Dear Commons Community,

The International Criminal Court yesterday issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes because of his alleged involvement in abductions of children from Ukraine.

The court said in a statement that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

It also issued a warrant for the arrest of Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, on similar allegations.

The court’s president, Piotr Hofmanski, said in a video statement that while the ICC’s judges have issued the warrants, it will be up to the international community to enforce them. The court has no police force of its own to enforce warrants.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The ICC is doing its part of work as a court of law,” he said. “The judges issued arrest warrants. The execution depends on international cooperation.”

A possible trial of any Russians at the ICC remains a long way off, as Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction— a position reaffirmed by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a first reaction to the warrants.

“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” she said.

Ukraine also is not a member of the court, but it has granted the ICC jurisdiction over its territory and ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has visited four times since opening an investigation a year ago.

The ICC said that its pre-trial chamber found there were “reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”

The court statement said that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for the child abductions “for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (and) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts.

After his most recent visit, in early March, ICC prosecutor Khan said he visited a care home for children two kilometers from frontlines in southern Ukraine.

“The drawings pinned on the wall … spoke to a context of love and support that was once there. But this home was empty, a result of alleged deportation of children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation or their unlawful transfer to other parts of the temporarily occupied territories,” he said in a statement. “As I noted to the United Nations Security Council last September, these alleged acts are being investigated by my Office as a priority. Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war.”

And while Russia rejected the allegations and warrants of the court as null and void, others said the ICC action will have an important impact.

“The ICC has made Putin a wanted man and taken its first step to end the impunity that has emboldened perpetrators in Russia’s war against Ukraine for far too long,” said Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “The warrants send a clear message that giving orders to commit, or tolerating, serious crimes against civilians may lead to a prison cell in The Hague.”

This is an important symbolic gesture that will likely never see any type of trial!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Microsoft is infusing artificial intelligence tools into its suite of office software, including Word, Excel and Outlook emails.

The company said yesterday the new feature, named Copilot, is a processing engine that will allow users to do things like summarize long emails, draft stories in Word and animate slides in PowerPoint.

Microsoft 365 General Manager Colette Stallbaumer said the new features are currently only available for 20 enterprise customers. It will roll it out for more enterprise customers over the coming months.

Microsoft is marketing the feature as a tool that will allow workers to be more productive by freeing up time they usually spend in their inbox, or allowing them to more easily analyze trends in Excel. The tech giant will also add a chat function called Business Chat, which resembles the popular ChatGPT. It takes commands and carries out actions — like summarizing an email about a particular project to co-workers — using user data.

“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.

Microsoft rival Google said this week it is integrating generative AI tools into its own Workspace applications, such as Google Docs, Gmail and Slides. Google says it will be rolling out the features to its “trusted testers on a rolling basis throughout the year.”

Microsoft’s announcement came two days after OpenAI, which powers the generative AI technology Microsoft is relying on, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4.

This is a major new development in AI mainly because it will be readily available in many digital applications that are commonly used by the vast majority of people.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maternal death rates surged by nearly 40% during the second year of the pandemic, widening disparities as Black women again faced alarmingly high, disproportionate rates, a new federal analysis shows.

In 2021, there were about 33 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births – a 38% increase from the year before, according to the report released yesterday from the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say COVID-19 likely contributed to the increases, but that the sobering ratescontinue to reveal deep flaws in health systems, such as structural racism, implicit bias and communities losing access to care.

“A roughly 40% increase in preventable deaths compared to a year prior is stunning news,” Dr. Iffath Abbasi Hoskins, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement to USA TODAY.

The rates “send a resounding message” that maternal health and evidence-based efforts to eliminate racial inequities must remain at the forefront of public health priorities, Hoskins said.

Most maternal deaths – which happen during pregnancy, labor or within 42 days of birth, per the CDC – are preventable. The United States’ maternal death rate continues to be higher than other wealthy, developed countries, and the new data shows a roughly 60% increase in overall rates in 2021 from 2019, the year before the start of the pandemic.

“This is quite devastating,” said maternal health scholar and professor Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, founding director of the Tufts University Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice.

“This is more lives broken. This is more lives shattered. This is more lives destroyed for largely preventable deaths.”

In total, 1,205 women died of maternal causes in 2021, an increase from 861 in 2020 and 754 in 2019.

Maternal death rates among all racial groups saw statistically significant increases, according to the analysis:

• Black women again saw the highest rates at almost 70 deaths per 100,000 births, up from about 55 in 2020.
• White women’s rates also saw concerning increase, jumping from 19 to 26.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2021.
• Hispanic women’s rates surged from about 18 to 28 deaths per 100,000. Prior to the the pandemic, Hispanic women had lower rates than white women.

While Black women gave birth less in 2021 compared to 2020, they died at higher rates.

“That inverse relationship really underscores the enormity of the problem,” said Amutah-Onukagha, noting rates could be underestimated due to flaws in death certificate reporting and backlogging in data collection. “You’re seeing the highest (rate) of deaths in a smaller population. …The inequities are increasing.”

The analysis also found women 40 and older were almost seven times higher than those women younger than 25.

Pregnant people are more vulnerable to COVID-19, and the virus can contribute to severe complications in pregnancy, according to the CDC.

“While we are still working to better understand the drivers of this increase, we know that pregnant or recently pregnant persons are more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19 compared to people who are not pregnant,” Dr. Wanda Barfield, director of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, told USA TODAY.

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office last year found COVID-19 contributed to about a quarter of maternal deaths.

“The pandemic has brought in a pathophysiology that puts those women more at risk,” said Dr. Idalia Rosado-Torres, obstetrician and gynecologist at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center and site director of Ob-Hospitalist Group.

Preeclampsia risk, for example, increases when a patient has COVID-19, she explained.

Barfield said other factors at play also include chronic conditions during pregnancy, access to quality care during and after pregnancy, and structural racism and implicit bias.

This is troubling given the resources of our country!  We are moving backwards!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Texas officials yesterday announced a state takeover of Houston’s nearly 200,000-student public school district, the eighth-largest in the country, acting on years of threats and angering Democrats who assailed the move as political.

The announcement, made by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s education commissioner, Mike Morath, amounts to one of the largest school takeovers ever in the U.S. It also deepens a high-stakes rift between Texas’ largest city, where Democrats wield control, and state Republican leaders, who have sought increased authority following election fumbles and COVID-19 restrictions.  As reported by the Associated Press.

In a letter to the Houston Independent School District( HISD), Morath said the Texas Education Agency will replace Superintendent Millard House II and the district’s elected board of trustees with a new superintendent and an appointed board of managers made of residents from within the district’s boundaries.

Morath said the board has failed to improve student outcomes while conducting “chaotic board meetings marred by infighting” and violating open meetings act and procurement laws. He accused the district of failing to provide proper special education services and of violating state and federal laws with its approach to supporting students with disabilities.

He cited the seven-year record of poor academic performance at one of the district’s roughly 50 high schools, Wheatley High, as well as the poor performance of several other campuses.

“The governing body of a school system bears ultimate responsibility for the outcomes of all students. While the current Board of Trustees has made progress, systemic problems in Houston ISD continue to impact district students,” Morath wrote in his six-page letter.

Most of Houston’s school board members have been replaced since the state began making moves toward a takeover in 2019. House became superintendent in 2021.

He and the current school board will remain until the new board of managers is chosen sometime after June 1. The new board of managers will be appointed for at least two years.

House in a statement pointed to strides made across the district, saying the announcement “does not discount the gains we have made.”

He said his focus now will be on ensuring “a smooth transition without disruption to our core mission of providing an exceptional educational experience for all students.”

The Texas State Teachers Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas condemned the takeover. At a news conference in Austin, state Democratic leaders called for the Legislature to increase funding for education and raise teacher pay.

“We acknowledge that there’s been underperformance in the past, mainly due to that severe underfunding in our public schools,” state Rep. Armando Walle, who represents parts of north Houston, said.

An annual Census Bureau survey of public school funding showed Texas spent $10,342 per pupil in the 2020 fiscal year, more than $3,000 less than the national average, according to the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.

The state was able to take over the district under a change in state law that Houston Democratic state Rep. Harold Dutton Jr. proposed in 2015. In an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle on Monday, Dutton said he has no regrets about what he did.

“We’re hearing voices of opposition, people who say that HISD shouldn’t have to face consequences for allowing a campus to fail for more than five consecutive years. Those critics’ concern is misplaced,” Dutton wrote.

Schools in other big cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans and Detroit, in recent decades have gone through state takeovers, which are generally viewed as last resorts for underperforming schools and are often met with community backlash.

Texas started moving to take over the district following allegations of misconduct by school trustees, including inappropriate influencing of vendor contracts, and chronically low academic scores at Wheatley High.

The district sued to block a takeover, but new education laws subsequently passed by the GOP-controlled state Legislature and a January ruling from the Texas Supreme Court cleared the way for the state to seize control.

“All of us Texans have an obligation and should come together to reinvent HISD in a way that will ensure that we’re going to be providing the best quality education for those kids,” Abbott said Wednesday.

Schools in Houston are not under mayoral control, unlike in New York and Chicago, but as expectations of a takeover mounted, the city’s Democratic leaders unified in opposition.

State takeovers of large urban schools districts have generally not resulted in any major improvement. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the years ahead!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

OpenAI,  the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, rolled out its new artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in a demonstration on Tuesday.

The new system can figure out tax deductions, but it still can “hallucinate” facts and make reasoning errors. 

Here’s an evaluation of  OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 courtesy of the Associated Press.

WHAT’S NEW?

OpenAI says GPT-4 “exhibits human-level performance.” It’s much more reliable, creative and can handle “more nuanced instructions” than its predecessor system, GPT-3.5, which ChatGPT was built on, OpenAI said in its announcement.

In an online demo, OpenAI President Greg Brockman ran through some scenarios that showed off GPT-4′s capabilities that appeared to show it’s a radical improvement on previous versions.

He demonstrated how the system could quickly come up with the proper income tax deduction after being fed reams of tax code — something he couldn’t figure himself.

“It’s not perfect, but neither are you. And together it’s this amplifying tool that lets you just reach new heights,” Brockman said.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Generative AI technology like GPT-4 could be the future of the internet, at least according to Microsoft, which has invested at least $1 billion in OpenAI and made a splash by integrating AI chatbot tech into its Bing browser.

It’s part of a new generation of machine-learning systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and produce novel images and video based on what they’ve learned from a vast database of digital books and online text.

These new AI breakthroughs have the potential to transform the internet search business long dominated by Google, which is trying to catch up with its own AI chatbot, and numerous professions.

“With GPT-4, we are one step closer to life imitating art,” said Mirella Lapata, professor of natural language processing at the University of Edinburgh. She referred to the TV show “Black Mirror,” which focuses on the dark side of technology.

“Humans are not fooled by the AI in ‘Black Mirror’ but they tolerate it,” Lapata said. “Likewise, GPT-4 is not perfect, but paves the way for AI being used as a commodity tool on a daily basis.”

WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE IMPROVEMENTS?

GPT-4 is a “large multimodal model,” which means it can be fed both text and images that it uses to come up with answers.

In one example posted on OpenAI’s website, GPT-4 is asked, “What is unusual about this image?” It’s answer: “The unusual thing about this image is that a man is ironing clothes on an ironing board attached to the roof of a moving taxi.”

GPT-4 is also “steerable,” which means that instead of getting an answer in ChatGPT’s “classic” fixed tone and verbosity, users can customize it by asking for responses in the style of a Shakespearean pirate, for instance.

In his demo, Brockman asked both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to summarize in one sentence an article explaining the difference between the two systems. The catch was that every word had to start with the letter G.

GPT-3.5 didn’t even try, spitting out a normal sentence. The newer version swiftly responded: “GPT-4 generates groundbreaking, grandiose gains, greatly galvanizing generalized AI goals.”

HOW WELL DOES IT WORK?

ChatGPT can write silly poems and songs or quickly explain just about anything found on the internet. It also gained notoriety for results that could be way off, such as confidently providing a detailed but false account of the Super Bowl game days before it took place, or even being disparaging to users.

OpenAI acknowledged that GPT-4 still has limitations and warned users to be careful. GPT-4 is “still not fully reliable” because it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors, it said.

“Great care should be taken when using language model outputs, particularly in high-stakes contexts,” the company said, though it added that hallucinations have been sharply reduced.

Experts also advised caution.

“We should remember that language models such as GPT-4 do not think in a human-like way, and we should not be misled by their fluency with language,” said Nello Cristianini, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bath.

Another problem is that GPT-4 does not know much about anything that happened after September 2021, because that was the cutoff date for the data it was trained on.

ARE THERE SAFEGUARDS?

OpenAI says GPT-4′s improved capabilities “lead to new risk surfaces” so it has improved safety by training it to refuse requests for sensitive or “disallowed” information.

It’s less likely to answer questions on, for example, how to build a bomb or buy cheap cigarettes.

Still, OpenAI cautions that while “eliciting bad behavior” from GPT is harder, “doing so is still possible.”

I cannot wait to try it out!

Tony

Seattle Times

Dear Commons Community,

In an article for the Los Angeles Times, Simon Johnson former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and a professor at MIT Sloan, evaluates the failure at Silicon Valley Bank that has generated significant concern in the banking industry across the globe.  He also suggests what should happen next.

Below is his entire article.

Tony

————————————————————————————–

Beyond saving SVB’s depositors, here’s what should happen next!

Simon Johnson,

Los Angeles Times

Before Thursday, Silicon Valley Bank was regarded as being in “sound financial condition.” But on that day it experienced attempted withdrawals of $42 billion, about a third of its U.S. deposits. By close of business, the run on the bank made it incapable of paying its obligations as they came due. On Friday, the California Commissioner of Financial Protection and Innovation took possession of the bank’s property and business.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures deposits up to a limit of $250,000 per individual account or for a corporation at a single bank, was immediately appointed as the receiver. In some ways, SVB was unusual. Around 97% of its deposits (by value) were uninsured. This is because the bank catered primarily to the tech community, with many of these companies and nonprofits (perhaps up to 37,000 of them) parking their operating cash there.

Its collapse raised critical questions: What protection should be provided to depositors at SVB with uninsured amounts? Will there be problems for similarly situated banks? And what official action would be appropriate to head-off any potential cascade of bank failures?

Some preliminary answers were provided Sunday night by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and FDIC Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg: All bank depositors with SVB and with Signature Bank, which was closed by New York authorities on Sunday, will be fully protected. The Federal Reserve will also make available additional funding to ensure banks have enough liquidity to meet the needs of all depositors trying to make withdrawals.

The hope is that this rapid response will stop any further panic that could drive more bank runs. It appeared to be working on Monday, when all depositors’ funds in SVB became available. The stocks of midsize regional banks, however, plummeted as equity investors worried about the sudden collapses of SVB and Signature Bank.

Going forward, the FDIC will also manage SVB’s remaining assets, which are of high quality, including government securities and mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by government sponsored enterprises. The recovery value of these assets will be high, and they can be sold immediately.

Preventing bank runs is the immediate fire to put out, but the underlying problem that weakened Silicon Valley Bank — and may also leave other banks susceptible — has yet to be addressed.

In this case, a significant factor was how SVB was affected by the Federal Reserve and its macroeconomic priority to bring down inflation. Somehow this message did not filter down to corporate leaders at the bank.

SVB was brought down because it and its Fed supervisors did not pay attention to what Powell said would happen — that the Fed would raise interest rates if inflation stayed stubbornly high, as it has. Instead, SVB’s assumption that interest rates would remain low appeared to drive its investment strategies.

For many years, SVB was well regarded, apparently successful and had the best possible connections to banking regulators. The chief executive, Greg Becker, has been on the board of the San Francisco Fed since 2019 (he was removed from that board on Friday). Mary Miller, former undersecretary for domestic finance at the U.S. Treasury Department, was on the board of SVB.

For a while, nothing seemed amiss. And when startups received a flood of funding during the pandemic and immediately after, deposits at SVB rose by about $100 billion, more than doubling its balance sheet. SVB leadership used these funds to buy long-term U.S. government-backed bonds that are free of credit risk (they never default).

Unfortunately, as the bank’s management and its Fed supervisors should have known, such assets are not free of interest rate risk — meaning that as the Fed raised interest rates over the last nine months, the market value of SVB’s portfolio declined. Eventually, the value of its assets fell so much that concern about solvency arose, and SVB was unable to find enough cash to match the attempted $42 billion withdrawal on Thursday.

The bank’s miscalculation of risks, based on over-optimism of future interest rates, was a central problem, creating a vulnerability that helped trigger the bank run. But Fed supervisors also apparently failed to see the interest rate risk inherent in SVB’s big bond buying spree or to do anything about it (e.g., to require the bank to hedge that risk).

As a result, the Federal Reserve and other officials feel pressed to provide additional support to the banking system. There has been widespread concern since Friday about a run on other midsize banks, leading to other insolvencies — hence the move to guarantee all deposits at SVB and Signature.

In 2008, the regulation and supervision of big Wall Street traders broke down, resulting in a major financial panic, millions of jobs lost and the Fed loosening monetary policy as much as possible to prevent even worse outcomes.

In 2023, it is the supervision of regular commercial banks that has broken down. The failure of a $200 billion bank should not bring down the financial system. But a breakdown in supervision is another matter.

Fearing a major financial panic, the Fed and other authorities seem willing to provide a de facto blanket guarantee for all bank deposits. (Total bank deposits in the U.S. are around $18 trillion, of which about $10 trillion are FDIC insured.)

To be fully effective, this extension of deposit insurance has to be permanent, and all such insurance should be paid for through appropriate contributions from banks.

Going forward, federal authorities and the taxpayer will ultimately be responsible for more of the downside risk associated with poor risk management at banks. Consequently, regulation and supervision will need to be strengthened in an appropriate manner. Many people said this after 2008, but not enough was done.

A well-regulated system is still the right goal. This time around, the Federal Reserve needs to overhaul and improve its bank supervision — and to make that consistent with its macroeconomic policy for interest rates.

__

(Simon Johnson is co-chair of the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and a professor at MIT Sloan.)

We present one and a half minutes of Tucker Carlson parroting Vladimir Putin. New video from RAP: pic.twitter.com/W4ca6Gdrgz

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) March 14, 2023

Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Community,

Litigation blocking student housing projects, a potential delay in state funding and escalating construction and labor costs, are posing formidable challenges to easing what students say is one of their most urgent needs. An estimated 417,000 students lack stable places to sleep, according to surveys conducted across the three systems, amounting to 5% of undergraduates at the University of California, 10% at California State University and 20% at California Community Colleges.

At the same time, student activists say their housing needs are growing more urgent as inflation drives up rents and competition increases for apartments particularly in many of the pricey communities where UC campuses are located, such as Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara and La Jolla.   As reported by the Los Angeles Times.

“What we’ve seen across the board is that students are starting to make different choices about where to go to school” based on housing costs, said Zennon Ulyate-Crow, a UC Santa Cruz student who heads a new housing advocacy coalition of peers from all three public higher education systems across the state.

The issue will be highlighted this week in several public forums, including the UC Board of Regents meeting, a state Assembly budget hearing and the unveiling of proposed state legislation, “the Student Housing Crisis Act of 2023,” to ease barriers to construction near campuses.

Nathan Brostrom, UC chief financial officer, said the demand for campus housing has escalated in recent years as living costs skyrocket throughout California. UC has added 34,000 beds since 2011 for a total of 113,000 systemwide, but since enrollment also has increased, the share of students with campus housing has risen only modestly, from 32% then to 38% today, he said. Another 22,000 beds are being planned between 2023 and 2028, with an additional 16,000 possible if funding can be found, he added.

Students who typically rent off campus, such as those in graduate programs or transfers to UC, are increasingly requesting university housing to take advantage of the generally below-market rates, he said. UC housing waitlists for fall 2022 climbed to 14,000 students at all 10 campuses compared with 7,500 students at eight campuses the previous year. UC Riverside, for instance, added 2,400 beds in 2021 but still has the system’s largest waitlist of 3,400 students, Brostrom said.

“Communities that we live in have just gotten much more expensive and so we’re starting to see demand in places and from students that we didn’t normally see,” he said.

One major focus of the student forums this week will be Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed delay of one-third of $750 million in funding for a student housing grant program, a move to address the state’s projected $22.5 billion budget deficit.

Last year, in the first state effort to support new student housing, the program distributed $1.4 billion for 25 construction projects across the three systems. In addition, the program provided $17 million to 75 community colleges to aid planning for on-campus dorms — a new venture for most of them.

The UC projects include 3,400 new beds at UC campuses at Santa Cruz, San Diego, Irvine, UCLA and Berkeley. At CSU, nine campuses are planning projects that would provide 3,300 more beds, including 750 at San Francisco State and 600 at Cal State Fullerton. Twelve California community colleges are working on plans for nearly 3,000 beds, with the most ambitious project at Napa Valley to provide housing for 528 students.

But rising construction costs have affected many of them, according to a memo by an Assembly budget subcommittee on education finance. CSU said costs have risen by an average 14% since 2021, when the plans were developed, with eight campuses reporting nearly $65 million in additional funds needed. Cal State Fullerton said it will reduce the number of proposed beds to 555 from 600 planned because of rising costs.

This year, campuses have submitted about 30 proposals for $2.1 billion in funding — far outstripping the $750 million budgeted for the program’s second year. Now Newsom is proposing to lower that funding to $500 million.

State legislators, however, may disagree when they discuss the student housing issue Tuesday.

“Given the student housing crisis, the ability for campuses to construct housing quickly when compared to other local housing projects, and the likelihood that delays will increase costs and lessen the number of beds projects can deliver, the Legislature should discuss whether this is an appropriate program to delay,” the Assembly memo said.

Another report by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, however, offered a more positive take on axing out funding.

The report said removing the $750 million entirely rather than delay the funding a year “could be one of the relatively less disruptive ways to achieve state budget solutions” given projected deficits over the next few years. The report said the projects were still in the early stages and campuses had other options to finance them. It also raised the question of whether the state should be directly supporting housing projects, saying other programs might be more effective in helping students afford housing, such as more financial aid.

The memo added that legislators could also choose to prioritize projects from universities over community colleges, saying they would have a greater chance of success and have longstanding housing programs. UC, for instance, houses the largest share of students — ranging from 49% at UCLA to 21% at UC Berkeley — compared to less than 1% at community colleges.

Newsom also has proposed delaying the funding of a state zero-interest revolving loan fund for campus housing projects, which could dramatically lower their costs. Funding for the $1.8 billion loan program was set to begin this year but Newsom wants to push it back to 2024.

At least one key legislator nixed the idea of delays. Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) said the programs, which he championed, would address two pressing and interrelated state issues: the housing crisis and the rising cost of college. Housing costs are the key driver of the increasing cost of college attendance at California public universities, as tuition has actually declined over the last decade when accounting for inflation, according to a new analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“We do not support the delay,” said McCarty, chair of the Assembly budget subcommittee on education finance. “The [housing] demand is off the charts and we see a lot of shovel-ready projects…that will make a dent in the housing crisis, as well as the cost of college prices.”

He added that he would consider, however, delaying the housing grant program while funding the zero-interest loan fund.

Brostrom, the UC chief financial officer, said UC has the capacity to fund its own housing projects, but the state subsidies allow steep discounts that can be passed on to students. A UC Irvine dorm project for 300 beds, funded in part with a $65 million state housing grant, has allowed the university to reduce the cost by 30%, he said. And a zero-interest loan fund could cut UC’s borrowing costs of about 4.25% by half.

He added that litigation to block campus housing projects based on the California Environmental Quality Act was another vexing obstacle.

UC Berkeley’s plan to build 1,100 student beds and 125 units for low-income community residents at People’s Park is on hold after a state appellate court ruled that the campus did not adequately consider the impact of noise or assess alternative sites.

At UC Santa Cruz, litigation has halted projects approved by regents in 2019 to construct nearly 3,000 student beds and 140 units of student family housing on a beloved meadow for years.

Such roadblocks have infuriated many students, who are working with an Inland Empire legislator to push legislation to ease the way for student housing projects. AB 1630 by Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella) would give developers a “density bonus” allowing them to build housing units for students, faculty and staff up to three stories high if they are located within 1,000 feet of campus and offer at least 20% of the units at affordable rates as determined in part by Cal Grant eligibility.

The bill also would put campus housing projects into a streamlined permit process that would take them outside the purview of state environmental laws that have been used to block them, according to Ulyate-Crow, the UC student housing activist who helped shape the proposal with the Student HOMES Coalition, UC Student Assn., Student Senate for California Community Colleges and Generation Up.

In his own Santa Cruz community, the nation’s second priciest real-estate market, Ulyate-Crow said more students are falling into housing insecurity or forced into bidding wars against as many as 60 others trying to nail down an apartment.

“We need action to tackle this now and get shovels in the ground as soon as possible,” he said.

Good luck with moving new student housing forward!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A demented Donald Trump yesterday claimed former Vice President Mike Pence was responsible for the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, two days after Pence took aim at his old boss for his conduct around the riots at the Capitol that day.

Trump, speaking to a group of reporters aboard his personal plane en route to a campaign event in Iowa, responded to comments Pence made at the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington, D.C., in which the former vice president said “history will hold Donald Trump accountable” for the events of Jan. 6.  As reported by The Hill and other media.

“Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6,” Trump said, according to The Washington Post. “Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, No. 1, you have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it.”

Pence has said he did not have the constitutional authority to reject the electoral votes on Jan. 6 and that Trump was “wrong” to suggest the vice president had the power to overturn election results.

“President Trump was wrong; I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told the gathering of reporters and politicians on Saturday. “And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

The courts have rejected Trump’s efforts to nullify the 2020 election, and Congress last December passed legislation to clarify that the vice president does not have the power to overturn a presidential election.

The Republicans need to stop this deranged individual!

Tony

Amy Wax

Dear Commons Community,

Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” that the country is “better off with fewer Asians” as long as they tend to vote for Democrats, and that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. And a Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration.

Professor Wax has denied saying anything belittling or racist to students, and her supporters see her as a truth teller about affirmative action, immigration and race. They agree with her argument that she is the target of censorship and “wokeism” because of her conservative views.

All of which poses a conundrum for the University of Pennsylvania: Should it fire Amy Wax? The New York Times had  a featured article yesterday reviewing Professor Wax situation.  Here is an excerpt.

The university is now moving closer to answering just that question. After long resisting the call of students, the dean of the law school, Theodore W. Ruger, has taken a rare step: He has filed a complaint and requested a faculty hearing to consider imposing a “major sanction” on the professor.

His about-face prompted protests from free speech groups, which cited one of tenure’s key tenets — the right of academics to speak freely, without fear of punishment, whether in public or in the classroom.

For years, Mr. Ruger wrote in his 12-page complaint, Professor Wax has shown “callous and flagrant disregard” for students, faculty and staff, subjecting them to “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements.”

The complaint said she has violated the university’s nondiscrimination policies and “standards of professional competence.”

Her statements, the complaint added, “have led students and faculty to reasonably believe they will be subjected to discriminatory animus if they come into contact with her.”

Professor Wax has fought back, arguing that the university is trying to trample on her academic freedom.

Universities want to “banish and punish” anyone “who dares to dissent, who dares to expose students to different ideas,” she said on a recent podcast. “That is a really dangerous and pernicious trend.”

Professor Wax did not agree to interview requests, but at a time when scholars say their speech is under attack from the left and the right, many free speech groups, including the Academic Freedom Alliance, PEN America and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, have criticized the dean and said that Professor Wax should not be fired because of her public statements.

“Academic freedom cannot be a privilege of those who only espouse prevailing views but a protected right of all faculty,” the Academic Freedom Alliance wrote in July to the university’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, arguing that the school should end the process to sanction Professor Wax.

But for many students, her public speech, which often mixes public policy with insulting broadsides, is the point.

Students have asked: Aren’t these statements relevant to her performance in the classroom? Don’t they show the potential for bias? And does this professor, and this speech, deserve the protection of tenure?

As vile as  Professor Wax’s comments are, I tend to side with the Academic Freedom Alliance’s position.

Tony