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Friday, 16 October 2009
1. Elite schools feeling hard knocks
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
October 15, 2009
...California's current fiscal crisis has been a disaster for the extraordinary University of California system. The UC system was hit with a budget reduction of a whopping $800 million in the last fiscal year and this year is facing another 20 percent cutback in funding.
There is no better way to illustrate the financial problems of the system than to look at its crown jewel, the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, which is saddled with a budget cutback of $150 million this year.
UC Berkeley is consistently ranked as one of the top research universities in the world. China's Jiao Tong University provides one of the most authoritative assessments of universities around the world. Jiao Tong ranks UC Berkeley as third best in the world behind only Harvard and Stanford.
A key indicator that gives us a glimpse of UC Berkeley's enormous contribution to knowledge and the well-being of our nation is the awarding of Nobel Prizes to its scholars and its graduates.
Just a few days ago PROFESSOR OLIVER WILLIAMSON OF UC BERKELEY jointly received the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics with Indiana professor Elinor Ostroms. Professor Williamson is the 21st recipient of the celebrated award at UCB.
It is also important to note that more than 20 alumni of UC Berkeley have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Severe cutbacks in funding for the past several years are bound to wreak havoc on UCB's academic excellence and its standing as one of the great public universities in the world....
Funding cutbacks also mean larger class sizes, fewer course offerings, higher tuition, fewer students, less money for research and less money for maintaining its outstanding libraries. The list goes on and the implications are serious.... Full Story
2. Out-of-State Dreams
Inside Higher Ed
October 16, 2009
At a time when getting admitted to many flagship universities is harder than ever, a growing number are considering plans to increase enrollments -- dramatically in some cases -- of out-of-state applicants....
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY is planning to admit more out-of-state residents this year. Berkeley's non-resident undergraduate population is quite low (around 10 percent typically, counting both U.S. residents outside California and international students). ROBERT BIRGENEAU, THE CHANCELLOR, told The Contra Costa Times that he hopes that the shift will set off some anger from California residents, saying: "Actually, I hope for some pushback. This is connected to the state's failure to pay for the University of California." ...
...Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said he worried about any state -- like California -- that moves to recruit more out-of-state students at a time when there are qualified residents losing slots, and those being recruited are likely to be less diverse than the residents of the state. He noted that most University of California campuses have more ethnic and racial diversity than much of American higher education. "So now that the majority of kids in the state will be more Latino, you are going to recruit more out-of-state students" who are likely to be white? he asked.
While Berkeley officials and UC faculty members have said that they believe any lost slots in California will build political pressure to support higher education, Callan said he was "very skeptical." He said he doesn't see signs that the public would respond in that way. "There's a danger here that you cut off your long-term support," he said.
At the same time, Callan acknowledged that in California and elsewhere, state officials considering these options face terrible budgets. "It's the dysfunctional nature of state government that makes these things possible."
DAVID L. KIRP, A PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY AT BERKELEY and the author of Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, said he viewed the out-of-state trend as "one of those lamentable necessities." He said that the University of California campuses and some other flagships have been "an equal opportunity gateway" for so many low-income students. Ultimately, he said that these plans work financially only by going after well-off students, and thus can encourage universities in that direction. You can easily end up, he said, with public universities "with a private school profile."... Full Story
3. Marin Voice: High tuition hits Cal's poor students
Marin Independent Journal
October 16, 2009
The big news on UC campuses these days is the dramatic thirty percent increase in tuition and fees for 2010 recently announced by UC President Mark Yudof.
New students next fall will begin paying $10,302 for a year's education. Tuition was $700 per year when I BEGAN TEACHING AT CAL in 1973.
Students living in dorms will also pay an additional $13,000, plus $938 in fees. All told, the annual cost for a California undergrad student to attend a UC campus will top $24,000 next year. Graduate tuition is being similarly increased....
According to a recent study by the James Irvine Foundation, UC campuses now enroll more low-income students than any other universities in the country, whether public or private. UCLA tops the list with 34.8 percent of its students coming from low-income families. UC BERKELEY is next on the low-income list, with 30.1 percent so situated....
While some of the new money from tuition increases at UC will provide more student aid, the majority of students today still have to take out loans and work part-time jobs.
The inevitable consequence of the dramatic rise in tuition fees, coupled with the removal of many affirmative action admissions policies, will be a continuing reduction in the number of poor and minority students at UC.
That's just the opposite of what should be happening. Full Story
4. UC shelves plan to charge engineering, business undergrads more
The proposal for those students to pay $900 extra a year is postponed for further study but could eventually come before the regents in a revised form, a spokesman says.
Los Angeles Times
October 16, 2009
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA OFFICIALS have decided to shelve, at least for now, a controversial proposal to charge undergraduate engineering and business students $900 more a year than those in other majors. The plan, which had been scheduled for discussion and a possible vote at next month's regents meeting, has been postponed for further study, a university spokesman said Thursday.
UC administrators "felt they wanted to take more time to examine it," spokesman Ricardo Vazquez said. But he said the idea was not dead and could be brought to the regents in a revised form at a later date.
Faculty leaders said they had urged the delay. Among the concerns about the plan was whether, as critics contend, the proposed surcharges would drive students away from engineering and business majors even if extra financial aid was provided.... Full Story
5. UC Berkeley gets $29M for underground lab plan
San Francisco Business Times
October 15, 2009
The National Science Foundation will pay $29.1 million for the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, to study how to turn a former South Dakota gold mine into a laboratory nearly a mile underground.
Construction won’t start until at least 2013, but when finished, the deep laboratory will permit experiments that need to be shielded from cosmic rays, which can penetrate nearly everything. About $120 million not from the NSF is already being spent cleaning up the mine, pumping out and treating water, and preparing the site for the laboratory.... Full Story
6. Furloughs saving less than expected, study says
San Francisco Chronicle
October 16, 2009
Sacramento -- Savings for California from a three-day-per-month furlough for state workers are significantly less than the governor's estimates, according to a UC BERKELEY study released Thursday.
The furloughs, which amount to nearly a 14 percent pay cut for 193,000 state workers, are supposed to save the state $1.3 billion this fiscal year. But it will actually save a little more than half that and the savings will decline significantly - to $236 million - as the real costs of furloughs play out over the next few years, the study found.
"If the goal of the furlough program is savings to the general fund, I think our conclusion is quite clear that this program is poorly designed," said KEN JACOBS, CHAIRMAN OF THE CENTER FOR LABOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION AT UC BERKELEY, which conducted the study.
The state would actually save slightly more money over the long term by having just one furlough day instead of three, Jacobs said. The losses to the state include reductions in income taxes paid by state workers, delayed or lost income from fewer audits of taxpayers and costs of hiring contract workers to make up for furloughed employees....
[Professor Jacobs also discussed this topic on KQED's Forum with Michael Krasny (link to audio) and KGO TV (link to video). Other stories appeared in the San Francisco Business Times, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and Sacramento Bee] Full Story
7. Nobels show fruits of long struggle
San Jose Mercury News (*requires registration)
October 15, 2009
When three women won Nobel Prizes in the sciences this year, one of them was asked whether women finally had been accepted by the scientific community. DR. CAROL GREIDER, A BIOLOGIST WHO ATTENDED GRAD SCHOOL AT UC-BERKELEY, answered like a scientist:
"This is one event," the Johns-Hopkins researcher told The New York Times. "I'm not going to see one event and say it's a trend. I hope it is."
I'm not a scientist, so unlike Greider, I'm free to draw conclusions from this year's extraordinary Nobel haul for women: the first economics prize ever. The first chemistry prize since 1964. And for the first time, the medicine prize went to three scientists, two of whom are women, including one from the Bay Area.
It is indeed a trend, but not one that began this year. This trend stretches back over a challenging and difficult four decades to the early days of the women's movement when girls were told that unlike their mothers, they had the right to pursue any career they chose. It is a trend that picked up steam in 1972, when Title IX told universities that took federal research money to stop discriminating against women as students, athletes and as professors.
It takes 40 years to grow a Nobel laureate, and that's why we are just now beginning to see the fruits of that long struggle.... Full Story
8. Room for Debate Blog: How to Improve National Math Scores
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
October 15, 2009
Only 39 percent of fourth graders and 34 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level on the nationwide math test given this spring. With little improvement over the past six years, it’s seems unlikely that all children will reach grade-level proficiency by 2014, a central goal of the No Child Left Behind law, which imposed federal testing rules on schools nationwide.
Do the poor results suggest that testing requirements under “No Child Left Behind” have been ineffective and should be abandoned? What’s lacking in math education that makes progress so hard to achieve?...
Rethink Federal Oversight
Bruce Fuller
BRUCE FULLER, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND PUBLIC POLICY AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, is author of “Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education.”
This week’s dismal test-score results are bad news for President Obama, just as his education secretary, Arne Duncan, begins to rethink Washington’s role in lifting the schools, searching for a less punitive, more robust blend of policies that energize students and teachers alike.
The progress of the nation’s fourth graders in mathematics has hit a plateau, while eighth graders did only slightly better compared with their performances a year earlier, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And gaps between students from poor versus middle-class families grew wider. The only good news is that students attending Catholic schools — ironically the institutions sheltered from Washington’s accountability regime — displayed a robust jump in achievement.... Full Story
9. DHS Reshapes Its Immigration Enforcement Program
Washington Post
October 16, 2009
A controversial federal program that deputizes state and local law enforcement agents to catch illegal immigrants is expanding under the Obama administration, despite changes announced this summer intended to curb alleged racial profiling and other police abuses....
A coalition of more than 500 local and national civil liberties and immigrant groups have opposed the federal program, saying it hampers public safety by intimidating immigrant communities from reporting crimes to the police and diverting police from investigating more serious crimes....
Omar C. Jadwat, staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, cited a report last month by the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW as evidence that the administration's shift to jail checks would encourage some local police to arrest and book more minorities so their immigration status could be determined once they were behind bars. That study found that police in Irving, Tex., working with a separate ICE program, increased arrests of Hispanics for minor offenses by nearly 150 percent between April and September 2007.
"Focusing on jail programs as opposed to these [investigative] task force programs doesn't eliminate the serious problems we've seen with profiling," Jadwat said. Full Story
10. The World’s Most Reviled Genius
Can the scientist who denied the cause of AIDS be trusted to cure cancer?
Newsweek
October 19, 2009
PETER DUESBERG has grown accustomed to all of the slights that come with a life in intellectual exile. The 72-year-old MOLECULAR BIOLOGIST no longer expects an invitation to present his research at the big conferences in his field or to meet with any of the scientists who visit the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, WHERE HE WORKS. Nor is he surprised when his manuscripts are inexplicably rejected. But in an open lecture this past May, when a visiting scientist claimed that practically no one had investigated the role chromosome damage plays in cancer, it was a step too far. Duesberg himself has been hammering away at that very question for years. He's published peer-reviewed papers on the topic, given a recent talk at the National Cancer Institute (his first there in 15 years), even hosted two small conferences of his own. So when the speaker solicited audience feedback, he jumped up immediately. "Excuse me," he said into the microphone. "But I am nobody."
He wasn't always. In the past three decades, Duesberg has been described as a genius, a martyr, and a genocidal lunatic—often by the same person, usually amid the fierce debates and international headlines that come with major scientific breakthroughs. In 1971, at the age of 33, he became the first scientist to identify a cancer-causing gene—a biological holy grail that secured his place among an elite group of the country's top researchers. Tenure at Berkeley and a coveted spot in the National Academy of Sciences followed. So did rumors of a Nobel and millions in grant money from the National Cancer Institute.
Then in 1988, Duesberg broke ranks with his colleagues and postulated that the newly discovered human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) was not the cause of AIDS. Rather, he declared, it was a harmless passenger virus, found by coincidence in patients whose illnesses stemmed from a constellation of other factors including malnutrition and substance abuse. For this, he was summarily cast out of Eden: Grant money evaporated. Graduate students disappeared. Nobel laureates stopped inviting him to dinner. Of course, he might have been forgiven—or at least forgotten—were it not for his consultation with Thabo Mbeki in 2000. When Duesberg advised the South African president not to bother with antiretroviral medication programs (he still believes the drugs are more toxic than the virus), his adversaries say he condemned hundreds of thousands of the world's most vulnerable people to death. Consorting with Mbeki to such disastrous ends fixed Duesberg as more than a mere pariah. From then on, he was Duesberg the mass murderer.
Since then, the fallen hero has toiled in what amounts to scientific purgatory—a smaller lab with private funding where he continues his cancer research. The shadows have proved both a refuge and a prison for Duesberg—freeing him to pursue less conventional ideas, but preventing his colleagues from taking those ideas seriously. His stubbornness has made him one of science's most disturbing paradoxes—a self-avowed outsider searching desperately for a way back in. While he implores his colleagues to open their minds about cancer, he continues to keep his own closed about HIV, insisting still that the virus does not cause AIDS. To honestly evaluate his latest work, we will have to separate science from scientist.... Full Story
11. Letters
Newsweek
October 19, 2009
...While Fareed Zakaria and Henry Kissinger ("Deployments and Diplomacy") anguish over the next steps with Iran, they miss one overriding fact: demography. Iran, with the blessing of the religious leaders, has seen average family size plummet from six to two in record time. By 2025 Iran will have 7 percent fewer men in the volatile 15-to-30 age group than today, and the country is likely to become increasingly stable and democratic. By 2025 Pakistan will have 68 percent more men 15 to 30, most likely poorly educated and largely unemployed. Stop obsessing over Iran and start worrying about Pakistan, which already has atomic weapons.
MALCOLM POTTS
SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY... Full Story
12. Welcome to Potopia
A nine-block section of downtown Oakland, Calif., has become a modern marijuana mecca—and a model for what a legalized-drug America could look like. Why the stars are aligning for the pro-weed movement.
Newsweek Online
October 15, 2009
On the corner of Broadway and 17th Street in downtown Oakland, nudged between a Chinese restaurant and a hat shop, Oaksterdam University greets passersby with a life-size cutout of Barack Obama and the sweet smell of fresh marijuana drifting from a back room. Inside, dutiful students flip through thick plastic binders of the day's lessons, which, on a recent Saturday began with "Pot Politics 101," taught by a ponytailed legal consultant who has authored a number of books on hemp....
Presently, 13 states allow medical marijuana, with similar legalization campaigns underway in more than a dozen others. And a number of cities, such as Oakland and Seattle, have passed measures making prosecution of adult pot use the lowest law-enforcement priority.
...In April, an ABC/Washington Post survey showed that 46 percent of Americans support legalization measures, up from 22 percent in 1997. And in California, a recent Field Poll showed that 56 percent are already on board to legalize and tax the drug. "This is a new world," says ROBERT MACCOUN, A PROFESSOR OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY AT UC BERKELEY and the coauthor of Drug War Heresies. "If you'd have asked me four years ago whether we'd be having this debate today, I can't say I would have predicted it."
The fact that we now are debating it—at least in some parts of the country—is the result of a number of forces that, as MacCoun puts it, have created the perfect pot storm: the failure of the War on Drugs, the growing death toll of murderous drug cartels, pop culture, the economy, and a generation of voters that have simply grown up around the stuff. Today there are pot television shows and frequent references to the drug in film, music, and books. And everyone from the president to the most successful athlete in modern history has talked about smoking it at one point or another.... Full Story
13. Twenty-Year Wait for Earthquake Fixes Keeps San Francisco Wary
Bloomberg
October 16, 2009
Jason Henderson keeps a hatchet and crowbar stashed in a closet of his sixth-floor apartment in San Francisco, so he can pry his way out if an earthquake topples the building....
The approaching Loma Prieta anniversary and natural disasters around the world are triggering concern about another earthquake in the San Francisco area, said Laura Adleman, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Emergency Management....
The Hayward, stretching south from San Pablo to Fremont, is the most dangerous fault in the region because it’s closer to densely populated areas and hasn’t had a major quake in more than 140 years, said PEGGY HELLWEG, A RESEARCH GEOPHYSICIST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S SEISMOLOGICAL LABORATORY. It runs under Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward and Richmond....
The UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S MEMORIAL STADIUM also faces earthquake-proofing. The Hayward fault runs directly under the 86-year-old football stadium, which holds 72,000 spectators. A $300 million renovation is proposed for completion in 2012.
“The odds of being in Memorial Stadium on one of the five home games when an earthquake hits is slim,” said Greg Glass, a 46-year-old Burbank resident, at a game this month. “If I had to live in Memorial Stadium, I’d be very concerned.” Full Story
14. IEDM offers most recent research nuggets
EE Times
October 15, 2009
Manhasset, NY — Research in semiconductor technology will be featured at the 55th International Electron Devices Meeting and two trends stand out: challenges for creating ever-decreasing feature sizes in next-generation processing nodes and integration of application-specific devices....
At the IEDM, UC-BERKELEY RESEARCHERS will describe a wetting-based technique used to build self-aligned organic transistors and circuits with a minimum overlap of just 0.78m. Everything was inkjetted including the semiconducting layers, metallization and dielectrics. The researchers say the process is simple enough that inexpensive all-printed circuits may be realized in the near future.... Full Story
15. Controlled experiment: Can a new research university save the Saudi economy and transform a closed society?
The National [United Arab Emirates]
October 15, 2009
In a bustling harbour just north of Jeddah one recent morning, a white 27-metre diving yacht was nosing its way slowly toward the open Red Sea. It was a gorgeous blue day, and the marina was teeming with families – young boys running around in swimming trunks; girls clustered at the margins, garbed from head to toe in black. Saudi youths on jetskis were swarming around the yacht, using its wake to launch themselves in the air and perform various tricks. The boat’s passengers, however, were absorbed in sombre discussion.
They were academic scientists who had recently converged on Jeddah from all over the world, and they naturally fell into trading reports of the shocks their profession had sustained in the global recession. One of the scientists was regaling the others with the latest dismal news from the United States, where the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SYSTEM, one of the country’s most prestigious networks of research universities, was enduring an emasculating set of cutbacks.
Swaying gently in the boat’s main cabin, the other scientists responded with grave wags of the head. But it was hard to sustain the talk of academic doomsday for very long. Most of the boat’s passengers were newly minted faculty at the likewise brand-new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust. Just two days before, Kaust had been inaugurated in an extravagant ceremony that brought together several heads of state, approximately 3,000 guests, a laser light show, many minutes of fireworks, and – by some accounts – the largest tent ever constructed without a central pole. (Mark Yudof, the beleaguered president of the University of California system, was among those who made the trip to pay their respects.)...
Though Kaust did not import its brand identity from overseas, it has found other ways to borrow prestige – and blueprints – from elite institutions abroad. Long before it had a campus, Kaust was a font of international research money, which it used to establish multimillion dollar partnerships with 42 universities across the globe. Some of those agreements guaranteed future collaborations between Kaust and the world’s great research institutions – which no doubt helped to attract faculty. Other partnerships were designed to help recruit faculty outright: Kaust struck multimillion-dollar deals with Stanford, UC BERKELEY, Cambridge, the University of Texas at Austin and Imperial College London, in which those institutions essentially helped identify the best faculty, curricula and equipment for the new university.... Full Story
16. Obituary: Erich L. Lehmann - Berkeley professor - dies
San Francisco Chronicle
October 16, 2009
Much of PROFESSOR ERICH L. LEHMANN's substantial influence in the field of theoretical statistics is best described using symbols, not words.
Those symbols have critical applications in some areas. Researchers evaluating thousands of genes, or millions of cosmic miles, need to know how reliable their data are, and Professor Lehmann's work has helped give them a means of gaining certainty.
Professor Lehmann died Sept. 12 at his home in Berkeley, at 91.
A refugee of Nazi Germany, Professor Lehmann authored seminal books on statistics and TAUGHT FOR MORE THAN FOUR DECADES AT UC BERKELEY....
"He provided the ideas which enabled others to make practical contributions," said friend and COLLEAGUE PETER BICKEL....
But perhaps his greatest reach comes from the more than 40 years he taught at UC Berkeley. He arrived at Cal in 1941, earned his Ph.D in 1946, and taught there until his retirement in 1988, with only a couple of years off in the early 1950s to teach at Columbia, Princeton and Stanford universities.
At Cal, Professor Lehmann supervised a remarkable 42 doctoral students, many of whom became leaders in the field, according to a database of mathematicians called the Mathematics Genealogy Project....
A memorial will be from 4 to 6 p.m. on Nov. 9, in the Great Hall of the Faculty Club at UC Berkeley. Three other memorials will be held through July in Venezuela, Canada and Sweden.
Donations to the Erich Lehmann Fund in Statistics may be made at www.stat.berkeley.edu/52 or mailed to the Statistics Department at 367 Evans Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720 c/o Maria Torralba. Full Story
17. Obituary: Hilda Krech dies - wrote several books
San Francisco Chronicle
October 16, 2009
Hilda Krech, a writer and longtime member of the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union, died Oct. 8 at St. Paul's Towers, a residential community in Oakland. She was 96.
Ms. Krech co-authored the influential textbook, "Psychology: A Basic Course," with her husband, PROFESSOR DAVID KRECH, A NOTED EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGIST AT UC BERKELEY, Richard S. Crutchfield and Norman Livson....
Her husband died in 1977 and, in 1985, Ms. Krech married Dan Stanislawski, a Berkeley geographer. She moved to the retirement community in Oakland after his death in 1997.... Full Story
18. US Hikers' Families Submit Release Petition
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
October 15, 2009
Berkeley, Calif. (AP) -- Relatives of three American hikers detained in Iran are appealing to authorities for their quick release.
A petition, signed by 2,500 people, was submitted Thursday to the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York.
Twenty-seven-year-old SHANE BAUER, 31-year-old SARAH SHOURD and 27-year-old JOSH FATTAL [ALL UC BERKELEY GRADUATES] were detained in late July after straying over the border during a hike in northern Iraq....
The three were visited by the Swiss ambassador to Iran in late September but have not had contact with their families. Full Story