Watch the May 19, 2022 sessions of the Regents Monday, June 06, 2022
At long last, we have now caught up with the Regents meets of May with this posting of the final day of the three-day meetings. Yours truly had other obligations to deal with, hence the delay. The first meeting of the day was of the full board. At public comments, there was discussion of the Parnassus project at UC-San Francisco, the gas-fired electricity generation plant at UCLA, labor issues, especially from the Teamsters, fertility treatment's lack of coverage in UC health plans, support for Ukraine, human rights, Peoples Park in Berkeley, abortion, SAT/ACT, the Hawaiian telescope, and climate change. Four students complained about antisemitic incidents at UCLA. Their complaints were similar to those expressed in the public comments concerning other campuses in the May 17th meeting.* Most of the remainder of the meeting was devoted to reports from the various regental committees that were already discussed in prior posts. In the discussion of the coronavirus situation, it was reported that a very high proportion of children - many of who were either not eligible for vaccination or unvaccinated if they were eligible - showed signs of previous infection in blood tests. There was a joint session of Academic and Student Affairs and Finance and Capital Strategies committees devoted to a presentation on UCLA by Chancellor Block and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Monroe Gorden, Jr. Two topics that might be of special interest to faculty were briefly discussed. One was remote teaching, at about minute 18 to 22, and about reviving the idea of a summer quarter, at about minute 22 to 25. Both were depicted as related. The chancellor said that there is a review underway of classroom infrastructure related to online education. The old summer quarter, as the chancellor noted, was part of the conversion to the quarter system when the baby boomers began to place capacity strains on UC in the 1960s. The idea was that there would be four equal quarters, thus increasing the student processing capacity of the university with the existing plant. It turned out, however, that students didn't want to go to school in the summer. So, the summer quarter devolved into today's summer session. Now UC (and UCLA) are again facing enrollment pressures. If the old summer quarter could be revived, some of that pressure would be alleviated. The chancellor suggested 224
UCLA Faculty Association Blog: 2nd Quarter 2022
