Acountability Report to Regents: Data Source

At the July Regents meeting, there will be consideration of the "Accountability Report."  While this report tends to be a booster publication, it contains interesting information on budgets, enrollment, etc.  For example, the impact of the Great Recession and its budgetary aftermath can be seen on the chart above from the report.  Nonresident undergrads - who pay full tuition - were increased as a percent of total enrollees.  (Clicking on the chart will enlarge it and show more detail.)

The Accountability Report is at http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/jul13/l1attach.pdf.

Regents to Consider Modifying Code of Faculty Conduct to Protect Academic Freedom

In an earlier post, before the full Regents' agenda for July was posted, we noted there was an item involving a modification of the faculty code of conduct.  It appears that the main modification to be proposed is explicit protection for faculty to comment on institutional UC policies.  Specifically, there is proposed explicit recognition of the "freedom to address any matter of institutional policy or action when acting as a member of the faculty whether or not as a member of an agency of institutional governance."

The report on this matter can be found at http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/jul13/e3.pdf.

Keeping Online Ed In-House at UC: Regents Report

Readers of this blog will know that the governor and legislative leaders have been pushing UC to do "more" online ed.  The governor originally earmarked $10 million in the UC budget for that purpose but then line-item-vetoed his own language on the promise that UC would do it anyway. 

The Regents next week will consider a report on online higher ed at UC.  What is interesting about the report is what is highlighted and what gets little mention.  At the January Regents meeting, guest speakers from commercial MOOCs were given the floor to tout their wares.  But the report for next week doesn't talk much about outsourcing to commercial vendors.  It says in the introduction that "faculty have continued to explore MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), and more campuses have established formal agreements with one or more MOOC providers."  Thereafter, it's almost all about various internal initiatives ranging from full courses to regular courses that are enhanced by online elements.

Nowadays, the buzz acronym is now ILTI which stands for Innovative Learning Technologies Initiative.

The report is at http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/jul13/e1.pdf

Of course, there can be problems, inside or outside:

Regents Will Consider Privacy (in Public)

We noted in an earlier post that a preliminary agenda for the Regents' meeting next week had been posted.  The more detailed attachments for the meeting have now been posted.  One topic to be taken up is UC policy on "privacy."  At this point, however, it is all processes to set a policy rather than the policy itself.  According to the agenda item, UCLA Chief Privacy Officer Kent Wada is involved.  (Did you know we had a Chief Privacy Officer?  See http://kentatucla.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/uclacpo-ddmemo1.pdf.)

The agenda item can be found at http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/jul13/a3.pdf

It's harder to keep things secret nowadays than it was back in the day:

Listen to the Regents Meeting of March 14, 2013

We continue our archiving of Regents meetings since the Regents themselves indicate they will preserve the recordings for only one year.  This is the March 14 meeting (the final session of the March 2013 meetings).
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This session was mainly taken up with public comments and reviews of various programs including the nuclear labs which UC co-manages.  At the public comments, there were complaints by students of limits on the student health plan.
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Agenda: Thursday, March 14, 2013

8:30 am Committee of the Whole - Public Comment (open session)

8:50 am Committee on Compensation (open session)

9:00 am Committee on Finance (open session)

9:40 am Committee on Oversight of the DOE Laboratories (open session)

10:00 am Committee on Compliance and Audit (open session)

10:30 am Board (open session)

Concurrent : Special Meeting: Board (open session)

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Note: Breaks in the soundtrack occurred and have been partially edited out.  The sound distorts at one point but can be understood..  Click below to hear the session:

Listen to the Regents: March 13, 2013 - afternoon session

We continue our efforts at "permanently" archiving the audio of Regents meetings since the Regents' office apparently will preserve it for only one year.

Below is the afternoon session of March 13.  We posted the morning session yesterday.  Since there is no download option on the temporary archive provided by the Regents, we have to record the audio in real time, i.e., an hour of a Regents session takes one hour to record.

Regents Afternoon Agenda – March 13, 2013

1:00 pm Committee on Compensation (closed session)

1:15 pm Committee on Compliance and Audit (closed session)

1:40 pm Committee on Governance (Regents only session)

1:45 pm Committee on Finance (Regents only session)

2:10 pm Board (Regents only session)

2:15 pm Joint Meeting: Board and Special Committee to Consider the Selection of a President (Regents only session)

3:00 pm Special Meeting: Special Committee to Consider the Selection of a President (Regents only session)

3:00 pm Committee on Compliance and Audit (Regents only session)

3:15 pm Committee on Compliance and Audit (open session)

Note: The soundtrack at the beginning of the open session contained interference from the soundtrack of an earlier meeting.  We provide the audio after the soundtrack problem was cleared up (a few minutes into the session).  There is no audio of closed sessions available.

Click on the link below to hear the session:

We're Waiting for the Complete Post for the July Regents Meeting

The preliminary Regents agenda for the July 16-18 meeting has been posted.  As yet, the detailed attachments to the agenda are not available.  However, there will be approval of contribution increases to the pension for next year (2014-15) and an interim replacement for the university’s Chief Investment Officer who suddenly resigned without explanation.  In a closed session, the Regents will discuss the criminal case the LA district attorney is pursuing against UCLA Prof. Patrick Harran.  See http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2013/04/justice.htmlfor our most recent post on that case.  The Christian Head case charging discrimination (and involving a viral YouTube video) at UCLA will also be discussed at that closed session.  It was discussed a year ago at the Regents.  See http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/07/regents-litigation-agenda-behind-closed.html.  An amendment to the code of faculty conduct and discipline will be considered – but what that entails is not yet available. 

When more information becomes available, we will blog about it.  The Regents agenda is at: http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/july13.html

Meanwhile, it's hard to wait for the complete post:

Listen to the Regents: March 13, 2013 - morning session

Our efforts to archive Regents meetings (since the Regents' policy is currently to preserve them only for one year) continues.  Below is the agenda for the morning meeting of March 13, 2013.  Included was approval of a UCLA medical building about which cost concerns had been raised at an earlier meeting.  Eventually, the Regents seem to approve any construction project - even if concerns are raised - particularly when they are assured that it won't cost them anything.

Agenda for Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - morning
8:30 am Committee of the Whole (open session - includes public comment session)
9:30 am Committee on Grounds and Buildings (open session)
11:00 am Committee on Finance (open session)
11:15 am Committee on Educational Policy (open session)
12:00 Lunch

You can hear the audio of this meeting at the link below:
 

Listen to the Regents Meeting of Jan. 17, 2013

This post completes our archiving of the Regents meetings of January 15-17, 2013.  Check our posting of June 30 for an explanation as to why we are archiving these meetings (and why it should not be necessary).  Below is the agenda of the Jan. 17 meeting:

Agenda: Thursday, January 17, 2013

8:30 am Committee of the Whole - Public Comment (open session)

8:50 am Committee on Finance (open session)

11:00 am Committee on Governance (open session)

11:15 am Board (open session)

Click on the link below to hear the meeting:

Listen to the Jan. 16, 2013 Afternoon Meeting of the Regents

Don't worry.  Gas mask not needed to listen to Regents..

We have been posting past (2013) meetings of the Regents because of their current archiving policy.  For more details on why this is necessary to preserve the record of these sessions, scroll down to our June 30, 2013 posts.

Much of the afternoon of Jan. 16 was taken up with closed sessions which are not available.  Included in the open discussions was a proposed medical building at UCLA (about which we have previously blogged) which is controversial because of the costs involved.

Below is the agenda:

• 1:15 pm Committee on Compensation (closed session)
• 1:30 pm Committee on Health Services (Regents only session)
• 2:00 pm Committee on Finance (Regents only session)
• 2:45 pm Board (Regents only session)
• 3:00 pm Committee on Grounds and Buildings(open session) – Includes discussion of proposed UCLA medical building (with controversy over costs)

Click on the link below to listen:

Listen to the Meeting of the Regents Jan. 16, 2013 - morning (online education)

Our previous post noted that we are going back through 2013 to post and archive audio of Regents' meetings.  See the previous post for why it is necessary to do this (and why it shouldn't be).

The morning session of January 16, 2013 was devoted largely to online higher education, essentially at the "request" of Governor Brown.

Agenda: Wednesday, January 16

8:30 am Committee of the Whole (open session - includes public comment session)
9:30 am Committee on Educational Policy (open session)
12:00: Lunch

You can hear the session at the link below:

Listen to the Regents Meeting of Jan. 15, 2013

Why are we going back in time to last January?  The Regents had been live-streaming audio of their meetings prior to January 2013 but not archiving the audio files.  So we would request the files and - once they were received on CDs sent by postal mail - archive them.  Of course, this process took some time to accomplish so the files were not immediately available after the meetings.  Unless you listened live, you had to wait, even with our eventual archiving.

Finally, the Regents - who keep pushing for high techy online ed - were embarrassed by their own primitive IT service and the fact that someone else was doing their archiving.  So they moved to both an audio and video live streaming of their meetings and archived the video.  That is all well and good except that current regental policy is to preserve the "archive" only for one year.  When we requested the audio files so that an indefinite archiving could occur, we were told that since the files were now online, they wouldn't be provided (even though they will disappear after a year).

If that sounds improper to you, it probably is - and we will pursue it.  In the meantime, we will painfully record the meetings from the "archives" before they disappear and archive them indefinitely.  You can't download the actual files; only record them.  So a four-hour session takes four hours to record.  You might note the contrast between the Regents and the Calchannel [http://www.calchannel.com/] which archives legislative hearings and other Sacramento official activities.  If you go to the Calchannel website, you have the option of downloading files or streaming them.  And there is no one year evaporation.  The Regents could use Calchannel or at least mimic its policy.  But right now, they don't for whatever reason.

If you follow California politics, you know that quite recently there was a big brouhaha in Sacramento when legislation was proposed as part of the state budget that would have ended the mandate that local governments make public documents available.  (The state must reimburse local governments for costs of mandates so dropping the requirement saved some budget money.)  When the dropping of the mandate became known, a firestorm erupted and the mandate was continued.  That episode should make the Regents and UC sensitive to the public documents issue.

Anyway, for now, below is a link to the January 15, 2013 session of the Regents. We will be posting later sessions as time permits. 

University of California Regents Meeting Jan. 15, 2013 (Compliance and Audit): Agenda

Public Comment Period
 

Action Approval of the Minutes of the Meeting of October 31, 2012

A3  Discussion Plan for External Audit Request for Proposal

A4  Discussion Continuous Monitoring and Continuous Auditing – Internal Audit Partnering with Management

A5  Discussion Information Technology Expertise for Internal Audit

A6  Discussion Information Technology Model and Interim Leadership

Click below to hear the session:

UC Sues the Banks

From Bloomberg: Bank of America Corp. and Barclays Plc (BARC) are among more than a dozen banks sued by the Regents of the University of California over claims they manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rate.  The university system filed an antitrust complaint in federal court in San Francisco. It accuses the banks of fraud, deceit and unjust enrichment, among other claims, and it seeks unspecified damages for either paying inflated interest rates or receiving deflated interest rates on its Libor-linked investments. “The defendant Libor banks in this case engaged in illegal and improper conduct and engaged in a criminal conspiracy that caused harm to public entities and hundreds of millions of people around the world,” the University of California said in yesterday’s complaint..

Michael O’Looney, a spokesman for London-based Barclays, declined to comment on the lawsuit...  [REALLY: That's his name!]  ...The case is Regents of the University of California v. Bank of America Corp. (BAC), 13-2921, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco)...  

Full story at:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-26/bofa-citi-sued-by-university-of-california-over-libor.html

For those who haven't lost their marbles, here is a little ditty to go with lawsuit:

Prop 209 Data

Prop 209, approved by voters in 1996, banned affirmative action in university admissions and public contracting.  It followed an earlier move in 1995 by the Regents to ban affirmative action and, in fact, made their decision redundant.  (They later revoked the decision, an action that had no effect once Prop 209 was enacted.)  The Contra Costa Times has a retrospective article on the subject because of the pending U.S. Supreme Court decision on affirmative action that could extend to private as well as public universities since the former accept federal funding.  The chart above comes from that article and focuses on admission rates at UC-Berkeley.

The article is at http://www.contracostatimes.com/breaking-news/ci_23516741/affirmative-action-ban-at-uc-15-years-later

 

You can see a video of the Regents’ action at the link below:

New Student Regent-Designate

The LA Times has a profile of the likely new student regent for 2014-15 (shown in the campaign poster).  As the article notes, there is both a student regent and a student regent-designate at regents meetings.  The latter doesn't vote but becomes the student regent the following year.  Excerpts:

Sadia Saifuddin, who is studying social welfare at UC Berkeley, is believed to be the first Muslim who would represent students on the Board of Regents

A UC Berkeley senior who majors in social welfare and has been active in student government and Mideast issues is expected to become the next University of California student regent, joining the board that sets policies for the 10-campus system.A special regents committee has nominated Sadia Saifuddin, 21, of Stockton to be the student regent in 2014-15. Confirmation by the full Board of Regents is expected next month. For the next year, Saifuddin would be a regent-designate, able to participate in all discussions but without voting rights until her one-year term as a fully empowered student representative begins in July 2014, officials said....  Saifuddin said a priority would be keeping tuition from increasing again... 

Saifuddin has been a senator in UC Berkeley's student government and founded a UC systemwide committee seeking to improve conditions on campus for minority students. She was co-sponsor of a controversial student Senate resolution that called for the UC system to divest companies that do business with the Israeli military in its occupation of Palestinian territory; the UC Berkeley student Senate narrowly passed that nonbinding resolution in April after an emotional debate. 

The student regent for 2013-14 is Cinthia Flores, a law student from UC Irvine...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0610-student-regent-20130610,0,3315886.story

UC History: Post-Meeting

Then-Governor Ronald Reagan holds news conference after a contentious Regents meeting in 1968.

Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

Something for the Regents to consider:

Gov. Jerry Brown, whose public remarks occasionally include a phrase or two in Latin, explained Wednesday two reasons he liked learning it. "It's obscure and makes you smarter than everybody," he told about 1,000 people at a California Chamber of Commerce breakfast...

Full article at http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/05/jerry-brown-says-latin-makes-you-smarter-than-everybody.html

Ipse dixit.

Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/05/jerry-brown-says-latin-makes-you-smarter-than-everybody.html#storylink=cpy

[And, for those who would critique the Latin phrases above, I learned them online so they must be correct.  Right?  Prima facie evidence!]

The Complete Regents Meeting for Your Listening Enjoyment AND a Note About the Governor's Legitimate Question and the Absurd UC Response

We have given you sections of last week's Regents meeting in various postings.  And we have noted that the archiving policy of the Regents is a problem.  According to the Regents website, "Video files for past open session meetings of The University of California Regents and its Committees are available for one year after the dates of the meetings."  So the files apparently vanish.  Prior to 2013, the Regents provided no archiving at all, just a live stream of the audio.  We would then request the audio files and archive them elsewhere.  Since it appears that files will eventually vanish, we have preserved audios of the most recent meeting as follows:

Morning of May 15 prior to demonstration which caused the meeting to be suspended:


Morning of May 15 after the demonstration ended and the session resumed:


Afternoon of May 15 including comments and questions by Gov. Brown:


And by the way, in the session above, the governor asked the right question and got the wrong answer.  He had been given data and charts on time to graduation across campuses.  There was considerable variation, both over time and cross-sectionally.  The governor essentially asked whether a multivariate analysis might be undertaken that would illuminate the factors behind the variation.  The right answer from UC officials should have been, "yes, but we haven't done it - and now that you have pointed it out, we will do it."  Instead, there was an evasive answer that came down to saying that it is all very complicated, maybe we should ask the local officials for anecdotal evidence, and despite all of our data you can't get any insights from an analytical statistical approach."  That response, my friends, is totally absurd.  There are plenty of faculty at UC who could conduct a meaningful statistical analysis, given the data and necessary support.  To the extent that additional data are needed, they could be collected.  If we don't like the governor and legislature coming in and micro-managing (which is what is happening with regard to online education), we need to do the micro-management in-house!  [To hear the back-and-forth with the governor, start at about minute 38.]

Session of May 16:


A link to the agenda for the sessions is at:
http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may13.html

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Note that there is an upcoming meeting of the Committee on Investments of the Regents on Tuesday, May 21.  A link to the agenda can be found at:
http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may13/invest.pdf

UPDATE: President Yudof's State of the University report to the Regents is at:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/documents/yudof_white_paper_0513.pdf

Appy days are here again

From an article in today's Sacramento Bee describing Governor Brown's visit to the Regents yesterday afternoon:

...UC President Mark Yudof said many factors influence the time it takes for students to graduate, including how much pressure their parents put on them, how much they have to work to afford tuition and how complex the requirements are for their majors of study.

Brown suggested that perhaps technology – "a little app," he said – could help students by alerting them of their progress toward graduation...

Source: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/16/5424543/uc-regents-cool-to-gov-browns.html

Clearly, an app't suggestion from the governor with no l'apps of his sound judgment.

The recording of the afternoon session of May 15 was not available at the time of this posting on the Regents' website.  However, we get the theme of the governor's remarks:

Listen to (Part of) Morning Session of UC Regents

I had some trouble with recording this morning’s meeting of the Regents.  It began with a statement by UC President Yudof which included reference to the impending strike at UC hospitals (which UC is trying to enjoin).  During the public comment period, however, various union spokespersons said a strike would take place next week and the public comment session ended in a demonstration which led to a halt in the meeting (and transmission) while the room was cleared.  I did record the later meeting of the Committee on Finance.  Below is a summary and a link to a recording.

Before that, however, you might ask why I recorded the session when the Regents are now providing online video and audio transmission online plus archives.  When I tried to access the archives this morning of the January and March meetings, the page on which they were supposed to be didn’t have them.  Instead, clicking on the past meetings just linked me to the current meeting.  Moreover,  a statement on the page indicates that the archived recordings (which I couldn’t find) would be available only for one year.  It was unclear whether the archives would be available in any form after one year.  I have inquired about all this to the Secretary of the Regents.  More news on the archive issue when it becomes available.

Lenz & Brostrom

In any event, here is an outline of discussion of the part I did record and the link:

• Discussion of the governor's May Revise budget as it pertains to the University. 
• Discussion of lack of state pension contributions to UC which would match CSU
• Discussion of UC debt restructuring to enhance cash flow. 
• Discussion of lack of state funding for UC-Riverside medical school. 
• Discussion of possible funds from Prop 39 of Nov. 2012 for energy efficiency. 
• Discussion of legislative performance standards hooked to budget and relation to Regental autonomy. 
• Discussion of setting up a 501c3 entity at UCLA to enhance revenue from technology transfer.



Dorr & Economou

• Discussion by UC President Yudof follows Committee session on his state of the university report.  Note: The report itself was not included with other online materials.  President Yudof did express some concern about loss of UCLA faculty to USC.  (See earlier posts.) However, his remarks were largely a suggestion to read the report – which we don’t have.

Yudof

Click below to listen: