UCLA in the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription. See more UCLA in the News.
Despite progress, COVID remains unpredictable | Los Angeles Times
“The definition of a pandemic is an outbreak of disease that has then spread beyond any one or two countries to a global spread,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist and infectious-disease expert with the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. One challenge to defining the end of a pandemic is figuring out when we’ve returned to some kind of baseline for coronavirus cases and deaths. For now, “we don’t have what the baseline is for COVID because we’ve never had it before,” Kim-Farley said.
The quandary of U.S.-trained Chinese scientists | Los Angeles Times
(Commentary by UCLA’s Christopher Tang) Would you train your workers and then squeeze them out by creating a hostile environment? Would you drive out these workers so they can go work for a competitor? The answer is obviously no. Yet this is what’s happening now in the U.S., with a rising number of U.S.-trained Chinese scientists leaving this country.
L.A. journalist’s suicide confounds years later | Los Angeles Times
Scott Timberg was one of approximately 47,500 Americans who took their lives in 2019 … “You can’t prevent every suicide,” said Joan Asarnow, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, “but organizing the healthcare system in such a way that you have leadership around suicide prevention is a big step forward.”
Limits on truth-telling about racism | Washington Post
(Commentary by UCLA’s Eddie Cole) And similar concerns exist in … other states where recent demands to prohibit teaching about race and the history of racism has widespread public support … But these attacks are not new and, like today, limitations placed on academic freedom have a history long rooted in racism. Race has been at the center of many of the most aggressive attempts to dismantle academic freedom in the nation’s universities.
College costs keep snowballing | NBC News
Hannah Appel, a co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union of borrowers who have fought for widespread student loan cancellation, and a professor of anthropology at UCLA, said that “$20,000 in student debt relief doesn’t go far enough, leaving millions of debtors with high balances out to dry and doing nothing for future students.”
Latinas and Newsom’s executive appointments | KABC-TV
“The amount of influence and decision-making authority that rests within boards and commissions is so critical, but we often don’t treat it as such, because it’s folded under the executive branch,” said Paul Barragan-Monge, the director of mobilization for the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute. Monge says Latinos remain grossly underrepresented in executive branch state appointments, which includes dozens of governing bodies that oversee everything from education to the environment, and criminal justice.
A strong dollar is hurting other countries | New York Times
Oleg Itskhoki, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an email that while there’s a theoretical case for coordination, “it is not even clear how this coordinating mechanism could be established (e.g., how other countries could compensate the U.S. for departing from its unilaterally optimal policy and the mandate to pursue domestic price stability).” Itskhoki is the 2022 winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the American economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.
Will Gavin Newsom run for president? | Guardian
With Joe Biden suggesting that he will probably run for re-election, Newsom might have to wait his turn. In any case, “Newsom is setting a course for higher office, after his tenure as governor,” said Sonja Diaz, director of UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute.
As locals grow old, housing will be scarce | Orange County Register
A 2019 University of Pennsylvania study of homelessness in Boston, New York and Los Angeles projected that L.A. County’s homeless senior population will nearly double to 13,900 from 2020 to 2030, including almost 2,500 who will be 75 and older. While homeless seniors are expected to account for just a small fraction of all older L.A. County residents, even one is intolerable, said UCLA Professor Randall Kuhn, study co-author. “There was a time when it was seemingly quite rare for people over age 65 to be unhoused … so the emergence of this phenomenon is troubling,” Kuhn said in an email.
James Dean deadly crash site is still a landmark | Courthouse News Service
Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian and lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, said Dean was an impressive actor, who channeled a momentous postwar movement. “He’s not only a method actor with all that angst, but he’s also part of the new youth culture that’s exploding,” Kuntz said, noting the simultaneous rise of rebellious rock and roll. “At that moment, James Dean seems to embody all that troubled youth of the ’50s in one person, and he seems to have a great way of expressing it in his pictures.”
Family leave expands under new state law | Sacramento Bee
The expansion of California’s program was celebrated by labor unions and advocates. Sonja Diaz, founding director of the UCLA Latino Politics and Policy Institute, called the measure a “common sense, data-backed reform” that aims to remedy a gap that disproportionately affects families of color.
California teachers stressed, burned out | KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk”
Recently UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools released findings from a survey that polled over 4,000 California teachers of various backgrounds on their feelings towards their careers. One exceptional finding was that over one-third of respondents currently teaching and not near retirement age admitted they were seriously considering leaving their professions in the next three years. At the same time, the data shows there was a slight increase in the total amount of teachers hired in California. (UCLA’s Kai Matthews is interviewed — approx. 3:45 mark).
Iranian Americans on the protests rocking Iran | Guardian
“We now all have the same demand inside and outside [of Iran],” says Esha Momeni. Momeni, a lecturer in the gender studies department at the University of California, Los Angeles, has attended solidarity protests in Los Angeles, home to one of the largest Iranian American communities in the US and where more than 100,000 members of the diaspora live.