Straws in the Wind - Part 467

From Inside Higher Ed: Law schools are no longer required to demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion among students, faculty or staff, following a special meeting Tuesday where the American Bar Association’s accreditation council voted 10 to 6 to eliminate the standard. The decision is final and takes effect immediately. It does not, however, prevent law schools from continuing to prioritize diversity on campus; rather, it bars the council as a quality-assurance group from mandating that colleges do so in order to remain accredited. Other diversity-related standards, including one concerning curriculum, are still up for discussion among the council.

Known as Standard 206, the now-repealed quality metric has been a topic of debate for years. Critics argue that it violated the 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning the consideration of race in college admissions; proponents call that view an overreaching interpretation of the high court’s opinion. More recently, the Trump administration has cited the standard in an executive order as one of many alleged infringements on the regulations that define which accreditors qualify for federal recognition—a status that allows them to deem a college eligible for federal student aid and that can be key to ensuring students qualify for an attorney’s license. The Education Department officially recommended that the ABA accreditation council be stripped of its recognition in August...

Full story at: https://www.insidehighered.com/index%2ephp/news/governance/accreditation/2026/09/08/aba-accreditation-council-repeals-diversity-standard. 

The Humanities Slide

From the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: ...In 2025, the nation’s colleges and universities awarded 164,847 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities—the smallest number of degrees awarded since 1991 and 30.4% below the recent high-water mark in 2012... That decline includes a particularly sharp drop of 12.7% from 2021 to 2023, followed by a more modest drop of 2.1% from 2023 to 2024, and a further decline of just 0.4% from 2024 to 2025—the smallest year-on-year decline since 2012. The number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in the “historical categories” (disciplines with data going back to 1949) has been falling more quickly than for the field as a whole—with a decline of 42% from 2012 to 2025...

The share of bachelor’s degrees conferred by disciplines among the historical categories contracted to 3.4% of all degrees conferred in 2025—the smallest share in records extending back to 1949, and just under one-fifth of the share at their peak in 1967 (when they constituted 17.2% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded)... 

Full report at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/academics/2026/09/10/report-humanities-majors-disappearing. 

Union Negotiation News

From time to time, we have noted that after a major strike predominantly of student-workers, UC "professionalized" its approach to collective bargaining. Part of that approach is the issuance of releases concerning its view of the state of negotiations. UC recently released this account of current negotiations with one unit that will continue today:

The University of California (UC) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) continued negotiations on August 28, September 2, and September 11 on the first systemwide collective bargaining agreement covering roughly 1,600 Communications, Marketing, and Sales Professionals, known as ComMaS. During the August 28 session, the University passed a package proposal that included the articles from the RPSP and SSAP* agreements ratified on March 20, 2026, and a revised Side Letter on Subcontracting.

At the September 2 session, the University passed a package proposal that included the articles from the RPSP and SSAP March 2026 agreements,** as well as further revisions to the Side Letter on Subcontracting. UAW also passed a revised Side Letter on Subcontracting. The parties reached a tentative agreement on the Side Letter on Subcontracting, marking an important step toward a first contract. At the September 11 session, UC and UAW continued to exchange ideas to help resolve outstanding issues and move the parties closer to a first contract. UC welcomes the progress made and remains committed to engaging in good faith toward reaching an agreement.

UAW ComMaS-represented employees help connect UC with the public and the broader university community through communications, marketing, outreach, and related work that advances the university’s mission.

The parties will resume negotiations on September 17.

Source: https://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/labor-news/uc-uaw-cm-09-15-26/.

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*RPSP = Research and Public Service Professionals. SSAP = Student Services and Advising Professionals.

**Since we don't have access to the negotiations, we don't know what these articles were. However, it should be noted that union contracts typically have a good deal of boilerplate provisions that repeat from contract to contract. An example would be language recognizing the union as the exclusive bargaining agent. It would not be surprising if such language in one UAW-UC contract was found in others.

Watch the Regents Meeting of September 14, 2026

We will catch up with the Regents as time permits. As blog readers will know, their meetings were shifted to a Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday schedule this week. Usually, regular meetings of the Regents do not occur on Mondays.

The Monday meeting began at 3 pm in the UCLA Luskin Hotel and Conference Center with public comments. Topics included the announced closure of a childcare center at UCLA, a complaint that the ACT requires students to sign an unfair contract, accommodations for disabled students, UCLA Health's discontinuation of a contract providing coverage to Medi-Cal patients, calls to protect international students, and a thank you for Chancellor Frenk's expression of concern about a law school conference related to the 25th anniversay of 9-11.

After public comments, the meeting of the Investments Committee began. Chair Makarechian - who has mainly attended Regents meetings by Zoom after a major accident - appeared in person and introduced a student observer. CFO Bachhar reviewed investment returns during the 2025-26 fiscal year and beyond, which were strong. In particular, on a market basis, the pension became fully funded due to those returns. Data presented indicated that the portfolio was 63.3% in stocks, 14.5% in bonds, 1% in cash, and 21.2% in private assets (private equity, real estate, other real assets, and private credit). It might be noted that "private" means that the assets' value is more subjective than stocks, bonds, and cash which have regular objective market prices.

The Committee had Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone as a guest speaker via Zoom. Among other things, he echoed the general public discussion about AI being a Big Deal including - he noted - affecting the demand for electricity and thus utilities. 

Because Blackstone was the parent of the BREIT that UC bailed out to the tune of $4.5 billion, there was a defense by Bachhar of that investment. I won't go through all the controversy about BREIT but he emphasized that UC was getting an 11.25% return as promised. The return itself was not the controversial element. What was controversial was that it was objectively a risky investment that Bachhar made entirely on his own initiative. 

Moreover, his explanation now indicates that the 11.25% was somehow being maintained by drawing down "collateral." Exactly what that means is not clear. But let's assume that in the end, the investment pays off as promised. That outcome does not mean it was an advisable investment given the circumstances at the time. If the CFO took a big chunk of UC assets and bet on a horse, we would not say that decision was appropriate even if the horse came in. As our numerous blog posts at the time pointed out, there was very little discussion of the financial aspect of the bailout at the Investments Committee - although presumably it is the job of that Committee to ask questions about risk and return.

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As always, we preserve recordings of Regents meetings on the Internet Archive since the Regents have no policy on retention. Their YouTube recordings are unlisted, i.e., not searchable by the public. You can see the Sept. 14 recording at:

https://archive.org/details/regents-investments-committee-9-14-2026.

Does the Barnum Rule Still Apply? - Part 2

From the Daily Bruin: Dozens of physicians protested on campus at noon Tuesday to denounce the termination of a Medi-Cal contract that allowed low-income patients to access UCLA Health services. Nine thousand patients lost access to UCLA Health providers after it did not renew its contract with Health Care LA, a non-profit group of doctors, on June 30... The Committee of Interns and Residents, a local affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, and Doctors United organized the protest, which coincided with a UC Board of Regents meeting, outside the Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2026/09/15/ucla-physicians-protest-end-of-contract-providing-free-care-for-low-income-patients.

Note: Absent other information, this appears to be a contract dispute between an outside healthcare provider* and UCLA Health. It's unclear from what has appeared in the news whether the termination is in some sense the "final" outcome or whether - as in other types of negotiations - the external publicity is being used as a negotiating tactic in a dispute that remain unresolved, but is ongoing.

Exactly what the contractual relationship with UCLA Health consisted of before the June 30 expiration is unclear. Yours truly used the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive to look for a reference to UCLA before that date. He found one for the previous June (2025) that lists contracts with various insurers but does not mention UCLA:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250613192011/https://healthcarela.org/our-health-plans

So it remains unclear what the relationship with UCLA was, even apart from the (unknown) monetary terms of the agreement.

He also used the Wayback Machine to look at hospitals that had contracts with Health Care LA as of Nov. 2025:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251118194049/https://healthcarela.org/contracted-hospitals

There is no listing of UCLA there, although other hospitals are listed. (Olive View-UCLA Medical Center was listed for "limited scope" - whatever that means. But it continues to be listed beyond June 30, 2026.)

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*https://healthcarela.org/ 

Afterwords

Outgoing systemwide Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu wrote a long letter to UC President Milliken reflecting on shared governance.* It's too long to reproduce but the key points were listing areas in which there was lack of consultation. These included discontinuation of a fellowship program, creation of a program at two campuses which augment degrees with a paid internship, creation of a program to assist junior faculty which replaced a diversity program, and enhancement of a language program. 

Prof. Palazoglu then goes on to highlight two programs that, he said, developed without consultation and which directly affect the pay and working conditions of faculty. I will reproduce that segment:

Both the Total Remuneration Study (Deloitte) and the Systemwide Assessment of Online Education (Noodle/Huron) could have benefited from early Senate engagement. Both studies were developed and contracted without meaningful early consultation with Senate faculty with relevant expertise. When faculty were eventually given an opportunity to review the work, significant methodological and design concerns became apparent, but only after the scopes of work had been established and contracts executed. In both cases, earlier engagement with faculty experts would not simply have increased faculty confidence in these studies; it could have materially improved their design, methodology, and usefulness to the University.

The two programs involved bringing in outside consultants to do evaluations. "Total Remuneration" involves assessing the value of noncash benefits such as pensions and health care. Longstanding methodology has involved looking just at cash pay in comparison with other universities. The total remuneration approach looks at wider definition of compensation. Note that the direct cost of a benefit is not the same as its value to the recipient. To take an example, there was a long period in which no contributions were made to the pension plan because it was deemed overfunded. But clearly, having a pension during that period was not seen by pension participants as having no value. As regards online education, there are issues of cost, convenience, and assessment of actual learning.

Prof. Palazoglu notes issues related to litigation with the feds which are typically discussed at Regents meetings behind closed doors. He acknowledges a need for nonpublic discussion, and it is somewhat unclear what he proposes. He also points to the (huge) health enterprise that is growing somewhat autonomously on campuses with such activities and for which shared governance is "far less developed." Again, exactly how that issue should be addressed is unclear.

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*https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/senate-chair-to-president-state-of-shared-governanace-report-9-10-26.docx.pdf.

Straws in the Wind - Part 466

From Inside Higher Ed: The Florida Board of Governors voted... to bar undocumented students from attending selective institutions in the state’s public university system. According to the new regulation, which passed the board unanimously and without discussion, starting next academic year, anyone “who is present in the United States unlawfully” cannot enroll in any of the state’s 12 public universities that “did not admit all academically qualified applicants” for the past two academic years. The move follows a similar vote in June by the Florida State Board of Education, which banned undocumented students from the state’s system of 28 colleges and adult education programs. Florida had already eliminated in-state tuition for undocumented students last year, before the Trump administration began suing states over the practice on the grounds that it discriminates against U.S. citizens from other states.

Florida now joins Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina in prohibiting any student without legal documentation from enrolling in a public institution. Florida Lt. Gov. Jay Collins celebrated the move on X, writing, “Florida’s public universities are for students who are here legally. Period … Florida taxpayers should not be expected to subsidize opportunities for people who broke our laws to come here.” ...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/09/06/florida-bars-undocumented-students-public-universities.