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Fights would not last if only side was wrong…

dniemeier — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:26:17 +0000

The Academic Senate of UC Davis appointed a special committee and charged them with reviewing policies and recommending changes in light of the events of Nov 18. The report was recently made available to the larger campus. It is hard to reconcile some of the good recommendations with ones that seem to have little to nothing to do with the charge given to the committee.

For example, not unsurprisingly, the Committee endorsed the Reynoso recommendation to form agreement on rules and policies related to campus protests and recommended forming a police review board.

These were diminished though by what seems to be a critical loss of focus. The committee apparently spent a great of time discussing who they should recommend resign, a distracting departure from the Committee’s charge. Members voted on recommendations for resignation for all the upper administrators (splitting in favor, with one abstention each time).

Then, when they have the chance to really make a forceful statement, they split 3 in favor and 3 abstaining in whether the Police Chief should resign. Really? This police chief vote is just baffling.

There is also a statement in the report,

“We are particularly concerned about the [Chancellor’s] failure to take responsibility in the weeks and months that followed the incident” (p7).

I have heard this a lot over recent months, but never actually seen any data. I asked an undergraduate in political science to do some research for me. He reviewed all the Chancellor’s speeches between now and last November. He organized any statements of responsibility into three categories: 1) those taking personal responsibility; 2) those taking collective responsibility, and 3) those deflecting responsibility. The data can be found here.

His summary:

“I [had] the impression in her first two public releases she spoke more about correcting mistakes and that her decision to remove the tents were for the safety of Davis students. Then beginning with her address at the Davis rally on the Quad, she began apologizing more, talking about how sad she was, then brought up coming together as a community and creating a task force.

Then in some of her interviews and later addresses (through national news, interviews, and other speeches) she apologized far less, and focused more on reforms of the senior administration and police protocol. As well as shifting her attention to underlying factors of the Occupy protests (tuition hikes, the economy, and job market) and what she has done, and will continue to advocate on behalf of Davis students, for reform to the UC system. She also expressed that the school needs her leadership moving forward and declines the calls for her resignation. “

I charted the results of his investigation below, and I also plotted the times “Katehi” and “pepper” were googled during this period (indexed to 100 on Nov 19).

Draw your own conclusions from the charts, but what is crystal clear is that there have been plenty of apologies and lots of assuming of responsibility.

Lets move on.

Open Letters, Petitions in support

dniemeier — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:24:43 +0000

Petition in support of Chancellor Katehi (updated 12-1-11, 4p)

additional signatories see here

Please see this link for an updated list of open letters, calls for fact finding

UC Davis Budget: A Concrete Proposal

dniemeier — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:30:43 +0000

Despite the wide range of opinions expressed in various media outlets, I suspect that most of us pretty much agree on the big things: the alarming privatization trends of the university, tuition increases that are shutting students out of higher education and the inequitable distribution of funding across campus (which, in my mind, is related to the privatization trends).

If this seems a reasonable assumption, then it’s time for action. Here’s a concrete proposal to get the juices flowing:

Create a campus committee. Give them 90 days to develop a budget framework, all state and tuition revenues and all possible cuts on the table. The committee should include equal parts senate faculty, students, and staff. If the budget committee can’t come up with a consensus budget framework, then the campus agrees to take the cuts proportionate to current expenditures, holding revenues constant.

To see how this might work, let’s say we decide this year’s budget (2011-2012) is up for debate. The shortfall for this year is $132m. Just for the purposes of this example, let’s use the expected tuition revenue ($39m) coming from recent increases and the savings the campus accrued from last year ($26m) to create one relatively straightforward scenario:

The committee doesn’t achieve consensus on an overall framework (we’ll call this the Congressional Scenario), but it does decide to rebate student fee increases back to students using campus mechanisms. This leaves a shortfall of $106m ($132m minus last year’s savings). According to the agreement – the cuts will be proportionate to the current expenditures.

So what does approximately $40m in faculty salary cuts look like?

eliminating the faculty salaries for the entire divisions of math and physical sciences and social sciences, or
eliminating the faculty salaries for the School of Agricultural and Environmental Science (~338 FTEs), or
we could eliminate the faculty salaries for the School of Engineering and the College of Biological Sciences (more or less).

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the faculty will stay if they’re not being paid. We could instead consider eliminating all of Graduate Studies, the Library, and the Office of Research. That will only total about $33m, but we can probably pick the difference up in efficiencies as departments take over the critical functions of these offices.

What about cuts in staffing? We need about $27m. Every college runs about $5-$6m in staffing costs, so we could just eliminate staffing for 4 colleges or spread this proportionally as well. (We’re already making our own copies so what’s the big deal).

Student financial aid gets cut $13m (you might think that it’s only fair to keep this whole, but then the cuts have to go somewhere, and of course without a consensus, we don’t know where). Of course, we might not need as much student aid, with the faculty gone some of the students in those majors will probably pick other schools, but then revenues will fall…

I drafted this scenario tongue in cheek, but tuition increases reflect our tragically limited range of available options to counter the cuts in revenues coming from the state coffers. Where the protesting is most needed is in the state capital, or we need to convince the boomers who protested at the UC campuses 40 years ago that this generation deserves an affordable education as much as they did.

Caveats/Sources: I used the budget information provided on these pages (1, 2) to estimate the cuts. If I made a mistake, don’t take me to task; I’m an engineer, not a finance wonk. I did not include the Vet, Sch of Medicine, Law School and Graduate School of Business because these professional schools have budget mechanisms that firewalls them from the general campus budget, although they do get about ~$14m in state funding.

“We stopped a war”

dniemeier — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:33:55 +0000

Yesterday I went to the campus protests. I listened carefully to each of the 7-10 students personally describe their experience of being pepper-sprayed. Then at some point during the telling of these stories, a highly respected faculty member who had gone to college in the 60s, turned to me, and shaking his head, said: “ ‘We’ stopped a war.”

Everyone I know is appalled at the pepper-spraying incident. The video is devastating to watch. I’m also hearing a lot of: what is it they [the protestors] want? I have to confess I find this confusing as well. Sunday night I went to dinner at one of the dorms and sat with 10-15 undergraduates ranging from political science to biology. They were unanimous in their condemnation of the police actions; they were also unanimous that – at least on the UC Davis campus – the protestors did not fairly represent their concerns. I asked them what their number one concern was and they responded tuition increases. I asked them what they thought the protestors were protesting, and they paused and said, that’s the problem, we’re not sure.

Yesterday’s protests seemed to be some about the experiences of the students who were sprayed, reasonable enough. Some of it also was about ‘taking back the system’, which means what? And a lot more than I expected seemed to revolve around a young English professor getting everyone to chant that the Chancellor should resign.

If she did indeed authorize force that night, I’ll be the first to say she must go, but the things is – we don’t know. We don’t know what the chain of command approved, said, or did that day. And we won’t know for a while. So what is it that the English professor thinks the Chancellor should resign for exactly?

Which brings me next to the “Davis Faculty Association”, who has also called for the Chancellor’s resignation and has been quoted everywhere (BBC, ABC News, WA Post). Who are they exactly? According to their membership list, there are about 120 active faculty members. The UC Davis faculty comprises roughly 1400 faculty. How is it that these 120 represent the rest of us? Among the faculty I have spoken to, none have said they want the Chancellor to resign ahead of fact-finding. I wouldn’t expect them to, we are a science and engineering campus. We tend to value the process of fact-finding. [I subsequently added an apology to this statement - see here]

While I am completely in sync with the students regarding the pepper-spraying, I see yesterday’s protest as a lost opportunity for them. Tuition increases (not to mention completely revamping police training) are a very big deal. The unwillingness of taxpayers, corporations, the whole lot, to pay for public education is a travesty. We are sacrificing everyone’s future. Yet, none of this seemed to be the focus of the day’s protests, especially for the young English professor, who is mostly aimed at having you buy tents (“100s’ of them) to populate the quad, because that’s what the “administration cannot tolerate” . Now that’s helpful to the students.

Lisa Simeone channels Bob Dylan

dniemeier — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:32:42 +0000

NPR has just dropped Lisa Simeone as host of World of Opera. Why? you might ask if you’re an opera lover. She helped organize a wall street protest in Washington.

“World of Opera” is the only radio show in the nation devoted to broadcasting full-length operas from around the world…”

What should city managers be paid? And how transparent should city councils be?

dniemeier — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 16:35:33 +0000

Normally I don’t delve much into Davis politics; we’re a small city with lots of bikes: what more do you need to know? But recently, there was quite a stir about the salary that the City Council offered to a new city manager (he took the job). There was a lot of confusion first, about the amount of the offer specifically, and then, about whether it was an appropriate amount given the city size and complexity. These issues, of course, blend into what a city council expects from a new manager and how that should feed into a salary offer. And it also brings up the issue of transparency (of both process and expectations).

I used the state Controller city salary data from 2009 to plot salary against: 1) CA cities with population between 55k and 85k and 2) against cities within Solano, Yolo and Sacramento counties (Davis is in Yolo). The League of Cities has suggested negotiating city manager compensation based on, among others, salaries in comparably sized cities and cities within geographic proximity.

I then added two estimates of the new Davis city manager salary. (They are estimates because some parts of the salary may be deferred in any given year). The first estimate came from Rich Rifkin, a local columnist, and the second from Sue Greenwald, a city council member. When asked for salary figure comparable to the controller data, the Davis Human Resources Department sent me the new city manager’s contract and told me that they couldn’t provide estimates until the 2011 taxes were filed. (It’s pretty strange to me that we hire people with public funds without being able to provide at least an estimate of this number). Finally, I also plotted the new city manager salary for Sacramento, a city with a population nearly 7x larger than Davis. (Note: When asked, the City of Sac seemed to be able to provide comparable estimates to the controller 2009 reported data).

Looking at the plot on the left, the salary for the incoming city manager will move Davis to from slightly below the 25th-percentile to above the 90th-percentile for all CA cities with populations between 55k-75k population. This is not an outrageous Bell-level salary, but certainly represents a big jump in what the City has traditionally paid its managers. Manteca is highlighted because that’s where the new Davis manager came from. If you look at the average salary paid for cities within and adjacent to Yolo County, Davis’ previous city manager (Emlen) was paid about the average amount. The new city manager will be paid at about the 95th percentile of cities within the 3 county comparison (Yolo, Sacramento and Solano).

So what does all of this mean? Well, first, it suggests that the City is paying a premium to get this particular city manager relative to previous city managers. Based on what’s been publically circulated, his experience seems to be about average for CA city managers. Given this, it would seem sensible to have some very public expectations about job performance. What are the performance expectations that demand this high salary level? This is a transparency issue: the City Council does not seem to have any clear performance goals, other than the usual “run the City.”

I looked around for cities who seem to have performance goals and greater transparency. I found a number, and here I highlight two. The first is Vancouver, WA, which has an amazing wealth of information available to the average citizen, and the second is San Ramon, which has the highest paid city manager in the 55k-75k population group. Maybe the City Council could use these two sites to help us understand their goals for what the new City Manager should accomplish in running the City (and, of course, to justify the salary).

Finally, a few caveats on the analysis. While I do know there is at least a solid $45k difference between the old and new city manager, with Human Resources unable to estimate the salary for the new city manager, I’m left the Rifkin/Greenwald estimates. Next, the controller data is for 2009 and the new city manager data is 2011. I don’t think this is a serious problem because the CPI last year was about 1.6, so in real dollars, there won’t be much difference. Finally, city population, of course, doesn’t explain all the variation in city manager salary (about 35%); lots of other factors can play a role in setting salary levels.

Riders on the Budget Bill

dniemeier — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 04:45:19 +0000

From a recent post on Little Green Footballs,

How many of us know what they actually are? Oh sure, we know about NPR and Greenhouse Gasses. But there are MASSES of them and they are absolutely demented.

There are dozens of "riders" about the environment, defunding everything from the Wetlands Reserve Program to the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act. No more Weatherization Assistance Program. Trash a bunch of environmental programs in California. No enforcement of water quality standards in Florida. No funds to go to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It prevents various White House positions from being funded. No Environment Czar (actually, no "Czar" positions at all, all to be defunded immediately). No White House director of Health Care reform. No funding for anybody at all involved in any possible implementation of the health care reform law.

No more transferring prisoners from Guantanamo. No more constructing facilities to house the ones who are there.

No funding for immigrant integration programs.

No more collecting information on multiple sales of guns to the same person.

Defunds Sustainable Communities Initiative.
NASA is prohibited from collaborating with China (??).

The whole document is outrageous. I feel like it must be a hoax. If not, then shut down the bloody government. This sort of thing is not supposed to happen on budget "riders."

This is the link for the riders: http://www.ombwatch.org/files/budget/OMB_Watch-HR1_Policy_Riders.pdf

More Montana Musings

dniemeier — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 19:55:07 +0000

Now that it appears useful to legislate science, I suggest the following actions by the various states right away:

- as a cure for lateness, mandate eating more apples (WA)

- as a cure for cancer, mandate eating more oranges (FL)

- as a cure for acne, mandate more walnut production (CA)

- as a cure for everything (NJ needs this), reserve the Atlantic Ocean … Read more

Koch Industries

dniemeier — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:40:32 +0000

For those wanting to know more about Koch, a new website has been started by the Alliance for Climate Protection. The website can be found at http://kochindustriesfacts.com/

California’s Propositions

dniemeier — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:26:08 +0000

California has a couple of important propositions: and 26. You can find lots about Prop 23 (e.g., check here for review of the misleading ads that have been circulating by supporters and here for information from the NO on Prop 23 campaign).

Prop 26 has seen less coverage and yet has very important environmental implications. The proposition redefines “fees” and will require a vote to pass them. A lot of these fees are levied against polluters by regulatory agencies. They are important for ensuring that industry plays by the rules. For a good summary of this aspect of Prop 26, read the recent article by Jean Ross, which can be found here.