University Of California

The University of California must refund about $38 million to professional degree students who were illegally charged fee increases after they started school in 2003, a Superior Court judge in San Francisco ruled Friday. UC is likely to appeal the decision, officials said. In the ruling, Judge John E. Munter said that several thousand UC students in law, medicine, nursing and other programs were, in effect, promised that their professional school fees would not rise during their enrollments and that the university violated that pledge.

With an innovative but little-known state program to study medical marijuana about to run out of money, researchers and political supporters said Wednesday the results show promise. "It should take all the mystery out of whether it works. We've got the results," said former state Sen. John Vasconcellos, who led the effort to create the 10-year-old Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research. The center has nearly spent its $8.7-million allocation, sponsoring 14 studies at UC campuses, including the first clinical trials of smoked marijuana in the United States in more than two decades.

Seeking to increase the ranks of black, Latino and Native American students at the University of California, civil rights activists said they will file a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging the state law that bans affirmative action in admissions. The suit contends that Proposition 209, which was passed by California voters in 1996, violates equal protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and says it has limited the numbers of non-Asian minority students at UC's most selective campuses.

The University of California regents Thursday approved the controversial payment of $3.1 million in performance bonuses to 38 senior executives at UC's five medical centers. The regents emphasized that the payments were linked to improved patient health and stronger hospital finances and said they were important tools to attract and retain talent. They said the bonuses were part of a 16-year-old plan funded by hospital revenue, not state funds or student fees. An additional $33.7 million is distributed among 22,000 lower-ranking medical employees.

The University of California will break with tradition and establish waiting lists for freshman admission as it copes with uncertain state funding, officials said Wednesday. UC has generally not used waiting lists in the past, and not all of its nine undergraduate campuses will do so this spring, administrators said during a UC Board of Regents meeting. But they predicted that most campuses would adopt the lists, at least to a limited extent, while university leaders decide whether to cut freshman enrollment for the fall.

Would a reasonable person confuse a USC logo on a garnet-and-black ball cap in Columbia, S.C., with the same letters on cardinal-and-gold sportswear worn by a Trojans fan at the Coliseum? Apparently so, a federal appeals court has decided in rejecting a petition from the Palmetto State to use the letters on baseball team clothing for the University of South Carolina Fighting Gamecocks. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday upheld a decision last year by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review board to recognize the University of Southern California's century-old claim to the logo letters.

The Greek mythology class has long been popular at UC Santa Barbara, but never quite like this. For the current term, 500 students are enrolled in Professor Apostolos Athanassakis' classics course, filling the lecture hall to capacity. And 300 others have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to land a spot on the roster, he said. Recent state funding cuts have translated to reductions in undergraduate course offerings across the beachside campus, sending students scurrying for classes such as Athanassakis' that fulfill various requirements.

University of California President Mark G. Yudof went to Sacramento this week in another valiant effort to convince legislators that they're playing with fire when they shortchange the state's higher-education system. In the course of his presentation, he gingerly mentioned the P-word. The state university, he told them, is a statewide boon, adding: "We do not want to partially privatize it through raising fees." "Privatization" is a crowd-pleasing nostrum for public officials seeking to shed the budgetary cost of programs and services that they nevertheless know to be a public responsibility.

Future social workers, architects and urban planners studying at the University of California are about to get a change in status they might not want. Starting next year, these UC students will be considered "professional" degree candidates and will be required to pay as much as $8,000 more a year in student fees than they do now. They will join law, business and medical students, among others, who have paid big surcharges for years. And some people say that isn't fair. As the UC system grapples with state funding cuts, its leaders recently approved steep increases in the charges that students in professional graduate schools must shell out on top of regular student fees.