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Wednesday, 23 September 2009
1. UC campuses brace for faculty-student walkout
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2009
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ADMINISTRATORS say they want to keep things running as smoothly as possible Thursday - the first day of school at many campuses - when many faculty, staff members and students are expected to walk out of classes, host rallies and stage a systemwide labor strike for technical employees.
UC is facing one of the worst years in its history as it tries to close a budget gap of more than $750 million in lost revenue from the state and increased expenses. To balance the budget, administrators have ordered unpaid furloughs for nonunion employees, staff layoffs and course cutbacks, and are expected to raise tuition for next year, making it 45 percent higher than last year's student fees....
"There is a lot of anger and frustration, and people need to vent that," said DAN MOGULOF, A SPOKESMAN FOR UC BERKELEY, where classes have been in session for a month. "The main concern is that the faculty are expected to meet their obligations to students - giving them notice about course cancellations and changes, and making sure that the course material is covered."...
Other faculty members at UC Berkeley have taken a different approach, forming a group called Save the University. They support their colleagues who plan to walk out, but will hold educational forums on UC's financial troubles from the perspective that there are better ways to bolster the university....
Some faculty members want a different message.
"I'd like them to talk to the students who are going to have to drop out because they can't meet the (expected) tuition increases," said SHANNON STEEN, A UC BERKELEY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF THEATER. "These are the students who are going to be hurt the most."
[Another story on this topic appeared at nbcbayarea.com] Full Story
2. In U. of California Budget Crisis, Some Faculty Members See a Cover-Up
Chronicle of Higher Education (*requires registration)
September 23, 2009
San Francisco -- THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA is dealing with its worst financial crisis in decades and a very uncertain financial future. But its leadership has another problem: convincing many of its employees that the situation really is as bad as it looks.
As thousands of faculty members, staff members, and students stage protests on the university's 10 campuses this week, many of the demonstrators are charging the university's leaders with fiscal mismanagement. President Mark G. Yudof and the system's Board of Regents, they say, have resorted too quickly to drastic measures such as employee furloughs, layoffs, and sharp increases in tuition to offset large budget cuts imposed by the state....
Some professors believe the university has been dishonest about its financial situation. GEORGE P. LAKOFF, A PROFESSOR OF LINGUISTICS AT BERKELEY, wrote a letter to the regents in July arguing in part that the university could find places to cut other than faculty salaries. The letter garnered more than 1,000 faculty signatures.
Mr. Lakoff said this week that he believed it may be possible to use income from the system's hospitals to prevent cuts to other parts of the university. He said the administration had failed to answer faculty questions about what money could and could not legally be used to support academic programs....
But university leaders say that they have taken pains to explain why such steps are impossible, and that their explanations have fallen on deaf ears. Peter J. Taylor, the university's chief financial officer and executive vice president, said that administrators have been open about the budget details, holding town hall-style meetings on each campus and starting a Web page to debunk misconceptions about the budget....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
3. Forum with Michael Krasny: UC Budget Walkout
KQED Radio
September 23, 2009
On Thursday, the first day of classes at the University of California, thousands of faculty, students and staff plan to walk out. They say it's a reaction to UC officials proposing tuition hikes and furloughs to contend with $800 million in state budget cuts. We discuss the university's fiscal reality, and the available alternatives.
Guests:
* JUDITH BUTLER, PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENTS OF RHETORIC AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT UC BERKELEY
* Lawrence Pitts, interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs for the University of California
* Nanette Asimov, education reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle
* Victor Sanchez, president of the University of California Student Association
[Link to audio forthcoming] Full Story
4. Annals of Science: A Life of Its Own
Where will synthetic biology lead us?
New Yorker Magazine
September 28, 2009
The first time JAY KEASLING remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” KEASLING, A PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMICAL ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which—by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology—seeks to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world.
Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades; inserting, deleting, and changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of colleagues around the world have something more radical in mind. By using gene-sequence information and synthetic DNA, they are attempting to reconfigure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and drugs. Eventually, they intend to construct genes—and new forms of life—from scratch. Keasling and others are putting together a kind of foundry of biological components—BioBricks, as Tom Knight, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped invent the field, has named them. Each BioBrick part, made of standardized pieces of DNA, can be used interchangeably to create and modify living cells.
“When your hard drive dies, you can go to the nearest computer store, buy a new one, and swap it out,” Keasling said. “That’s because it’s a standard part in a machine. The entire electronics industry is based on a plug-and-play mentality. Get a transistor, plug it in, and off you go. What works in one cell phone or laptop should work in another. That is true for almost everything we build: when you go to Home Depot, you don’t think about the thread size on the bolts you buy, because they’re all made to the same standard. Why shouldn’t we use biological parts in the same way?” Keasling and others in the field, who have formed bicoastal clusters in the Bay Area and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, see cells as hardware, and genetic code as the software required to make them run. Synthetic biologists are convinced that, with enough knowledge, they will be able to write programs to control those genetic components, programs that would let them not only alter nature but guide human evolution as well.... Full Story
5. Health experts meet to battle flu season
KGO TV
September 22, 2009
Palo Alto, CA (KGO) -- Fall arrived on Tuesday and the flu season is here, but this year it is different. The H1N1 virus, or commonly referred to as the swine flu -- combined with the seasonal flu -- threatens to make this an especially dangerous winter. Experts met at Stanford Wednesday night to discuss the battle plan.
The H1N1 virus isn't slowing down. Wednesday night, dozens packed a forum sponsored by the Stanford Blood Center to find out how to stop the virus from spreading....
"Most of us believe that this coming flu season which starts now will be worse than the usual flu in terms of the number of cases, the numbers of people hospitalized, the number of people dying," said PROFESSOR ARTHUR REINGOLD, M.D., FROM THE UC BERKELEY SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH....
[Link to video] Full Story
6. Op-Ed: Parks, diversity need each other
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
September 23, 2009
Statistics back the prevailing notion that nonwhite people don’t much visit or work in our national parks. Media focused on this fact when the First Family visited Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon mid-August. But history tells a conflicting story.
The first rangers at Yosemite National Park were black men, known as buffalo soldiers....
Yet, in recent years, only 1 percent of Yosemite’s visitors have been African American, and the number of black rangers there has fallen since the days of the buffalo soldier....
At BERKELEY UNIVERSITY, GEOGRAPHER CAROLYN FINNEY is exploring the relationship of African Americans to the environment and to the environmental movement. Her work focuses on “the role of memory and identity in influencing African-American environmental participation, and the general disconnect between African-American environmental professionals and their white counterparts regarding the perception of exclusion and racism within an environmental context,” she said.... Full Story
7. You're the Boss Blog: Experts Agree: An Employer Mandate Doesn’t Cost Many Jobs
New York times Online (*requires registration)
September 23, 2009
Agenda readers were, well, skeptical when we highlighted a radio story showing that, so far at least, a recent play-or-pay mandate for employers in San Francisco to provide health coverage hasn’t led to significant job losses. “Thin reporting,” chided “Ted”. “Gabi” suspected that the economist studying the program, U.C. BERKELEY’S WILL DOW, was sloppy. “I would suspect that the decrease is there alright [sic], but I’m not seeing it; I’d call it measurement error.”
In fact, most of Mr. Dow’s colleagues are probably not surprised by the results that he returned. In July, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office took on the question in an issue brief that looked at how health insurance reform might affect labor markets. Although these so-called employer mandates ostensibly make the business pay health care costs directly, it is the workers, says the C.B.O., who actually bear those costs.... Full Story
8. Meg Whitman officially in governor's race
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2009
Billionaire former eBay CEO and political neophyte Meg Whitman officially announced her candidacy for governor Tuesday in Orange County, vowing to cut 40,000 state government jobs and lower taxes....
Whitman will battle state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Rep. [and UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR] TOM CAMPBELL in the Republican primary June 8. On the Democratic side, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has declared his candidacy and state Attorney General, and former governor, Jerry Brown is expected to challenge him....
"I don't think you can be taken seriously, given the importance of the budget, unless you are prepared to identify the cuts now, up front, so people can evaluate what you think is achievable," said CAMPBELL, A FORMER DEAN OF UC BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS who has also served as state budget director.
"If instead you say, 'Elect me first, and I'll deliver the $15 billion,' you're asking people to trust you with zero basis for doing so."
On his Web site ( www.campbell.org), Campbell has detailed where he would cut the state budget, line by line, finding $15.4 billion in savings.... Full Story
9. Saudi Arabia's billion-dollar boost to education
Financial Times
September 23 2009
The equipment is so new that manufacturers' labels still hang from desk lamps, while in a laboratory a printer sits on the box from which it was unpacked.
For two years, builders and administrators have been working round the clock as Saudi Arabia strove to complete one of its most grandiose projects: a multi-billion-dollar graduate research institution that it hopes will compare with the best in the world. This week, the finishing touches were being put to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust) as it prepares to be inaugurated today by King Abdullah, the Saudi ruler....
The hope is that, buoyed by a $10bn (€6.8bn, £6.1bn) endowment fund - one of the world's largest - Kaust will help the kingdom develop a world-class scientific centre to accelerate the nation's modernisation and ultimately help reduce its dependency on the highs and lows of oil prices....
Billions of dollars have been poured into the project, with $1.5bn spent on equipment alone, while partnerships have been signed with a long list of international institutions, including MIT and the -universities of Stanford, BERKELEY, Oxford, Tokyo and Cambridge.... Full Story
10. Ahmadinejad to ask leniency for U.S. hikers
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2009
New York -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that he will seek leniency for three American hikers who strayed across the Iranian border.
The Iranian leader also said he expects "free and open" discussion of nuclear issues at a meeting next week with six world powers, but stressed that his country would not negotiate on its own nuclear plans.
Ahmadinejad said the THREE UC BERKELEY GRADUATES broke the law, and "we're not happy that this happened."
"What I can ask is that the judiciary expedites the process and gives it its full attention, and to basically look at the case with maximum leniency," Ahmadinejad said.
SHANE BAUER, JOSHUA FATTAL and SARAH SHOURD have been held for 52 days since they apparently strayed into Iran while hiking in northern Iraq's Kurdistan region in July. Their case has become the latest source of friction between the United States and Iran. Their families maintain that although two of the three detainees are journalists, their entry into Iran was an innocent mistake.... Full Story
11. The Essence of America in 1,095 Pages
New York Times & International Herald Tribune
September 23, 2009
With entries on the porn star Linda Lovelace, the indie film “Wild Style” and Hurricane Katrina, it is clear that “A New Literary History of America” is not your typical Harvard University Press anthology. Although it has many features of an academic compendium — page numbers that reach into four digits and scores of scholarly contributors — this new collection of essays, being released on Wednesday, roams far beyond any standard definition of literature....
“We didn’t want to call it a cultural history because it’s too trendy,” Greil Marcus, an author and one of the volume’s editors, said; that might suggest it was “intellectually soft.”...
Each topic begins with an event, a moment that something changed, an act of creation, the editors said....
Choosing writers came next. Editorial board members suggested themselves as well as others. Sometimes a subject and a writer didn’t work out. For an essay combining two 1936 books, Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” and Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” Mr. Marcus contacted two Southerners, Lee Smith and Bobbie Ann Mason, only to discover that neither had ever read Mitchell’s thick novel. Then he tried CAROLYN PORTER, A PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. “Read it?” she replied. “I’ve memorized it.”
The 201 contributors include some well-known writers, scholars and artists, like Gish Jen, [UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR] BHARATI MUKHERJEE, Walter Mosley, Michael Tolkin, Helen Vendler, Camille Paglia, Richard Powers, [UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR EMERITUS] ISHMAEL REED, Ted Gioia, Sarah Vowell, Cass Sunstein, Richard Schickel and Michael Kazin.... Full Story
12. Book Review: 'Freedom's Orator,' by Robert Cohen
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2009
Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s
By Robert Cohen
(Oxford University Press; 512 pages; $34.95)
Born in 1942, and a fledgling 1960s civil rights activist, MARIO SAVIO seems like a rabble-rousing figure of the 18th century. One can imagine him addressing angry crowds in Boston in 1776, or Paris in 1789.
Charismatic and fearless, he put his body on the line in the early days of the student power movement of the 1960s. In his most famous speech, from Dec. 2, 1964 - which is reproduced in its entirety in the new book "Freedom's Orator" - Savio told fellow STUDENTS AT UC BERKELEY, "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious ... you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."
Robert Cohen tells Savio's story with passion and compassion, and helps to explain how an avatar of 1960s rebellion seemingly came out of nowhere, streaked across the headlines of contemporary history, and burned up in a blaze of glory.
From October 1964 to April 1965, Savio was the most famous - and notorious - student activist in the United States. He was also the progenitor of a radical style that would be borrowed and adapted by Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies and Mark Rudd of the Students for a Democratic Society. Like them, Savio repeatedly defied college administrators, including Clark Kerr, the liberal president of the University of California, who recognized Savio's "genius at understanding crowds."... Full Story