Watch the Regents Session of Nov. 18, 2021

Monday, November 22, 2021

Our prior post noted the announcement at the Regents meeting last Thursday, Nov. 18, that boosters would be required at UC. The full board meeting of that day is discussed below:

At the public comments session, remarks were delivered on staff pay, fossil fuel, labor issues, the transfer process, nurse staffing, student regent-designate voting, the Hawaiian telescope, request for a City of Riverside service fee, and UC-Riverside's longrange development plan.

The Daily Cal describes the rest of the meeting below. Note that the discussion of not using an alternative test for admissions is at 1:29 (hour one; minute 29) to 2:03 (hour two; minute 3) in the bottom link on this posting:

Executive Vice President of UC Health Carrie Byington reported that 99.15% of UC students and 97.2% of UC employees are currently fully vaccinated, in compliance with the systemwide vaccine mandate. When asked about suggestions for students travelling during the upcoming Thanksgiving break, Byington advised campuses to strengthen testing infrastructure and ensure the testing of all students upon their return to campus.

The regents also discussed the findings of the Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, a group established to create responsible principles for and assess the potential risks of using AI in the university’s operations.

The university received a record number of applications this past year, leading to conversations about potentially using AI in the admissions process, according to Brandie Nonnecke, founding director of UC Berkeley’s CITRIS Policy Lab. However, Nonnecke provided a “cautionary tale,” in which an AI system used in the University of Texas at Austin admissions office was found to be discriminatory against applicants from underrepresented groups, as the algorithm based its decisions on historical datasets that had ingrained biases. The working group recommended a series of principles to be institutionalized, including transparency, reliability, nondiscrimination and shared benefit

and prosperity.

The last discussion item in the regents’ morning session surrounded the elimination of the standardized testing requirement in UC admissions. In January 2021, President Drake requested that the Academic Senate investigate the potential use of the Smarter Balanced assessment in place of the ACT and SAT, which were used in previous years. The Academic Senate’s Smarter Balanced Study Group concluded it does not recommend the Smarter Balanced assessment to be used in the UC undergraduate admissions process, according to Mary Gauvain, co-chair of the group and chair of the UC Academic Senate. “Converting (the Smarter Balanced Assessment) from a low stakes to high stakes assessment would lead to the development of testing centers, which would exacerbate inequity,” Gauvain said during the meeting. President Drake noted the recent surge of applicants from more diverse backgrounds, which he attributed to the elimination of the standardized test requirement. Student Regent Alexis Atsilvsgi Zaragoza added that the UC is becoming a national leader and an example for other universities in terms of admission requirements.

At the following joint session of the Academic and Student Affairs Committee and the Finance and Capital Strategies Committee, UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood presented to the UC Board of Regents a detailed look at how the UCSF campus is aligning its longterm institutional goals with its financial plan. During the presentation, Hawgood highlighted the campus’ three major capital projects, its success in philanthropy, its community investment program and a new educational partnership with UC Merced. The presentation was part of a series in which the regents will look closely at one campus at a time. “I think there’s lots to celebrate and lots to look forward to,” Regent Lark Park said at the end of the meeting.

As always, we preserve the recording of the meeting since the Regents deletes their recordings after one year for no apparent reason. You can see the meeting at:

https://archive.org/details/ regents-board-11-18-21 .

A UCLA Architect's View of the UC-Santa Barbara Munger Building Plan

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

The Charlie Munger windowless dorm is the building of our moment

Dana Cuff | 18 November 2021 | Dezeen

Dana Cuff is an architect, director of City Lab and a professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design University of California Los Angeles.

The controversial Munger Hall at University of California Santa Barbara represents the university's capitulation to "the whims of old white men" and will lead to another Greta Thunberg moment, argues UCLA architecture professor and City Lab director Dana Cuff.

Architecture has the capacity to coalesce historical eras by reflecting society at a key moment in time, telling us the story of our shared existence. In 1981, an uproar sprang from the winning competition entry for the Vietnam War Memorial by Maya Lin, a young Asian woman still a graduate student.

In the early 1970s, the demolition of nearly 3,000 units of public housing at Pruitt-Igoe designed by Minoru Yamasaki symbolized the end of modernist utopian aspirations, and with them, the idea of warehousing poor families of color. One step further back, when public housing programs were advanced by the federal government in the 1930s and '40s, public debate raged. In each of these moments, social and political conditions reached a flashpoint that was clarified by architecture.

A building or monument mirrors back to architects and the general public an intelligible translation of swirling complexities otherwise hard to grasp. When that happens, the debate around the architecture is a debate about our shared existence. Alas, the Charlie Munger windowless dorm at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is attracting so much attention because it is the building of our moment.

What was confusing or invisible now seems apparent, and what we see is surely not the world we want to live in but one we seem resigned to accept. Despite all our contemporary divisiveness, from political partisanship to architecture’s incoherent

response to climate change and homelessness, the UCSB-Munger building is bringing us all back together. The real question is: in response, will we collectively rise up or give up?

The grossly scaled, concrete, semi-classically decorated, Costco-capped, 4,500-bed dormitory architecturally captures, all at once, the grim realities of our impoverished public sphere, the bloated powers of industry kings and the punishing inequities that face students even in the best public university in the nation.

Repercussions from California’s taxpayer revolt of 1978 mean only 8.3 per cent of the UC budget now comes from the state. In 2012, rising student tuition exceeded the state contribution for the first time in history. Even further cuts to the state budget are sending UC to look for revenues like out-of-state tuition, but also income from residential services, including dormitory rents.

So the university capitulates to the whims of old white men like Munger, the Berkshire Hathaway billionaire who promises $200 million toward the $1.5 billion estimated cost and dictates the architecture in which a full 20 per cent of undergraduate students' lives will be lived, with no guarantees of affordability. Small rooms, each holding a bed and desk, are organized around a common room, and none of these spaces has any natural light or ventilation.

Prisons and lower ship decks use exactly this model – think of the UCSB-Munger solution as bringing steerage class and San Quentin to campus. Maybe that’s unfair to the Department of Justice, which recommends natural light throughout their facilities.

On top of that, the 11-story windowless building goes against UC’s 2020 Sustainable Practices Policy. Without windows, the building requires electrification and mechanical systems where daylight and natural ventilation would have pleasurably sufficed, and the huge embodied carbon in its concrete construction is environmentally indefensible.

Even though the university will have to find the other $1.3 billion, it capitulated to Munger’s donation and to the further privatization of the world’s best public university system. We can see the results of industry titans evading taxes, and then "donating" far less than they owed in taxes to get the next write-off. We shouldn’t be too surprised when Munger offers to build a business school so long as he can shape the curriculum.

According to knowledgeable sources, the building is further developed than published schematic plans might imply, which is surprising given the apparent indifference to code requirements tied to bedrooms without windows and lack of required egress. For sleeping rooms that exit into another room rather than the outside, there must be a safe evacuation passage in case of fire or earthquake. To get to an exterior wall from inside UCSB-Munger, inevitably long corridors between cell blocks will be part of a life-safety system, generating the need for all that concrete and "communal spaces" overwhelmed by safety requirements.

Building code renders the common good through setting minimum standards to protect the public health, safety, and welfare, but that doesn’t absolve the architects, Van Tilburg Banvard and Soderbergh, or UCSB for that matter, from abandoning the intent of the code.

As an architecture professor at University of California Los Angeles, and director of the design research center cityLAB, my students and I have been working for the past five

years to understand student housing insecurity and come up with dignified, creative solutions. Nationwide, in 2020, 15 per cent of students at four-year colleges experienced homelessness and over 40 per cent had some kind of significant housing challenge.

When I asked my students their opinion about the UCSB-Munger building, their sanguine reaction surprised me but it shouldn’t have. Besides dorm rooms, students look for every avenue to affordably sleep near campus from overcrowded apartments to couch-surfing. Captive for four years, a housing crisis can generate a residential version of Stockholm Syndrome among students who rationalize unacceptable conditions.

After tuition, housing is the second largest expense for UC students so it is no wonder they have been advocating for the cheapest solution they can imagine: safe parking. Students consider the UCSB-Munger building in relation to available grim alternatives: better than a car or a sardine can.

Our cityLAB studies found the most affordable housing available to students is living in a co-op, a group house where a few hours of weekly work serves to lower rents, or living at home often with crushing commutes. In response to commuter issues, cityLAB and UCLA created an on-campus lounge where these students can nap, study, or stay overnight for free.

This one small solution, along with a range of decent dormitories, co-ops, rooming houses, co-living arrangements, motel conversions, and even some safe parking would mirror students’ lives far more humanely than one giant concrete block.

But it looks like the grown-ups have lost their way: UCSB, Munger, VTBS Architects, have all abdicated their responsibility to the students as well as to the environment. Yet despite UCSB students living in vans, motel rooms, and on friends’ couches, the windowless dorm sparked a protest demanding humane housing solutions.

We are facing another Greta Thunberg moment when youth will have to show the way forward. It should be architecture students who envision creative new alternatives, along with UCSB students, students advocating for safe parking, students commuting hours each way to get an education, and all the others who are being offered lousy housing options. Remixing John Legend and Lennon, tomorrow’s starting now so if you’re out there: all together now.

Source: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/18/charlie-munger-windowless-dorm-danacuff-opinion/.