetts court as well.

To add to the chorus of institutions in opposition to the NIH reduction in F/A (IDC), the Association of American Universities (AAU), the American College of Education (ACE), and the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities (APLU) have now filed their complaint and motion for a temporary restraining order. The University of California is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with 12 other institutions (Brandeis, Brown, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Cornell, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Penn, Rochester, and Tufts).

It is heartening to see this degree of unity in the higher education sector, across so many different states. We know there is a longer road to travel before this issue is resolved, but we are working overtime on it. And, as you probably also realize, this is not the only issue the University faces. The recent announcement that grants from the Institute for Education Science have been cancelled represents another area of concern and we are tracking/responding there as well.

So as not to take up additional space in your inbox, I recommend that you consult this site for weekly updates on issues in Washington, DC developed by our Federal Relations colleagues: UC Federal Updates website:

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/federal-updates

Going forward, that will be the best place to find updates.

Thank you, once again, for all that you do for UC. It has never been more important.

Cordially,

Katherine S. Newman

UC System Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy

Toxic Econ - Part 2

We have in the past posted stories about the website EJMR https://www.econjobrumors.com/ (now XJMR) which caters to academic economists, originally to help job candidates, but has limited moderation. Bloomberg is the latest source of information about the website in a very lengthy article. Some excerpts: 

...Started in 2008 as a website to help Ph.D. students and professors navigate academia’s opaque job market, it soon became a forum for everything from ivory tower gossip to chatter about food or personal technology. (Recent, less inflammatory topics: “Canadian school flyouts,” “Headline CPI increases to 3.2%” and “Pokemon is morally evil.”)

Over the years, the site has also developed a reputation as a swamp of misogyny and racism, with a strict moderation policy but lax enforcement that’s earned it comparisons to 4Chan, the ugly online forum. (Recent, more inflammatory topics on EJMR: “Would you ever hire a hot grad student as a postdoc?,” “Why do feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial writers, etc know so little” and “Does tenure allow me to refuse teaching black people?” Those are just the printable ones.)

By the mid-2010s, the site had hundreds of thousands of visitors a month...

The culture war over EJMR has had implications for the profession, too. For decades, advocates for equality in economics have argued that the lack of women and minorities results in blinkered, narrow-minded policy (for example, not prioritizing research on child care or on the effects of incarceration). Economics as a field can’t address real-world problems, they say, unless it first looks like the real world. Over the years, EJMR had become a symbol of that imbalance as well as a bastion of resistance to change. Its targets have included Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economics professor who’s won recognition for her research on families and inequality, and Claudia Sahm, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve who in a 2020 blogpost titled “Economics Is a Disgrace” denounced the profession as sexist, racist and elitist.

EJMR’s influence has grown despite attempts to shut it down or create sanitized alternatives. In some cases, anonymous attacks that started on the site eventually broke through into mainstream discourse. In December 2023, conservative activists published what they said was evidence that Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized her dissertation, which added to an already-raging firestorm over the school’s response to the war in Gaza and led to her resignation. An anonymous post on EJMR had made a similar claim months before. (Gay has said she’s never misrepresented her findings or took credit for others’ research.)...

[The article then goes on to describe how a subset of supposedly anonymous posts were traced to specific institutions.]

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Posts on Economics Job Market Rumors

Share of all posts from US universities or research institutions on the site

Sources: Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jensen; U.S. News & World Report

Share is the percentage of posts accounted for by the school or institution among all posts originating from IP addresses associated with US universities or research institutions. U.S. News economics graduate school rankings are for 2023-24.

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Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-03-15/ejmr-economics-forum-posts-unmask-field-s-racism-and-sexism.

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Our earlier post on EJMR-XMJR:

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/toxic-econ.html. It features a chart based on the percent of posts from various universities were classified as "toxic." The website has expanded to math, poli sci, and sociology, but seems less comprehensive and active in those fields. A still earlier post from 2017: https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2017/08/bias-in-econ.html.

We are not alone - Part 2

In an earlier posting, we noted that another UC campus - Santa Barbara - was joining UCLA in tightening up its coronavirus rules.* But like the disease, the tightening up has spread: 

From Inside Higher Ed:

The University of California, Los Angeles, restored its indoor mask mandate last week, joining the University of Hawai‘i system, Pennsylvania State University (for both the main campus and 13 others), and other colleges and universities. “The past few weeks have revealed a consistent rise in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles County and on our campus. Last week alone, UCLA had close to 870 new cases, which, per the UCLA COVID-19 Pivot Matrix, would place us at the ‘severe’ level,” said a letter announcing the mandate.

The letter outlined limited cases where masks may be removed: performance arts rehearsals and performances, indoor dining, and when alone in one's room. At commencement, June 10-12, all attendees must wear masks indoors, but speakers may remove their masks for their addresses, and graduates “may momentarily remove their masks while walking across the stage and while being photographed on or adjacent to the stage,” the letter said. (UCLA operates on a quarter system, and the spring quarter classes are not over until June 3.) Other institutions that have announced mask mandates have already had commencement and are in summer sessions, or their renewed mandates were announced just prior to commencement. UCLA also said weekly testing for COVID-19 will continue until June 15.

For colleges, indoor mask mandates were a key part of their response during earlier peaks of the pandemic. The lifting of mask mandates was seen by many as a sign that the pandemic was behind us. But most of the colleges are citing rising COVID-19 cases as a reason for their actions. Here are some of the colleges restoring mask mandates:

• Penn State University. On Friday, the university restored mask mandates for the university’s main campus and the Penn State campuses at Beaver, Greater Allegheny, New Kensington and Schuylkill. The university previously announced that masks were required at the campuses in Abington, Behrend, Brandywine, Great Valley, Hazleton, Lehigh Valley, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. The College of Medicine also continues to require masks indoors. Penn State said it acted on the basis of guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on county COVID-19 rates.
• University of Hawai‘i system. The system restored its mask mandate for the entire university system except when people are working in a room alone or at least six feet from others. “The indoor face mask requirement will remain in place and be re-evaluated when the level of COVID-19 transmission in the state decreases,” the university said.
• University of Pittsburgh. The university on Friday cited the CDC in restoring the requirements for the Pittsburgh, Greensburg and Titusville campuses. Masks remain optional on the Johnstown and Bradford campuses.
• University of Delaware. The university imposed an indoor mask requirement last week, citing “rising numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations around the country, including in Delaware over the past week.” The university permitted people to be outdoors without a mask, but administrators at commencement appeared with masks outdoors...

All of those colleges acted last week. Some of the colleges that acted earlier to restore indoor mask mandates include Gallaudet, Georgetown, Howard, Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities; and the University of Rochester.  California State University, Los Angeles never removed its mask mandate.

Rochester had promised when instituting its mandate on April 15 to update the policy in early May. On May 4, Rochester announced, “Campus health officials believe indoor masking has reduced the number of COVID infections among students in recent days. Based on the effectiveness of the mask requirement in returning COVID cases to more manageable levels, as well as the still relatively high rate of COVID infections in the greater Rochester community and in New York State—the current face mask policy will remain in place for now, including at indoor commencement ceremonies and events.”

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/05/31/ucla-university-hawai%E2%80%98i-penn-state-adopt-mask-mandates.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/05/we-are-not-alone.html.

More non-UCs extend online instruction beyond January 18

We have been noting the trend at other UC campuses to extend their online instruction periods beyond January 18. And we have noted other non-UCs doing the same. Here are more non-UCs from Inside Higher Ed:

Carnegie Mellon, U of Texas, U of Rochester Move Online

January 7, 2022

More colleges and universities have announced that they are moving most or all of their classes online to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Carnegie Mellon University announced that the first two weeks of most campus courses, which start Jan. 18, would be remote.

The University of Texas at Austin announced, “We are asking faculty members to teach remotely for the first two weeks of the semester, with a target date of January 31 to return to the originally assigned teaching modality. Some may choose to teach in person, while also providing online delivery between January 18 and January 28.” The University of Rochester announced that all classes in January (except those in the nursing or medical schools) would be taught remotely. 

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/01/07/carnegie-mellon-u-texas-u-rochester-move-online.

Moving to Berkeley

Two more professors involved in a legal case against the University of Rochester over its handling of the Florian Jaeger case have resigned. Celeste Kidd and Steven Piantadosi, married assistant professors of brain and cognitive sciences, announced on Twitter that they’re moving their labs to the University of California, Berkeley, saying they leave not with anger but with “unshakable sadness” that students on campus “have no one in the administration who will support them.”

Last year, Kidd, Piantadosi and seven other past and present students and professors in the brain sciences department sued Rochester for what they described as an inadequate response to the sexual harassment concerns they raised about their department colleague, Jaeger, whom the university cleared of misconduct. Other professors involved in the case already have left the department to join other institutions...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/06/18/more-faculty-departures-rochester