Rose Bowl Honors Former Chancellor Young

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The Rose Bowl Stadium dedicated the UCLA Home Locker Room in honor of Charles E. Young, former chancellor of the university and professor emeritus of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Young served as chancellor from 1968 to 1997. In 1982, he selected the Rose Bowl as the home of Bruin football. “While it was 40 years ago, the decision to use the Rose Bowl Stadium as the home field of UCLA football still stands out in my mind as one of the more important decisions I made regarding UCLA Athletics during my tenure as chancellor of UCLA,” Young said. “The boost that gave to UCLA football in the 1980s under Terry Donahue and to all fans of UCLA Athletics remains vivid in my mind even today.” A Pasadena Now article noted that the ceremony honoring Young’s contributions to UCLA and the city of Pasadena comes as the Rose Bowl, opened in 1922, is marking its centennial year.

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Astor Emphasizes Emotional Intelligence as a School Priority

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Professor of Social Welfare Ron Avi Astor spoke to the Southern California News Group about ways to prevent bullying and violence in schools. In a survey of California middle and high school students, about one in three reported being bullied or harassed over a five-year period. However, schools that have implemented a focus on “social-emotional learning” saw lower levels of reported bullying. Social-emotional learning emphasizes that students get in touch with their own emotions and mental well-being and show empathy for others. “This actually moves into the core purpose of what schools are supposed to do for society; they are supposed to create a society that cares, that supports and helps people,” Astor said. “It puts schools out in front of what we hope society will be in 10 years.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, many California school districts have increased their focus on students’ mental health and well-being.

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Luskin Housing Scholars Weigh In on California’s Crisis

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A UCLA Newsroom article on how to tackle California’s affordable housing crisis cited several scholars from UCLA Luskin. Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen sees the housing crisis as a combination of “unaffordability, instability and inability to house” and has urged the state to “use many levers to push cities to allow more new housing.” Los Angeles Initiative Director Zev Yaroslavsky has cautioned against changes that fundamentally undermine the character of neighborhoods. He suggested increasing zoning capacity but allowing the city to decide where it should take place. “You don’t need to destroy communities,” Yaroslavsky said. Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Michael Lens highlighted the urgent need for more money for permanent supportive housing. The article was written by Jim Newton, editor of UCLA’s Blueprint magazine, who concluded that the competing arguments “reflect and shape California’s ongoing and urgent search for ways to adequately house every resident of the state.” 

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Report Highlights COVID’s Impact on Higher Education Goals

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Inside Higher Ed and Axios highlighted the findings of a policy report from the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latino students. According to the report, Black and Latino students were more likely than others to cancel or postpone their higher education plans during the COVID-19 pandemic. This trend persisted even after vaccines were made widely available. “Higher education attainment is an important pathway to social and economic mobility and has cascading effects across a person’s lifespan,” explained  Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, the initiative’s director of research. “Given Latinos’ position as the future workforce of America, addressing this disparity is critical to the prosperity of our nation.”

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Anheier Reflects on Germany’s Three-Party Coalition Government

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Helmut Anheier authored a Project Syndicate article about the first 100 days of Germany’s three-party coalition government. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Ampelkoalition (“traffic light coalition”), which comprises the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens, is Germany’s first three-party government since the 1950s. “To make it work, each party has had to bend on sacred principles and adopt policy positions that previously would have seemed unthinkable,” Anheier wrote. “For a country that prefers consensual, deliberative decision-making and no-surprises, many of the recent, sudden policy shifts have been profound and will alter Germany’s domestic and foreign-policy trajectory for decades to come.” Anheier warned that radical policy changes could backfire, especially when they lack clear public consent, and that the three parties must remain united. “If uncertain times demand novel policies and political flexibility, the Ampelkoalition has so far shown itself to be up to the challenge,” he concluded.

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Ong on Reforms to Uphold Census Integrity

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UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Director Paul Ong spoke to the Associated Press about ways to address flaws in how the U.S. Census is conducted. The Census Bureau found that Black, Hispanic, American Indian and other minority residents were undercounted at greater rates in 2020 than in the previous decade, prompting discussion about ways to better measure changes in the U.S. population. In 2020, the Trump administration unsuccessfully attempted to use administrative records to determine the number of people in the country illegally in order to influence the allocation of congressional seats. Ong noted that any effort to revamp how the count is conducted will need to be protected from similar efforts to misuse the count for political purposes. “The 2020 enumeration was a wakeup call,” Ong said. “The Census Bureau has a very important and fundamental function in our society. It is the keeper of our demographic truths.”

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Monkkonen on UCLA as a Model for Affordable Housing

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen spoke to Curbed about UCLA’s new guaranteed student housing plan. UCLA is the first University of California school to offer four years of housing for first-year students and two years of housing for transfer students. Meanwhile, the city of L.A. continues to struggle to produce affordable housing. According to Monkkonen, the biggest lesson to be learned from UCLA is the power of consolidating everything from planning to financing in one department and essentially becoming a public-housing developer. “UCLA develops its own land-use plan and then executes capital programs like the construction of dorms,” Monkkonen said. “Proactively planning for housing to be built rather than setting up rules and waiting to see if developers build or not is the kind of paradigm shift we need.” He also recommended expanding affordable housing closer to schools in order to benefit students, families, teachers and staff.

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Astor on Aggression Targeting School Staff

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Several media outlets reached out to Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor to provide context to a new report by the American Psychological Association (APA) on the alarming levels of harassment and threats experienced by school staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Astor, a member of the APA task force that conducted the research, spoke to NPR’s Morning Edition, CBS Los Angeles, K-12 Dive and The 74 about the “pressure-cooker” atmosphere in the nation’s schools. “Schools were and still are a battleground,” he said. “COVID is symbolic of all these larger cultural layers that filter into every classroom, every school in the country.” Astor also appeared at a March 17 congressional briefing on the study, and noted that school staffs are “just underfunded, understaffed and do not have enough help organizationally to create a positive, healthy environment.” The report, which received national attention from NBC News and EdWeek, among other outlets, recommended comprehensive research-based solutions to improve the campus environment for both students and staff.

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Yin on Burden on U.S. Medical Debt

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Associate Professor of Public Policy Wesley Yin’s research into the soaring cost of medical debt in the United States was featured in the UCLA Anderson Review. A study co-authored by Yin and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that medical bills sent to collection agencies totaled an estimated $140 billion as of June 2020. That sum, which is bigger than all other sources of debt in collection combined, was tallied even before the pandemic saddled COVID-19 sufferers with unpaid doctor and hospital bills. Medical debt is concentrated in low-income neighborhoods, in the South and in states that refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act. “Communities that had been most burdened by medical debt have become even worse off, in absolute and relative terms, due to their leaders choosing not to expand Medicaid,” Yin said. “The results are important because they indicate that these problems are within the control of public policy.”

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Slowing Down Saves Money and Lives, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in an Atlantic article about the benefits of driving slower. Fast speeds use more energy to cover the same distance, making driving fast more dangerous, more harmful to the environment and more expensive, especially with the recent increase in gas prices. According to Manville, the first step to altering the culture of fast driving is simply to enforce existing speed limits more consistently. “If a camera catches everyone who speeds on a road segment, every time they speed, then you can actually get meaningful deterrence,” he said. Furthermore, speeding fines would be less expensive if they caught every instance of speeding. “The logic behind the high fines for speeding right now is that you don’t catch most people who speed,” Manville explained. However, if drivers knew they would be consistently penalized for speeding, they may slow down, a decision that could save money and lives.

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