UC regents will vote on Kim Wilcox’s nomination as UC Riverside chancellor Aug. 8. He was at Michigan State during budget cuts… Until the regents vote, Wilcox will decline interviews, according to UC officials… More than 100 candidates were considered and six were interviewed, officials said. But unlike some other state universities, UC does not reveal finalists. UC Riverside’s previous chancellor, Timothy White, left last year to lead the 23-campus Cal State system.
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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 25th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
In the delayed-tuition model, students would elect, essentially, to tax their future earnings to attend a public university. In exchange, they wouldn’t need to take out loans to pay tuition bills; and if their public higher education leads to a good-paying job, the cash-starved state colleges would likewise see an increase in funding. “I’m cautiously supportive of the idea,” Ohio University economist Richard Vedder, a frequent critic of higher education spending, said on WVIZ Wednesday, “cautiously, because the devil’s in the details.” Vedder said the Ohio proposal was tantamount to students selling stock in themselves. If the graduates do well and succeed, then the state colleges that trained them will gain with them.
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by Tyler Kingkade, The Huffington Post.
Posted: July 24th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Efforts to cut federal funding for the humanities and the arts are anything but new; funding for the NEH has had a series of peaks and valleys, rising to roughly $150 million a year in the late 1970s, falling some during the 1980s, rising to roughly $170 million annually during the early 1990s, dropping sharply (to $110 million) in the mid-1990s, and then settling back in the $150-million-a-year range since then… “The NEH’s programs are preparing people to play critical roles in what’s happening in our society in the 21st century, whether it’s analysts in our intelligence agencies or people who drive innovation in our companies. If the NEH’s programs are not going in the direction that people want, let’s debate those programs, let’s debate those directions. Let’s not gut those programs.”
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by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed.
Posted: July 23rd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Online courses should be developed thoughtfully, from within the colleges, not as a result of top-down directives from the governor. The subjects that are offered should be based on student demand and faculty analysis of which would work best online. The preferences of even the best-intentioned billionaires should not be part of the equation. Nor should online courses be viewed as major money-savers, as Brown has pitched them. It still takes well-educated people, interacting with those who need an education, to provide high-quality courses, whether that’s via the Internet or in a classroom.
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by The Editorial Board, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 23rd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
“Most students in general are not aware of the impact of accrediting decisions,” said Campos, who also served as student trustee for the Los Angeles Community College District. “If the college loses accreditation, I’ll lose transfer credits, so I’ll need to find a way to line up everything in one year in case that happens.” The warning issued to Mission is the mildest of the possible penalties. The college will remain accredited pending a follow-up report due by March 2014. But in a raft of actions earlier this month, the panel made the rare decision to revoke accreditation from City College of San Francisco in July 2014 (the college is appealing) and issued warnings to Los Angeles Valley, Orange Coast and six other campuses. Sanctions were removed from West Los Angeles and Harbor colleges and seven other campuses.
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by Carla Rivera, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 21st, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
California State Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, criticized the UC Board of Regents for the process used in selecting Janet Napolitano as its new President, calling it a “very flawed search.” “It should have been a much more open and deliberative process” Perez said on NBC 4’s News Conference program. “They should have narrowed it down to a short list and had the short list of candidates interact with students, faculty and staff.” Perez said he nevertheless supports the selection of the Homeland Security Secretary for the position. “You can have a bad process and have a good outcome… sometimes it’s called getting lucky.”
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by Conan Nolan, NBC Los Angeles.
Posted: July 20th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Advocates of this effort will offer all kinds of excuses. They may attempt to blame teachers. They may argue that it is only a pilot program and kinks still need to be worked out or that the data is only preliminary. However, there are real-world, long-term consequences when we “fail fast” in higher education… Dealing with tough economic times by handing off education to private vendors and using public funds to increase online offerings through these vendors will not serve California well in the long run. Politicians’ well-intentioned efforts to increase access for students ignores a proven solution that we know will increase access: investing resources in more class sections. Thanks to rebounding economy, we finally have a chance to begin reinvestment in our public higher education. Let’s invest these public monies in what we know works.
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by Kell Fujimoto and Elizabeth Cara, The San Jose Mercury News.
Posted: July 19th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
While $570,000 is slightly less than what outgoing UC President Mark Yudof has earned, it perpetuates the administrative salary bloat that UC faculty, taxpayer groups and this editorial page have criticized for years. UC was once an institution of relatively even salaries between faculty and administrators, partly because the latter were nearly always drawn from the faculty, with plans to return to teaching after finishing their administrative terms. That has all changed, with UC administrators being treated like corporate CEOs and receiving salaries and benefits out of sync with every other form of public service. That bloat undermines their ability to work with faculty and lower-paid staff, and it undermines their credibility when they go to the Legislature to seek increased financial support for UC and its mission. Undoubtedly, the regents designed a compressed schedule around Napolitano’s selection to avoid scrutiny over her qualifications and salary.
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by The Editorial Board, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: July 19th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The fact that a secret selection process was used to choose someone with no experience as an educator and a long history working in fields that are, at best, adversarial to the ethics and practices of the Academy, is deeply distressing. Colleagues have informed me that two of the other finalists for UC President were Colin Powell and Leon Panetta, both of whom are also entrenched in the security-intelligence-surveillance bureaucracies and supported and/or executed government policies, including the invasion of Iraq and more recently drone strikes and indefinite detentions, that are clear violations of international law. Napolitano also supported the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Shouldn’t that massive lack of judgement, which cost so much in American and Iraqi lives and treasure, be enough to disqualify her from being UC President? … At the very least, the Regents should have afforded a longer period for consideration of Secretary Napolitano’s nomination. Instead, in the very announcement of her nomination they actually forbade any discussion… What is truly frightening here is that the senior academic leadership, in the system-wide Academic Senate, seems to have completely supported not just her hiring, but this closed, secretive and completely undemocratic process through which it has proceeded.
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by Mark LeVine, Aljazeera.
Posted: July 19th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano became the first woman appointed to lead the University of California on Thursday during a sometimes raucous meeting of the UC regents in San Francisco where police arrested six immigrant rights protesters. They were among dozens of demonstrators who contended that Napolitano was the wrong person to lead an institution with so many students from around the world. The immigration issue cost her unanimous approval when student Regent Cinthia Flores refused to support her, echoing protesters’ concerns that the record number of immigrants deported under her leadership “produced insurmountable barriers to higher education.” … Reporters later asked for her response to the protesters. “I’d say to those students – documented or undocumented – that we welcome all students,” Napolitano said. “We’re in the business of education.”
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: July 18th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
