Campus Update
UCLA News from May 12 – 16

Anderson endowed with $10 million
UCLA Anderson School of Management alumnus Lawrence Fink and his wife Lori made a donation of $10 million to the Anderson School on May 8. This contribution is the largest since John Anderson’s naming donation in 1987. The gift will fund the UCLA Center for Finance, which will be renamed the Laurence D. and Lori W. Fink Center for Finance and Investments. About $3 million of the sum will go toward a new endowed chair, while the remainder will be used to pay for speaker events, fund research, and supplement salaries, as well as for activities, conferences, scholarships, and for a quarterly bulletin.

Student parking poses problems
Nearby UCLA residential neighborhoods are noticing an increase in long-term student parking in their streets, leading to complaints from residents who claim the cars take up parking spaces for days or weeks. The Brentwood Glen Homeowners Association has begun to contact officials about ways to prevent students from parking in the neighborhoods long-term.

Ads give face to UCLA
Recent full-page advertisements printed in the Los Angeles and New York Times featured prominent UCLA alumni in an effort to garner attention and support for the university. The ads explain why alumni believe UCLA is a pre-eminent university. The campaign costs approximately $670,000 and took a year and a half to put together. The ads are meant to coincide with the time during which incoming freshmen are deciding which university to enroll in.

Chancellor Block officially inaugurated
Chancellor Gene Block was finally inaugurated after almost 10 months of taking over the position from Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams. He addressed the challenges that lay ahead for UCLA, such as continuous declining government funding, and keeping diversity consistent in the institution. Despite the challenges, Block says he is excited about the future of UCLA and its role in the community.

Making the city his campus
Newly inaugurated UCLA chancellor Gene Block hopes to broaden UCLA’s horizons by increasing its involvement in the greater Los Angeles community. One of Block’s new initiatives is to establish a new institute that will identify and offer solutions to social problems in L.A. The group would select an issue and faculty members from different areas would work together to find new approaches to dealing with the problem.

Enrollment slightly more diverse
Preliminary enrollment data shows the incoming freshman class will have the highest number of underrepresented minorities in recent years. Collectively, the number of Native Americans, blacks, and Chicanos and Latinos has risen 2.2 percent from last year. Also, one-fourth of incoming freshman come from low-income families, and one-third of them are the first in their families to go to college. However, UCLA continues to struggle with diversity, as the UCLA African American Student Enrollment Task Force was only able to produce an increase of 23 African Americans enrolled this year.

Influential tobacco researcher, 84, dies
Dr. Murray Jarvik, a pioneer in nicotine research, passed away May 8 at the age of 84 due to congestive heart failure. He had received his master’s degree at UCLA and then went on to become a professor here. Jarvik and his fellow researchers had discovered that nicotine was behind the addictiveness of cigarettes and created the nicotine patch, which helps many people quit smoking. His son Jerry Jarvik credits his father for having saved millions of lives because of his work with nicotine addictions and the nicotine patch.

LSU releases Morgan from commitment
Trent Johnson, Louisiana State men’s basketball coach, has confirmed that star recruit J’Mison Morgan will be released from his commitment to the school. This will allow for Morgan to attend UCLA and fill the void that big men Kevin Love and Lorenzo Mata-Real will leave. Though Morgan has not officially committed to play for UCLA, his brother and mother have told multiple media outlets that he will.

Fee hike leads to protests
On May 14, more than 100 students from UCLA and other UC campuses joined together to fight the recent 7.4 percent increase in student fees that UC Board of Regents recently passed to overcome the heavy state budget cuts. Students chained their arms together, chanting about how fees would hit minority and low-income families the hardest, and 16 students were arrested when they refused to leave peacefully from the demonstration.

Dentist resigns from post
Orthodontics resident Kent Ochiai wrote a resignation letter from the UCLA School of Dentistry after he revealed the scandal behind the admissions process in the dental school last year. Ochiai stated that the orthodontics chair took away his patients, limited his study materials, discredited him among colleagues, and greatly slowed down his progress in the three-year program. Ochiai resigned after he helped expose to the Daily Bruin last year that students who gave six-figure monetary gifts were automatically accepted over students with higher grades and test scores.
Read the original Daily Bruin story here: http://www.dailybruin.com/news/2007/nov/13/donations-influence-admissions/

A host of experiences with Jerry Springer
This past week, Jerry Springer came to UCLA to share his thoughts on politics, news, television, and pop culture in Ackerman Grand Ballroom. In a Daily Bruin interview, Springer cited his show as the “silliest on television” and found his greatest audience in college students who accept the outrageous far more than any other age group. He also believes it is “educational” to come to a college campus because it helps him escape the television world and connect to people on a different level

Compiled by Megan Smith, Tiffany Hsia, Carolina Chau, and Aleen Bedrosian.