Follow up on UCLA branding campaign

At least there's a nice shot of the soon-to-be demolished 6th Street Bridge in the accompanying video. (See below.)

Yesterday we posted an "optimistic" billboard from UCLA which is supposed to... what? ...promote donations?  There is an explanation on the UCLA newsroom website:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/we-dare-new-ucla-brand-campaign-celebrates-optimists-everywhere

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We dare: New UCLA brand campaign celebrates optimists everywhere

UCLA has launched “We, the Optimists,” a new iteration of the university’s highly successful, [Editorial note: Successful how?  It produced what result at what cost?] national Optimists brand campaign. [Editorial note: Did you know we had such a campaign?  If your answer is "no" and you are affiliated with UCLA, how many non-affiliated people could have been aware of it?] The marketing effort spotlights UCLA’s role as an engine of opportunity and progress, propelling action and change in Los Angeles and around the world.

The Optimists campaign, which launched in 2012, [Editorial note: If you answered "no" to our previous question, consider that the campaign has been going on for 2 years without your awareness.] initially focused on the accomplishments of UCLA icons who were trailblazers in their fields, from Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche to John Wooden and Francis Ford Coppola. [Editorial note: No women? Tsk. Tsk.] It has highlighted the institution’s world-class breadth and depth and the diversity of UCLA’s campus community, which mirrors the dynamic, multicultural metropolis of Los Angeles. The new iteration of the brand campaign will run for one year and is centered on the present, telling compelling stories of people and programs from downtown Los Angeles to Southeast Asia to the far reaches of the solar system.

Our latest alumni association member?

The new effort celebrates the transformative power of optimism, which in the context of the campaign means a relentless drive to excel, a refusal to accept the status quo and the belief that anything is possible.

Careful! Norman's heirs may sue us for copyright infringement

Leveraging UCLA’s role as a public university serving its community, We, the Optimists looks beyond the campus’s borders and invites people who are driven to live a life that matters to come together as a community of optimists.

What it's all about.

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We can't end this posting without the video which we'll preserve here in case someone, someday takes the YouTube version down:

We know this is extremely clever...

and we're sure glad it didn't cost anything to create it.  Oh?  It did!

The More Things Change...

Dorothy Dehner (1901-1904)

A story appeared today in Inside Higher Ed about a decision by the University of Oregon to cancel an art class featuring nude models.  The Inside Higher Ed story was based on a local newspaper account:  [excerpt]

The University of Oregon’s mascot, the Duck himself, might walk around half-naked, but there will be no more free weekly figure drawing classes open to the public involving nude models at the UO after this Saturday’s session. A lack of funding and concerns about safety for the nude models are behind the decision, according to a letter provided Tuesday by the UO’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts, written by acting dean Brook Muller to participants of the long-running weekly drawing sessions...

But several people who have long been involved with what is known as the Saturday Figure Drawing Group, which has run in its current configuration since the mid-1990s, say they are unaware of any such problems.  “Figure drawing is a very mild activity,” said Will Mitchell, a local artist and the group’s volunteer coordinator for the past year. “Kind of slow and quiet. So I haven’t yet found out what the safety concerns are.”  Mitchell said he was told in a meeting last week with art department head Carla Bengtson that the group was being canceled and the last session would be Saturday.  Mitchell said Bengtson expressed concerns about liability, and that the general public might regard nude models as being “exhibitionist” or that artists at the sessions might behave inappropriately...

Full story at http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/32199924-75/uo-to-discontinue-weekend-figure-drawing-class-with-nude-models.html

Inside Higher Ed version at https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/09/26/u-oregon-ends-community-art-class-nudes

I point to that controversy at Oregon because a similar event occurred at UCLA back in the 1920s when UCLA was located at its Vermont Avenue campus.  The noted artist and sculptor, Dorothy Dehner (shown above; also http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/bios/dehner-bio.htm) was a friend of my mother and related the event.  In the early 1920s, Dehner lived in Pasadena and attended UCLA, traveling by car.  She told me that there was a fuss at the time about an art class at the university over the use of naked models.  Whether the class was able to continue, I do not know.  Of course, our friends up north in Oregon are not living in the 1920s.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Risky Business?

In an earlier posting, we noted UCLA was on the verge of presenting its new technology enterprise to the news media.  Here is the LA Times' version:

UCLA on Wednesday launched a new, not-for-profit affiliate and advisory board that will seek to increase the number of patents stemming from faculty research, then get the inventions and discoveries into the commercial realm faster.

Westwood Technology Transfer will help oversee the campus’ existing office for intellectual properties and industry-sponsored research. Its 10-member board of directors of financial, managerial, technological and academic experts will help identify promising research and forge licensing agreements, officials said.

“The goal is to accelerate and improve the decision-making and to accelerate the discoveries emerging from our labs and classrooms for social benefit,” said UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor Brendan Rauw, who is president and chief executive of the new oversight organization. “We think we can make smarter decisions and help contribute to the campus that way.”

UCLA holds about 700 patents. Last year the university earned about $39 million in licensing income, shared with the inventors, from those copyrights, Rauw said...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-ln-ucla-inventions-20140924-story.html

This new entity seems linked to UC's creation of a venture capital business, a program that entails risk.  If you are in the business of picking winners, you can make mistakes.  The UCLA version is being described as mainly an improved marketing effort, but it is not clear whether any UCLA money is at risk.  If you go on the UCLA newsroom site, you don't (as of 3 pm today) find any background information.  Presumably, some info was provided to the LA Times.  It's funny that no media release dated yesterday (Wednesday) appears on the website.  Yours truly tried searching the newsroom under such terms as "Westwood," "innovation," "patents," etc., with no success.

UC History: Addendum

In response to the posting yesterday about South Africa divestment in 1986, Michael Meranze sent me his recollections of the period including the significance of the upcoming gubernatorial race.  In 1986, there was a rematch of LA Mayor Tom Bradley vs. incumbent George Deukmejian.  In the earlier 1982 contest, Bradley lost narrowly.  He lost more handily in 1986 because Deukmejian was able to run on having dealt successfully with the budget crisis he inherited from Jerry Brown.  (As it turned out later, Deukmejian left a similar budget crisis to his successor, Pete Wilson, after the 1990 election.)  The South Africa divestment became a non-issue as a result of the 1986 action.

The regents had good reason to want to get along with Deukmejian as he was sympathetic to UC and pushed up faculty pay.  See:

UC History: South Africa and Willie Brown

As blog readers will know, the Regents effectively chose not to divest from fossil fuel at their last meeting.  As part of the divestment call, however, there have been frequent references to South African divestment in the 1980s.  You might be interested in the account below on how that divestment came about, from James Richardson's intriguing biography of Willie Brown, former speaker of the California state assembly.  If it's any reassurance, the account agrees with the recollections of yours truly.  Keep in mind in reading the account that both Willie Brown and then-governor George Deukmejian were ex officio regents.  Also keep in mind the need of Gov. Deukmejian to maintain reasonable relations with Willie Brown in order to enact legislation:  (from pp. 311-312)

The partnership with George Deukmejian yielded one enormous, personally gratifying payoff for Willie Brown: after years of opposition, Deukmejian agreed to support withdrawing Californias $11.4 million pension fund portfolio from investments in companies conducting business in racially divided South Africa.  Getting Deukmejian to that position took Deukmejian's entire first term, and ranked as one of Brown's chief accomplishments as Assembly Speaker.

At first, Deukmejian was flatly against the South Africa boycott.  When Maxine Waters succeeded in putting a South Africa boycott bill on Deukmejian's desk in 1985, he vetoed it.

After the veto, the battleground over investments in South Africa switched to the University of California, which had $2.4 billion of its $6.4 billion portfolio invested in companies with ties to South Africa.  The stodgy Board of Regents, led by UC President David Gardner, was reluctant to withdraw the investments, fearful it would endanger the university's financial health.  The board and Gardner came under intense pressure from legislators and protesters.  Then Willie Brown entered the fray.  When the university's imperious president came to testify at a May 1985 legislative hearing, he was interrogated by the Assembly Speaker for nearly and hour.

"Now, Dr. Gardner," Brown began, "we are very concerned with the university's attitude.  Specifically, I want one scintilla of evidence that the atrocities of the South African regime present a problem to you personally, not as president of the University, but as a human being."

Gardner replied that, as a Mormon, he was familiar with discrimination.  He told how his grandfather was driven to Utah by religious bigots.  But Gardner maintained that the university could not take moral stands.

"I abhor oppression," said Gardner, "but I don't choose to advertise it."  Brown found the answer unsatisfactory.

"You can end discrimination against you by changing your religion.  Blacks in South Africa cannot," Brown shot back. "Willie Brown cannot change his skin as he could his religion.  There are no Utahs for Bishop Tutu."

Brown also went to work convincing Deukmejian that it was morally imperative for California to keep its money from supporting apartheid.  Brown appealed to Deukmejian's Armenian heritage and the oppression suffered by his relatives at the hands of the Turks.  Brown used one more argument: it was good politics.  The city of Los Angeles had enacted a South African investment boycott ordinance, and Mayor Bradley was preparing to bludgeon Deukmejian with it in their 1986 rematch.  Brown told Deukmejian that he did not have to take the chance.

Finally Deukmejian became a convert.  He began throwing his weight behind the push to pull the University of California's investments out of South Africa.  The governor even offered to lobby Congress and President Reagan who had vetoed a boycott bill.  The showdown came at a Regents meeting at UC Santa Cruz in July 1986.  Faced with a united front from Deukmejian and Brown, the board voted to become the first major institutional investor in California to join the South African boycott...

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You can draw what lessons you like from this account.  But it does appear that the action of the Board of Regents in 1986 was not some sudden regental conversion to the cause; rather it was the product of a political deal between two ex officio regents who were taking a position the other regents could not decline to endorse.  It might be noted, because of some recent demands for anti-Israel divestment and academic boycott, that the 1986 regents/Willie Brown-George Deukmejian action was confined to investments and did not seek to impose an academic boycott of South Africans, South African academics, or South African universities.  At the time, you had South African researchers such as Dr. Christiaan Barnard, a pioneer in heart transplants, whose work medical academics couldn't easily ignore.  Poking around the UCLA library catalog, I find journals from South Africa from that era.  Indeed, in Sept. 1986, the library - shortly after the financial boycott decision - began a subscription to the South African Journal of Economic History.  Yours truly can recall South African visitors to UCLA in the apartheid period who arrived after the financial action.  I doubt the regents - even if asked by Brown and Deukmejian (which never happened) - would have gone along with an academic boycott.

Announcement coming

UCLA is set to announce a not-for-profit company to guide startups spawned from university-sponsored research to help commercialize their tech for the marketplace.
A spokesman for UCLA’s Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Sponsored Research said the company will help optimize discoveries and inventions created on campus. UCLA, a top-ranked university in research funding, produced 17 startups and 95 U.S. patents last year...

 The UCLA announcement is expected to be made Wednesday morning.

Full story at http://www.labusinessjournal.com/news/2014/sep/23/ucla-announce-tech-transfer-company/