The bill - The College Athlete Protection Act - was amended this past Thursday and survived a critical hurdle, passing in the Appropriations Committee. It now goes to the full assembly and would have to pass by June 2 to move to the state senate.
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/01/redividing-athletic-revenue-pie.html; https://fastdemocracy.com/bill-search/ca/2023-2024/bills/CAB00028290/.
From Higher Ed Dive:
A former University of Toronto psychology professor sued the University of California system Thursday over its use of diversity statements in its hiring process. These statements typically detail job applicants’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, and how they have furthered these ideals in their careers. But the ex-professor, J.D. Haltigan, in court documents alleged they are “loyalty oaths,” likening them to the ones that proliferated during the Cold War.
A UC spokesperson declined to comment Thursday, saying the system has not yet been served with the lawsuit.
Dive Insight:
Conservatives lawmakers across the U.S. have taken aim at a range of colleges’ DEI efforts, with some going so far as to ban them altogether. These legislative campaigns have targeted diversity statements. But other groups have snubbed them, too. The Idaho State Board of Education recently banned four-year public colleges from using DEI statements in hiring. And last year, an academic freedom group representing hundreds of current and former faculty members publicly urged colleges to drop the statements.
Critics like Haltigan argue the statements force job applicants to pledge to progressive views. His lawsuit, alleging constitutional violations, is being backed by a conservative nonprofit, the Pacific Legal Foundation. Specifically, he is suing UC President Michael Drake, as well as officials at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where Haltigan applied for a job...
Full story at https://www.highereddive.com/news/former-professor-sues-university-of-california-system-over-diversity-statem/650705/.
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The Regents yesterday responded to calls for UC to employ undocumented students by creating a committee - a working group - to study the legalities of doing so. See below. (We will be reviewing the May 18 and 19 Regents meetings as time permits. As always, we have preserved recordings of the meetings indefinitely on the Internet Archive since the Regents have no policy on the duration of their preservation.)
UC statement from President Michael V. Drake, M.D., and Board of Regents Chair Richard Leib
UC Office of the President, May 18, 2023
University of California President Michael V. Drake, M.D., and Board of Regents Chair Richard Leib today (May 18) issued the following statement on student employment opportunities:
The University is committed to ensuring that all students, regardless of their immigration status, can pursue and attain a world-class UC education. This should include providing enriching student employment opportunities to all students. After an in-depth discussion, consistent with the adopted policy statement, the Board of Regents appointed a Regents working group that, by the end of November of this year, will consider relevant issues and develop an implementation plan and a legal strategy. The working group will determine whether, how and when to implement next steps.
The Regents could have just gone ahead and green-lighted the hiring. Since they did not do so, we can infer that in their closed discussion of this issue, some potential legal obstacles were presented by the general counsel. When in doubt, create a committee.
While an essay that is grammatically perfect but contains factual errors is suggestive of AI content generation, use of AI can't be proved.
Inside Higher Ed today has a story about an instructor at another university who inputted student papers into chatGPT and asked it if the essays were AI-generated. He then sanctioned many students who denied using AI.*** The problem with this method is that chatGPT, just as it is capable of making errors or seeming to make stuff up, cannot be relied on as an AI detector.
Yesterday we posted a video from a segment of a Regents meeting on AI in which a Berkeley expert slammed those telling sci-fi stories about AI potentially becoming sentient and taking over the world.**** However, apart from saying that the usual way of teaching writing was no longer going to work, his suggestion for dealing with that development was limited. He suggested presenting students with an AI-generated essay and asking them to critique it. It's not clear that such an approach is a full substitute for learning basic writing skills. The sad fact is that other than telling students not to submit AI-generated content, we don't yet have a simple answer to the problem.
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/04/ai-policy-at-ucla-no-turnitin-detector.html.
**https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/03/ucla-senate-guidelines-regarding-ai.html.
****If you didn't see it in our earlier post, here it is again:
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AygJUbwCwJc.
From the San Francisco Chronicle: The state Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to consider UC Berkeley’s plan to take over the historic People’s Park and build housing there for students and the homeless, setting aside a lower-court ruling that would have required the university to consider alternative housing sites. UC Berkeley now provides housing for only 23% of its students, the lowest rate in the UC system, and says the new development would help to meet that need. Its $312 million project would build housing in the park for 1,111 students in a 17-story, 148-unit building.
A separate building would contain 125 beds, with either half or all going to homeless people, depending on financing. During construction, the university says, it would provide shelter for about four dozen unhoused people who now sleep at the park. More than half of the 2.8 acres would remain open space, with a new grove of trees. But neighborhood groups want to preserve the park and say the university has less-disruptive options to build housing elsewhere. In February, the state’s First District Court of Appeal said UC Berkeley had failed to consider those options in its legally required environmental review of the project.
In a 3-0 ruling, Justice Gordon Burns said the university’s own development plan had identified several other nearby properties as potential housing locations, but the UC Regents refused to assess alternative locations or provide any “valid reason” for that decision. Burns also said the environmental report “failed to analyze potential noise impacts from loud student parties in residential areas near the campus” or propose any measures to reduce the noise. He said the court was not requiring UC Berkeley to abandon the housing project, but instead to conduct a new study and see if alternatives exist that would minimize harmful impacts.
On Wednesday, the state’s high court voted unanimously to hold a hearing on UC Berkeley’s appeal, an action that set aside the appeals court’s mandate to conduct a new review and adequately consider alternatives before going ahead with the project. The court denied review of a separate appeal by neighborhood opponents of the plan arguing that the university should also be required to consider addressing its housing shortage by limiting enrollment...
Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/supreme-court-peoples-park-housing-18105284.php.
Note: That even if UC wins at the state supreme court, it will still have to deal with the inevitable demonstrations that brought things to a halt when construction was attempted. The situation could end up comparable to the Hawaiian telescope (TMT) situation in which the project got a legal go-ahead but could not proceed because authorities did not want to remove demonstrators blocking the project.
UC-Berkeley gets front-page PR in LA where the Regents are meeting this week:
From the LA Times: ...UC Berkeley’s faculty and students are marshaling the vast power of data science across myriad fields to address tough problems. And now the university is set to accelerate those efforts with a new college, its first in more than 50 years — and is providing free curriculum to help spread the gospel of data science to California community colleges, California State University and institutions across the nation and world.As data floods society faster than ever before, demand has surged for specialists who can organize and analyze it with coding skills, computing prowess and creative thinking. To meet the “insatiable demand,” as university officials put it, UC Berkeley will open a College of Computing, Data Science and Society.
The University of California Board of Regents is expected to approve the plan Thursday, following approval by its Academic and Student Affairs Committee on Wednesday. A new college building is scheduled to open during the 2025-26 academic year and will house the data science major, first offered five years ago, with other degree programs in computer science, statistics, computational biology and computational precision health. Some of the programs will be run jointly with the Berkeley College of Engineering and UC San Francisco. UC Berkeley says no new state funds will be required; the campus has raised private funds for 14 new faculty positions and about $330 million so far in gifts for the new building...
Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-05-18/uc-berkeley-spreads-the-gospel-of-data-science-with-new-college-free-curriculum.
...The pension fund and the endowment fund have different mixes of assets in their portfolios, each mix presumably assumed to be appropriate for the two purposes. According to the table available in the detailed agenda, the pension return is below the benchmark for all durations shown up through the 5 years ending March 31.
Source: https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may23/i2.pdf (p. 3).
The returns for the endowment are below benchmark for durations through 3 years... Will any Regents ask questions about the below-benchmark returns? (Boldface added)
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Source: https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/05/investment-performance-above-or-below.html.
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Short answer to the question above: No.
So what did happen at the meeting? In public comments, there were remarks on staff burnout and pay, staff shortages, hiring undocumented students, Blackrock and Blackstone, the student-worker strike, affordable student housing, antisemitism, student food needs, Hawaiian telescope, UC fossil fuels emissions, climate change, and disabled student funding.
The official program then opened with an approval of a policy change allowing somewhat longer duration investments in the working capital funds. Lots of interesting material was presented about diversity in the investments industry, medical advances at Irvine, and artificial intelligence. In the midst of these interesting presentations, there was a brief review of investments performance. However, the charts that were put on the screen showed absolute amounts in the portfolio over time, but not the benchmarks. In principle, the committee members had the pre-meeting materials and could have asked about the below-benchmark returns. No one did.
Again, we point to the role of the Regents as trustees of the pension and endowment. Isn't the prime function of this committee to ask critical questions about the earnings of those funds? There is nothing wrong with taking up topics de jour such as artificial intelligence. But such topics should not be deflections from the prime function. Surely in a meeting that ran over three hours, the committee members should have ample time to ask the critical questions.
You can see the meeting at:
https://archive.org/details/investments-committee_202305.
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And by the way, the segment on artificial intelligence was interesting. Below is an excerpt. The artificial intelligence (AI) presentation was by UC-Berkeley Professor Michael Jordan. In response to a question by Regent Hernandez, Jordan criticized the sci-fi hyping of AI and slammed Geoffrey Hinton (formerly of Google), Elon Musk, and Sam Altman as misrepresenting or not understanding the technology.
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AygJUbwCwJc.
