Stephen Verona: Rue de Buci (1979)
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Saturday, August 3, 2019
UC Appears to Differ from CSU in Title 9 Adjudication
The most extreme penalty in employee discipline cases is, of course, firing, which is analogous to student expulsion. Neither is a criminal penalty, but both can have a major lifetime effect on the accused. UC needs to do what CSU does and make the separation, to the extent it is not present. And there is also the issue of what is meant by "neutral" in practice. The decision maker should be as neutral as any union-sector arbitrator.
The details will matter. It's not clear from the description below whether or not the CSU "hearing officer" is truly independent and what his/her incentives are. Who is the final neutral decision-maker? How is he or she chosen? Etc. In the union-contract/employee-discipline case, the neutral is typically an outsider/professional whose fee is split 50-50 between the employer and the union.
Nonetheless, the principle of separation and true neutrality is important, if there is to be due process. The more there is departure from these concepts, the more trouble for the university there will be when cases get into external court settings. (We have made this observation in the past.)
Students accused of sexual harassment sue California universities
Teresa Watanabe, Aug. 3, 2019, LA Times
He was a University of California graduate student who said he dated another student twice — and was shocked when she accused him of stalking and sexual harassment in a Title IX complaint in 2017.
The UC system substantiated her allegations, he said, and suspended him for two years in June 2017, reducing the sanction to three months on appeal.
But the accused student is fighting back — not only for himself but for potentially hundreds of others, predominantly men, in similar straits.
This week, he filed a class-action lawsuit in Alameda County against the 10-campus UC system, arguing that the procedures used to find him and other students responsible for sexual misconduct are unfair and failed to provide them due process. A male Cal State Fullerton student filed a similar class-action lawsuit last month against the 23-campus California State University system.
“This class action seeks to clear the records of those who’ve been wrongfully punished by this deeply flawed disciplinary system,” said Mark Hathaway, a Los Angeles attorney representing the UC and Cal State Fullerton students, identified as John Does in court filings.
UC and Cal State officials say they believe their Title IX processes are fair, respectful to all parties and comply with state and federal law. Both systems recently issued new policies and procedures to strengthen due process protections for accused students, as courts have ordered and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed in new Title IX rules.
The lawsuits mark an emerging strategy by students accused of sexual misconduct to use class-action lawsuits to force universities to set aside, en masse, findings and sanctions that led to their suspension or expulsion. The nation’s first class action was filed July 5 against Michigan State University, followed by Cal State on July 16 and UC this week. The Cal State and UC lawsuits cover all students who were suspended or expelled since June 2015, when both systems issued new Title IX policies that sought to be more sensitive to victims.
Brett Sokolow, president of the Assn. of Title IX Administrators, called class action a “clever approach” that would make legal action accessible to potentially thousands of students unable to afford personal lawsuits. He said more than 300 students across the nation have filed lawsuits challenging their Title IX outcomes, but he estimated that as many as 20,000 students at the nation’s 4,500 colleges may have been disciplined for sexual misconduct.
UC and Cal State data on the number of students who have been suspended or expelled for sexual misconduct were not immediately available. Attorneys estimate that more than 500 UC students could potentially be affected, with even more at the larger Cal State system.
“If one case succeeds,” Sokolow said, “it opens the floodgates for others.”
The class-action strategy relies on recent appellate court rulings in California and Ohio that ordered universities to provide students the opportunity for cross-examination at hearings before a neutral adjudicator.
The California court, in a January ruling in a USC case, held that “fundamental fairness” required colleges and universities statewide to provide those due process protections to students who are subject to severe disciplinary sanctions in cases that turned on questions of credibility — he-said, she-said situations, for instance.
In the Cal State Fullerton case, the university notified John Doe that a female student had filed a sexual misconduct complaint against him about one month after their alleged encounter. He denied any misconduct.
The university investigated and substantiated the allegation, expelled him and denied his appeal in a June 2017 decision by the systemwide Title IX coordinator, the lawsuit said. The university said it complied with Cal State policy and state law in place at the time.
However, for the class-action lawsuits to proceed, the courts must first agree that the proposed class of students can be clearly defined, have suffered the same alleged injuries and share a common legal interest. Courts have yet to certify the class in any of the lawsuits, and a Cal State spokeswoman said university officials don’t believe they should.
“The CSU is still analyzing the lawsuit, but upon initial review, it does not appear that a class action is appropriate or legally justifiable,” said Toni Molle, Cal State spokeswoman. “Each Title IX case is distinctive with individualized facts and has unique interests for the individual parties.”
The UC system has not yet been served with the lawsuit and has no comment, spokeswoman Claire Doan said Friday.
Both Cal State and UC have recently issued new Title IX policies and procedures to comply with the appellate court ruling to allow cross-examination at hearings and end the practice of allowing a single investigator to interview witnesses, gather evidence and determine facts and findings about whether the allegations are true.
In response to the ruling, all students are now entitled to a hearing before a neutral decision maker on Title IX complaints.
[Editor's note: Who is the decision-maker? How chosen? What are the incentives?]
UC and Cal State handle the process slightly differently.
Under UC’s new policies issued this week, any student dissatisfied with preliminary determinations and proposed sanctions can request a hearing. Previously, hearings were in granted only in limited circumstances.
Cal State will provide hearings in all cases before determining whether sexual misconduct occurred. Previously, hearings were held only after sanctions had been proposed.
Both systems will offer videoconferencing or other means of physical or visual separation to reduce the potential for trauma at the hearing. They also will allow only indirect cross-examination through questions submitted by both sides to the hearing officer, who may choose not to ask any deemed irrelevant or harassing.
In addition, Cal State has curtailed the role of investigators so they only will gather testimony and evidence, but no longer decide if allegations are true. A hearing officer will make that decision.
UC investigators will offer preliminary determinations of whether sexual misconduct allegations are true, and student conduct officers will then propose sanctions if warranted. But the accused and accuser have the right to contest those proposed decisions and ask for a hearing.
Suzanne Taylor, UC’s systemwide Title IX coordinator, said a university working group consulted widely and took several months to carefully craft a revised model.
“We had to provide a process that was fair, that treats parties with respect and compassion and that results in just and reliable outcomes,” she said. “We also knew we had to minimize the burden on our students as well as the vulnerability of our decisions being overturned by the courts. We really have to hold the values of fairness and compassion equally close as we move forward, and that’s what we will do.”
Hathaway, the attorney representing the two students, said the revised policies still fall short. He said they continue to prevent accused students from presenting a “full defense” by barring, for instance, direct cross-examination by their representatives, as DeVos’ proposed rules would allow.
Taylor, however, said UC had no intention of allowing that practice at the moment.
“It really does create an adversarial process, and it would make our process much more like a criminal proceeding,” she said, “and so that’s something that we absolutely will not do unless we have to.”
She said that university disciplinary procedures are very different from criminal charges and trials, where consequences can be far more severe. It is not clear how many students report sexual misconduct allegations to police; Taylor said many choose not to because it can be an “arduous process” that may not result in a prosecutorial decision to file charges.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-02/california-universities-face-class-action-suits-by-students-accused-of-sexual-harassment
Bottom line: There are more questions than answers in what we see above. And there is always the gap between how things are supposed to work in theory and how they work in practice.
CRISPR Deceit?
The documents were filed as part of UC Berkeley's motions list, which represents the first step in proceedings initiated by the USPTO in June to settle priority issues between 10 patent applications filed by UC Berkeley in 2018 and 13 patents previously awarded to the Broad Institute.
The dispute originated in 2011 and 2012, when Jennifer A. Doudna of UC Berkeley and Emmanuelle M. Charpentier of Umeå University in Sweden were researching CRISPR-Cas9. Simultaneously, Feng Zhang ’04 of the Broad Institute was working on the same problem, albeit separately.
CRISPR is a gene-editing technology that scientists say has revolutionary potential applications in the biomedical sphere, including helping to cure genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis.
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| Patent Office: 1924 |
Most of CRISPR’s potential industrial and commercial applications concern its use in higher order, eukaryotic cells.
The documents filed Tuesday by UC Berkeley claim that — “in pattern of deception” — Zhang and other Broad scientists presented “cherry-picked data” and “materially misstated facts” in order to prove an earlier date of invention.
“Broad withheld or misrepresented material information with the intent to deceive the Office, in order to secure allowance of the involved patents,” the UC Berkeley lawyers stated in their list of intended motions.
The documents cited a 2015 email sent to Doudna from Shuailiang Lin, one of Zhang’s former lab members.
“My lab notebooks, emails and other files like dropbox or gel pictures recorded every step of the lab's failure process. I am willing to give more details and records if you are interested or whoever is interested to clear the truth,” Lin wrote, according to the document.
The Broad Institute wrote in a statement on its website that UC Berkeley’s claims are “baseless” and do not supplant the lack of “any actual evidence of UC’s work in eukaryotic cells.”
“The UC repeats its previous false claim around an email from a student with an expiring visa who emailed Dr. Doudna seeking a job and promising information. The student was hired by the UC system within days. The email was inaccurate and contrary to all records,” the statement read.
The Broad added that UC Berkeley’s choice of tactics was “deeply unfortunate.”
“It is time for all institutions to move beyond litigation and instead work together to ensure wide, open access to this transformative technology,” the statement concluded.
Both the Broad Institute and UC Berkeley have licensed CRISPR-related patents to for-profit companies. After the patent office’s 2017 decision, Editas — the Broad Institute’s commercial surrogate and primary licensee of CRISPR — went up in value from $765 million to $1 billion, according to Forbes. A patent for CRISPR-Cas9 is valued at approximately $265 million.
This round of litigation will continue in a conference call between the two parties on August 5, according to legal documents.
Source: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/8/2/ucb-files-crispr-motion/
Friday, August 2, 2019
Who knew, and when?
Jason Maikis, 8-1-19, Daily Bruin
A former track coach who allegedly trained multiple UCLA students at Drake Stadium was accused of sexually abusing 41 men since 1975, ESPN reported Thursday.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported that Conrad Mainwaring, a former Olympian and track and field trainer, has been accused of inappropriate sexual contact with many of his trainees. Mainwaring was arrested June 19 on one count of sexual battery by fraud, but plead not guilty and was released on bail. If found guilty, Mainwaring could serve up to four years in prison.
Although Mainwaring wasn’t employed by UCLA, he began to train athletes at UCLA’s Drake Stadium beginning in the mid-1990s. Fourteen men, who trained at Drake Stadium, have come forward to Outside the Lines with stories of abuse, with the most recent coming in 2016.
Former UCLA track and field runner David O’Boyle, an accuser of Mainwaring, and several others wrote complaints to UCLA’s athletic department that resulted in Mainwaring getting banned in 2016 from campus and from working with UCLA student-athletes, according to Outside the Lines’ investigation.
This came after O’Boyle confronted Mainwaring while he was training an anonymous UCLA student on a morning of June 2016. After the confrontation, O’Boyle brought the allegations to the UCPD, which allegedly spoke with Mainwaring but did not file charges, according to Outside the Lines.
Despite the accusations, UCLA’s athletic department said it had no knowledge of any UCLA student-athletes who trained with Mainwaring during their time on the track and field team.
The alleged abuse started in the 1970s in England – where Mainwaring was raised – and continued in the United States, Outside the Lines reported. Mainwaring was a counselor at Camp Greylock, a boys’ sports camp in Massachusetts, where he allegedly abused seven men.
When Mainwaring was a graduate student at Syracuse University in the 1980s, he trained their track athletes as well as some athletes from the local Nottingham High School. Thursday’s Outside the Lines report said seven former athletes from Syracuse and seven from Nottingham have come forward with stories of abuse.
Mainwaring was hired by the California Institute of Technology in 1987 but was fired less than a year later after “an internal investigation related to a student complaint,” according to a spokesperson from the school who shared a statement with Outside the Lines. Mainwaring allegedly abused three men while employed there, according to Outside the Lines.
Mainwaring was originally a track and field athlete for Antigua, competing in the 400- and 110-meter hurdles at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics.
He most notably coached Felix Sanchez, two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 400-meter hurdles. Sanchez has not come forward with any allegations.
Source: http://dailybruin.com/2019/08/01/former-track-coach-who-trained-at-drake-stadium-accused-of-sexual-abuse-by-41-men/
In case you are wondering, here are the CA tuition numbers
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[a] Reflects tuition for juris doctor program.
[b] The Board of Regents increased professional degree supplemental tuition at 59 programs across the UC system, with increases ranging from 2 percent to 9 percent over 2018-19 levels. The board did not adjust supplemental tuition for 10 professional degree programs. In addition to these adjustments, the board adopted a new supplemental charge ($8,000) for an educational leadership doctorate at UC Berkeley.
[c] At the time of budget enactment, UC and CSU campuses had not yet reported all fees in 2019-20. This table assumes the average campus fee increases by 5 percent in 2019-20 for both segments. UC amounts reflect average charge for undergraduate students, with graduate students charged less. CSU amounts reflect the average charge for undergraduate and graduate students combined.
[d] Includes postbaccalaureate programs other than teacher credential programs.
[e] Reflects maximum charges for five campus service fees authorized by state law. Not all CCC campuses charge the maximum amount.
Telescope - The View from Afar - Part 6
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Timothy Hurley, 8-2-19 via UC Daily News Clips
Thirty Meter Telescope supporters Thursday rallied at the state Capitol for the second week in a row, and like last week, they were greeted by a sizable group of TMT opponents. In a smaller replay of last week’s event, about 70 supporters lined Beretania Street on the Capitol side, while some 50 anti-TMT activists lined the mauka side. For more than an hour, drivers honked their support for sign-carrying and flag-waving demonstrators on both sides of the street as police looked on. Last week about 200 lined each side of Beretania without incident.
“The number of people here today is awesome since we thought of rallying only four days ago. So I think it’s great that supporters will come out after a big turnout last week,” said organizer Malia Martin with Imua TMT. “We’re out here telling our story. We’re not doing the numbers counting,” co-organizer Samuel Wilder King II said.
King and Martin, both Native Hawaiians, said lots of people remain intimidated and reluctant to publicly show their support for the next-generation telescope project.
“You got to bring more people out to speak publicly about it, and that’s the next steps: talking to people, getting them more comfortable with it,” King said.
On the mountain, meanwhile, anti-TMT activists canceled their regular midday media briefing Thursday, saying they were focused on storm preparations as Tropical Storms Erick and Flossie approach the islands. However, music, chants and offerings continued as usual during the noontime protocol on the closed Mauna Kea Access Road, where a crowd of about 350 people gathered to watch, chant and pray.
A 20-foot shipping container was deposited at the puuhonua site at Puu Huluhulu, and crews began loading items into it shortly after noon. The protesters have set up tents to shelter a warehouse operation, a kitchen, a day care center and other facilities, but it was unclear Thursday whether organizers planned to pull down each of those tents. The Central Pacific Hurricane Center has issued a high-wind advisory for Hawaii County as well as a flash flood watch as Hurricane Erick passes south of the island.
In Honolulu, on the kiai, or “protector,” side of Beretania Street, Lehua and Kealaula Cockett of Honolulu stood at the curb holding anti-TMT signs with their two sons and daughter. Lehua Cockett said she and her husband hadn’t gotten a chance to go to the mountain yet.
“We’re doing our part,” she said. “It’s desecration. It’s disrespectful. It hurts.”
Anti-TMT leader Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu said that, like last week, many of her followers felt compelled to respond to the pro-TMT demonstration, and she was there primarily to enforce the nonviolent “kapu aloha” protocol.
“We have seen how (the TMT) has galvanized our people, and emotions are running very, very high,” she said. “We’ve seen people come out for our marches and rallies in the past, but this is different.”
Thursday, August 1, 2019
For now, the Runaway Train on retiree healthcare has been put on a siding - Part 3
But here is an odd footnote. For insurance that UC carries other than retiree health, the powers-that-be seem to love self-insuring via the creation of "captive" insurance entities:
The University of California (UC) will launch its fifth captive, Sequoia IC, within the next 60-90 days, subject to regulatory approval.
“The University is committed to utilizing its captive insurance platform to more efficiently finance the myriad risks for the University, as well as to provide new and efficient insurance offerings to our faculty, staff, students and employees,” a spokesperson for the University said. “Sequoia, IC will provide UC with the appropriate insurance company structure.”
UC generates innumerable risks from its ten research Universities, five academic medical centers and three affiliated national laboratories, UC said, and uses a captive insurance company platform to manage these risks.
Fiat Lux Risk and Insurance Company was formed in 2012, financing UC’s retained risk layers, purchasing reinsurance directly, filling gaps in insurance coverages and participating with reinsurance underwriters.
But as a not-for-profit insurance company Fiat Lux has a limited ability to write third party insurance contracts. It therefore created Eureka Insurance Company, Eureka One Insurance Company and UC Health RRG, a reciprocal risk retention group, to ensure adequate coverage for students, faculty, physicians, staff, alumni and UC affiliates.
Source: https://www.captiveinternational.com/news/university-of-california-to-launch-fifth-captive-2938
Go figure.
Inside joke for health insurance mavens: Is this captivation over capitation?
Inside joke for health insurance mavens: Is this captivation over capitation?
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