More on UCLA Measles

From the Bruin: 

UCLA dodged a bullet – or a plague, to be more precise. The university was rocked by news of a measles case last week after a student infected with the disease attended classes in Franz and Boelter halls April 2, 4 and 9. And 11 days, at least 46 quarantines and countless worried phone calls later, it seems like the university has gotten by without too much issue.

But it can’t be stated enough how bad this could have been. A disease as contagious as measles could tear through a school like UCLA, with the largest undergraduate student body packed onto the second-smallest campus in the University of California system.

This issue could have been avoided with stricter vaccination requirements. It seems the UC knew this, but didn’t act fast or go far enough. The University agreed to impose a policy in 2015 requiring two doses of vaccinations or a blood test proving immunity to the disease, but only started enforcing it in 2018, according to the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately, this policy only applies to incoming students and not students who enrolled prior to this school year.

By delaying stricter vaccination requirements, the UC has indirectly endangered students who can’t be vaccinated. By not enacting this policy earlier, the University has allowed three classes of students to slip through the cracks and placed them at a greater risk of infection.

All students from these classes who can be vaccinated should now be required to in order to reduce the risk of infection and spread of measles in the future.

Delaying vaccination requirements is a risk we can’t afford for a disease as serious as measles, said Deborah Lehman, a professor in pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases...

Full op ed at http://dailybruin.com/2019/05/02/uclas-lax-vaccination-requirements-put-students-at-risk-for-future-diseases/

An April Shower

April is a big month for state tax collections for obvious reasons. In prior months, revenue had been somewhat below budget projections, but April went above projections, more or less washing out the prior deficiency. The Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) attributes this pattern to the change in federal tax law that affected the timing of payments to the state. For more information, see:
https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/360

Note that the governor's May Revise is due this month and is likely to reflect the news that, except for timing, things are on track.

Missing Info - Part 2

We noted yesterday that there were reports of a big event on campus involving Michelle Obama with little info on what the impact might be on traffic, etc. If you were on campus, you would have seen a lot of yellow school buses and high school age students.

Here is what occurred:

Michelle Obama, celebrities in tow, brings words of inspiration to students at UCLA

LA Times, Teresa Watanabe, 5-1-19

Former First Lady Michelle Obama, who was told by her high school counselor that she wasn’t Ivy League material, but went on to Princeton and Harvard anyway, urged thousands of students to follow her lead on Wednesday during a high-energy appearance at UCLA. It marked the first time that Obama chose to celebrate College Signing Day on the West Coast. She started the event in 2014 to encourage teenagers to pursue higher education, career training or military service after high school. A major focus is on students who are low-income and the first in their families to attend college. The roar and cheers were deafening as she stepped on stage at Pauley Pavilion.

“Helloooo Los Angeles!” Obama said after being introduced by late night TV host Conan O’Brien. “We are here today for all of you. I want you all to know you personally are about to make the best investment that you can possibly make.”

Wearing a Compton College T-shirt to point out the importance of community colleges, she congratulated the 10,000 students in attendance for overcoming myriad hurdles. She warned that other people would try to bring them down, as her high school counselor had tried to do.

“In those times — because they will come up — you have to ask yourselves whether you’re gonna believe the haters or whether you’re gonna believe the own truth of your story,” she said. Bouncing back from failure, she added, is the mark of a true champion. "You do not do this alone,” Obama said.

Participation in Obama’s annual May 1 College Signing Day has grown from a few dozen schools to more than 3,000 campuses in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, said Eric Waldo, executive director of Reach Higher. Last year, the event inspired 1.24 billion social media posts tagged #collegesigningday in just 24 hours. The University of California — where four of 10 undergraduates are first-generation college students — contacted Reach Higher about a year ago to host the event, Waldo said. All nine undergraduate campuses celebrated, the first systemwide effort to do so, said Carolyn McMillan, UC editorial director. Campuses invited about 6,000 high school and community college students to visit and host rallies, hip-hop performances, inspirational speakers, college resource fairs and free swag.

Reach Higher selected UCLA for the main event, in part, because the campus is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Waldo said. On Wednesday, nearly 50 celebrities took the stage to talk up college, including John Legend, Usher, Pentatonix and Bebe Rexha. LaLa Anthony and Lil Rel Howery served as emcees. Students, wearing T-shirts lettered with their colleges of choice, mugged for pictures against a College Signing Day backdrop. One friend group held up signs of their future colleges: Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, University of Chicago and UC Berkeley. UCLA volunteers — and Bruins mascots Joe and Josie — handed out UC banners and goodie bags stuffed with water bottles, T-shirts and snacks. Some students traveled for hours to get there.

Victoria Soldana Sanchez came to UCLA from the Central Valley with about 60 other seniors from Dinuba High School. She will attend UC Davis, where she hopes to major in biology and possibly become an ophthalmologist or optometrist – an interest sparked by her own astigmatism and vision problems. She said her greatest inspiration has been her mother, an agricultural worker who picks seasonal crops — grapes, oranges, strawberries — although she went to secretarial school in her native Mexico.

Kayla Perez, an El Rancho High School senior who plans to attend UCLA, managed to earn a 4.2 GPA while working three jobs, serving as captain of her school’s Academic Decathlon team and being editor of her school newspaper. She said seeing Obama affirmed her own journey from high school to college.

“I feel as if all the hard work that I put towards my academics and activities is finally paying off,” Perez said.

Rising tuition and student debt loads have prompted some students to wonder if college is worth it. But three-quarters of all jobs in the 21st century will require education or training beyond high school, according to Reach Higher. And research has shown that college graduates earn more — as much as $1 million more over a lifetime — vote more and contribute more to charity than their less educated peers, said Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, UCLA vice chancellor of enrollment management.

“A college education is not only a benefit to the individual, it’s also a benefit to society,” she said.

In her best-selling memoir, “Becoming,” Obama shared her own educational journey growing up in the south side of Chicago. Ambitious and bright from childhood, she skipped second grade. She tested into Chicago’s first magnet high school, Whitney Young, and woke up at 5 a.m. for a 90-minute commute on two city buses to get there in time. She got good grades, loved writing, built confidence and graduated in the top 10% of her class. When her high school counselor told her she wasn’t right for Princeton, Obama fumed and then vowed: I’ll show you.

But attending the Ivy League university with mostly white men, many of them well-off, was startling, she wrote. She and other minorities became aware of their disadvantages for the first time — no SAT tutoring, for instance, or college-caliber teaching in high school. She had never seen a syllabus and suffered from impostor syndrome. Ultimately, though, Obama held her own, graduated cum laude in sociology and went on to Harvard Law School.

Obama’s passion for education and personal understanding of the barriers faced in many underserved communities prompted her to launch Reach Higher to inspire all students to pursue education or career training beyond high school.

“She’s the school counselor-in-chief,” Waldo said.

On Wednesday, five students headed for universities, community colleges and the military joined Obama on stage and shared their dreams with the crowd — to save lives as a paramedic, to protect the country as a U.S. Marine, to inform and empower communities as a journalist, to help underserved students as an educator.

Sage Bennett, a senior at Antioch High School, jumped to his feet, let out a whoop and teared up when Obama appeared. Bennett, who is African American and gay, survived poverty, homelessness and bullying to excel in school with a 4.1 GPA. He will attend UC Berkeley this fall, receiving a full ride as a Berkeley Regents’ Scholar.

 “Michelle Obama has been the person who showed me I can do this — that no matter where you come from, you can always alter where you’re going,” he said.

Source: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-michelle-obama-ucla-college-signing-day-20190501-story.html

Closed Door - Part 2

There is another closed-door meeting of the Regents coming up on Friday. This time, it is the Special Committee on Nominations. It appears to be a telephone or teleconference meeting:

S1(X) Action Recommendations for Election of Officers and Appointments to Standing Committees and Subcommittees for 2019-20

Source: https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may19/nominations.pdf

The Regents' website has the following obituary:

With deep sadness, we announce the death of Regent Ellen Tauscher

Esteemed Regent, colleague, and friend Ellen Tauscher passed away on Monday, April 29. Regent Tauscher was appointed to the Board by Governor Brown in 2017 and served as the Chair of the Regents' National Laboratories Subcommittee and the Vice Chair of the Regents’ Academic & Student Affairs Committee. She was a calm force on the Board and brilliantly helped to guide the University with genuine dedication, knowledge and fierce grace. Regent Tauscher will be dearly missed by us all. 

Her official bio is at https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/members-and-advisors/bios/ellen-tauscher.html

The vacancy will give Gov. Newsom his first opportunity to nominate a regent.

Confucius

3 More Universities Close Confucius Institutes

May 1, 2019, Inside Higher Ed

Three more universities are closing their Confucius Institutes, bringing the total number of universities that have announced closures of the Chinese government-funded centers for language education over the past 15 months to at least 15.

San Francisco State University, the University of Oregon and Western Kentucky University all announced within the last two weeks that they would close their Confucius Institutes after the Department of Defense declined their requests for waivers that would allow them to continue to operate both a Confucius Institute and a Defense Department-funded Chinese Language Flagship program. The National Defense Authorization Act signed into law last August prohibits universities that host Confucius Institutes from receiving Defense Department funding for Chinese language study. The Pentagon declined all requests it received for waivers to that prohibition, according to Newsweek.

Oregon said in a statement that closing the Confucius Institute was necessary in order to protect the Chinese Language Flagship program, which has received nearly $3.8 million in grants from the Defense Department since the 2016-17 academic year. According to Oregon, the Defense Department has withheld $343,000 in funding for Oregon students to study or intern in China pending the Confucius Institute’s closure.

Three other universities that also operated both Confucius Institutes and DOD-funded Chinese Language Flagship programs -- Indiana University and the Universities of Minnesota and Rhode Island -- have already announced closures of their institutes. Two other universities in this situation, Arizona State University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, both confirmed their requests for waivers were denied. Hawaii declined to comment further, while Arizona State said that the university is "in the process of exploring options that would allow the Confucius Institute to continue to serve Arizona’s K-12 community."

At their peak, close to 100 American universities hosted Confucius Institutes, which typically offer Chinese language classes, cultural programs, and outreach to K-12 schools.  An increasing number of colleges have closed the institutes as they have come under scrutiny from lawmakers who view them as platforms for Chinese government propaganda.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/05/01/3-more-universities-close-confucius-institutes

Missing Info

Yours truly has been unable to find out exactly when and where the event described below and slated to occur today will take place, and what effect it might have on traffic, parking, etc., on campus. So be aware.

Former first lady Michelle Obama will visit UCLA Wednesday, joined by an array of celebrities, to celebrate 10,000 high school seniors and transfer students who have committed to pursue higher education.

The celebration of College Signing Day is part of Obama’s Reach Higher campaign, which she started in the White House in 2014 as an effort to encourage students to pursue higher education, “whether at a professional training program, a community college or a four-year college or university.”...

Full story at https://mynewsla.com/education/2019/05/01/michelle-obama-to-visit-ucla-to-celebrate-college-signing-day/

UPDATE: This source says the event starts at 11 am. It doesn't say where:
http://mms.tveyes.com/PlaybackPortal.aspx?SavedEditID=c33fb462-47db-40e0-9879-94ff2facfb99

Not Alone - Part 3

We somehow missed this announcement (below) from last month, which indirectly pertains to the Elsevier matter:

Post-Elsevier breakup, new publishing agreement ‘a win for everyone’

By Gretchen Kell, UC Berkeley, April 11, 2019

Six weeks after ending negotiations with academic publishing giant Elsevier, the University of California announced April 10 that it’s entered into its first open access agreement with a major publisher — Cambridge University Press. The agreement maintains UC’s full access to all scholarly journal articles published by Cambridge University Press and also provides open access publishing in those journals to authors on all 10 UC campuses.

“The publisher gets the same amount of money, we get the access our scholars need and everyone in the world gets to read the scientific discoveries our scholars produce. This is a win for everyone,” says UC Berkeley University Librarian and professor Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, who is co-chair of the UC team that negotiated with Elsevier.

The UC had been trying to negotiate a new subscription deal with Elsevier since Dec. 31, when its five-year license ended. But Elsevier was unwilling to provide UC’s biggest ask: universal open access publishing, so that the UC system’s research could be freely available to all.

The UC-Cambridge University Press deal also is one of the first and largest transformative open access publishing agreements in the United States to date.

“This agreement with Cambridge shows that our model for transforming subscription agreements into open access publishing agreements is sensible and feasible,” says MacKie-Mason. “Cambridge agreed to essentially the same proposal that we offered Elsevier. We hope that Elsevier is paying attention to the increasing number of similar agreements that other publishers are signing in North America and in Europe and will come back to the table with an offer that is as future-facing as the Cambridge agreement.”

In the past two years, Cambridge University Press has reached open access deals in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany.

“We are delighted to partner with Cambridge in helping to move the publishing industry into the 21st century, delivering scientific scholarship to everyone, anywhere, without a paywall,” adds MacKie-Mason. “We are continuing our negotiations with several other publishers and hope to have more successes to announce in the coming months.”

Source: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/post-elsevier-breakup-new-publishing-agreement-win-everyone