They Just Don’t Get It

I just received a mass-mailing telling us UC’s latest initiative to solve its budget problem: “It is critical that we work together to prevent still deeper funding cuts by reminding lawmakers in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Washington, D.C. of the vital role UCLA plays in serving our community and as an engine for the California economy.  Now, more than ever, we need faculty and staff to take UCLA‚s (sic) message to elected officials.”  ?!?  In other words, the exact same message that UC sent as strongly as it could before the current budget cuts, and the ones before that, ad nauseum.

Sorry, but this message failed before and will almost certainly fail again.  By continuing with this business-as-usual strategy, UC’s leaders show that they are in denial.  They don’t seem to understand that the economy is headed for increasingly dire straights, and that the old arguments will not sway a legislature desperate to make ever more cuts.

Postbot wordpress tool for Google Android

I’m posting this from my Google G1. Seems to work great. And it lets you work with multiple blogs.

Why UC Should Prefer Furloughs over Pay Cuts

UC faculty are being informed of an 8% pay reduction, and the only question we’re being asked as if we want it as a “pay cut” or as a “furlough” (up to 21 days forced, unpaid leave).  I prefer the furlough option.  I think this is actually critical for the university’s negotiating position with the state going forward.  A furlough at least in theory preserves the principle of “reduced budget = reduced services”.  By contrast, just announcing a pay cut (i.e. unilaterally changing our employment contract without faculty or staff having any way to disagree short of simply leaving) gives the legislature the impression that they can get something for nothing: just cut the UC budget, and then sit back and enjoy the spectacle of UCOP cutting staff salaries in order to maintain services.  What this communicates to the legislature is that the salaries were excessive in the first place, since they could be cut without any visible impact on services. (Of course, in the long-term the impact on quality will be devastating, but the legislature isn’t thinking about that right now).  Every other cost-cutting option (reducing prison expenditures; reducing health or welfare expenditures) translates directly into reduced services and corresponding backlash from constituents (some of whom, like the prison guards union, are very powerful).  So legislators will be sorely tempted to re-try that amazing “cut UC” magic, to find out just how deep they can go before hitting a political wall (i.e. voters getting angry enough to vote them out).

Of course, most of us would spend our furlough days working madly just like we currently spend our nights and weekends…

I actually think this is a deep issue for UC: re-establishing a transparent linkage between the UC budget and its resulting services, so even the least thoughtful politicians can see that reducing the budget means proportionally fewer students admitted, and that they will be blamed for this by voters.  I feel that UC has for years been playing a loser’s strategy:

Open Letter on the John Yoo Case

Dear Brad,
as fellow faculty member of UC, I too am deeply disturbed by the John Yoo case, and wanted to give you a perspective on how misconduct allegations would be approached in the sciences.

The core principle of handling scientific misconduct cases is that any allegation of significant misconduct MUST receive a careful and fair official investigation to determine the facts of the case.  Anything less would undermine public confidence in the entire system of research.  For example, funding agencies like NIH require us to take our graduate students through very thorough ethics courses in which we go through example scenario after example scenario to analyze the ethical issues involved.  I can tell you as a matter of course that the right answer presented in any of those example cases where there is an allegation of significant misconduct is that the university must investigate to determine the facts of the case.  Obviously the possible outcomes are 1. the allegations are contradicted by the total evidence, and the committee clears the “defendant” of any allegations of wrong doing; 2. the evidence is insufficient to ascertain definite wrong doing, so no action is taken; 3. the evidence verifies some or all of the allegations, and the university must determine appropriate actions.  Equally obviously, in evaluating the evidence the assumption is always “innocent until proven guilty.”  I’m not certain of this, but I think outcome #3 is pretty unusual — much of the time the outcome is #1 or #2 (“not guilty”).  And this highlights one of the principal functions of the “always investigate” policy: it clears the innocent of any lingering shadow of suspicion caused by the initial allegations.

Investigating a misconduct allegation is just Standard Operating Procedure.  Those who say that opening a fact finding investigation cannot be considered because to do so would be “defamatory” to Yoo confess either ignorance or deliberate disregard of the university’s misconduct policies.  Such a violation of normal policy seems hard to explain except in political terms.  If Yoo were a UC doctor accused of providing medical advice during torture in some Third World dictatorship, a UC misconduct investigation would simply be automatic!

I also want to suggest that the universally recognized policies for handling scientific misconduct cases provide a useful point of comparison for assessing the appropriateness of an investigation in this case.  By the way, there are standard textbooks of case examples that we use for scientific ethics courses; I can get you a title if you’re interested.  Two perspectives: