mortiz055

The San Francisco Chronicle has coverage of an issue that has been circulating on faculty email networks at UC Berkeley for a few days.  The piece, " Cal professors fear UC bosses will snoop on them ," is behind a paywall. The first sentence reads, "UC Berkeley faculty members are buzzing over news that University of California President Janet Napolitano ordered the installation of computer hardware capable of monitoring all e-mails going in and out of the UC system."   UC's Chief Operating Officer says "that UC policy “forbids the university from using such data for nonsecurity purposes.”  UC Berkeley's Senate chair replies, "What has upset a lot of the faculty was that the surveillance was put in place without consulting the faculty. In fact, the people installing the system were under strict instructions not to reveal it was taking place."  On the blog's Facebook page, we've had some debate about how new this capability is, with so...

This is the statement released today by the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA). A link to their petition can be found below. The University of California is currently considering introducing a new pension plan for its employees hired after 2016.  These proposed changes will dramatically reduce pension benefits for most new faculty. The Academic Senate will be reviewing the proposals over the next few weeks. Your opportunity to provide input to the Senate lasts just a couple weeks. For some purposes, it will be most effective to provide input this week. Contact information is at the end of this document. This ill-conceived and ill-advised plan, which was negotiated behind closed doors by President Napolitano and Governor Brown without any engagement with the Academic Senate, the Regents, the Legislature, or the larger university community, will do serious damage to the quality of the University of California. While the details are highly technical the implications are not: ...

The Task Force charged with making a silk purse from the sow's war of President Napolitano's pension agreement with Governor Brown issued its report  on Friday.  To no one's surprise, the Task Force indicated that the task was impossible; given the limits the Task Force faced most faculty and many staff (especially in the health sciences) hired from July 1, 2016 will face dramatically reduced retirement benefits compared to current employees.  This situation results from two interrelated factors: the actual budget deal that President Napolitano accepted and the desire on the part of Vice-President Brostrom that there be savings produced by the new 2016 tier.  In exchange for a relatively small (about 5% of UCRP's unfunded liability) short-term State contribution to UCRP, UCOP has agreed to reduce the compensation for generations of employees to come. In this post I am going to do several things:  first, describe the contexts within which the Task Force was pres...

Since Flash  Comics writers discovered the existence of Earth-Two in 1961, readers have been tracking unexpected divergences between the paired planets that exist in parallel dimensions.  The Earths have generated divergent histories with more or less the same people. This makes it easy to study the effects of variable reactions to structural forces like culture, law, and economic policy, since backward leaders and our unfortunate "human nature" reign on both worlds-- as on the other Earths DC Comics has discovered since. There's one other thing:  Earth-One is considered a Silver Age and Earth-Two a Golden Age planet.  The terms derived initially from the age of comics in which their lead superheros evolved, but came to be applied to the quality of the planets themselves.  Life is better on Earth-Two: less impoverished, less tyrannical, less hypermasculine in leadership styles, and less inclined towards multiple gun deaths.  Some believe that the lower, Sil...

Governor Brown has issued his proposed 2016-2017 budget .  Shorn of its rhetorical invocation of technocratic answers, the Governor's Higher Education budget simply locks in the continuing underfunding of CSU and UC (I won't offer an analysis of the community college budget in this post).  When I first read the budget, I was tempted to think that Governor Brown was now governing openly as an Eisenhower Republican.  But Eisenhower actually helped expand higher education for the country. He did not diminish it. UC The Governor's proposal fundamentally restates the agreement reached in secret negotiations with UCOP under the auspices of the so-called Committee of Two.  There is the $125M general fund increase that the Governor had intended as part of his "sustainability" plan (about 4% of this year's base funding) and the one-time $171M contribution to the UCRP unfunded retirement obligation. ( 18 ) The proposed budget continues the supplemental $25M appropriatio...