Legislature & governor punish UCOP over state audit

Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders announced a budget deal Tuesday that strips University of California President Janet Napolitano's office of some of its financial autonomy...

The main budget bill, AB97, includes $296.4 million for Napolitano’s office in the upcoming fiscal year that begins July 1 and another $52.4 million for UC Path, the university’s payroll and human resources system.

Currently, the office receives state funding indirectly through fees collected from all 10 campuses, which give the president’s office exclusive control over how to spend that money. The state would instead directly send money to Napolitano’s office and eliminate the campus fees, so that lawmakers could oversee and control how that money is spent. UC opposed the change.

Lawmakers moved to wrest control of spending by Napolitano’s office after a state audit found a litany of problems there, including hidden funds and misleading accounting practices. The budget bill also includes other strings on the president’s office, such as barring it from providing supplemental retirement payments for new senior administrators.

The state would withhold $50 million in funding if UC doesn’t fix financial problems the state auditor identified in the review...

Full story at http://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/New-state-budget-deal-punishes-UC-president-s-11216554.php

Irvine Bargain Discount

Pilot program at UCI to slash tuition in half for incoming freshmen

By BRIAN WHITEHEAD | Orange County Register, June 12, 2017

In a twist to boost enrollment of California residents, UC Irvine is launching a pilot program that lets up to 500 incoming freshman next fall pay about half the price of first-year admission.

The Anteater Leadership Academy program would let students take fully-accredited courses, taught by accredited instructors in the Division of Continuing Education during their freshman year, paying tuition of $6,315, a savings of about $6,000. Students also would take a leadership course, something the school considers an incentive for those in the program. After their freshmen year, students would be eligible to take all courses throughout the campus at standard prices.

In recent years, the UC system has come under fire for increasing its revenue by accepting more out-of-state students, who typically pay tuition that’s nearly triple in-state rates. Last year, out-of-state students accounted for about 16.5 percent of the system’s total enrollment of 210,000, according to a state report.

Last year, at UCI, out-of-state students accounted for about 19 percent of the 25,256 undergrads, most coming from out of the country. It’s unclear what the breakdown will be next year. More than 104,000 incoming freshmen and transfer students applied to UC Irvine for the 2017 fall semester, of which about 41,000 were from out of state. The school will accept about 5,200 students for the freshman class.

Though UC officials didn’t say if the financial side of the program at UCI would be a model for other campuses, they pointed to another element of the program — clustering a group of students by class within the broader student population — as something that might be picked up elsewhere.

“The general theme of providing a first-year cohort experience is something that could expand to other UCs,” said Mike Dennin, a vice provost who helped put the program together.

The new Anteater Leadership Academy will target local students: Participants can’t live on campus or receive income-based financial aid. It allows UCI to take on hundreds more students than it would otherwise. Admittance is first come, first serve until the June 30 deadline.

“With almost 39 million people now in California, there’s a pressing need to have our universities, our state system of higher education, accommodate in-state students,” said Tom Vasich, a UCI spokesman. “The mission of this university is to think of innovative approaches for creating undergraduate programs that can allow us to provide a UCI education to more students.

“These first students are going to be the pioneers in that they’ll be providing feedback to our program managers,” Vasich added.

“It’s definitely an exciting opportunity for students looking for a non-traditional way to get a UCI education and make a difference for the future leaders coming through campus.”

The Anteater Leadership Academy will offer general-education courses in fields such as sociology, economics, political science and math, and special courses aimed at beefing up leadership skills.

Taught by UCI professors, classes will be in a new Division of Continuing Education building and elsewhere on campus. Vasich said the courses are transferable.

“The first year of college for students can be difficult,” Vasich said. “When they’re rooted with a peer group, they thrive in the college environment at a much higher rate. As an Anteater Leader, they’ll hit the ground running.”

In 2009, UCI offered a similar incentive when it covered tuition for the first year for its inaugural law school students. That law school quickly excelled; the last two years, U.S. News & World Report listed UCI 28th in its annual ranking of best law schools in the country.

Source: http://www.ocregister.com/2017/06/12/pilot-program-at-uci-to-slash-tuition-in-half-for-incoming-freshmen/

Can we make a modest proposal for PR for this offer?

Click twice if needed.

More Slowly

Yours truly will attend the UCLA Anderson economic forecast later today. But the LA Times this morning carries a summary of implications for California:

California will increase jobs and incomes more slowly than expected this year, mainly because President Trump’s big spending plans don’t seem to be coming to fruition yet.

That’s the upshot of the latest forecast from economists at UCLA, released Tuesday, that predicts employment in California will increase by a modest 1.4% and personal income will grow by 3.1% this year. Earlier projections were more optimistic.

Over the last several months, Trump has promised to pour money into a “great rebuilding of the armed forces” and has hyped a $1-trillion investment into upgrading the country’s roads and bridges.

But his budget proposal doesn’t include a huge increase in defense spending, and “infrastructure week” passed without much of an update from the administration on the prospects of securing government funds for a national rebuilding plan.

“Congress seems to be so tied up in considering healthcare and taxes that they aren’t ready to take on a massive infrastructure bill,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, a coauthor of the UCLA report.

Nickelsburg noted that the president spent months saying he would bulk up the Navy by buying more than 70 new ships, but his budget included no extra money for shipbuilding. Trump’s original proposal didn’t go beyond former President Obama’s plan to buy eight new ships in 2018, and Trump cut the number of aircraft to be purchased next year, according to a report on Breakingdefense.com.according to a report on Breakingdefense.com.

Bringing the battle force up to 350 ships, as Trump promised, would cost $165 billion over 30 years, the Congressional Budget Office calculated. Those billions would have been a boon to the three large shipyards in San Diego, and could have lead to new military jobs across the state.

“If there were to be an expansion of the military and size of military forces stationed at the bases in California, that would have been stimulative,” Nickelsburg said.

The state will have to fight headwinds as it approaches full employment and there are fewer and fewer job candidates available to fill openings. Trump's “deportations, or the threat thereof, of unskilled workers" will only make things worse in an already tight job market, the report said.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-anderson-forecast-20170612-story.html

Early Bird Budget

Under Prop 54, enacted by voters last year, bills - including budget bills - have to be available for at least 72 hours before passage. So the legislature has to finalize its state budget by the end of today, June 12, so that it can be passed by the constitutional deadline of June 15.

Even when passed by the legislature, the budget isn't final until the governor signs it some time before July 1. The governor has a line-item veto, but since he presumably will have worked out a deal with the Democratic legislative leaders, any such vetoes will likely be minor.

Details at:
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CA_XGR_CALIFORNIA_BUDGET_CAOL-?SITE=CASON&SECTION=STATE&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-06-12-03-06-28

BruinCast

Yours truly came across an op ed in the Daily Bruin complaining that many faculty are not aware of the BruinCast option at UCLA.* And, indeed, yours truly was not aware of it. Basically, it is a system run by the Office of Instructional Development (OID) in which - from selected classrooms only - lectures can be video and audio recorded with access to the students enrolled provided. As it happens, when you go on the OID-BruinCast webpage to find out about the system, although there is a lot of descriptive material, if you try to access a course to see what the recordings look or sound like, you get a message saying that you have to be an enrolled student.** I did find one course, which although it was supposed to be "locked," gave me access. I won't say which it was, but you can see an image above taken from a screenshot of the course.***

Anyway, if you didn't know about BruinCast, now you do. Note that if you are not in a classroom equipped for BruinCast, it is pretty easy to audio record lectures and put them on your course website. Video is more complicated, but if you have PowerPoint-type slides (as in the image above), you can audio record the lecture and then sync the slides with the audio in various programs. The resulting video can then be put online or on the course website.
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*http://dailybruin.com/2017/06/07/avvalzameer-bhatia-ucla-must-better-inform-professors-about-bruincast-equip-more-rooms/
**http://www.oid.ucla.edu/classroom/bruincast/info
***I also found that the video from the class shown in the image would not work in Chrome, but would work in Internet Explorer, although I had the right program in Chrome that was supposed to work.

More or less

The state controller has issued the cash report through May, i.e., through the first 11 months of the current fiscal year.

So far there is an estimated $133 million more revenue than was estimated back in January when the governor's first budget proposal for next year was introduced. But it is $1.3 billion less than the revenue that was estimated a year ago at the time of the enactment of the current year's budget.

We are pretty close to the June 15 deadline for the legislature to enact next year's budget and there are reports that the governor and the legislative leaders (Democrats only) were near a budget deal.* So it's not clear that the new cash report will have much influence on the outcome.

The controller's report is at:
http://sco.ca.gov/Files-ARD/CASH/May%202017%20Statement%20of%20General%20Fund%20Cash%20Receipts%20and%20Disbursements.pdf
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*https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2017-06-08/california-lawmakers-governor-near-state-budget-deal

Don't ask; he'll tell

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Most of the 26 regents who run the University of California are chosen in a process involving a ghostly, unnamed committee of 12 people who never meet, produce no public record of their actions, and publish no list of members. Some don’t even know who the other members are.

That’s how it’s been for more than four decades. And that’s how it was this month when Gov. Jerry Brown appointed four new regents, including Lark Park, his own policy adviser, and Peter Guber, co-owner of the Golden State Warriors.

It isn’t supposed to be that way.

“In the selection of the regents,” says the California Constitution, “the governor shall consult an advisory committee” of 12 people: six members of the public, two elected officials (the Assembly speaker and state Senate president), a UC student, a faculty member, an alumnus and the regents chair. Some committee members are appointed by the governor, others by members of the Legislature, and others by faculty and students.

California voters approved the system in 1974 as part of several constitutional changes intended to make the UC regents more responsive to the public. The governing board of the $30 billion university oversees 10 campuses with 238,000 students, five hospitals and three national laboratories.
But six committee members reached by The Chronicle said they are never consulted in the selection of regents — only told shortly before the announcement that choices have been made.

“Typically, I get a heads-up with a phone call that appointments will be happening,” said Rishi Kumar, a Saratoga city councilman and public member of the volunteer advisory committee. “We receive an email with the profiles of the folks that are going to be appointed.”

Whether the governor is breaking the law would be up to a judge, said Jessica Levinson, a law professor and government ethics expert at Loyola Law School.

“But it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t meet our expectation,” she said. “Our general expectation of ‘consult’ is that it’s distinct from ‘informing.’ You wouldn’t say, ‘I’m consulting this person by leaving a note on their door.’”

The governor’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The office did provide the current list of committee members, but not previous lists as requested.

Terms on the advisory committee range from one to four years, the Constitution says. Former state Sen. Gary Hart doesn’t recall how long he has served on it, but said he was appointed by Gov. Gray Davis. Davis left office in 2003.

“The committee hasn’t met for over a decade and does no work,” Hart said. But Brown’s office duly phoned the former senator to let him know of the impending appointments. “I was given a brief biographical description of each and was certainly free to express an opinion on his nominees.” Hart said he did not weigh in, however, because he wasn’t familiar with the names.

It’s unclear whether the committee has ever met.

“I had no recollection of the existence of the committee in my 14 years on the Board of Regents,” said Bill Bagley, who was named a regent by Gov. George Deukmejian in 1988 and served in the state Assembly when voters approved the advisory committee.

Bagley, an expert on government ethics for whom California’s Bagley-Keene open records and open meetings law was named, said the committee should have at least a week to opine on the governor’s preferred regent candidates.

The governor appoints 18 of the 26 voting regents, who serve 12-year terms. The others include one student and seven “ex-officio” regents who serve automatically because of their job. Brown, himself an ex-officio regent, has appointed eight regents since taking office in 2011 — half of them this month. Appointees have a year to be confirmed by the Senate or lose their seat.

Kumar said he learned the names of the four most recent appointees on June 2, the same day the governor announced them. Asked why the governor’s office notified him at all, Kumar said:

“Because I am on the selection committee.”

The duties of committee members are often unclear — even to the members themselves.

Cynthia So Schroeder is not only on the advisory committee but holds one of two alumni positions on UC’s Board of Regents.

“I think that as an alumni regent, I’m notified (of regents appointees), but I’m not part of the search,” she said, although nothing in the Constitution says that anyone on the committee is excluded from helping the governor select regents.

Another committee member who asked not to be identified said: “I don’t even know who is on the committee.”

Besides creating the committee, voters in 1974 also changed the state Constitution to say the regents should be “broadly reflective of the economic, cultural, and social diversity of the state, including ethnic minorities and women.”

...“We’d be interested in reviving” the committee’s work, said one of its members, James Chalfant, chairman of UC’s Academic Senate.

“We were not consulted at all,” said Chalfant who, like the others, received a voice mail from the governor’s office the same day the new regents appointees were announced. “It’s very disappointing.”

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

Full story at http://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/For-decades-UC-has-selected-board-of-regents-11209660.php