Compare and Contrast

Thursday, May 19, 2022

A blog post yesterday contained some photos of the renovated Faculty Club. One comment on the post was a complaint that the wooden ceiling in the dining room had been painted.* The ceiling in the California room was also painted. We have a photo of that room from seven years ago (2015) below at the same Arts and Craft show, so you can compare ceilings and decide about the new paint.

Back then above. ---- Now below.

* https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/05/an-inside-look-at-renovated-facultyclub.html. (Click on the comment.)

Watch the Regents' Investments Committee Session of 5-17-2022

Friday, May 20, 2022

The Regents meetings this week began on Tuesday with a meeting of the Investments Committee. The meeting opened with public comments on UC admissions standards and the dropping of the SAT, state vs. out-of-state UC admissions, electrifying UC campuses in response to global warming, the Hawaiian telescope, textbook costs, the UC-San Francisco Parnassus project, and labor issues. Four students (3 in-person; one by phone) complained of antisemitic incidents at UC-Davis and UC-Irvine. Apart from the general link below in which they are embedded, we provide a separate link to those four comments.

As for the actual subject of the day, investment returns, there was nothing unexpected. In a prior blog post, we noted that returns to the pension were negative in the first nine months of the current fiscal year ending March 31, thanks to the sinking stock market. We also noted that in our prior post that there would be gloomy results in the period after March 31 - and there were.* No one seemed particularly upset. However, such results which inevitably will be mirrored at the larger CalPERS and CalSTRS pension funds, are likely to revive talk about underfunded public pensions.

There was some discussion as to why UC assets can't be used to finance UC campus building projects. It was said that such use would save money but that there were legal hurdles raised whenever the subject arose. It was decided to have a presentation on what those hurdles were at some future meeting.

As always, we preserve Regents meetings indefinitely since the Regents, for reasons unknown, delete them after one year. Links to the session are below:

Full session: https://archive.org/details/regents-investments-5-17-22.

F o u r i n c i d e n t s : h t t p s : / / a r c h i v e . o r g / d e t a i l s / r e g e n t s - i n v e s t m e n t s - 5 - 1 7 22/4+comments+UC+regents+5-17-2022.mp4.

F u l l m e e t i n g : h t t p s : / / a r c h i v e . o r g / d e t a i l s / r e g e n t s - i n v e s t m e n t s - 5 - 1 7 22/regents+investments+5-17-22.mp4.

* http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/05/pension-finance.html.