UCLA History: Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson at UCLA in 1941. "At UCLA, Jackie became the first athlete to win varsity letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football and track. In 1941, he was named to the All-American football team. Due to financial difficulties, he was forced to leave college, and eventually decided to enlist in the U.S. Army."

Source: http://www.jackierobinson.com/about/bio.html

Live West of the 405? Don't bother to come to UCLA

From LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky:

Sometime this fall, two Wilshire on- and off-ramps to the 405 Freeway will be closed for 90 days. That work will be followed by a series of closures of the other Wilshire ramps, each expected to last from 14 to 90 days. (There are eight ramps in all, and they will be worked on two at a time.) The end result should be sweet: modern, swooping flyover ramps that will make it easier to navigate the notoriously jammed intersection. But getting to that point may be considerably less so, in the view of residents of neighborhoods around the construction.

“That’s going to be the next shoe to drop,” said Steve Resnick, president of the Westwood Homeowners Association. “The 405 closure, as it turned out, was just the opposite of what was expected. It was terrific. The feeling is that this could be much worse.”

The tentative schedule for the project says the ramps are set to close in October, but project officials say the work is actually likely to begin in November. The ramps that will be closing first are the westbound Wilshire on-ramp to the northbound 405 and the northbound 405 off-ramp to westbound Wilshire.

It’s all part of a massive, $1.034 billion project, set to finish in 2013, that will add a 10-mile northbound carpool lane to the 405 along with other improvements such as the flyover ramps at Wilshire.

There are also concerns at UCLA. The closures will have a “significant impact on traffic congestion and commute patterns in and around Westwood,” Renée A. Fortier, Executive Director, UCLA Events & Transportation, said in a statement. She said the university is working with project officials to minimize “cut-through” traffic on the campus, particularly around Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. It also plans to take steps to publicize the closures in advance and to encourage students and employees who live north of the Sepulveda Pass to to join existing rideshare programs…

Read more, if you really want to, at http://zev.lacounty.gov/405-report/a-really-long-goodbye-to-wilshire-ramps

Cheer up:

How to Have a Major Conference Without a Campus Hotel

As a follow up, readers of this blog will recall an earlier entry about the 2-day Governor's Conference on Local Renewable Energy Resources which was held at UCLA recently without the need for a new hotel/conference center.

If you don't recall it, check out http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/07/rooms-at-inns.html

The first day of the governor's conference was held at Covel and the second at the Faculty Center, the very Faculty Center that was slated to be demolished for the hotel/conference center.

For a more complete photo montage, below is a full collection of pictures of the event. Click on the arrow to start the automatic show:

An official statement about the event reports that "The conference embodied the Governor's vision along with the Luskin Center for Innovation's purpose to unite the intellectual capital of UCLA with forward-looking civic leaders to address the most pressing issues confronting our community, nation and world."

Oops! Are We Missing from the Open Access Group?

Inside Higher Ed today notes that various universities, public and private, have formed the Coalition of Open Access Policies.

Among the members are such institutions as MIT, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford. But no UCs are listed, although – as noted above – public universities in other states are members. Apparently, the Coalition was started at the U of Kansas. If you click on the link at the end of this entry, it will in turn send you to a link to a press release at that university which says:

In 2009, KU was the first public university in the United States to adopt an open access policy regarding faculty research published in peer-review journals. The policy “asserts the rights of KU faculty to provide broad, free access to their journal publications to colleagues around the world.”

Just today, yours truly receive a link to a journal article at the journal itself. To read the article, however, one had to have a paid subscription. If you went to the faculty website of the author (who is at one of the institutions listed above), you can find the article for free. In fact, it is quite common for faculty to put articles they have written directly on their websites. Journal publishers – who have copyrights – could in principle object to this practice, but generally don’t. Still, the legal limbo remains.

The question remains as to whether UC should be part of the Coalition and/or why it isn’t.

The link mentioned above is http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/04/qt#266915

UCLA History: Moving Experience

Moving day to new Westwood campus of UCLA in 1929

Confusing Signs on Prospects for a Pension Initiative (& Everything Else)

Earlier posts on this blog have outlined the possibility that some pension initiative could end up on the 2012 ballot that would override the Regents' December 2010 decision on the UC pension.

There are two "legacy" organizations that descend from the Prop 13 property tax initiative of 1978. In a previous post, we noted that one of them - Peoples Advocate - has filed a pension initiative and seems to be fishing for someone or some group to provide financial backing for a signature and election campaign. But now the other group, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, has said it is not interested in dealing with pensions in 2012. See http://blogs.sacbee.com/the_state_worker/2011/08/taxpayers-association-not-taki.html

An earlier post also noted that a bill heading to Governor Brown's desk would make signature gathering for initiatives (all initiatives - not just pensions) more difficult by forbidding payment on a piece rate basis per signature. However, the governor has vetoed the bill on the grounds that it seemed odd to make signature gatherers less productive. (That was the goal of the bill, no?) See http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/08/jerry-brown-vetoes-signature-g.html

Meanwhile, referenda are now in circulation that would undo parts of the recently enacted California budget. The so-called "Amazon tax" - requiring out-of-state online retailers to collect and remit the state sales tax - could be reversed by voters under one referendum. Another would undo a fee for rural fire fighting. And there was a complex deal involving local redevelopment agencies that was part of the budget and could be undone. When referenda get on the ballot, that prevents the law they are aimed at repealing from going into effect until the issue is decided. So there could be a loss of revenue to the state, even if the voters ultimately reject repeal. More would be lost if they enact a repeal.

Finally, an earlier post noted that finding out what would happen if the U.S. was allowed to hit the federal debt ceiling would not be a good social science experiment to run. It appears that the "solution" being enacted in Washington is also not a good social science experiment to run.

We are living in a land of confusion:

Debt Deal (if there really is one) and Higher Ed

Excerpt from Inside Higher Ed:

Short-Term Stability, But ...

August 1, 2011

Congressional leaders appeared late Sunday to have reached a deal on increasing the nation’s debt limit that would avoid many of higher education’s worst-case scenarios: cuts to Pell Grants, the end of subsidized student loans, or a government default that would leave student financial aid and other funding for colleges in limbo going into the fall semester. But as details about the deal began to emerge Sunday evening, it became clear that the plan leaves colleges and universities with plenty of long-term uncertainty.

The plan, which will be presented to Congress today, gives President Obama authority to increase the debt limit by at least $2.1 trillion and calls for at least $2.4 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years. About $900 billion in cuts would take effect immediately through discretionary spending caps. The rest would be decided on by a Congressional "super-committee." If the committee does not reach an agreement by Thanksgiving, $1.2 trillion in cuts would automatically go into effect in 2013, including cuts to defense spending, domestic discretionary spending and some entitlement programs...

Full article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/01/higher_education_in_debt_ceiling_deal

And an analysis from a weekly blog yours truly does for another organization (The Employment Policy Research Network) on why negotiations tend to produce last-minute deals and why that isn’t always a Good Thing is at http://www.employmentpolicy.org/topic/15/blog/mitchell%E2%80%99s-musings-8111-good-news-and-bad-news-real-deadlines-negotiations-and-negotia

or more directly at http://www.employmentpolicy.org/sites/www.employmentpolicy.org/files/field-content-file/pdf/Daniel%20J.B.%20Mitchell/mitchellmusings%208-1-11.pdf

or at UCLA Today http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/good-and-bad-news-about-wrangling-211349.aspx

Suffice it to say, the machinery that has been agreed to seems complex:

UPDATE: As more details come out, it appears that Pell grants were saved by reducing other forms of student aid. See http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/01/news/economy/debt_ceiling_students/index.htm Thanks to Bob Samuels for passing this reference along.