Q & A with AVC Erin Gore delayed
Gore has informed me that the remainder of her responses will be delayed. I will post a complete list of her answers to my questions when they are available.
Stay tuned: More Q & A with AVC Erin Gore
In February, Graduate Student John Stehlin and I met with Associate Vice Chancellor for Budget Erin Gore to ask some questions and discuss the 2008-09 UC financial reports. (Read the post about that meeting here.) Gore wasn’t able to answer all of our questions in the hour-long meeting, but has responded to some of them by e-mail. I’ll post the Q & A after she clarifies parts of answers I didn’t understand. She said she would send an additional e-mail with more answers Monday.
UC and state prison healthcare
Also, student loan overhaul approved by Congress (NY Times).
CA Senate committee established to study CA public record and open meeting laws
Sen. Leland Yee, who has complained about California universities not making public records accessible, will chair the committee. See Associated Press article.
Interim Provost Larry Pitts appointed UC provost
Interim Provost Larry Pitts was appointed UC provost today. Here is an e-mail sent out by UC President Mark Yudof to UC employees that I received in my inbox. (I work for University of California Press, so I get UC employee e-mails). I’m posting the letter because it includes information about Pitts as well as an explanation of what the provost does, which I have highlighted in bold print.
March 25, 2010
Dear UC colleagues:
I am pleased to inform you that the UC Regents earlier today confirmed my recommendation that Larry Pitts be appointed UC provost.
As many of you know, Larry has been serving as interim provost since February 2009. In this role, he has done a terrific job not only maintaining the academic enterprise but also overseeing the restructuring of the Academic Affairs organization here at the Office of the President in order to better support the campuses and plan for the future.
As provost, Larry will be responsible for academic affairs systemwide, which includes setting academic policies on student admissions, retention and graduation; developing academic priorities; and long-ranging planning activities – ever-important activities given the challenges we are facing.
Larry knows UC extremely well. He is a longtime faculty member and a professor of neurosurgery at UC San Francisco, where he has served since 1975. At UCSF, he has been chief of neurosurgery at San Francisco General Hospital and of UCSF/Mount Zion Hospital, and vice chair and acting chair of the Department of Neurosurgery. He is also past chair of the UC Academic Senate, and has served on a variety of UC Academic Senate committees at the divisional and systemwide levels, including the Senate’s Shared Governance Task Force, the Task Force on Healthcare and the drafting task force on UC’s Health Corporate Compliance Plan.
As an accomplished leader and a passionate advocate for UC, I believe he’ll do a terrific job working with University leadership, the faculty and the entire the UC community to help lead the University into the future and to maintain UC’s standards of academic and scientific excellence.
Please join me in congratulating Larry on his appointment.
Sincerely,
Mark
Mark G. Yudof
President
Last day of March UC Regents meeting
The hot topic today is the UC’s involvement in California state prison healthcare and whether the university should take over prison healthcare for the state. (Read the L.A. Times article.)
I won’t be at the meeting today so I won’t be blogging about it but here’s the link to the UC Regents Live(blog).
Also, some articles about yesterday’s meeting:
Finally, the last session of Wednesday’s meeting: committee on investments
Did you know that spending per student actually has little to nothing to do with how much the university actually spends on each student, or that the UC’s investments function on a different plane than it’s funding of student services? These are things I learned during the committee on investments meeting, which was the very last open session of the Wednesday portion of the regents’ meeting, after waiting through hours of closed session Wednesday afternoon.
The meeting was particularly interesting in that it was so much more relaxed and intimate than other open sessions. The committee met in a small conference room as opposed to the large auditorium used for the better part of the day and those in attendance were relaxed enough to joke around and show their personalities. Magnifying the intimacy was the fact that I was also the only non-administrator or consultant there by the time the meeting ended at 7:30. With the exception of one photographer, all other journalists had left when the closed session portion of the day began.
Seeing regents and others so laid-back was a bit bizarre for me, since they were stone-faced during all the other meetings. Also, the regents in particular have a reputation for being inaccessible. As interesting as the session was from an anthropological perspective, I understood little of the content discussed by the committee. I don’t know a lot about finances or investments—yet. I’m learning. Fortunately, after the meeting I had an opportunity to speak with some UC administrators: UC Chief Investment Officer Marie N. Berggren, Managing Director of Investment Risk Management for UC Jesse Phillips and UC Chief Financial Officer Peter Taylor.
Question and Answer
Q: Berggren spoke about spending per student at one point during the session. How does spending per student factor into the UC’s investment performance?
A: “Spending per student” actually has little to nothing to do with how much the university spends on each student, Phillips said. Rather, the number is the quotient of endowment spending per year divided by the number of students in the UC system—it’s a ratio.
Q: How do UC’s investment strategies compare to those of other universities?
A: In the past, universities like Harvard and Yale far out-performed the UC in their investments because they engaged in high risk investing, which has the potential to yield higher returns. The UC keeps its liquid assets, or assets that can easily be converted into cash, separate from its investments.
Berggren illustrated this comparison by explaining that some universities took portions of their general operations funds—i.e. the money that’s spent to make a university run for a year—and put those portions in the endowment. When those universities’ endowments declined in 2008, they didn’t have enough money to cover their operating budgets.
Tayor described UC investment strategies as “very conservative” compared to other higher education institutions, mentioning that big, Ivy League-level universities were calling up his banker friends asking for $50 million loans to cover their payrolls when their endowments dipped.
Currently, Berggren says, there is a survey floating around asking universities what proportion of their operating budgets they invest in endowments. Responses range from none to 20 percent.
Q: If UC’s investments are doing so well, why is UC doing so poorly financially?
A: The answer to this question is not exactly intuitive to me. Phillips said investments and finances are not one and the same and the UC’s investments function somewhat separately from UC finances as a whole.
What the separateness of investments and overall finances means for the UC is that, when the investment market is doing well, UC investments do well, even if the economy is doing poorly. I think this is a bit too simple of an explanation, but it’s a start.
The administrators described the process of learning about UC’s financial model with a metaphor about blind men feeling an elephant: one feels the elephant’s tail and says the elephant is a rope, another feels the elephant’s leg and asserts that the elephant is in fact a tree. If you approach the UC from one angle, you’ll only get one part of the overall explanation of how the whole, big animal works. The challenge is approaching the UC from as many angles as possible and figuring out how the pieces fit together.
Some extra background and random tidbits:
- The UC will be investing in real assets such as timber in the future.
- The UC has three types of investment funds: pension fund, endowment fund, short-term investment pool (“cash”)
- Money in investment funds is legally bound for certain uses, at least most of the time. (I don’t know if there may be exceptions to this rule.) For example, endowment money is earmarked and legally bound for certain uses such as the funding of endowed chairs. The pension funding can’t be used for anything but pensions.
Public comment period and responce of UC Regents, Administrators
The public comment period was centered on the racially charged incidents at UC San Diego and other campuses, though one student who spoke focused on homophobic incidents UC Davis and UC Riverside. Also, AFSCME union members discussed reductions in their retirement benefits.
Following the public commentary was a period of time during which the UC Regents and other administrators and state officials in attendance responded to the campus incidents. Their response period was followed by a final response from UC Student Association President Victor Sanchez and Black Student Union Co-chairs David Ritchardson and Fnann Keflezighi (UCSD chapter).
***
Public comment period
Frequently used phrases and memorable quotes:
Students called campus climate issues such as displays of racism and homophobia “toxic.”
Black Student Union leaders and other students who spoke often introduced their comments by saying, “I stand in solidarity with the Irvine 11,” referring to the 11 students arrested on February 26 for interrupting a speech by an Israeli Ambassador at UC Irvine.
One student said, “If education is a business, then listen to your customers.”
UCSD racially charged incidents
Read an article explaining the incidents here.
One UCSD student said, “As a black student at UC San Diego, I’m not a student but a survivor.”
BSU Vice Chair Fnann Keflezighi struggled to hold back tears as she recounted black students who she had recruited to come to UCSD telling her that they regretted going to a school with such a hostile environment.
Proposition 209
Many who spoke brought up Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot proposition opposed by affirmative action proponents that made it illegal for public institutions to consider race, sex or ethnicity.
Monica Smith, a civil rights attorney from BAMN, called Prop 209 unconstitutional and said the UC Regents should speak out against it. She said that the UC Regents taking a stand against prop 209 “would send a very strong message to the right wing and hte racists on these campuses.”
AFSCME retirement benefits
A representative of AFSCME said the union believes UC was using the economic downturn as an excuse to reduce members’ retirement benefits while UC executives still get bonuses.
“UC even asked the IRS to increase pension benefits for certain UC executives,” the representative said. “Get your priorities straight. Reducing retirement benefits will disproportionately hurt employees who don’t earn enough to save.”
***
UC Regents and other administrators respond to public comment
UC Regent Russell Gould responds to the public comment period first. “We hear your pain frustrations anger and fears,” he said. Someone from the audience interrupted him and called, “Time!” (During the public comment period, each speaker is limited to three minutes with the microphone, at the end of which, an administrator calls “time.”)
UC President Mark Yudof spoke after Gould. Yudof emphasized the importance of discussing the recent “expressions of bigotry” in the UC system.
“As a university we must start by recognizing that we have a problem,” he said.
However, Yudof optimistically noted that “one-third of (UC) students, notwithstanding anything you’ve heard, are low-income students,” a larger proportion than at any other research institution.
Yudof said he saw making admissions policies more holistic as a way of increasing the enrollment of underrepresented minorities and thus mitigating racial tensions.
“I want an admissions system hat is more in depth and more fair and that looks at more than grade point average and test scores,” he said.
He disagreed with suggestions that UC oppose Prop 209, which he described as “the law of the land,” adding, “We are bound to obey the law,” to which an audience member responded by shouting, “Wrong!”
Other UC Regents, administrators and state officials spoke as well.
Speaker of the California State Assembly John Pérez, who was attending a UC Regents meeting for the first time as a non-student, reflected on how he was a student activist 20 years ago, “decrying the same problems.”
***
Student leaders respond to UC administrators and state officials
A toxic environment
UCSA President Victor Sanchez and Black Student Union Co-chairs David Ritchardson and Fnann Keflezighi (UCSD chapter) spoke about how there have been past recommendations for improving campus climate that were not implemented.
Ritchardson cited a past study he called the Walter Allen Report, which he alleged gave recommendations to improve campus climate and mitigate racial tensions but that UC administrators never followed through on those recommendations.
“I’m sure (that report) is sitting on the desk of someone’s office right now,” he said. “Why haven’t those recommendations been implemented?”
Keflezighi said it wasn’t admissions policies but students’ perceptions of campus climate that caused African American student enrollment to be so low at UCSD.
“If you admit more black students, they’re not going to come to UCSD because of the hostility of this environment,” Keflezighi said, declaring that campus climate issues should have been dealt with before she became a student at UCSD.
The students called the climate “toxic.”
“We are trying to mitigate race riots here,” Sanchez said. “The conditions have become so toxic that we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“It’s really toxic on campus and I’m not joking when I say that,” Ritchardson echoed.
The Irvine 11
The students also discussed the February 26 incident at UC Irvine where 11 students were arrested for interrupting a speech by an Israeli ambassador, conveying the UC administration’s response to the incident as a violation of free speech.
“We stand in solidarity with the Irvine 11,” Sanchez said. The audience applauded loudly. “It bothers me to see whose first amendment rights are being prioritized,” he added.
Nanette Asimov, who covers education for the San Francisco Chronicle, caught the students off-guard when she questioned the students’ distinction between the “Irvine 11” and the students who committed racist acts on the UCSD campus.
“You can’t really put two and two together,” Sanchez responded, explaining that he saw the Irvine incident as protest while the UCSD incidents were driven by “mere and utter hate.”
Yudof and Pérez said they disagreed with Sanchez’s distinction.
Regents approve clarification of student fee policy
This recommendation was approved:
“The Regents expressly reserves the right and option, in its absolute
discretion, to establish fees at any level it deems appropriate based on a full
consideration of the circumstances, and nothing in this policy shall be a basis for any
party to rely on fees of a specified level or based on a specified formula.”
Still responding to incidents at UCSD, etc.
Regents and administrators are still responding to campus climate issues, focusing on UCSD. Student speaking about noose at UCSD.
I went out to the hall for a moment to get a bagel and saw UC President Mark Yudof walk by. If you had an opportunity to ask Yudof one question, what would you ask?
Public Comment– Brief Overview
BAMN– By Any Means Necessary– a group that supports affirmative action, dominated the public comment period.
Most speakers focused on the incidents on UCSD’s campus.
The public comment period ends and Regent Gould transitions into Board Meeting. President Mark Yudof responds to controversial incidents, mentioning things people said during public comment. Large portion of people attending public comment period leave as yudof starts to speak, shouting “Whose university? Our university!” Yudof continues to speak.
More details about public comment later.
Liveblog: UC Board of Regents Meeting
Public Comment Period
Started with one of the regents (I think it was Russell Gould) speaks about the recent controversial incidence at UC Davis, UC San Diego and UC Irvine.
Comment period is being doubled from 20 minutes to 40 minutes.
“At the heart of these issues are the values of respect and tolerance … I ask that you embrace those values when you deliver those remarks today.”
In case you missed today’s UC Regents meeting …
In case you missed today’s UC Regents meeting like I did (I was at work):
Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng’s liveblog
UC Commission on the Future Releases Initial Findings (the Daily Californian)
The commission proposes increasing the enrollment of out-of-state students, setting up multi-year fee increase plans and introducing online classes as an option for students.
Some links from the UC Student Regent blog
Some additional links related to the UC Regents meeting
A blog titled Student Activism has posted a link to a briefing on the meeting put together by UC Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng. Cheng will be liveblogging the meeting all three days of it.
An SF Chronicle article about the possibility of the UC Regents changing a policy so they will have the ability to raise fees at professional schools more drastically. According to the Student Activism blog, Cheng has said that this proposal is not reflected in the meeting materials.
March 2011 UC Regents Meeting
The UC Regents will meet Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week at the Community Center, UC San Francisco Mission Bay. For directions to the meeting and a link to the meeting’s live Webcast of the meeting, go to the UC Regents Web site (or click here).
The meeting falls during the spring break of UC Berkeley, the UC campus closest to the location of the meeting other than UCSF itself. (Most other UC campuses are in session right now.) As a result, a large number of students and other members of the UC community who would otherwise attend the meeting will be out of the area. At the last meeting of the Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future, Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz questioned whether this week was the most ideal time to have a meeting. UC Student Association board member Ricardo Gomez raised the same concern in the March 18 Daily Californian article previewing the meeting.
The Daily Cal article states that the meeting will focus on promoting diversity in the UC system in light of recent controversial incidents at UC Davis and UC San Diego:
Last month, the UCSD administration faced backlash following an off-campus “Compton Cookout” party and the discovery of a noose in a campus library. At UC Davis, derogatory graffiti was sprayed on the campus Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center and cotton was placed in front of the campus’s Black Culture Center.
The meeting agenda also mentions an incident at UC Irvine, in which a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. was interrupted by students.
The Wednesday and Thursday portions of the UC Regents Meeting both start with a public comment period at 8:30 a.m. On Tuesday and Thursday, all committee meetings are open sessions, meaning the public may attend those sessions. On Wednesday, all the morning sessions are open, then about three hours worth of sessions are closed in the afternoon, and the last session of that day– a meeting of the Committee on Investments– will be open.
The topic of UC investments is very controversial, especially concerning UC pensions and the UC’s bond-selling practices. UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister (political science) wrote a paper claiming that the UC uses student fees as collateral for bonds, meaning that fee increases, which are increases in collateral, improve the bond rating of the UC. The placement of the last open session on Wednesday raises similar concerns about scheduling as having the meetings during Berkeley’s spring break does. The fact that a single open session– especially one that may be very controversial– is placed after hours of closed and Regents-only sessions makes me wonder by what method each day of the UC Regents Meeting is planned. I would think that hours of closed session would cause a lot of people to leave UCSF, at least while the closed sessions are going on. Also, since a session can start as soon as the one before it ends, this last session could start at a wide range of times. I want to emphasize though that I really don’t know how UC Regents meetings are planned and the UC Regents may well have to discuss certain content before the Committee on Investments can meet Wednesday. Still, I think the question about method of scheduling is worth posing.
I plan to go to the Wednesday portion of the meetings and will try to blog live, provided I can get onto the internet. The agenda for the meeting can be found here. Click on each committee meeting to see its action items, which can each be clicked on as well to find out more about each one.
What do you think about …
What do you think about the block quote in the “President of the University of California” subsection of UC President Mark Yudof’s Wikipedia page? Witty? An abusive manipulation of information? Good? Bad? Share your thoughts.
In case the page gets corrected, click on one of the thumbnails below and scroll to the bottom of the image. The one on the top is smaller print, the one on the bottom is larger print.
Smaller print:
.
Larger print:
Transparency 101, part 2
Tuesday night (March 16) was the second part of UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz’s Transparency 101 presentation. The turnout was much lower than the first part of his presentation, probably due to factors such as midterms and the closeness of spring break. More detailed notes from both parts of the presentation will be up by early next week.
Topics discussed:
- There is a lack of information available about how student fees are spent.
- State funding is referred to as “state education funds” in documents, as opposed to “state education and research funds,” which would more accurately denote how state funding to the UC is spent.
- Administrative growth–Schwartz said middle and upper management positions have grown 200 percent while overall employment has grown by 44 percent.
- Cal Profiles, “an interactive database containing multiple years of institutional data for all UC Berkeley campus units.” (description from the Cal Profiles overview page.)
The seminar also had a heated discussion of a Daily Cal article published today, “Athletics Department May Be in Violation of State Policy,” which states that the athletics department at UC Berkeley may be violating a state policy. People at the seminar said the article is inaccurate. Professor Stanley Klein (optometry), who brought up the topic of the article, said he thinks the title is incorrect but did not specify exactly why. Klein is on a task force that researches UC Berkeley athletics funding.
What do you think?
- How would California citizens feel about their money going towards education vs. education and research?
- Is the Daily Cal article inaccurate?
- Why can only people with student or staff IDs get into Cal Profiles? Should California citizens who are not a part of the university be able to access this information?
Transparency 101
Context: The Transparency 101 presentation was hosted by the Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future, an open seminar organized by UC Berkeley Professors Stanley Klein (Optometry), Alan Schoenfeld (Education) and Charles Schwartz (Physics), devoted to research into topics such as the construction finance and how the University of California contributes to the state’s economy. The seminar meets Tuesdays from 5-7 p.m. in 489 Minor Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
Note: Additional specific questions asked during the Transparency 101 presentation and their answers, if available, will be available in a later post.
***
“Money not formally restricted to its use is fungible,” UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz (physics) said. “Fungibility is the antithesis to transparency.”
Schwartz was speaking at a presentation hosted by the Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future Tuesday night (March 9th) called Transparency 101. The presentation consisted primarily of a lecture given by Schwartz about parts of the UC budget and UC financial documents that he considered unclear. His lecture was followed by a response period for UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor (AVC) for budget Erin Gore and AVC for Finance and Controller John Ellis, as well as a question-and-comment period for the audience, which consisted of around 30 to 40 students, faculty and staff.
Disagreements shaped the presentation, but overall it was characterized by a shared interest in inquiry. Everyone seemed to agree that UC finances could be more transparent.
Berkeley Professor Stanley Klein (optometry) emphasized the nuances of views expressed in the seminar, explaining as an example that he disagrees with Schwartz on a number of topics.
“That’s what makes this seminar interesting– different points of view,” he said.
The presence of Ellis and Gore made the presentation particularly unique. UC administrators and non-administrative members of the UC tend to be seen as polarized and uncooperative, but here they were engaging in thoughtful dialogue.
However, there may be a limit to the impact this dialogue can have. While Gore and Ellis can share information about UC finances and may even be able to revise UC financial records to make them more understandable, they have specific responsibilities that are mostly restricted to the Berkeley campus. Their positions have little to no influence over the UC Regents.**
Schwartz, who was clear to direct his criticism of the UC to higher officers such as UC President Mark Yudof, explained that Gore’s responsibilities include Berkeley’s budget planning at the beginning of the fiscal year and Ellis’s include the accounting for the campus at the end.
***
Controversies that figured prominently in the presentation were accounting for unrestricted funding, the classification of funding that goes toward university hospitals and the effect of pay cuts on faculty.
Unrestricted funding
In the quote about fungibility and transparency, Schwartz was referring to the University of California’s unrestricted fund, which is comprised of money pooled together from various sources such as state aid and student fees. Because the funding sources that flow into the unrestricted fund are fungible or not bound to specific uses, no one can pull a dollar out of a student’s fees and say, “This dollar went toward this professor’s salary,” or “This dollar went toward construction.” The uses of unrestricted funds, therefore, are not transparent.
Gore disagreed with Schwartz that fungibility and transparency are irreconcilable, though she admitted that information about how the UC uses its fungible funds is currently not as clear as it could be.
“Just because money is fungible doesn’t mean you can’t see where it’s spent—not to say we’re there yet,” she said.
Classification of funding for hospitals
On the topic of funding for university hospitals, Schwartz said the category “Total Expenditure for Instruction” in UC financial schedules 1D (Berkeley) and 4D (UCLA) is deluding because it does not refer specifically to money spent on teaching activities but also includes money that goes toward things like the salaries of doctors at university hospitals.
A professor in the audience countered that UCLA doctors’ salaries can be considered instruction expenses because the doctors may be educating medical students who are watching their procedures.
Pay cuts
In relation to the controversy over pay cuts, a graduate student asked if UC Office of the President officials could quantify at what level of pay cut faculty would leave their jobs. He recited a “mantra” used by UCOP officials:
“If we don’t pay them enough, then they’ll walk,” he said, and asked at what point the faculty would walk–will a doctor or professor leave after receiving a one percent pay decrease?
A professor responded that Berkeley lost 48 retention cases last year.*
Gore suggested that it’s not just the money that keeps people at the UC and that that various factors create a delicate balance, including a desire to contribute to public education.
“It’s more art than science,” she said. “The fear is always that we don’t want to break Berkeley, we don’t want to break (the) UC.”
The next step
Many topics, such as where the overhead on grants goes, were only touched upon on Tuesday. In order to follow-up on topics that were not thoroughly explored, seminar facilitators and audience members decided to continue the discussion next week, at the March 16 session of the seminar.
“We knew this (presentation) would just be dipping our toes into the issues of fiscal complexity,” Schwartz said.
*I don’t know if “last year” means 2009 or the 2008-09 school year, but it is the phrase the professor used.
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