The University of California’s president and investments committee chair are standing by chief investment officer Jagdeep Bachher following charges of mismanagement at the $118 billion investment office. An investigation by Institutional Investor, published September 6, found Bachher had allegedly used investment staff for personal errands, overrode asset-class heads’ opposition to invest with UC’s ex-investments chair, and twice leaked confidential information about an outgoing employee. “Just read the story. It’s an ugly one, no doubt,” UC President Janet Napolitano apparently wrote Bachher in a September 6 email, which he forwarded to staff. II obtained and verified a copy, along with several other internal documents. “You should know that I remain fully confident in you and your abilities,” Napolitano continued. “You are an important and integral part of our leadership team.”
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by Leanna Orr, Institutional Investor.
Posted: September 11th, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Approximately half of the people Bachher’s team hired are gone… At least three members of the senior investment staff are actively eyeing the door… UC’s governance model endows the chief investment officer with extraordinary power and provides scant oversight. There is no investment office CEO to serve as a check on the CIO, as is the case at many other funds of UC’s size and complexity… The stakes of unilateral decision-making became unsettlingly obvious last year, according to four senior investors serving at the time. Bachher decided to invest about $250 million with Main Street Advisors, the wealth management outfit run by ex–investment chair and Bachher backer Wachter. The deals broke no UC rules and had approval from the Office of the General Counsel…
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by Leanna Orr, Institutional Investor.
Posted: September 6th, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Student visa data show that the number of international students at U.S. universities declined last year after years of substantial growth. Professionals in international education attribute the decline to a range of factors, including reductions in scholarship programs sponsored by foreign governments, issues of cost and affordability, uncertainty about visa policies and the future availability of poststudy work opportunities, concerns about physical safety and, yes, perceptions of the U.S. as a less welcoming place to foreign nationals under the Trump presidency. The president reportedly called “almost every” Chinese student in the U.S. a spy at a recent meeting with CEOs. And various Trump administration policies on immigration have been broadly seen by many in U.S. academe as unwelcoming and counterproductive to the cause of recruiting talented students and scholars to American campuses.
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by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed.
Posted: August 24th, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The study catalogued the history of UC revenue sources and expenditures over its 150-year history across 10 campuses, noting its reliance on state funding from 1900 through the 1990s. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, state revenue per student started to decrease “dramatically,” while total enrollment grew alongside the California population from 166,500 students to the 273,000 students enrolled today. John Douglass, a co-author of the study, said in an email that the UC and the state had an agreement whereby more enrollment generated operating and capital investment by California lawmakers, but this is no longer in place.
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by Amanda Bradford, The Daily Californian.
Posted: August 23rd, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
It produces almost a third of the state’s bachelor’s degrees. The system is dominant on a federal level, too — its faculty and researchers secure almost 9 percent of all federal academic and research grants, the report says. Now, however, most UC campuses are at or near enrollment capacity, cutting into the chances that students will apply and be admitted to the UC campus of their choice. Significant pressure will likely continue to mount, as the state’s population has been projected to grow by 22.5 percent, from 40 million to almost 49 million, by 2040… Monday’s report comes just a few days after another report from the Public Policy Institute of California found UC and the California State University systems continue to receive shares of the state’s General Fund allocations that are at “historic lows.”
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by Rick Seltzer, Inside Higher Ed.
Posted: August 21st, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The UC system released its annual payroll report in August, detailing employee compensation for 2017 in a continued effort to promote transparency and accountability. At UC Berkeley, seven of the 10 highest-paid employees are in the athletics department, according to the database… “Salaries for general campus tenured and tenure-track faculty lags the market by 12 percent,” the report said, citing a 2014 update. “An inability to address below market salaries weakens UC’s ability to attract and retain high-performing faculty and staff, particularly as other institutions become more competitive and attractive.”
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by Madeleine Gregory, The Daily Californian.
Posted: August 20th, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
In reaction to President Trump’s policy of separating families at the border, students and labor leaders at the University of California are urging UC President Janet Napolitano to sever contracts with dozens of companies doing business with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. UC labor leaders say they’ve found 25 companies — from uniform suppliers to weapons manufacturers — that do hundreds of millions of dollars of business with the university, and with ICE.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: August 11th, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Dietitians, physical therapists and other health care professionals at UC Davis Health say that, over nearly a year of bargaining, the university’s labor negotiators have been skipping sessions and have not offered raises of more than 2 percent a year… All of the unions worry that UC wants to move new union hires into 401(k)-style retirement plans and away from the traditional pension… But this is not the only shifting of risk that UC is attempting during current contract negotiations, Wine said. “They want to eliminate any cap on the shared cost of our health benefits, and they want to eliminate any cap on parking costs for their employees,” Wine said. “When you do that, what cost-of-living increase are you really getting?…Currently, we believe if we accepted the 2 percent and we accepted elimination of these caps to the costs of benefits and parking, we believe the employee would actually take home less (money).”
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by Cathie Anderson, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: August 6th, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
There are well over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. And multiple attempts to catalog free speech incidents on campus, from different sources, keep coming up with numbers in the dozens. And of those dozens, a fairly large percentage of the targets are liberals, and a fairly large percentage of the others were conservative speakers who seem to have come to campus with the intent of provoking students… Some campus free speech critics, I suspect, aren’t operating in good faith. For them, the entire debate is a way to attack universities as hopelessly and dangerously liberal — to undermine higher education for nakedly partisan reasons.
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by Zack Beauchamp, Vox.
Posted: August 3rd, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Powerful possibilities will open up when K-12 and our colleges and universities work together, rather than in silos, and when policies are implemented with the full K-degree pipeline in mind. Unfortunately, that is not how those in public education are currently organized, incentivized, supported, or held accountable. Our state and educational leaders must reimagine a system fully aligned around student success, and must incentivize and require collaboration between the segments, from K-12 through community colleges to CSUs and the UC.
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by Monica Lozano, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: August 2nd, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
