news aggregator

World's top scientists: California & nations must act now on environment
UC Berkeley
... publishing in scientific journals and not translating their findings into terms that policy makers, industry and the general public can understand and start to address,” said Anthony Barnosky, University of California, Berkeley, professor of ...
Opinion: Stop the decay of our planet's life-support systemsThe Daily Climate

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
3rd UC Berkeley law school student in Vegas exotic bird beheading takes plea
San Jose Mercury News
LAS VEGAS -- A University of California, Berkeley, law school graduate has pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors for his role in the beheading of an exotic bird last October at a Las Vegas Strip resort. Prosecutor Frank Coumou (koo-MOH') says 26-year ...
UC Berkeley law student in Vegas exotic bird death takes pleaKTVU San Francisco
Third Suspect - Cal Student - Charged With Killing Exotic BirdNBC Bay Area
Hazir Kargaran, third Calif. law student charged in Las Vegas exotic bird ...CBS News
Las Vegas Review-Journal -ABA Journal -Las Vegas Sun
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Philly.com
Federal complaint filed against UC Berkeley over handling of rape cases
KTVU San Francisco
Allred said complaints were filed Wednesday against USC, Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College and the University of California at Berkeley. "We are asking the Department of Education to open an investigation into these complaints and take appropriate ...
UC Berkeley Targeted In Federal Complaint Over Its Handling Of Rape AllegationsCBS Local
4 More Colleges Are Targets of Students' Complaints Over Sexual AssaultChronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Dartmouth Students To File ComplaintValley News
ThinkProgress -Philly.com -Businessweek
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Ansal University's Disha Sahu Selected for '2013 BERKELEY PRIZE Travel Fellow'
Moneylife
The BERKELEY PRIZE Competition was established in 1998, made possible by a generous gift of Judith Lee Stronach to the Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Through three distinct ...

Campus Progress
UC Berkeley Targeted In Federal Complaint Over Its Handling Of Rape Allegations
CBS Local
Allred joined students from the colleges at a New York City news conference to announce the filing of complaints against Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley. She said ...
4 More Colleges Are Targets of Students' Complaints Over Sexual AssaultChronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Students To File ComplaintValley News
Swarthmore among colleges named in federal suitPhilly.com
Businessweek -WCAX
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UC Berkeley
Campus to share expertise with Middle Eastern research center
UC Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley, plans to share scientific and engineering expertise with the Middle East's first major international research center, which is a unique collaboration among scientists from many countries in the region, including ...

UC Berkeley
Help wanted: Public needed to uncover clues in natural history collections
UC Berkeley
These are just some of the reasons why people should join a project led by the University of California, Berkeley's Essig Museum of Entomology. UC Berkeley graduate student, Joan Ball, holds a display of specimens at the Essig Museum of Entomology.
CU-Boulder helps tap crowds to digitize museum records of bugs and plantsCU Boulder News & Events

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University's Israel divestment vote is latest sign of hostile environment
Jewish Advocate
A pril's Israel divestment vote at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is just the latest unfortunate expression of how hateful an environment the anti-Israel movement can create for Jewish students and supporters of Israel on campus ...

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Brown's Commencement Address at UC Berkeley
MyMotherLode.com
Mark Truppner, MML Reporter. Governor Jerry Brown delivered the commencement address to the University of California, Berkeley's political science graduates. Brown was Tuesday's KVML "Newsmaker of the Day". Here's the text of the Governor's address: ...

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San Francisco Chronicle
Brown cites safety in possible Bay Bridge delay
The San Luis Obispo Tribune
Brown spoke to reporters Monday before delivering a graduation speech for University of California, Berkeley political science students. The Sacramento Bee http://bit.ly/Z8qthw quoted him as saying, "I drive across that bridge, too." He says the ...
Calif. gov cites safety in possible bridge delaySeattle Post Intelligencer
Jerry Brown on Bay Bridge: 'First we want to make it safe'Sacramento Bee (blog)

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Governor Brown Delivers Commencement Address at UC Berkeley
Imperial Valley News
Berkeley, California - Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today delivered the commencement address to the University of California, Berkeley's political science graduates: First of all. Congratulations to all you graduates. It is not an easy or trouble free ...

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One of the main questions presented at the last UC regents meeting was why do only 60% of UC students graduate in four years. While President Yudof celebrated this rate, Governor Brown was not very pleased, and both men indicated that online education may be the solution to the problem. However, what should be clear is that the university needs to do a comprehensive study to determine the main causes for the different graduation rates on the various campuses.

In my interviews with students, I have found that the biggest reasons for a delay in graduation is that students switch majors, they fail out of courses, they cannot get required courses, they do not qualify for their intended majors, they have to work to pay for their living expenses, they do not think there are any jobs for them after graduation, they pursue double majors, they do not receive adequate advising, they have medical problems and personal issues. Students also complain about the number of requirements for certain majors and their dislike of large lecture classes. A comprehensive survey of the UC system would help to determine what is really happening on a local level.

Another important aspect of this problem is the question of how much money individual campuses dedicate to undergraduate instruction. UCOP has reported on the increase in classes and the decrease in faculty relative to the number of students, but it is still unclear what has caused these changes. After all, during the last five years, while the state did reduce the UC budget by $1 billion, total tuition revenue went up by over $1.2 billion. It would seem that as students pay more for their education, they would get more support and smaller classes instead of less support and larger classes, but as this blog has stressed, the university continues to use undergraduate funds to subsidize many other university functions.

Since President Yudof claims that tuition increases have only covered 38% of state reductions, he has opened the door for the state to argue that tuition can be frozen for the next four years. Once again manipulated budget numbers are coming back to bite the UC. If the UC had instead stated the truth that tuition dollars have outpaced state reductions, it would have been much harder for the governor and the legislature to simply tell the UC to stop raising tuition. While I am not calling for a tuition increase, I am arguing that false and misleading budgetary numbers always seem to backfire on the UC.

Our Emotions Match Colors to Music, Says Berkeley Study
WQXR Radio (blog)
According to a study by the University of California, Berkeley, we are hardwired to associate anything from Ravel to Radiohead with a particular hue from the color spectrum. For instance, Mozart's perky Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often ...

Ex-Detroit Pistons star Isiah Thomas earns master's degree at UC Berkeley
Detroit Free Press
Thomas graduated with a masters of education from the University of California at Berkeley, tweeting his cap and gown and retweeting congratulations to other UC Berkeley graduates. He said in a recent Huffington Post story that he has “studied the ...

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NBC Southern California
Common Lipstick, Lip Gloss Products Contain Lead, Other Metals
NBC Southern California
A University of California, Berkeley study testing 32 common lipsticks and lip glosses found metals like lead, titanium, manganese and chromium. Scientists were concerned that overexposure to the metals could lead to health problems in the long term ...

Chris here, introducing a post by Ivan Evans, professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi's opinion piece, "The Neoliberal Assault on Academia," produced a long discussion on several lists because of its claim that faculty have played a central role in shifting their universities towards revenue metrics and managerial assessments of intellectual value.  His example is the arrival of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, which has molted into the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  

Though pushed by the Thatcher government, the RAE was accepted and applied by the UK professoriat. Its successor, the five-yearly REF," Prof. Barkawi writes, "completely dominates UK academic life. It determines hiring patterns, career progression, and status and duties within departments. It organises the research projects of individual scholars so as to meet arbitrary deadlines. It has created space for a whole class of paid consultants who rank scholarship and assist in putting together REF returns. UK academics regularly talk about each other's work in terms of whether this or that book or article is 'three star' or 'four star'."

Prof. Barkawi argues that UK universities are now run by managers who see their jobs not as furnishing resources needed for academic work, but as the continuous monitoring and non-expert assessment of research and teaching that winds up justifying resource restriction and permanent reorganization.  Shifting audit to management, he argues, undermines "the entire point of university research," which "is conversation and contestation over what is true and right. In the natural sciences, as in the social sciences and humanities, one person's truth is another person's tosh, and valid knowledge emerges from the clash of many different perspectives." This complex, internally regulated, expertize-driven debate is being in large part replaced by audit mechanisms. "Meanwhile," Prof. Barkawi concludes, "all those adjunct faculty are far more subject to managerial control and regulation than are tenured professors. Aside from their low cost, that is one of the principal reasons why they are so attractive to university managers."

Prof. Evans extends this remark about adjucts below.

I strongly agree with Tarkawi's conclusion that faculty are far more complicit in the sacking of public higher education than we are prepared to acknowledge. One of the best indexes of this is the arrogance that ladder-rank faculty display towards adjunct/part-time faculty/"lecturers" in our own departments. As with the caste system, there are so many categories for them, all of which serve the purpose of the Brahmins in the Academic Senate.  

We--and here am I tempted to specifically include you [on the list] alongside myself in this condemnation, but won't  because there's always a small chance that some of you/us are exempt from these generalizations--in fact appear to take some pride in treating adjuncts as an inferior caste. It is the norm for adjuncts to be excluded from faculty meetings and to be deprived of any say in the management of departments. Instead of resisting the "adjunctification" of the professoriat by incorporating these colleagues--because they are colleagues--into the university and our respective departments, we tolerate them as useful proof of our Brahmin status. They are our untouchables. 

And we treat them accordingly. 

I have recently asked my colleagues at UCSD questions such as: How many adjunct/contingent/non-tenure track faculty are there in your department? Can you name them? Have you met any adjuncts for coffee or lunch on campus? Are they invited to the homes of ladder rank faculty? Do they have office space? Do they have any voting rights in your department? Should they? Do you know how they are evaluated? Should they be rewarded for publishing? Should ladder-rank faculty with poor teaching evaluations be assigned to courses ahead of adjunct colleague with excellent teaching evaluations? Should campus charters be changed to extend representation to adjuncts in the Senate?

The results of the informal survey have been so depressing that I would like to survey faculty at UCSD to draw attention to the cooperation that ladder-rank faculty give to the corporatizaton of their home institutions. We should be forging firm bonds with the fastest-growing category in our midst instead of setting ourselves apart from and above them. We are all aware that our fate is tied to the fate of adjuncts and that our separate futures would be far more pleasant if we stand firm with them now. But I think we know that we will not. Better to burnish our progressive self-image by baying at the moon (on this and other list servs) even as we help campus administrators slip the dagger between our collective ribs.
Truth is that ladder-rank faculty are growing old and we are not prepared to pick this important fight with our administrations or UCOP. We are edging towards retirement, counting our beans in our pension funds, and just holding on until we escape amidst encircling doom. Safe in retirement, many of us will tut-tut and speak of the halcyon days when ladder rank faculty were little gods with real rights. 

I am much more apprised of the unflattering assessment that adjuncts/non-tenure track/contingent faculty have of ladder-rank faculty because several of them sit on the Steering Committee of the CA-AAUP. I have become acutely aware of, and grown very ashamed of, the way ladder-ranks treat the nameless Other. As Stuart Hall summarized an analogous arrogance back in the '80s, it's "The West versus the rest". 

Consider this: One adjunct on the Steering Committee teaches 6-9 courses per quarter at a bewildering array of campuses in the Bay Area. I do not have a good enough grasp of the geography of that region to understand exactly why: 

• she hits the road at 5:30 am to make her first class;  
• teachers non-stop from 8am - 5 pm (including travel time as she whizzes at breakneck speed from one campus to another) 
• takes her first and only break from 5-7pm 
• teaches again from 7-9pm 
• holds her office hour from 9-10pm (yes, that's PM) 
• checks in at a $49 /night motel on Highway 101 (in a town called Gilroy); and
• repeats this schedule three times per week.

On a "good day", she remains in the Berkeley area where she resides and teaches at 2-3 colleges. No contract, no benefits, no representation in the Senate. At the beginning of the Winter quarter, she was informed that one course had just been re-assigned to another adjunct "who needs the course more." Just like that, income that she is so vitally dependent on, and in fact cannot survive without, was taken away--by email, without prior notification and for a reason that is as inscrutable as it is uncontestable. 

Re-read this list again to grasp the full dimensions of what I can only call its horror. It is unspeakably appalling. And I am ashamed that our preponderant collective interest in matters such as SB 520, MOOCs, etc. is: "what's in it for the ladder ranks?" "How dare they strip away our rights", etc

This is the price others pay to keep us ladder ranks in clover. The results of my still informal survey at UCSD leave no doubt that  ladder ranks would club adjuncts into oblivion rather than be amalgamated with them. The arrogance, and fear of being lumped together with the Untouchable Other remains and perhaps increases even as the once-venerable ladder rank category shrinks with each passing year.

In fact, it is best to not mention a category of fellow workers and colleagues--humans and good people all--who now account for 76% of the academic workforce.

Absent a UC faculty union with real teeth, I cannot see faculty mounting anything close to meaningful opposition to the gutting of UC. What would make a difference is an alliance of faculty, regardless of rank, at all three levels of the Master Plan. (Yes, there are other two other levels). But that will not happen, mostly because UC faculty are aghast at the idea of rubbing shoulders with the Untouchables both amongst them and those who labor in recondite places without darkening the views from Sather Gate or scenic La Jolla.

I now feel that we shall deserve what we get.

abc7news.com
Albany residents protest return of Occupy activists
abc7news.com
(KGO) -- A standoff is taking place at the "Gill Tract" in Albany, where protesters have grown an urban farm on land owned by U.C. Berkeley. A second group joined ... "It is not Albany land, this is University of California land," she said. "And it ...
Lawsuit to stop grocery store tentatively deniedBerkeleyside
Judge set to rule on lawsuit challenging University Village project in AlbanyContra Costa Times
Lawsuit to stop Albany grocery store planned by Cal is tentatively deniedSan Francisco Chronicle (blog)

all 6 news articles »

UC Berkeley
Bach to the blues, our emotions match music to colors
UC Berkeley
Whether we're listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, Mozart's jaunty Flute ...
Why the Blues Are BlueLiveScience.com

all 2 news articles »

Governor Brown’s May revision of the state budget for the University of California makes very few changes. One difference from the January budget is the removal of a cap on how many units students can take and still receive financial aid (Cal Grants). Another change deals with the introduction of accountability measures for UC funding. While the governor’s Department of Finance has released an outline of the accountability measures, the May Revise pulls them pack and states that the governor will work with the legislature to develop the guidelines. The backstory is that during a legislative hearing on higher education, it became clear that there were many problems with the governor’s multi-year proposal to tie funding to a 10% increase in graduation rates for UC and CSU. One major problem is that the CSU 4-year graduation rate is 16%, and the UC 4-year rate is 60%, so the UC would have to increase by 6% and the CSU by 1.6%. Also the legislative analyst pointed out that most multi-year deals between the state and the UC have been broken, and therefore, it is not a good idea to make long-term funding commitments. The LAO also argued that it might be a good idea to first study why people do not graduate in a timely fashion before you start legislating accountability measures.

The question of timely graduation is obviously a major focus of the administration, and that is one reason why the governor and the legislature want to see if online education will move students through the systems in a quicker fashion. While there is no mention of online education in the May Revise, we can assume the governor still intends to earmark $10 million of the UC budget for distance education; however, we still do not know how the governor’s funding for online education relates to Steinberg’s and Marty Block’s distance education bills. To make matters even more complicated, the UC now seems to be running several competing online programs of its own.

While the original UC online pilot program appears to be running out of funding, a new initiative, run out of the Office of the President, is calling for a new round of course proposals. Under the heading of ILTI, this call for proposals concentrates on highly-impacted, lower-division cross-campus courses. The desire here is to develop system-wide classes that would help students graduate in a more efficient manner, but there still remains the major problems of how to allow students from one campus to take courses on another campus. Not only are there issues with incompatible registration systems, but the biggest difficulty is how will revenue be shared between the campuses. For example, if many UCSB students take their Biology classes with UC Davis, who pays for the courses and how much do they pay, and what happens if suddenly, no one at UCSB is taking Biology courses, does the UCSB Biology Department layoff teachers? We have been told that a new working group has been assembled to deal with these issues, but it may take several years.

Another complication in the Online scrum is the fact that individual faculty members are signing up with private providers like Coursera to put their courses online. Meanwhile, departments are developing their own online courses, and some summer programs have augmented their online offerings. No one knows how all of these different online ventures relate to each other and how they relate to the governor’s plans and the various bills coming out of the legislature.

Since no one knows how much it really costs to educate a student in the UC system, it is hard to know if online courses will save money or not. In fact, the governor’s January budget did include some budget transparency language to see how much it costs to educate each student, but the UC does not have to report on this until October 2014. It would make sense to hold off on the accountability measures until after we know how much things actually cost and why students do not graduate in a more timely fashion.

Temple University News
Department of Energy fellowship propels physics grad
Temple University News
Following graduation, he will pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Temple Times: What got you interested in physics? Eric Hunter: I'm motivated by a compelling need that a lot of young people in every generation feel, and ...