Blog readers will know that in late December, we took note of an item in the Daily Bruin about a UCLA-owned building that was the source of student complaints concerning poor maintenance.* Intersession seemed like a good time to get the building fixed. Apparently, it didn't happen, according to a follow-up by the Bruin which now also refers to other buildings along with the original source of complaints:
Multiple students and recent graduates have come forward with allegations about unsafe living conditions in UCLA-owned housing following a Daily Bruin investigation into the university apartment building Westwood Chateau. New accusations from current and former residents spanned four UCLA-operated buildings. Across three off-campus apartments and one dorm, Bruins said UCLA Housing’s disregard of their concerns and requests impacted both their physical health and academic performance. In the Westwood Palm apartments, multiple students said they felt unsupported by UCLA Housing after raising concerns about mold.
Emilee Elyasian, a fourth-year psychology student, said she started experiencing debilitating migraines and asthma in mid-November, which she suspected were caused by mold in her air conditioning unit after a recent flood in the building. Mold exposure symptoms can include wheezing, headaches and shortness of breath, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences...
We might note that the recently-concluded Regents meetings included discussion of approaching the state legislature to obtain more funding for student housing. So, it might be best if university-owned student housing was kept in good shape.
We conclude our series on the Regents meetings of last week with a review of the concluding Thursday sessions. Links to the videos are provided below. As always, we preserve the recordings indefinitely since the Regents - for no apparent reason - delete them after one year.
The full Board met twice on Thursday. Its morning session began with public comments covering the Hawaiian telescope, DACA and undocumented student hiring by UC, treatment of rape test kits, retention pay, military divestment, Blackrock (as opposed to Blackstone), climate change, the governor's proposed delay of the Berkeley clean energy project, voter turnout, and abortion. In subsequent comments, the graduate student representative took note of concerns expressed in an earlier meeting by the faculty representative on the model for funding PhD students, given the cost increases in the student-worker strike settlement. Concerns were also expressed about the requirement that student workers attest to having worked, or not, during the strike. (The university's payroll system apparently paid most of the workers during the strike; attesting to having struck and not worked would presumably lead to a requirement to pay back such compensation.)
The Finance and Capital Strategies committee discussed the backlog of building maintenance including seismic upgrades. Regent Leib suggested that when donors give money for new buildings, the donations should include funds for maintenance. However, the chancellor of UC-San Diego commented that donors often don't pay the full cost of construction to get their names on buildings. They might pay, say, $50 million of a $200 million building. So saying they should add more funds for maintenance is not practical.
Nathan Brostrom noted that with more employees working from home for some of the workweek, less office space was needed. Campuses are not renewing some off-campus leases on office space. He also noted that the governor's January budget proposal delayed some capital projects including the above-mentioned Berkeley clean energy facility and certain student housing. There will be advocacy in the legislature about UC capital projects, perhaps connected to bond financing.
At the Academic and Student Affairs committee, various professional school programs were discussed including journalism and public health. Increases in professional school tuition were approved. There was discussion of student-athletes as an aftermath of the UCLA-Big Ten move. Regent Park noted that at the March meetings Regent Leib would be officially announcing creation of the subcommittee on student-athletes.
It was also reported that campus centers for students with disabilities were having a hard time recruiting sufficient staff. The pandemic delayed progress on a planned report on disability accommodation. Various Regents complained that the report they were given for this meeting was superficial. Finally, there was discussion of transfers from community colleges. In particular, there were concerns about community colleges with poor records of sending transfers to UC and outreach to those colleges. Regent Cohen indicated that CSU has a better system for transfers than UC and expressed the view that UC had dragged its feet in setting up a system. He advocated using the CSU system and didn't accept the view that transfers to UC were more complicated than to CSU.
The full Board came back into session and accepted the reports and recommendations of the various committees. It then went into closed session and dismissed a tenured faculty member for what news reports described as sexual misconduct.
Blog readers will recall the major brouhaha that resulted from the decision of UCLA to move to the Big Ten. Ultimately, after a fuss by the governor at a closed Regents meeting and several later discussions by the Regents, the move was allowed, subject to certain payments to compensate UC-Berkeley.
However, the gradual move of supposedly amateur student athletes toward a professional compensation system suggests that more changes are to come. Already, student athletes can cash in on their name, image, and likeness or NIL, thanks to a US Supreme Court decision. A recently-submitted bill in the California state legislature would entitle certain athletes to payments of up to $25,000 per year plus more upon graduation. From Sportico:
California’s legislature is raring to upset the college sports apple cart once more. While federal authorities contemplate how and whether to address the unruliness of NIL—three years after the the Golden State passed the nation’s first name, image and likeness bill—a powerful California legislator wants to move the athlete-rights goal posts with a new law that would create a pathway for direct compensation from schools to players. The proposed legislation by Assemblymember Chris Holden revives an effort he previously pursued and follows two other California pay-for-play bills that failed to make it to the floor for a vote. The most recent of those bills, which was introduced last February by state Senator Steven Bradford, passed both the state Senate education and judiciary committees before getting snagged in appropriations amid aggressive lobbying from schools such as USC and UCLA...
Holden’s new bill (Assembly Bill 252), christened the College Athlete Protection Act, requires that each Division I institution in the state establish a “degree completion fund” as a means of paying their head-count scholarship athletes their “fair market value,” which the bill defines as an equal share of half their team’s annual revenue, minus the cost of the athlete’s grant-in-aid...
In a statement, Holden couched the rationale for AB 252 in educational terms. “My goal is for athletes to play hard and study harder without fear of losing access to what they’ve trained and worked for,” he said. The law would serve to provide cover for schools to contravene the NCAA’s prohibition on players getting compensated beyond their scholarship, a $4,000 cost-of-attendance stipend and the $5,980 in education-related benefits established by the Supreme Court’s NCAA versus Alston ruling. The amount would be determined by a revenue-sharing formula based on figures schools report annually to the Department of Education...
The bill could pave the way for a number of football and men’s basketball players to receive six-figure payments each year from their institutions. It would also create a state government agency called the College Athlete Protection Program, which would be tasked with making sure schools don’t fudge their revenue numbers and, if they do, issuing punishment. As with its predecessor legislation, AB 252 is being backed by the National College Players Association, the athlete advocacy group that spearheaded the state-based NIL reform effort. This law-making bid represents the latest salvo in the NCPA’s ongoing war against college sports amateurism, which includes its pending effort to have the National Labor Relations Board classify USC football and basketball players as joint employees of their school, the Pac-12 Conference and the NCAA. Holden’s bill, however, attempts to sidestep the labor question entirely, stipulating that its provisions do not, one way or the other, “serve as evidence of an employment relationship.” ...
We are catching up with the Regents meetings of last week. So far, we have summarized the Tuesday session and what occurred on Wednesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, three committees met: National Labs, Public Engagement and Development, and Governance. As always, we preserve these and the other Regents recordings indefinitely since the Regents, for no particular reason, delete them after one year. Links to the meetings are provided below.
The Governance session was divided into open and closed segments. Unfortunately, the interesting part was closed, a review of collective bargaining developments which likely featured discussion of the recently-concluded student-worker strike and its aftermath. The open segment lasted only a few minutes and consisted of a series of routine approvals.
At the meeting of the National Labs committee, members approved a $1.5 million child day-care facility for Los Alamos. As blog readers will know, UC currently has a management role in three national labs: Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos. These three labs - which at one time were referred to as the nuclear labs - are outgrowths of the Manhattan Project of World War II. At this meeting, however, the committee approved making a bid to manage a fourth lab, the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Frederick, Maryland. UC Health appears to be the driving force behind this expansion. It would be something that goes beyond the Manhattan Project origins. Nonetheless, it could be argued that a still earlier history is involved, although no one made that point. In the 1930s, before the Manhattan Project, some of the private funding for UC-Berkeley's cyclotrons was for the use of radiation to treat cancer.
At Public Engagement and Development, the meeting started with a conversation via Zoom with State Senator Ben Allen who represents a district that includes UCLA. Allen spoke approvingly of the compact with the governor. As seems to be routine, no one noted that the governor's January budget proposal includes a nominal cut in funding. And in real terms, even the compact's increase for "core" functions is below the current rate of inflation. UCLA Chancellor Block asked about the long-term outlook for the state budget. Allen didn't answer directly but alluded to the heavy dependence of the budget on capital gains and the resulting link to the ups and downs of financial markets. He noted the problem of the big drop in enrollment in community colleges which could result in fewer transfers to UC and - perversely - force a drop in admissions of freshmen due to the formula of one transfer student for every two freshmen. Something needed to be done, but what that might be was not explored.
There followed a review of fundraising at UC-Merced and UC fundraising more generally. After that, there was a review of legislative developments. Bills were being submitted in the legislature that limit the ability of UC to contract out for services, bonds for UC and CSU capital projects, and regulation of repatriation of Native American artifacts held by UC.
As we noted in our review of the January budget proposal for 2023-24, language was included in the budget documents dealing with admission of transfer students by UCLA. Apparently, no language to that effect was included in the actual budgetary bill submitted to the legislature. UCOP is attempting to find out exactly what the governor wants.
As blog readers will know, we track new weekly California claims for unemployment insurance as an indicator of the state's labor market and economic direction. As we noted last week, the numbers have popped up recently, but the jump matches the pre-pandemic period in 2020, so we may be looking at a seasonal event. Or it could be that the high-profile tech layoffs are showing up in the data. Possibly both are occurring.
The state budget proposal of January is based on an economic assumption of a slowing of growth and a chance of recession.* What the ultimate enacted budget looks like will depend on perceptions of what is happening over the next few months.
Blog readers will know that UCLA was singled out in Governor Newsom's proposed 2023-24 budget as a UC campus that should do more to facilitate transfers from community colleges. And UC more generally is under pressure to increase transfers. Blog readers will also know that a problem has arisen: Enrollment in community colleges has dropped dramatically since the pandemic. The concept of a formula involving one transfer student for every two freshmen could have a perverse impact of lowering freshmen admits if transfers fall.
EdSource has an article on this topic:
The University of California is planning to expand outreach at more than half of the state’s community colleges in an effort to increase the number of students who successfully transfer from those colleges. The 65 community colleges identified by UC serve a high proportion of low-income students and already have partnerships with UC, and UC plans to deepen those partnerships, according to a report provided Thursday to the academic affairs committee of UC’s board of regents.
The additional outreach could include UC expanding academic advising at those colleges or creating new faculty-to-faculty collaborations between UC campuses and individual colleges, said Yvette Gullatt, UC’s vice president for graduate and undergraduate affairs. “This can increase transfer access and attainment,” Gullatt added.
UC leaders also signaled, however, that they are resisting calls to implement a systemwide admission guarantee similar to the Associate Degree for Transfer program that offers community college students a guaranteed spot at the 23-campus California State University system. UC’s intention to expand outreach at community colleges across the state comes after a joint task force between UC and the community college system recommended last year that UC increase the percentage of community college transfers who apply, are admitted to and enroll at UC. UC also has a systemwide goal to enroll one California community college transfer student for every two California resident freshmen.
...To accomplish the additional outreach, UC campuses plan to spend $2.5 million set aside for the system’s Student Academic Preparation and Educational Partnerships, according to the item presented to the regents. The 65 community colleges range across all regions of the state, from Southwestern College near the state’s border with Mexico to colleges in the far northern part of the state, including Mendocino College on the northern coast. Mark Osea, a transfer counselor and articulation officer at Mendocino College, said during Thursday’s meeting that it will be important for UC campuses to market themselves to students in rural parts of the state.
...To further ensure that community college transfers have an opportunity to attend UC, one regent suggested Thursday that UC follow CSU’s lead and use something similar to the Associate Degree for Transfer pathway. That program guarantees admission to community college students who meet CSU eligibility requirements, though not necessarily at their preferred campus. The regent, Michael Cohen, said it would be “completely doable” to bring the ADT to UC, which is something that college access groups have also advocated. Currently, there is no systemwide admission guarantee at UC for community college students, although six of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses do have their own guarantee programs, and Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed in his January budget that UCLA become the seventh. But within those guarantee programs, each campus has different course and grade requirements, and the guarantees exclude some majors.
...UC’s systemwide president, Michael Drake, was hesitant to endorse adopting the ADT across UC...
