UCLA History: Moore

Portrait of Ernest Carroll Moore who became the first “director” of the Southern Branch of the University of California, now UCLA.  Moore had been head of the State Normal School on Vermont Avenue which UCLA took over as its first campus. He oversaw the later move to Westwood.  (From a book published by the UCLA Alumni Assn. in 1937 entitled California of the Southland, a history of UCLA to that point.)

The CalPERS Long-Term Care Affair

We have noted in earlier posts that although UC employees are not covered by CalPERS, at one point in the past, they were offered the "opportunity" to buy long-term care insurance through CalPERS.  But then CalPERS began jacking up the cost and, for those who protested, offering inferior alternative policies.

CalPERS position is that it didn't deliberately lowball the initial premiums but instead just underestimated what the costs would be.  But some subscribers disagree and now there is a lawsuit.

From the Sacramento Bee:

CalPERS was sued Tuesday over the big rate hikes it imposed on its long-term care insurance program, which covers stays in nursing homes. The class-action suit was filed by a Los Angeles law firm on behalf of more than 100,000 CalPERS members who have purchased the coverage and now face big rate increases. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, says policyholders were duped into thinking the rates would be fixed and "reasonably priced."...

Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/06/5628197/calpers-sued-over-long-term-care.html 

Update: A link to the lawsuit is at http://blogs.sacbee.com/the_state_worker/2013/08/read-the-lawsuit-against-calpers-on-long-term-care-insurance.html

Rank Congratulations to Our Colleagues at UC-SB

From time to time on this blog, we have said skeptical things about the various rankings that occur in the world of higher education. But we do want to take the opportunity of congratulating our colleagues at Santa Barbara for their number 2 ranking among the top 10 party schools by the Princeton Review. From Inside Higher Ed today comes the story and here are the rankings:

Princeton Review's Top 10 "Party Schools"
1. University of Iowa
2. University of California, Santa Barbara
3. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
4. West Virginia University
5. Syracuse University
6. University of Florida
7. Ohio University at Athens
8. University of Wisconsin at Madison
9. Pennsylvania State University at University Park
10. Lehigh University

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/08/06/u-iowa-tops-princeton-reviews-2014-party-school-list

So, again, our congratulations.  And we're not the only ones celebrating:

ObamaJam May Be ObamaJelly

It looks like the ObamaJam that we mentioned as a possibility for today and tomorrow in an earlier post will turn out to be more like ObamaJelly - at least in the Westside area near UCLA.  The President is coming but it appears most of his traveling will be by helicopter and what street closings there may be won't be close to campus.

More details at http://centurycity.patch.com/groups/around-town/p/officials-warn-of-clogged-traffic-as-president-visits-tuesday

The High Cost of Pepper

UC Davis officials are making an expensive investment toward improving the college's image. The university hired Luanne Lawrence, formerly of the University of South Carolina, as associate chancellor for strategic communications earlier this year. She will make an annual salary of $260,000, more than any other campus communications chief in the University of California system...

Lawrence steps into her role as the university tries to put a public relations nightmare behind it: the 2011 incident in which campus police officers used pepper spray against students during a protest largely focused on tuition hikes...

Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/05/5624083/ucd-pays-top-dollar-for-communications.html

Things are definitely getting expensive:

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/05/5624083/ucd-pays-top-dollar-for-communications.html#storylink=cpy

ObamaJam Possible Tuesday-Wednesday

From LAObserved yesterday:

There are a few more details now about President Obama's trip to the Los Angeles area on Tuesday to appear on the Jay Leno show. According to the White House schedule, Air Force One will arrive from Phoenix and land at LAX about 3:30 p.m. The president will be staying overnight...

On Wednesday the president is scheduled to fly to Camp Pendleton to visit with military families and deliver remarks to troops, then make an mid-afternoon departure from LAX.

Full story at http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2013/08/obamas_arrival_on_tuesday.php

Since the ground routes have not been announced, the impact on Westside traffic near UCLA is not known.

Rank Order or Rank Odor

From today's Sacramento Bee:

On the surface, it might seem self-serving for UC Davis School of Medicine to rip into the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings that rate it below the nation's elite primary care schools. One might suspect it was sour grapes by a medical school unhappy with its rankings.The school poured four years of research and almost $10,000 of its own grant funding into a stinging academic critique of the news magazine's ranking methodology."These findings raise questions regarding the ranking's validity and usefulness," said the paper, published this month in the journal Academic Medicine.

A primary problem, the paper said, is that the magazine essentially is conducting an opinion survey. This results in wild swings in a medical school's year-to-year standings...

The full story is at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/04/5622346/public-eye-uc-davis-study-challenges.html

The underlying study is at http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2013/08000/Short_Term_Stability_and_Spread_of_the_U_S__News__.26.aspx

And the song is at: