University of California chancellors will get big salary boosts — near or exceeding 30% in most cases… Regents also approved salary adjustments for six senior UC leaders, including a 25.3% boost for UC President Michael V. Drake to bring his annual base pay to $1.3 million. In addition, 27 senior managers, including Drake and chancellors, will receive a 4.2% general increase. Regent John A. Pérez said he was “very uncomfortable with the overreliance” on a salary survey data compilation known as the Market Reference Zone used to make decisions about UC salaries. He said UC uses that comparative tool only for the system’s highest-paid leaders and doesn’t evaluate lower-paid employees in the same way…

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by Teresa Watanabe, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: September 20th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Two faculty members at UCSF, a medical school, faced intense pushback for speaking out about the health consequences resulting from the destruction of hospitals and other infrastructure in Gaza, Ghannam said. That falls within the purview of health-related academic discussion at the university, Ghannam argued, but he said those faculty members were “either written up, counseled, or had their material taken down.”

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by Juan Carlos Lara, KQED.

Posted: September 19th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

It’s likely that the regents were preparing for a lengthy discussion about the inventory of weapons at campuses, their purpose and whether the schools need new equipment. Regent John Pérez set that inquiring tone just as the compliance committee began. But when the committee reconvened moments later, Perez was gone. Also not in the room was Jody Stiger, the UC director of safety, who was explaining the uses of the weapons and equipment before the students shut down the meeting. He was in the next room where protesters and police squared off.

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by Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters.

Posted: September 19th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The ULP charge rejects claims by the UC that these actions have been taken in order to promote campus safety, instead arguing that the UC has targeted activity and speech that express solidarity with Palestine. “From the brutal predawn arrests ordered by university leaders to the vague and threatening notices of investigation, the university’s goal is clear: to end Palestine solidarity activism on campus,” said Anna Markowitz, associate professor of education at UCLA. “In this ULP charge, we are saying that this illegal suppression of speech cannot stand, whether about Palestine or about other issues that students and faculty may raise in the future.”

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by Caitlin Scialla, Santa Barbara Independent.

Posted: September 19th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The allegations against Aini touch on trespassing and failing to disperse; violations of school policies. She is not accused of any violent behavior, and says her involvement in the protests was simply an act of free speech, a guaranteed right. School officials say the process is taking time because they want to follow University of California guidelines. The Orange County District Attorney’s office doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations, and it’s unclear if any students have been charged with a crime connected to the May 15 conflict. Now — several hearings, court filings and sleepless nights later — Aini and other students are still waiting to hear whether they’ll be subject to formal sanctions by either the university or the county criminal system. Officials at UC Irvine haven’t absolved them or declared them guilty. And it’s been a month since Aini has heard from the District Attorney’s office.

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by Victoria Le, The Orange County Register.

Posted: August 7th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

An increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education. As a result, Americans are now nearly equally divided among those who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence (36%), some confidence (32%), or little or no confidence (32%) in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and 10% had little or none. The latest results are based on a June 3-23 Gallup survey that gauged Americans’ confidence in various institutions.

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by Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup.

Posted: July 8th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The academic senate, a voting body that represents faculty members, has already called for an independent investigation into the administration’s crackdown on a protest at the on-campus pro-Palestinian encampment on May 15 that led to law enforcement from over 20 local agencies making nearly four dozen arrests and the encampment being cleared. On Friday, the senate explicitly asked UCI to lift the punishments levied on students allegedly involved with the encampment until investigations into the students’ conduct are completed. In early May, UCI issued interim suspensions to several students involved with the encampment. Critics of the interim suspensions say UCI has historically reserved them for students posing an imminent threat to the safety of others — something, they say, these students did not do.

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by Jonathan Horwitz, The Orange County Register.

Posted: June 14th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Why have think tanks funded by right-wing mega-donors paid such attention to college campuses? One answer is that the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the increased visibility of queer and trans people, fundamentally threaten the libertarian and conservative ideologies that justify the obscene wealth hoarded by these donors. Since 2020, for example, millions of people came into the streets demanding that governments take action to address the COVID-19 pandemic and structural racism. In recent years, young people have demanded climate action. These demands for collective solutions to social problems threaten the ultra-wealthy mega-donors, who see all collective goods and collective action as proceeding along the road to socialism.

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by Isaac Kamola, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: June 5th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Each system would receive a modest bump of 2.05% in 2025-26 — a far cry from the 10% the governor projected in his January budget proposal. That 10% itself was a compromise. Each system was supposed to see a 5% bump in 2024-25 and the same in 2025-26. But in January, Newsom called for no bump in year one and to double-up in year two as a way to manage the state deficit. That 10% for the two systems would have meant $1 billion combined in 2025-26, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. A mere 2% increase would total roughly $200 million.

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by Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters.

Posted: May 15th, 2024, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

While the increasingly popular quip that “colleges are just real-estate hedge funds with classes attached” may inspire eye rolls, recent moves are making the joke cut deeper… Rather than help ease student’s cost burdens, the growing hedge-fund-like nature of endowments has actually made affordability worse. According to a 2018 case study on the financialization of higher education from the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, complex financial investments called interest-rate swaps had cost a sample of 19 schools $2.7 billion — enough to cover the total cost of college for 108,000 students.

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by Catherine Liu, Business Insider.

Posted: March 8th, 2023, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.