Listen to the Regents Meeting of Sept. 14, 2017

Yes, we have a gap in our coverage so far of the recent Regents meeting, namely the afternoon of Sept. 13th. We will fill that gap in a later posting. But, in the meantime, below is a link to the audio of the full board meeting of Sept. 14th, which in part summarizes what came out of the various committees that met the day before, both morning (which we have covered) and afternoon.

Some of the topics on the 14th: DACA (in the public comments), controversy - with some negative votes - on a pay increase for chancellors, discussion of the state auditor's report on contracting out procedures, the rebidding of the management contract for the Los Alamos lab, pension funding and the gap between the assumed earnings rate of 7.25% and the actual long-term earnings rate in the past of 6.7%, and the cost of carbon neutrality in construction standards for UC.

You can hear the discussion at:

Berkeley May Cancel

We noted yesterday that the "Berkeley Patriot" which is the supposed organizer of "free speech week" at UC-Berkeley seems to be a flaky organization with a largely non-working website. Some of the speakers that are supposed to come know nothing about the event.

The LA Times reports that the organization has not put down a contractually-required deposit for the event within a specified deadline, raising the possibility that the entire affair will be cancelled.

UC-Berkeley officials said Saturday that organizers of a far-right speakers’ series scheduled for later this month have missed the deadline to reserve two of the largest indoor venues on campus for the event, but that they will continue to work with organizers on planning for the festival.

“The University cannot defend spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide security arrangements for events” based on the press releases of organizers, Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor of the university’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs, said in a statement.

Mogulof said the Berkeley Patriot student group that is working with right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on the “Free Speech Week” festival had failed to meet the university’s requirements to reserve Wheeler Auditorium on Sept. 24 — the first day of the festival — and Zellerbach Auditorium on Sept. 27. He said organizers failed to submit the necessary payments to reserve the halls by 5 p.m. Friday.

Berkeley Patriot also failed to provide the university “with evidence that speakers are actually confirmed, such as e-mails, evidence of travel arrangements, or contracts,” Mogulof said. In both instances, the student organization missed three previous deadlines set by the university, he said.

“This failure to confirm, combined with the refusal to provide unqualified speaker lists and schedules has led the campus to question whether Berkeley Patriot actually intends to, and/or is able to, carry out the proposed events,” Mogulof said in his statement...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-berkeley-security-20170916-story.html

Listen to the Regents Meeting: Morning of Sept. 13, 2017

We are gradually catching up with archiving the recent Regents meetings.

Just a technical note and rant: The Regents currently put their recording on YouTube for one year. There are various web-based programs by which yours truly extracts the audio from these temporary YouTubes and then archives them. Given the revised format of Regents meetings, there is substantially more to record at the meetings than their used to be, due to the various sessions that go on at the same time.

In one case for the morning meetings, the recording was posted in such a way as to make it impossible to use the online programs to preserve the audio directly. In that case, the audio had to be played into an audio recorder in real time.

All of this hassle could have been avoided if the Regents simply kept their recordings on YouTube indefinitely. We ask for the umpteenth time: Why isn't this being done, especially since the Regents are already posting to YouTube? What is the point of removing the recordings after one year.

Below are links to the audio of the meetings. One highlight from the public comment session of Sept. 13 was the many speakers protesting potential cuts in retiree health care. A cut was proposed and then withdrawn after protest from the agenda of the July meetings due to lack of Senate consultation.

Full Board:


Other links to the morning meeting:

Governance and Compensation:
https://archive.org/details/PublicEngagementAndDevelopment91317AMedited/GovernanceAndCompensation9-13-17AMedited.wma

Public Engagement & Development:
https://archive.org/details/PublicEngagementAndDevelopment91317AMedited/PublicEngagementAndDevelopment9-13-17AMedited.wma  Note: After the meeting ended, the mike remained on briefly and a regent can be heard complaining about state audits and opining that "Sacramento" wants to control the university.

Compliance and Audit:
https://archive.org/details/PublicEngagementAndDevelopment91317AMedited/complianceAndAudit9-13-17AMedited.wma

Possible Traffic Hassle

If you commute to UCLA from the Valley, there may be issues this weekend:

A natural gas pipeline improvement project will prompt some lane reductions and ramp closures near the San Diego (405) Freeway in the Bel Air area this weekend.

The closures are part of a multibillion-dollar safety enhancement program, according to the Southern California Gas Co.

Saturday and Sunday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., the work will be conducted on North Sepulveda Boulevard at the Moraga Drive on-ramp and off-ramp at the 405 Freeway.

The ramps at Moraga Drive will be closed to traffic, and northbound and southbound traffic on Sepulveda will be reduced to one lane in each direction...

Full story at:
https://patch.com/california/centurycity/s/g8d83/ramp-lane-closures-near-405-freeway-heads-up

The Next Berkeley Drama

It looks so calm.

Now that one speaker has come and gone without major incident, there is "free speech week" coming up at UC-Berkeley. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The University of California will uphold its free-speech tradition by hosting provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos regardless of their message, unless they resort to personal threats or attacks on audience members, UC President Janet Napolitano says.

“If we at UC unreasonably limit the ability of speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to safely express themselves on our campuses, we are telling the world that we would accept suppression of our own speech,” Napolitano told a legal conference Friday in Sacramento.

She spoke a day after conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall under heavy security, while several hundred protesters held a rally nearby but were kept from entering the campus. Yiannopoulos, Coulter and another right-wing commentator, Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for President Trump, are scheduled to appear at UC Berkeley during a four-day event, starting Sept. 24, that sponsors are calling “Free Speech Week.”

A speech by Yiannopoulos at the campus in February was called off after violent clashes, and Coulter canceled a Berkeley appearance in April, saying she had been warned of possible violence.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Napolitano-vows-to-uphold-UC-s-free-speech-12202087.php

Some faculty and others want to close down the campus (boycott) during this period. (Editorial note from yours truly: Is it a good idea to give Milo & Co. the ability to shut down the campus by simply announcing an event?) From the Daily Cal:

UC Berkeley faculty members circulated a letter Wednesday morning calling for campus and the Berkeley community to boycott the “alt-right presence” by canceling all classes and campus activities for the duration of “Free Speech Week.”

The letter, signed by about 130 campus staff members, was written by seven professors from the African American studies, ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies and film departments. These departments house populations of students targeted by the “alt-right,” according to Leigh Raiford, campus African American studies professor and co-author of the letter...

Full article with link to letter at http://www.dailycal.org/2017/09/14/uc-berkeley-staff-members-express-safety-concerns-free-speech-week/

And it turns out that the group sponsoring this event is announcing speakers who aren't confirmed; at least one has never heard of the event:

Although Milo Yiannopoulos released a full list of speakers Thursday that are scheduled to attend “Free Speech Week” at UC Berkeley in the coming weeks, both the campus and the Berkeley Patriot have revealed that not all the speakers have been confirmed.

Yiannopoulos issued a press release naming the speakers who he said were confirmed to speak at the UC Berkeley campus from Sept. 24-27. Prominent speakers on the list include former White House chief strategist and Breitbart editor Steve Bannon and Ann Coulter, whose previous campus event was postponed. Not all the speakers on the list, however, have been confirmed.

Charles Murray, a libertarian conservative political scientist, posted a tweet Friday saying that he has “never heard of this event.”

“I was never contacted by the organizers of this event,” Murray said in an email. “The inclusion of my name in the list of speakers was done without my knowledge or permission. I will add that I would never under any circumstances appear at an event that included Milo Yiannopoulos.” ...

Full article with the supposed list of speakers is at: http://www.dailycal.org/2017/09/15/speakers-invited-free-speech-week-uc-berkeley-unconfirmed/

PS: The group that seems to be somehow involved in "Free Speech Week" is something - apparently a newspaper - called the Berkeley Patriot. When yours truly searched for it on the web, there was a link to:

http://www.californiapatriot.org/magazine/. If you click on that link, you get a page of headlines with broken links to the actual text. So maybe it's not surprising that in the article above you find:

“The Berkeley Patriot was under the impression that those speakers were confirmed and it’s seeming like some speakers didn’t know that they were invited,” (a spokesperson for the Berkeley Patriot) said. “That’s a big issue and we’re going to try to figure this out with Milo and his team.”...

If you look at the Wikipedia page for the Berkeley Patriot, everything it references in the history of the newspaper went on in the early 2000s. So no one is bothering to update its page. In short, the powers-that-be at Berkeley are dealing with an event that seems to be under the jurisdiction of an entity that at best has a shaky existence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Patriot. It's not clear even whether its name is Berkeley Patriot or California Patriot.

Illicit Drugs?

A state pharmacy inspector made a surprising discovery last year while conducting a routine records review at a Westside facility that compounded drugs for patients at UCLA medical centers. More than 1,000 IV bags of sterile medications for heart patients and others with serious health issues had been made with expired and potentially dangerous ingredients, according to state Board of Pharmacy records. At least 350 bags of the adulterated medications were delivered to patients in the sprawling UCLA Health system, which includes Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, the records show.

Whether any patients were harmed is unknown, and UCLA, which owned and operated the compounding pharmacy, has refused to comment. It’s unclear if the university attempted to warn patients who might be at risk or to recall the adulterated medications that were sent to them. UCLA quietly closed the pharmacy within days of the inspection. By then, pharmacist-in-charge Richard C. Graul had already abruptly quit his $173,000-a-year job and declared his license “inactive.”

The inspection triggered an investigation by the pharmacy board, which in July filed an accusation, a formal action seeking disciplinary sanctions against Graul and the off-campus facility, UCLA Medical Center Pharmaceutical Technology. Possible sanctions include license revocation, suspension or “further action as deemed necessary and proper,” according to the board. The accusation, which is pending, alleges that the pharmacy lacked the proper licensing, used expired drugs in compounding sterile medications, and failed to meet state standards for quality assurance and product testing.

Graul, who had been the chief pharmacist since 2005, declined to comment on the inspection results when contacted at his home in Arcadia earlier this year. “No thanks,” he said, then closed his front door. He has not responded to repeated telephone and email messages since then.

Compounding pharmacies combine, mix or alter ingredients of a drug to create prescription medication suited to individual patients. The UCLA facility compounded large quantities of antibiotics, intravenous nutritional products and sterile solutions administered during heart surgeries and other procedures. The expired drugs cited by regulators in the UCLA case include monosodium glutamate monohydrate (MSG) and monosodium aspartate monohydrate (MSA), both of which are used in cardiac surgery and other surgical procedures; clopidogrel, which is used to prevent blood clotting; mexiletine, used to treat arrhythmia; and the hormone estradiol, which in intravenous solutions is sometimes used to treat heavy uterine bleeding.

The expiration dates on those drugs ranged from November 2015 to September 2016, a month before the inspection. Using expired ingredients is potentially dangerous because they can become tainted, lose their potency or change the efficacy of the compounded medication...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ucla-pharmacy-20170915-story.html

The Buck Stops Here (With 1,013,958 Others)

The University of California board of regents approved on Thursday a $1,013,959 incentive award for Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Singh Bachher for the 2017 fiscal year. The bonus is in addition to his $652,454 base salary. The compensation and governance committee, after meeting in closed session Wednesday, issued a statement citing "strong" investment results for the June 30 fiscal year as its reason for making the incentive payment. The $10.8 billion endowment returned a net 15.1% for the fiscal year, while the $61.6 billion pension fund returned 14.5%...

Full story at http://www.pionline.com/article/20170914/ONLINE/170919924/university-of-california-oks-1-million-bonus-for-cio-jagdeep-singh-bachher