Regents Will Meet Nov. 13-15

November will be the last Regents meeting for Jerry Brown, if he attends.

The Regents will be meeting November 13-15 and the agenda is now posted.* It looks like a relatively tame meeting, i.e., no grand controversies on the agenda.

To the extent that there is an agenda item that could be especially important, it is to be taken up in a closed session of the Compliance and Audit Committee.** There is litigation which appears to go back to 2010 as to whether Lawrence Livermore employees have some entitlement to UC retiree health benefits. A byproduct of that litigation could be a court decision that retiree health care is an entitlement for all UC employees. The position of UC has been that retiree health care is a nice thing the Regents do, but not something they have to do. That is, unlike the pension plan, retiree health care is not a vested benefit. There will also be discussion - in open session of the Finance and Capital Strategies Committee - of the annual valuation of UC retiree health benefits (F14).*** That committee will also get a report on the status of UCPath (F12).
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*https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/meetings/agendas/nov18.html.
**https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/nov18/auditx.pdf. Requa is the Lawrence Livermore case.
***https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/nov18/fin.pdf.

Harvard Admissions - Part 12

‘Your Honor, I’m Drew Faust.’ Former Harvard President Testifies in Trial

By Alexandra A. Chaidez and Delano R. Franklin,
Harvard Crimson, 11-2-18

Former University President Drew G. Faust took the stand Thursday afternoon as the final witness in the Harvard admissions trial, spending most of her testimony defending initiatives she pursued during her 11 years in power to promote diversity across the University’s schools.

“I feel that my tenure has been committed in considerable part to expanding openness, access to Harvard,” Faust said. “There is no place for discrimination of any kind at Harvard.”

Though University President Lawrence S. Bacow now holds the school's top job, Faust — who stepped down in June 2018 after steering the University for over a decade — helmed Harvard through the 2014 filing of an unprecedented lawsuit that alleged the College discriminates against Asian Americans in its admissions process. Four years later, that suit — brought by anti-affirmative action advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions — is now being litigated in a high-stakes and high-profile trial that could shape the facte of race-conscious admissions in the United States.

Faust is among the most high-profile witness to take the stand in the trial, which has drawn national media attention and revealed long-kept secrets of Harvard's notoriously private admissions process.

After Faust introduced herself to the judge, Harvard lead trial lawyer William F. Lee ’72 questioned the former president for nearly an hour Thursday. He asked the former president about established Supreme Court precedent that supports the College's admissions policies. The Supreme Court has ruled on three prior affirmative action cases; each of those rulings — in the University of California v. Bakke, Grutter v. Bollinger, and Fisher v. the University of Texas — upheld the use of race in admissions.

Harvard, alongside other major American universities, submitted amicus briefs in those three cases meant to back affirmative action. Faust said in court that the Supreme Court precedents “underscored” the importance of diversity in education.

“There are a wide range of types of diversity that matter to us,” Faust said. “Racial diversity is important because race is an element of importance in our society.”

SFFA lawyer John M. Hughes later grilled Faust about Harvard's 1920s-era discrimination against Jewish applicants; at the time, then-University President Abbot Lawrence Lowell debuted a system of admission meant to limit the number of Jews attending the school. Faust objected to SFFA’s claim that the anti-Semitic behavior has any bearing on current policies, adding she would not “make an equation” between the two processes.

“It was not a proud chapter in Harvard’s history,” Faust said.

In her testimony, Faust also canvassed several programs she spearheaded to promote diversity at Harvard, particularly emphasizing her execution and expansion of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. The initiative, which launched in 2004, currently provides aid to roughly 60 percent of students at the College and covers the full cost of attendance for around 20 percent.

The Financial Aid Initiative was “an absolute essential act” in order to fulfill Harvard’s mission, Faust said.

She spoke about prioritizing the program throughout the 2008 recession, during which she said she increased — rather than cut — financial aid programs.

Faust also testified about increasing racial diversity at the College, noting that her tenure saw a marked increase in the number of Asian-American students and faculty in Cambridge. Faust said SFFA’s claims of discrimination against Asian Americans are “completely at odds to the history of Harvard in recent decades.”

As one of her final initiatives as president, Faust convened a University-wide task force on inclusion and belonging. That task force, which included students, faculty, and administrators, issued a report on efforts to promote diversity in spring 2018. She appointed John S. Wilson — the former president of Morehouse College and a former member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers — as a senior adviser and strategist meant to help the president implement the task force recommendations.

Friday marks the final day of the trial’s regular proceedings. Lawyers for Harvard and SFFA are slated to deliver closing statements.

Source: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/11/2/faust-testifies-in-admissions-trial/

Note: NPR estimates that the judge in this case will release her decision in early 2019:
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/02/660734399/harvard-discrimination-trial-is-ending-but-lawsuit-is-far-from-over

Can't Bear It

Note: The bear logo in question:

Sources: http://jewishjournal.com/news/nation/241116/national-sjp-use-logo-ucla-bruin-playing-kite-conference-logo/ and
http://jewishjournal.com/news/nation/241234/ucla-sends-cease-desist-letter-sjp-logo/

The 1% Glitch

Important Information: Temporary Changes in UCPath Employee Services Support

Dear Faculty and Staff,

As UCLA enters into the second month of stabilizing UCPath on our campus, we are truly grateful for the herculean efforts that have resulted in the new system successfully and accurately paying 99% of UCLA employees. This success is due in great part to the collective efforts of campus organizations and departments working collaboratively with the UCPath team to prepare for the transition.

While we acknowledge this milestone for UCLA, we too recognize that the transition to the UCPath Center has been challenging for some employees, who have experienced longer than normal wait times and a delay in resolving issues. As our campus enters Open Enrollment we expect the volume and frequency of UCLA employee interaction with the UCPath Center to increase substantially. In order to help the UCPath Center handle the volume and meet the needs of UCLA, the UCLA Central Resource Unit (CRU) and UCLA Business Transformation Office (BTO) will be working together to provide customer service support for Payroll-related questions and issues for UCLA employees.

Starting on Monday, November 5, 2018, please reference the matrix below for contact information:

During this transition, you should continue to access the UCPath Portal to manage your personal data, view your paycheck, access benefits information, enroll in benefits, and view vacation and sick leave balances.

UCLA is committed to ensuring that employees receive accurate, timely payments as well as excellent customer service. We apologize for any inconvenience this temporary transition may cause you, and appreciate your patience and understanding as we work collectively with the UCPath Center to ensure the needs of our campus are met.

Sincerely,

The UCLA UCPath Team

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Source: From an email sent to all employees.

Film Clips

Although the article below refers to "ripping" clips from films for use in documentaries, it provides some comfort for faculty - such as yours truly - who use such clips in class to illustrate particular points.

Copyright Office Broadens DMCA Exemption for Filmmakers

Ripping of protected videos will be allowed for all films, not just documentaries, if the clip has biographical or historic significance.

By Scott Graham | Oct. 31, 2018 | Law.com

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) exemptions aren’t just for documentary filmmakers anymore. The U.S. Copyright Office and Library of Congress last week broadened a DMCA exception to now allow more filmmakers to circumvent anti-copying technology and rip short video clips for purposes of commentary and criticism.

The DMCA criminalizes the hacking of copyrighted books, movies, video games and computer software. But every three years the Copyright Office updates a list of exemptions for legitimate non-infringing uses, such as “jailbreaking” an iPhone to add third-party software.

“This is huge for the independent film industry,” said Michael Donaldson, an attorney who argued for expanding the exemption before the Copyright Office, in a written statement. “The use of fair use material by narrative filmmakers has exponentially increased to the point where expanding the exemption to fiction films was absolutely necessary.”

Donaldson + Callif partner Chris Perez said Wednesday that the firm has been working on broadening the exemption since 2012. They were helped by a boom in dramatic films that use actors to tell a true story, such as the 2014 Cesar Chavez biopic. Many such films have been adding short, historical video clips to underscore the truth of the narrative.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Perez said. During previous attempts to expand the exemption, “we just didn’t have as many stories to tell the Copyright Office.”

Donaldson + Callif handles a range of transactions for filmmakers and production companies, including IP rights clearances. They teamed with professor Jack Lerner, director of the Intellectual Property, Arts and Technology Clinic at UC-Irvine, in their presentation to the Copyright Office.

The new rule shifts the emphasis from the type of film to the purpose of the clip. Only clips used for parody or their “biographical or historically significant nature” are entitled to the exemption. The exemption is premised on the fair use defense to copyright infringement.

Perez said limiting the exemption to documentaries was problematic in part because there’s no universally agreed-upon definition of what a documentary is. The new rule is “not perfect in our eyes,” he said, “but it covers a lot more filmmakers than it did before.”

Source: https://www.law.com/therecorder/2018/10/31/copyright-office-broadens-dmca-exemption-for-filmmakers/

Note: Any legal experts are invited to comment on the relevance to classroom/educational usage.

Harvard Admissions - Part 11

Harvard’s Star Witness Testified All Day. Here Are 4 Moments That Mattered.

By Eric Hoover Oct. 31, 2018, Chronicle of Higher Education

A key witness for Harvard University spent five hours testifying here in federal court on Wednesday. For most of that time, David Card appeared calm and composed while discussing numerous data points and explaining various charts. But by mid-afternoon, he seemed uncomfortable, shifting around in his chair. His seat, after all, was getting hotter.

In his second day of testimony, Card, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, described many findings from his statistical analyses of Harvard’s admissions process. Students for Fair Admissions, an organization that opposes affirmative action, has alleged that the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants.

Yet Card found no such thing. “The evidence,” he said, “does not support that claim.”

Seth P. Waxman, a lawyer representing Harvard, asked Card hundreds of questions. In answer after answer, the researcher rejected the findings of another economist whose conclusions underpin the plaintiff’s lawsuit against the university.

Card’s elaborate testimony, accompanied by colorful bar graphs and pie charts, just might represent Harvard’s best chance of winning this high-profile case. That’s why the soft-spoken economist has spent so much time on the witness stand — and why a lawyer for the plaintiff seemed intent on raining doubt upon him.

Here are four key moments from Wednesday’s testimony:

Card said his model better captures the reality of Harvard’s admissions process.

Elaborating on testimony he gave on Tuesday, Card challenged the findings of Peter S. Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University. Arcidiacono, a key witness for the plaintiff, found evidence of bias against Asian-American applicants in Harvard’s admissions process.

Card’s main objection to Arcidiacono’s model is that it omits recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a special list that includes children of donors. Excluding all those applicants, who are accepted at a relatively high rate, Card suggested, had skewed his counterpart’s results.

Moreover, Card said, Arcidiacono’s analysis fails to account for several contextual variables that admissions officers consider when evaluating applicants. Those include their parents’ occupations and intended majors.

“Harvard is thinking about trying to get a set of students who will have lots of diversity,” he said. “Having a large fraction of students who all, for example, intended to pursue a career in medicine would not accomplish that goal.”

Then there was the personal rating, one of the four ratings that admissions officers use to assess applicants. That rating, Card explained, is meant to capture evidence of integrity and leadership skills, among other factors. Such factors, he said, can go a long way toward explaining why some qualified applicants get in and others don’t.

Personal ratings, Card said, aren’t “a mechanism” of discrimination.

Card rejected what is perhaps Arcidiacono’s most significant claim: that Harvard’s admissions officers, by assigning relatively low personal ratings to Asian-American students, are expressing a bias against them.

Though Asian-American applicants have stronger academic and extracurricular ratings than white students do, Card found that white applicants have stronger ratings in the other two nonacademic measures (personal and athletic qualities) and are more likely to be “multidimensional,” with top ratings in three of the four categories.*

Why, Card asked, would admissions officers assign high ratings to Asian-American students in some categories but not others? “I find it extremely hard or impossible to reconcile [his] claim that the personal rating is the mechanism by which discrimination against Asian-Americans is operating,” he said. “Like there’s some kind of schizophrenia going on here.”

Race matters, Card said, but in a more nuanced way than the plaintiff has alleged.

Yes, an applicant’s race matters in Harvard’s admissions process, Card said. But race alone won’t punch his or her ticket to Cambridge, Mass. For that variable to come into play, he explained, an applicant must be highly competitive to begin with.

Three-quarters of Harvard’s applicants are, as Card put it, “out of the money,” with no chance of getting in. Those in the top percentiles, who are “on the bubble,” he explained, excel in multiple dimensions of merit that the university considers.

Add race and — boom — the odds will increase for some applicants. But only if they are highly qualified in various ways.

For the most-competitive black students in the top two deciles, Card said, race can increase their chances of acceptance by 50 percentage points. For Hispanic applicants, there’s a similar but smaller effect.

That testimony echoed what admissions officials often say: A given attribute — such as race or geographic location — doesn’t really come into play unless a student already possesses many other desirable qualities.

“Race, in isolation, has almost no contribution,” Card said, to an applicant’s chances of admission.

One notable aside: Card said that there is no “tip,” or advantage, for Asian-American applicants in his model.

Later, Card rejected Students for Fair Admissions’ claim that Harvard engages in racial balancing. He discussed one chart showing how the racial breakdown of admitted applicants at Harvard varied from year to year. One year, for instance, the number of Asian-Americans dropped 11 percent. A year later, they rose by 17 percent.

Another chart showed a similar pattern among students who matriculated.

If Harvard officials were trying to balance classes by race, Card said, “they’re not doing a very good job.”

Card got an earful of tough questions.

Adam K. Mortara, a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, wasted no time in challenging Card’s findings. As soon as the cross-examination began, the mood in the courtroom changed.

Mortara was clipped and assertive. He challenged the economist’s finding that race wasn’t a major factor in admissions decisions. He said that there were “inaccuracies” in his slides. He contended that Card had mislabeled charts.

A trial over the race-conscious admissions policy of Harvard University could have lasting implications for selective colleges. Here is detailed background on the case and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.

Some of Mortara’s questions seemed to fluster Card, who paused several times before answering his questions. Once, after the economist gave a somewhat long-winded answer, Mortara asked, “Are you done?”

That prompted Waxman, one of the Harvard lawyers, to stand up and object. “It’s one thing for counsel to be asking questions,” he said. “Snide remarks are another.”

Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court told Mortara that Arcidiacono, the plaintiff’s witness, had also given some longer answers to questions.

The tense moment served as a reminder: The stakes in this case are high, with both sides girding for a long legal battle that could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The plaintiff’s lawyers will continue to question Card on Thursday. And if the conclusion to Wednesday’s cross-examination is any indication, the gloves are most certainly off.

Source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Harvard-s-Star-Witness/244979
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*Note: The more you "accept" Harvard's procedures as valid, the less likely it is that you will find statistical symptoms of discrimination. Harvard's procedures ultimately lead to an overall rating which determines whether you get it. If you start from the rating, i.e., if you accept everything that went into that rating as unbiased, then there will be no discrimination. The more you depart from that assumption, the more likely it is that you will find some discrimination. In the Harvard case, the personality ratings have been an issue. If you accept the personality ratings as unbiased (and then it just so happens that Asians get lower personality ratings for some unbiased reasons), then you won't find discrimination.

Hard to Find

We reproduce below an article about UC investment returns that appear in a newsletter called "Chief Investment Officer." The info clearly comes from UC's Chief Investment Officer. But if it's on his webpage, it's sure hard to find.

Presumably, it will eventually show up at the upcoming Regents meeting.

University of California’s Pensions, Endowments Drive Asset Outperformance

10-31-18, Chief Investment Officer (newsletter)

An 8.1% total return sees the institution’s asset growth beat most benchmarks.

The University of California’s assets under management returned 8.1% in fiscal 2018, bringing its total value to $118.7 billion.

The institution’s main drivers for the fiscal year, which ended June 30, were its $12.3 billion endowment and $66.8 billion pension fund, which returned 8.9% and 7.8%, respectively.

The endowment beat its 8.5% benchmark in the period ended June 30, and has consistently outperformed, returning 6.5%, 8.8%, 5.6%, and 5.9% over the past three-, five-, 10-, and 20-year periods, respectively. However, it returned a little more than half of last year’s 15.1%, although the shortfall can be attributed to the stock market’s selloff in first quarter, which has been echoed in October.   

Its pension plan, while missing this year’s 8.4% benchmark by 0.6 percentage point, has still outperformed its benchmarks for the five-, 10-, and 20-year spans (it missed the three-year by just 0.1 point). It is also 90% funded. 

“Whether it’s a fund we’re investing in or a partner co-investment or even direct investing, we’re now finding more ways to earn returns while being ever-cognizant of the risks we’re taking,” said Jagdeep Bachher, the organization’s chief investment officer, who added that it conducted more private market transactions in the past year than ever.

All assets are encompassed into five separate divisions, including the endowment and pension pools—retirement savings, working capital (total-return investments and short-term investments), and captive insurance. The bulk is invested in public equity (51%), followed by fixed income (29%). Another 14% is invested in absolute return strategies, which is made up of private equity, real estate, and real assets. The remaining 6% is in cash.

A whopping 73.1% of the university’s assets are invested in the US.

The report did not mention whether the University of California surpassed its total benchmark, or what the aggregate benchmark currently is.

Bachher was unable to be reached for direct comment.

Source: https://www.ai-cio.com/news/university-californias-pensions-endowments-drive-asset-outperformance/