The University of California is laying off a group of IT workers at its San Francisco campus as part of a plan to move work offshore. The layoffs will happen at the end of February, but before the final day arrives the IT employees expect to train foreign replacements from India-based IT services firm HCL. The firm is working under a university contract valued at $50 million over five years… This layoff affects 17% of UCSF’s total IT staff… In 2004, California lawmakers approved legislation prohibiting state and local entities from offshoring work, but the bill was vetoed by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger… In 2003, one year before Schwarzenegger’s veto, a UCSF outsourcing contract made the news. A medical transcriptionist in Pakistan threatened to expose patient records unless she was paid more.

Read full article [here].
by Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld.

Posted: September 7th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

A day after ITT Technical Institute abruptly shut down all its schools, thousands of students are researching their options for what to do next… Paul Feist, a spokesman for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, said decisions about transfer of credits to community colleges are done on a “college-to-college basis.” …Because ITT was not regionally accredited, its units will not transfer, said John Pope, a college spokesman. However, the college is looking into the possibility of credit by exam, in which ITT students could take a test and get credit for that course.

Read full article [here].
by Samantha Masunaga, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: September 7th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Just 19 percent of California State University students graduate within four years. Senate Bill 412, the “California Promise” bill, is said to provide students with the tools they need to get through all their requirements in four years… “I personally don’t think that academic advisors and priority registration is the root cause of why people stay longer [in school],” said Jacqueline Brezinski, senior at Sonoma State University. “I think that it’s more of the fact that there are more students than classes offered or not enough classes to begin with, which makes certain classes only offered during certain semesters.”

Read full article [here].
by Samantha Oyler, The Sonoma State Star.

Posted: September 6th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

For months they juggled classes, schoolwork and exams with testimony, endless meetings and midnight trips to Sacramento — all on their own dime. It was the most successful year yet for the amateur lobbyists of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, owing largely to the sacrifices and sheer stamina of its recent leaders. As the legislative session came to a close this week, five of the seven bills the students championed were on their way to the governor’s desk or awaiting his signature, including one that would require two-year schools to give their homeless students access to showers on campus.

Posted: September 4th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In the past few weeks, much has been said about the scandals, follies and errors that led to Chancellor Nicholas Dirks’ resignation. Dirks was less the victim of inexperience and incompetence than that of adherence to the failed policies of his predecessors. Capitulation to “the new normal” of reduced state funding and the enthusiastic embrace of privatization has been the common sense of Berkeley’s leadership for over a decade. While electorates around the world have revolted against those policies and scholars across the spectrum have challenged their fiscal logic, Dirks steadfastly championed them, even touting them as a “new” model for preserving the public good. In fact, these are precisely the policies that, before Dirks ever took office, produced Berkeley’s structural deficit. Now, many of Dirks’ keenest faculty and administrative critics want to accelerate those failed policies.

Read full article [here].
by Wendy Brown, Michael Burawoy, Celeste Langan, Colleen Lye, James Vernon and Dick Walker, The Daily Californian.

Posted: August 30th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

California has broken a lot of promises to its citizens who want access to a quality, low-cost college degree. Now comes Senate Bill 412, dubbed “The California Promise,” … The public university system, which used to be known for its almost free access but where tuition has risen astronomically, is now being judged by the norms of more privileged institutions whose students aren’t working 30 or 40 hours a week, as CSU students often must to pay the bills. And in these difficult economic times for working-class people, our students are supporting their families, not the other way around. CSU students are making great progress toward their degrees but they are not taking a full course load every term. Not only is the current focus on four-year graduation rates short-sighted, it also reveals a failure of vision by the state’s academic and political leaders, who have given up on any real solutions for restoring full funding to the CSU.

Read full article [here].
by Susan Gubernat, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: August 30th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Then UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi stepped down last week, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Napolitano called the sudden vacancies an opportunity for a new start… Wasting no time, Napolitano issued a letter Wednesday to the UC Berkeley Academic Senate chairman outlining the new chancellor search process. The goal is to submit a candidate to the UC Board of Regents by March for Berkeley and by January for Davis… UC officials said Napolitano’s bold leadership started immediately. As a homeland security chief who presided over record numbers of deportations, she faced protests from immigrant-rights advocates and undocumented students. On her second day in office, she invited several of them to meet with her.

Read full article [here].
by Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times.

Posted: August 18th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Embroiled in a UC investigation into allegations of misused funds, multiple sexual misconduct incidents at UC Berkeley and a $150 million annual structural deficit, Dirks announced his resignation Tuesday via email. The resignation comes as a petition — currently signed by 47 UC Berkeley faculty — circulates, calling on the campus’s division of the Academic Senate to consider a vote of no confidence in Dirks, according to campus sociology professor Michael Burawoy. “There has been a lot of pressure from the campus community, but particularly faculty, that he stand down based on poor judgments over the last year,” Burawoy said, referencing projects such as the nearly $700,000 fence built around Dirks’ campus residence and a more than $200,000 strategy to improve his image globally.

Read full article [here].
by Andrea Platten, The Daily Californian.

Posted: August 17th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Spending at the University of California’s Oakland headquarters has nearly doubled in recent years, and official staff counts vary by nearly 500 people, depending on who’s doing the counting. So on Wednesday, state lawmakers authorized an audit of UC’s Office of the President to determine whether its $686 million annual budget — more than twice that of the Legislature — is money well spent… Slightly more than half the president’s budget, $372 million, pays for programs across UC campuses. It funds millions of digital books, thousands of students studying abroad, hundreds of agricultural advisers and specialists, HIV/AIDS and breast cancer research, and more, documents show. The remaining $314 million of the president’s budget pays for UC headquarters and administrative services. This includes running the pension plan and investments, employee benefits, insurance and legal services, among other items.

Read full article [here].
by Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: August 10th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Napolitano ordered an investigation in April in response to allegations that Katehi had violated conflict-of-interest rules in the hiring and promotion of her son and daughter-in-law at UC Davis. Investigators also looked into whether she had made “material misstatements” to Napolitano in asserting that she had not been involved in hiring social media firms to scrub the Internet of references to campus police pepper-spraying of student protesters in 2011. “Chancellor Katehi has engaged in a pattern of misrepresentations, … has repeatedly exercised poor judgment when confronted with challenges, has consistently disregarded the impact of her actions on the campus and the university as a whole and has failed to mitigate troubling management practices,” said UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein. “This behavior is not fit for a UC chancellor or anyone in a leadership position.”

Read full article [here].
by Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times.

Posted: August 9th, 2016, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.