LLNL and Retiree Health Care

From Inside Higher Ed:

A California appeals court said this week that the University of California owes retirees who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory the university-sponsored group health insurance they were promised during their employment, reversing an earlier court decision saying otherwise. Several Livermore retirees sued the California system in 2010, saying that it effectively disowned them in terms of retiree health care when a private partnership started running the federal defense lab, in 2007. The retirees argued that their new plan, administered by the private partnership, had “significant disadvantages and no comparable new advantages when compared with the university-provided retiree medical benefit plan,” such as higher premium and higher monthly out-of-pocket costs. Thousands of people were affected by the change...

A spokesperson for the California system said it was “disappointed” in the decision and “considering our options as we review the court’s reasoning.”

Full story at:
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/08/03/appeals-court-says-livermore-lab-retirees-are-entitled-u-california-health

Note that this decision, if it isn't appealed or if it survives an appeal, tends to undermine the UC position that retiree health care is just a nice thing UC provides, but that it has no legal obligation to do so.

Paths can lead to problems

UCLA will deploy UCPath in September, 2018. UCLA will partner with UC Santa Barbara as part of the UCLA/UCSB Pilot implementation, joining the Office of the President, which launched UCPath in 2015, and our sister campuses — Merced, Riverside, and ASUCLA — all of which are now live on UCPath as of January 2, 2018. 

Source and more info at: https://ucpath.ucla.edu/

For those who don't know, UCPath is the much-delayed and much-over-budget computer system to handle payroll and employee records.

OK, But Not Too Close

From the LA Times:

University of California President Janet Napolitano took the helm of the nation’s top public research university five years ago as a tough and seasoned politician and former Cabinet member in the Obama administration. Her take-charge style and ambitions to make a mark startled some campus leaders accustomed to more low-key academics. But their sentiments were not always communicated to the top — and when the state auditor tried to assess campus views in a review of Napolitano’s office published last year, two of the president’s aides tampered with the surveys. The interference sparked a political uproar and prompted Napolitano to apologize publicly.

Now campus leaders have spoken up — and say they want more autonomy from Napolitano’s office even as they value many of the systemwide services it provides. Their opinions are expressed in a new study obtained by The Times that was commissioned by the UC Board of Regents after the audit interference fiasco. Consultants with Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting Inc. interviewed 74 senior campus leaders, including all 10 chancellors, to gauge their views of the services and programs provided by the UC Office of the President, often referred to as UCOP.

The study found widespread support for the vast majority of systemwide services, such as legal counsel, government relations, employee benefits and the retirement system. One longtime chancellor said the breadth of support for the president’s office is greater today than a decade ago, when a poll of campus leaders showed more dissatisfaction.

Senior administrators expressed the greatest concerns about the flurry of Napolitano’s systemwide presidential initiatives. Since 2013, Napolitano has launched several signature ventures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, expand access to food, promote free speech, increase collaboration with Mexico, aid UC students living in the U.S. illegally, and encourage students to pursue public service careers...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-uc-campuses-president-20180801-story.html

They just want to be left alone:

Implication Unclear

From Inside Higher Ed:

A $717 billion defense spending bill sent by the Senate to President Trump for his signature Wednesday prohibits the use of appropriated funds for Chinese language instruction provided by a Confucius Institute or by a Chinese language program at a college or university that hosts a Confucius Institute. The bill states that the prohibition can be waived if a defense official certifies that Confucius Institute employees and instructors will have no involvement with the Chinese language program or authority or influence over its curriculum.

Confucius Institutes -- Chinese government-funded centers for language and cultural education that can be found at about 100 U.S. universities -- have come under increasing scrutiny in recent months from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and other lawmakers. Critics say the institutes spread Chinese Communist Party propaganda and allow an entity of the Chinese government undue control over instruction and curriculum in U.S. universities, while supporters say the institutes are vehicles for cultural and educational exchange and provide much-needed funds for Chinese language instruction.

Trump is expected to sign the defense spending bill into law.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/08/02/defense-bill-restricts-funds-colleges-confucius-institutes

A Slow Day

It's another slow day for university-related news. So, as we have done before, here are some recent photos of the new building going up as part of the Anderson School complex. 

$25 Million Gift

We like to pay special attention to gifts to UCLA that don't involve bricks-and-mortar construction projects. Here is one:

The UCLA College humanities division has received its largest ever gift — and one of the largest ever to any university philosophy department: $25 million in honor of two longtime UCLA faculty members.

Of the total, $20 million will support the philosophy department; the other $5 million will provide seed funding to create a planned $15 million endowment to provide financial support for graduate students in the humanities division.

Jordan Kaplan, his wife, Christine, and Jordan’s longtime business partner, Ken Panzer, made the gift in honor of Jordan’s parents, Renée and David Kaplan — each of whom has been a member of the UCLA faculty for almost 60 years — and to recognize his father’s contributions to the study of philosophy.

In recognition of the gift, UCLA’s Humanities Building will be renamed Renée and David Kaplan Hall.

“This extraordinary gift signals a new era for the humanities at UCLA and, in particular, for philosophy,” said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. “It’s more important than ever to instill in our students the philosophical perspective that helps make sense of today’s complex societal challenges.”

Jordan Kaplan is the CEO and president of Douglas Emmett Inc., a real estate investment trust. David Kaplan is a renowned scholar of philosophical logic and the philosophy of language, and Renée Kaplan was a clinical professor of psychology and the director of training at UCLA Student Psychological Services. Both Renée and David earned doctorates at UCLA.

“We are proud to participate in UCLA’s Centennial Campaign and be able to meaningfully support Humanities and Philosophy, areas of study that we feel are particularly important now to the health of our modern society,” Jordan Kaplan said. “Our hope is that this gift will encourage others to recognize the importance of these departments and join us in providing them with very much needed support.”

The gift, the second largest made to the UCLA College during the ongoing Centennial Campaign for UCLA, comes two years after Renée, David, Jordan and Christine Kaplan donated funds to establish the Presidential Professor of Philosophy endowed chair.

The new gift will help the humanities division and philosophy department recruit and retain top faculty, and attract the most outstanding graduate students.

“We are deeply grateful for this inspirational gift from Christine and Jordan Kaplan and Ken Panzer,” said Scott Waugh, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “It demonstrates not only their commitment to advancing the excellence of the humanities and our study of philosophy, but also their confidence in UCLA’s academic mission as we enter our second century.”

The study of philosophy has been a cornerstone of the humanities at UCLA since the campus’ founding in 1919; an endowed chair in philosophy that was established in 1928 was the first in UCLA’s history. Among the department’s current faculty are recipients of Mellon and Guggenheim fellowships and National Science Foundation grants, and members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Council of Learned Societies. UCLA doctoral graduates in philosophy have gone on to teach at the most preeminent universities around the world.

“This gift will help make our department of philosophy the bellwether for departments of its kind around the world,” said David Schaberg, dean of the humanities division. “Especially valuable is the opportunity to build a $15 million endowment for graduate students in the humanities on the basis of the generous matching fund the gift creates.”

Professor Seana Shiffrin, chair of the philosophy department, said the gift will be transformative for the future of the department.

“Philosophical issues touch on every aspect of life — including issues about what sort of creatures we are and could become, what we can know of ourselves and others, how we should treat one another, whether we are capable of forming a better society and what that would look like, and the significance of our mortality,” she said. “A philosophy education introduces students to captivating ideas and perennial questions while imparting crucial skills of analysis, argumentation, clarity, and precision.  

“In its capacity both to stimulate and to discipline the imagination, training in philosophy empowers students to enter any career, while enriching their entire lives by opening up new avenues of thought and fresh possibilities for living.”

The gift is part of the UCLA Centennial Campaign, which is scheduled to conclude in December 2019, during UCLA’s 100th anniversary year.

Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-25-million-gift-humanities-division-philosophy

Some Numbers

As the chart above shows, the population of California has more than doubled since the days of the 1960 Master Plan.* UCLA has become notorious for being hard to get into. What was UCLA's undergraduate enrollment back then? Yours truly poked around on the web and it turns out getting data on that issue takes some doing. I ended up looking at the Master Plan itself. That document gives data on the entire UC System as it was in 1958 and on total student enrollment. You never find undergraduates-only by campus. But with some estimating, it appears that UCLA probably had about 11-12,000 undergrads at most. It now has around 31,000 undergrads, so the undergrad population has come close to tripling. In short, UCLA undergraduate enrollment has outpaced overall population growth. Now, you would have to look at college-age population rather than total to get a more legitimate comparison. And you might want to look at the comparative growth of northern vs. southern California. And there is the sensitive issue of out-of-state admissions. But putting it all together suggests (to me, at least) that what has happened over the long-term is that a) more folks out of the general population want to go to college than was the case circa 1960, and b) UCLA's reputation as a desirable university to attend has gone up. If anyone out there has more to say about this matter, please add a comment.

I suspect there is some analogy to the freeways, which were also being expanded at the time of the Master Plan. When you first build them, there is lots of capacity and traffic flows freely. But since access is subsidized, they eventually fill up and become congested.
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*http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/masterplan/MasterPlan1960.pdf