UCLA History: Former Presidents Visit

Jimmy Carter visits with Prof. Michael Intriligator at UCLA's Burkle Center (2001)

Bill Clinton visits with Acting Chancellor Norm Abrams (2006)

UC History on Presidents' Day: A Message from the First UC President

The first UC President, Clark Kerr, viewed the university as of the mid-20th century as part of the "knowledge industry."  Video below.

UCLA History: From the Air

In this aerial view of Westwood and UCLA in 1965, not much is to be seen west of Westwood Boulevard once you enter the campus.  The building on Wilshire under construction now houses Occidental Petroleum and UCLA's Hammer Museum (which UCLA essentially inherited after the death of Occidental CEO Armand Hammer).

China Care Bruins Program

There is an interesting story today in the Daily Bruin about the UCLA China Care Bruins Program.  Excerpt:

Six-year-old Ruby Knowlton held her arms up to Kim Tran, asking to be picked up. Smiling fondly, Tran, a second-year biochemistry student, picked the young girl up, swinging her around in a circle. From the way they interacted with one another at a mentorship event at UCLA last Sunday, Ruby and Tran could almost be mistaken for sisters. As Ruby’s “Big Buddy,” Tran has watched her grow for the past year and a half.  

The two were paired together through UCLA’s China Care Bruins club, which matches UCLA students with adoptees from China who live in the Los Angeles area...

Full story http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/02/students_in_ucla039s_china_care_bruins_play_039big_buddy039_role_for_adoptees/

The organization has a website at http://www.chinacarebruins.org/

UCLA History: Bear

Chancellor Young examines statue of the UCLA bear in 1984, shortly after its unveiling.

Love at UCLA on Valentine's Day

The UCLA campus is so lovable that couples come to it to have engagement photos taken, as per above.

But sometimes, even at UCLA, all does not go well in affairsof the heart:

On the other hand, boy (Houdini) did get girl (the hard way)in 1919 in Santa Monica:

PS: Faithful readers of this blog will know that things can work out at UCLA, too, as we demonstrated last fall:
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/10/modest-proposal-at-ucla.html

UCLA's Teofilo F. Ruiz awarded the National Humanities Medal, President Obama has announced

Inside Higher Ed thismorning pointed me to a news item from last Friday: Teofilo Ruiz, a professor of history and of Spanish andPortuguese at UCLA – whose unusual faculty webpage photo appears at left - wasawarded a National Humanities Medal according to a White House announcement.  The actual awarding of the medal will takeplace today.

Excerpt from the officialprofile released by the White House: 

Ruizhas also earned accolades for his teaching, including being named U.S.professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement ofTeaching in 1995 and receiving UCLA’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 2008. Hedescribes his teaching style as “frantic, hectic.” As a graduate student, Ruizadmired professors like Carl Schorske, who could deliver an elegantwell-crafted lecture from behind a podium. “I can’t do that. It’s not in myabilities,” he says. “I engage the students by combining the personal with thescholarly.”

He also doesn’t use notes. “I can’t explain howit happens. I walk into the classroom. I am in an absolute panic even afterthirty-nine years of doing this. And then something possesses me for one hourand fifteen minutes and I cannot stop. I am like the Energizer Bunny.”

Full story on Ruiz and othermedal winners in Inside Higher Ed at: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/02/13/obama-announces-2011-national-humanities-medals#ixzz1mHNQqATJ 

White House announcement at http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20120210.html

Profile of Prof. Ruiz as part of the announcement at http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/2011_Medalists.html#No7

UCLA announcement at http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-wins-national-humanities-228694.aspx

UCLA History: Mayor Speaks

Not all demonstrations on the UCLA campus during the Vietnam War opposed the war.  Above in 1966, LA Mayor Sam Yorty speaks to group supporting the war.

UCLA History: Fowler

Before the Fowler Museum moved to the UCLA campus, it stood on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills as this 1978 photo shows.

UCLA History: Children's Hospital

Photo from LA Public Library collection.  Photograph caption dated January 9, 1958 reads, "Marion Davies presents check for $1,500,000 to build a new Marion Davies Children's Wing at UCLA Medical Center to Edwin W. Pauley, chairman of the board of regents. Watching are Vern O. Knudsen, UCLA vice chancellor, and Dr. Stafford L. Warren (right), dean of the UCLA Medical School. An architect's sketch of the medical center is in the background." In 1998, the hospital was renamed the Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA in recognition of the gift made to the hospital by Mattel, Inc. 

Golly!

Arizona legislators areconsidering a bill that would punish college instructors whose speechor actions would violate broadcast obscenity standards...

Full story from Inside Higher Ed:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/10/arizona-debates-legislation-classroom-obscenitiy-political-discrimination#ixzz1lzq3qZof 

UCLA History: Level Parking

Parking in the pre-parking structure age on the UCLA campus (1961).

UCLA History: Bunche Instructor

Photo of an unidentified professor at UCLA's Vermont Avenue campus in 1925 said to be one of the instructors of Ralph Bunche.

No Bee Link Here

The Sacramento Bee has updated its database of all state salaries by name, including UC employees.  No, I won't give you the link although you can readily search it out.  

Yours truly writes a weekly blog for a group called the Employment Policy Research Association.  As it happens, this week's blog for that group tells you why I won't supply the link to the Bee's database.  (The fact that the blog entry and the database appeared in the same week was a coincidence.)

=====================

http://www.employmentpolicy.org/topic/402/blog/mitchell%E2%80%99s-musings-1-30-12-matters-degree

Mitchell’s Musings1-30-12: Matters of Degree

Daniel J.B. Mitchell

Let’s start with the admission that I am not a lawyer, letalone a constitutional scholar.  So Ican’t really evaluate the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision whichvoided the conviction of someone apparently dealing drugs that was obtainedbased on GPS evidence.  All I can say isthat the justices seemed upset with the idea of the police attaching a deviceto a private car which allowed tracking of the car’s movements and eventualfinding of incriminating evidence.  Trustme; I will ultimately relate that decision to an employment concern.

It appears (to me) that the degree of efficiency in thetechnology utilized played an important role in the GPS decision although partof the discomfort of the court seemed related to the intrusion on the vehicleneeded to attach the device.  It alsoappears (to me) that if the police had done old fashioned following of thevehicle around with another car - and eventually found incriminating evidenceas a result - that approach to obtaining evidence would have been OK with theCourt.

If that interpretation is correct, there seems – to thisnon-lawyer at least – to be only a matter of degree between high-techsurveillance - which produced massive amounts of data according to the Courtdecision – and old fashioned tailing. But obviously the former was much more efficient and much less costlyand labor intensive, than the latter.  Ifprivacy violations are cheap, they are more likely to occur than if they areexpensive.  

There are analogies in other controversies in the newsinvolving evolving technology.  Therecent brouhaha surrounding the congressional political battle betweenHollywood and Internet providers over measures to prevent piracy of films andsuch has similarities to the GPS decision. If you saw the film, The King’sSpeech, you may recall the scene – taking place in the 1930s – in which thespeech therapist, using a new home phonograph record device said to be fromAmerica – records the King. 

So it technically was possible in the 1930s, with what musthave been an expensive device, to copy phonograph records – possibly violatingcopyright.  After World War II, lessexpensive home tape recorders and wire recorders became available.  It was becoming easier to copy, say, radio broadcastsof the top-ten tunes, again possibly violating copyright.  But record companies didn’t panic since themeans of copying and distributing was cumbersome involving reels of tape orspools of wire.

More concern concerning copyrights and intellectual propertyarose when home video cassette recorders came along and movies might thereforebe copied from TV broadcasts.  TheBetamax case ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court on that issue.  But home cassette recorders were allowed inthe Court’s 1984 decision.  Thatcontroversy occurred before there was an effective Internet which would allowrelatively easy distribution of copied movies by digital means.

In short, courts and legislators are now continually facedwith changes in technology which make past transgressions that were onceinherently limited much easier.  Exactlywhere you draw the line between what is and what isn’t going to be allowed is amatter of degree and discretion.  And adecision at one point in time may be made obsolete as technology advances.  There really is no absolute, timeless rule.

That observation brings me to issues of privacy andtechnology – and employment.  A number ofnewspapers and other organizations have obtained court judgments saying thatpublic payrolls and public pension rolls are public documents – and presumablyalways were.  Therefore, it is OK to postthem wholesale on the web with the namesof the employee or retiree included. 

Now it may well have been the case in a simpler age that onecould have gone to a public office and obtained information on payments toemployee X or retiree Y, using state and local equivalents of the federalFreedom of Information Act.  But copyingdown the entire payroll of an agency would not have been a simple matter.  And wholesale and easy distributing theinformation, if one had the patience to copy it, would also have been difficultand costly.  But currently such wholesalecopying and distribution has become easy, thanks to computer technology and theInternet.  With that technologicaladvance, the process today raises issues of privacy and potential identitytheft.

Most private employers would not think that publishing theirpayrolls wholesale, disclosing pay named employee by named employee, was a goodidea as a human resource practice.  Weknow that no private employers do it.  Andamong the employers who do not choose to do it are the very newspapers makingavailable public employer databases. Surely, their readers might like to find out what they (the newspapers)pay their editors, columnists, reporters, and – who knows – even their floorsweepers.  But the fact that readersmight be interested and that the newspapers already have the data on their ownpayrolls has not impelled any newspapers I know of even to contemplate suchpublication.

When pushed, the newspaper response is that the public has aright to know where its tax money goes.[1]  But actually there are lines drawn.  So far there have been no court decisions –again that I know of – that make wholesale health records of public employeesavailable by name, even though taxpayers fund public health insurance benefitsfor employees.  Internal personnel fileswith performance appraisals are not routinely made public on a wholesale basis.But couldn’t it be argued that the public has a right to know about healthexpenses and performance reviews?  So, infact, as in the GPS case, it is a matter of degree and balance.  Not everything funded by taxpayers is in facta public document.

There are ways of balancing publication of public payrolldata against privacy and identity theft concerns.  Pay rates by occupation can be made available– but without names – so that outsiders can judge whether public pay rates arebeing set correctly.  The Californiastate controller, for example, has published municipal pay rates without names.  One can learn, for example, that one “policeevidence clerk” in the City of Santa Monica in base salary and overtime earned$60,228 while the other earned $59,923.[2]  But no names are provided.  If you are worried about whether Santa Monicaoverpays or underpays its police evidence clerks, now you have the data todecide.

The general exception about naming names in the privatesector, at least for publically-traded firms, is that top executive pay is madepublic (with the names known).  Thatpractice might also be followed in the public sector.  And it typically is - and has been.  What the President of the United States ispaid has not been top secret.  And notethat presidents, governors, mayors, or Supreme Court justices are publicfigures.  Police evidence clerks are not.

Undoubtedly, the GPS decision by the Supreme Court will berevisited in the future as technology changes. What if it becomes possible to track a car without actually attaching adevice?  Cars of the future may havedevices built in that transmit information for internal operating reasons.  What if the police pick up those signals anduse them for tracking? 

Bottom line: The public employee payroll issue also needsrenewed court and legislative attention. Many more people are affected. That is, many more people work in the public sector than there are drugdealers who police might want to tail. It is clear that those newspapers that are publishing payrolls by nameare set on doing so.  Sometimes they simplysay it is legal – which it apparently is at present.  But they don’t routinely publish, say, thehome addresses of crime victims or the names of rape victims even though thesecan be obtained in public police records. So they cannot really take the position that they simply publisheverything that is legal without making any judgments about what is appropriate.  Since their good judgment on crime victims isevidently not going to be applied to public payroll records, only if courts andlegislators say it is not legal would wholesale public payroll publishing byname come to an end.

---

[1]I rather doubt that the fact that subsidized mailing rates would be viewed bynewspaper publishers as grounds to force them to make their payrolls public,even though one might argue that public money is involved in the subsidy.  Newspapers also receive other public benefitsincluding antitrust exemptions in some circumstances and, of course, FirstAmendment protections. 

[2]Figures are for 2010.  The full databaseis at http://lgcr.sco.ca.gov/.

UCLA History: Fundraising

The issues of the sale of the Japanese Garden and the construction of the hotel/conference center both point to fundraising and gifts to UCLA.  The recent history of UCLA - UCLA: The First Century - has a section on the early days of fundraising.  (See an earlier blog post on the book.)

In the book is the undated photo on the left of Dean Neil Jacoby of the business school promoting his idea of a building for the school.  The book, incidentally, incorrectly gives his dates as dean as 1948-73.  In fact, when yours truly arrived on campus in the summer of 1968, Jacoby was no longer dean although he remained a faculty member.  The deanship had been recently assumed by George Robbins and then later by Harold Williams, all before 1973.  (Jacoby managed, however, to be both dean and a member of President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors simultaneously during his actual term as dean.)

In any event, Jacoby first went to the local business community in a fundraising effort for the new building. The private universities screamed about UCLA - which got state support - competing with them for private funds.  Various accords were reached over time - described in the book - limiting the ability of UC and UCLA to solicit private funds. In the end - not reported in the book - Jacoby went around the university bureaucracy that controlled priorities for capital projects and took his case for the building to the Regents. By the time I arrived in 1968, the structure had been built.  (It is now the Luskin School of Public Affairs.)

Of course, nowadays UC campuses fund raise at will.  However, one suspects that in the era when fundraising was restricted by the deals with the privates - gifts in kind - such as the Japanese Garden got around whatever constraints there were.

OMG! Whoops. Oh My Whatever-You-Are!

InsideHigher Ed pointed to this story:

"It'sno wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college," said… formerPennsylvania senator (Santorum.) "The indoctrination that occurs inAmerican universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintainingpower in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, theACLU would be out there making sure that there wasn't one penny of governmentdollars going to colleges and universities, right?"

Hecontinued: "If they taught Judeo-Christian principles in those collegesand universities, they would be stripped of every dollar. If they teach radicalsecular ideology, they get all the government support that they can possiblygive them. Because you know 62 percent of children who enter college with afaith conviction leave without it."

Santorumwent on to encourage his audience not to "give money" to colleges anduniversities that he said are causing harm to the country.  "I'll bet you there are people in thisroom who give money to colleges and universities who are undermining the veryprinciples of our country every single day by indoctrinating kids withleft-wing ideology," he said. "And you continue to give to thesecolleges and universities. Let me have a suggestion: Stop it." …

Fullstory at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57366219-503544/rick-santorum-left-uses-college-for-indoctrination/

The Inside HigherEd reference is at http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/01/26/santorum-attacks-colleges-religion-politics

Well, maybe some ofthese folks would like to donate:

UCLA History: Vermont Graduation

Photo shows a UCLA graduation ceremony in 1927 at the former Vermont Avenue campus.

UC History: Connerly

Former UC Regent Ward Connerly who led the move to abolishaffirmative action at UC in 1995 is back in the news, albeit not in a positiveway. 

http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/01/18/allegations-against-prominent-foe-affirmative-action  (There is a link within that link to a NYTimes article with more detail.)  A related news item appeared in the Sacramento Bee this morning:

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/18/4195636/connerly-financial-misdeeds-alleged.html

The news clip below describes the Regents’action but focuses on then-Governor Pete Wilson.  (Connerly is briefly shown.)  The Regents’ resolution was made redundant bythe later Prop 209 and the resolution was subsequently repealed.  However, since UC is covered by Prop 209, therepeal was symbolic.

As a prior blog post noted, this week's Regents meeting is likely to be less controversial.

News video from 1995:

UCLA History: Home Economics

Home economics course at UCLA's Vermont Avenue campus in 1923.

UCLA History: Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King, Jr. on campus with UCLA Chancellor Murphy, April 27, 1965