UCLA Faculty Association

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

$700 Million (!!!) Research Park

Question for Daddy UCLAbucks.

Recall our recent posts about UCLA's purchase of the Westside Pavillion?* Here is the latest:

After $700M Deal, UCLA To Transform Westside Pavilion Into Research Park

Project previously dubbed One Westside, it was set to be massive Google office developed by Hudson Pacific Properties and Macerich

By Greg Cornfield, January 3, 2024, Commercial Observer

Hudson Pacific Properties and mall giant Macerich have sold the projects known as One Westside and Westside Two in Los Angeles in a landmark $700 million deal with the University of California.

UCLA announced Wednesday will transform the 687,000-square-foot property on L.A.’s Westside into a large-scale research park. This comes after CO reported the property is likely destined for a life sciences redevelopment following news that UCLA was looking to acquire the former shopping center portion that was intended to be a large-scale trophy office fully leased to Google (GOOGL) through 2036.

The research park will house the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy at UCLA and the UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, as well as programs across the disciplines, the university said.

HPP held a 75 percent interest and Macerich a 25 percent interest in the joint venture that owned the assets. Google had signed a 14-year lease that was announced five years ago in 2019, and commenced in 2022. It was set to generate $43.2 million of net operating income annually for HPP. It is not immediately clear the status of that lease. The Mountain View-based company has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars cutting office leasing, but that had not yet included the West Pavilion project.

The sale of 10800, 10830 and 10850 West Pico Boulevard to UC is a godsend for studio and office landlord HPP, which suffered through the Hollywood strikes last year and has been unloading underperforming office properties from its portfolio.

“The opportunistic sale of One Westside and Westside Two significantly bolsters our balance sheet and we now have no debt maturities until year-end 2025,” Victor Coleman, chairman and CEO of HPP, said in a statement.

Macerich CEO Tom O’Hern said net proceeds will enable the firm to “further deleverage and improve our liquidity profile, allowing us to more aggressively advance Macerich’s successful densification-diversification strategy” of adding new uses to residential, hotel and office space.

UCLA has been an active buyer in commercial real estate this year. In June, the university acquired the historic Trust Building in Downtown L.A. for less than $40 million to expand with new classrooms and administration offices. UCLA also acquired a 24.5-acre campus in Rancho Palos Verdes and an 11-acre residential site in San Pedro for $80 million in January 2023.

Source: https://commercialobserver.com/2024/01/la-sale-ucla-hudson-pacific-google-life-sciences/.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/12/about-yesterdays-post-on-purchase-of.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/12/another-ucla-real-estate-purchase.html.

The Harvard Resignation: Implications

The resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay yesterday not surprisingly has led to substantial commentary. Yours truly noted an opinion piece in the NY Times by Bret Stephens indicating that the problem was Harvard had selected someone as president who wasn't a top scholar.* I'm not sure the modern major university president has to be a great scholar, contrary to Stephens' view (although engaging in plagiarism is a disqualifying Bad Thing). University presidents have to raise money and represent the university in the larger community including among the political authorities, whether their campuses are public or private. They have also to be sensitive to the internal academic community.

UC president Clark Kerr said the job was to deal with parking for the faculty, football for the alumni, and sex for the students. He omitted the political realm in his listing, the realm which ultimately got him fired. Typically, presidents have what amounts to a chief operating officer to manage the day-to-day affairs of the institution while they deal with the various constituencies and interest groups. Gay at Harvard wasn't up to the job on various dimensions as both events on campus and at the congressional hearing demonstrated, although reportedly she did well in previous positions. There is the old saying about a tendency to be promoted to your level of incompetence. Maybe that's what happened.

Beyond Harvard's problems, however, there is bound now to be a rethinking about university governance more generally and the role of the chief officer. The degree to which universities and their top leaders are responsible for student actions keeps coming up, intensified by the Israel-Gaza War, but not beginning with that event. To the extent that universities provide student groups with official recognition and compel all students to pay fees to support various student organizations needs to be rethought.** Otherwise, the university IS responsible, at least to a degree, for what happens within those organizations. The recent uptick in union activity, including the high-profile student-worker strike at UC, suggests a need to revisit the current university labor model.

There may be a temptation by university leaders to keep their heads down and hope and pray that no further issues arise on their watch. An alternative, however, would be to set up a process to examine such touchy issues as changing public opinion about higher ed, concerns about speech, diversity of viewpoints, etc. Will any UC campus leaders do it? Will the Academic Senate? Will the Regents?

All is not well. Harvard's problems are not unique.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay-resignation.html.

Apart from the Bret Stephens piece, you can find the letter of resignation at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/claudine-gay-resignation-letter-harvard.html.

A statement from the Harvard board that oversees the university is at:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/02/us/claudine-gay-harvard#a-statement-from-harvards-governing-board.

A CNN chronology of the event is at:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/01/02/business/timeline-harvard-president-claudine-gay-resignation/index.html.

**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyJ33TEFOXM.

Slowly Grinding Wheels

The wheels of justice are notoriously slow. Blog readers may recall the Klein vs. Bernardo case that arose from the George Floyd affair and aftermath. We noted the case in a prior posting.* It has been hard to track developments in the case. At one point it appeared that a trial might occur in the fall of 2023. However, someone with legal expertise and access has now provided yours truly with the current schedule.

On January 19, there will be a hearing in which it appears legal counsel for the defendants (Bernardo and UC) will attempt to exclude some potential evidence. "Motion in Limine."

On February 26, there will be a "final status conference."

On March 4, a jury trial will begin.

All of this will take place on Dept. O, 1725 Main St., Santa Monica, unless some settlement is reached.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/two-speech-cases-that-involve-ucla.html. Scroll down to the second case. Klein continues as a lecturer at Anderson:

https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/accounting/faculty/klein.

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

The Alternative

As we have done at the end of each calendar quarter, we again make available last quarter's blog in downloadable pdf form (or readable directly at the link below). Of course, in that format all video, audio, and animated gifs are omitted.

To read it online, go to https://archive.org/details/ucla-faculty-association-blog-4th-quarter-2023.

Download at https://archive.org/download/ucla-faculty-association-blog-4th-quarter-2023/UCLA%20Faculty%20Association%20Blog%20%204th%20Quarter%202023.pdf.

The French Revolution

Faithful blog readers will recall UC's long battle with commercial academic publisher Elsevier over the issue of cost and access to various journals. Eventually, a settlement was reached in 2021.* Nonetheless, the concerns persist. It seems the Sorbonne is leading the charge over this matter in Europe. From the Financial Times:

A leading French university has cancelled its contract with a commercial provider of academic data to switch to a non-profit rival, boosting a growing movement to make research available for free.

From January 1, the Sorbonne will work with OpenAlex, a recently developed service offering free online access to search and analytical tools for academics’ publications, after dropping its longstanding partnership with Web of Science, owned by UK-based Clarivate.

The action is part of a wider pushback against the current model in academic publishing, where researchers publish and review papers for free but have to buy expensive subscriptions to the journals in which they are published to analyse data relating to their work. Thousands of researchers have turned to open-access platforms in recent years.

Élisabeth Angel-Perez, vice-president for research and innovation at the Sorbonne, which paid Clarivate $51,000 this year, said the “radical decision” was designed to “reappropriate the results of research and to be in a position to regain control and ownership of what we produce”.

Jason Priem, a founder of OpenAlex, said: “We felt there’s a mismatch between the values of the academy and the shareholder boardroom. Research is fundamentally about sharing, while for-profits are fundamentally about capturing and enclosing." ...

Google Scholar provides some free information on academic publications including an index to measure the impact of authors’ research, but only allows limited analysis or explanations of which articles it prioritises.

OpenAlex, which draws on a similar free service developed and then scrapped in 2021 by Microsoft Academic, already indexes 250mn articles. Launched in 2022, it is built with open-source software and funded primarily by Arcadia, a UK-based charitable fund.

Full story at https://www.ft.com/content/89098b25-78af-4539-ba24-c770cf9ec7c3.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-elsevier-deal.html.