Topic Archive: Academia
Former L.A. Times sportswriter Lonnie White has posted a remarkable first-person story for Fox Sports disclosing for the first time how he accepted a brown bag with $5,000 cash — and took a total of $14,000 — while he was a star wide receiver and kick returner for the Trojans in the 1980s.
Posted June 22, 2011 6:40 PM
Metro reporter Scott Gold will focus on stories about "the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the modern era" — and also earthquakes. The challenge of the beat will be to...
Posted June 21, 2011 6:19 PM
Kristy Edmunds, who comes to UCLA from Australia, talks about programming the performing arts and how she intends to get to know what Los Angeles audiences want.
Posted June 6, 2011 11:33 PM
Ronald Macaulay, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Pitzer College, is the author of last year's "Seven Ways of Looking at Language." When he heard that the Claremont Colleges Library...
Posted May 24, 2011 6:10 PM
Lisbeth Salander is all over the agenda for a two-day symposium in Royce Hall on the late Larsson's works and the larger genre.
Posted May 17, 2011 7:09 PM
The Dalai Lama had two sold-out appearances scheduled Monday in UCLA's Royce Hall.
Posted May 1, 2011 6:02 PM
It's just coincidence I'm sure, but the same week that Eli Broad is profiled for his philanthropy on "60 Minutes," three major local gifts have been announced.
Posted April 26, 2011 11:46 PM
'SoCal Connected' ties together two stories — on the animal rights activists who terrorize UCLA researchers and the clashes involving movie and TV characters who wait for tourists outside Hollywood and Highland — into an episode with a limits-of-free-speech theme.
Posted April 13, 2011 5:47 PM
Turns out that former Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs was instrumental in getting Ackerman Student Union built.
Posted April 12, 2011 10:13 PM
One of the little quirks about Downtown L.A. is that a major north-south street, Hope Street, stops at the Central Library. Yet Hope Street predates the library.
Posted March 30, 2011 8:45 AM
Nice feature in Smithsonian Air & Space on the private and amateur rocket teams figuring out space flight of the future way out in the Mojave Desert.
Posted March 24, 2011 5:10 PM
Jimmy Wong is the 24-year-old Los Angeles performer whose amusing video answer to UCLA student Alexandra Wallace's anti-Asian rant set a high bar for video responses and helped defuse an...
Posted March 24, 2011 11:05 AM
Dayna Baer, one of the co-authors of "The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story," joined the CIA while a grad student at UCLA.
Posted March 21, 2011 12:55 AM
Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA political science student whose video mocking Asian students and their families became a huge social media sensation, says in a letter to the Daily Bruin that...
Posted March 18, 2011 7:31 PM
Video goes viral and sparks angry comments, death threats, official denunciations and mocking remixes.
Posted March 14, 2011 11:33 PM
The gift of $200 million from David and Dana Dornsife is the largest ever to USC, surpassing the $175 million from George Lucas.
Posted March 8, 2011 5:55 PM
Caltech broke its 310-game losing streak with a one-point win tonight over rival Occidental in the final game of the season. It's the Beavers' first basketball win in the conference since, oh, 1985.
Posted February 22, 2011 10:11 PM
Zocalo Public Square is joining with Arizona State University and the New America Foundation to launch the non-partisan Center for Social Cohesion, "dedicated to studying the forces that shape our sense of social unity."
Posted February 16, 2011 1:34 PM
The NYU arts professor who had a Los Angeles tattoo parlor embed a web camera in the back of his head has changed...focus...and is now wearing the camera around his neck.
Posted February 13, 2011 10:24 PM
UCLA's HyperCities Egypt project displays and archives tweets as they come in from Cairo and Alexandria.
Posted February 10, 2011 1:35 PM
Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry who is a professor at Caltech, returned to Egypt Sunday as a potential leader of his native country and called on Hosni Mubarak to give up power.
Posted February 7, 2011 12:56 AM
Jacki Wells Cisneros and her husband have put $1 million into a scholarship fund at the USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, her alma mater.
Posted February 2, 2011 4:27 PM
Denis Dutton in 1998 created the well-read Arts & Letters Daily, which the New Yorker's Blake Eskin today calls "the first and foremost aggregator of well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas. Denis was the intellectual’s Matt Drudge."
Posted December 28, 2010 12:57 PM
Journalism students at USC Annenberg have put together a website exploring the two blocks around MacArthur Park, with one focus on the Park Plaza hotel at Park View and 6th Street.
Posted December 15, 2010 3:40 PM
Jet Propulsion Lab scientists and NASA's EPOXI mission captured this image of comet Hartley 2 in a fly-by today.
Posted November 4, 2010 10:26 PM
Applications are being accepted until Dec. 17 for the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion.
Posted October 21, 2010 11:17 PM
Installation artist Jorge Pardo, who is a graduate of Art Center, and Caltech biophysicist John Dabiri, who studies the theoretical engineering behind jellyfish propulsion, have been named 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellows.
Posted September 27, 2010 9:53 PM
L.A. Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein and USC just jointly announced that next year's Festival of Books will be moving from UCLA, where it started and was held for 15 years.
Posted September 22, 2010 1:17 PM
In the San Fernando Valley secession election in 2002, state Assemblyman Keith Richman received the most votes and would have become the first mayor of the newly formed sixth-most populous U.S. city if voters had allowed the split.
Posted August 1, 2010 8:41 PM
The former Trojan and L.A. Rams quarterback takes over from Mike Garrett on Aug. 3, the same day that USC's new president takes office.
Posted July 20, 2010 1:59 PM
The author and OC Weekly "Ask a Mexican!" columnist gave the keynote address at tonight's main UCLA commencement ceremony.
Posted June 11, 2010 10:03 PM
The NCAA has given USC a two-year bowl ban and stripped more than 20 football scholarships after a four-year investigation into allegations involving Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo, the L.A. Times' Gary Klein reports.
Posted June 9, 2010 9:57 PM
Flowers and messages honoring John Wooden were piled up this morning at The Bruin sculpture on campus at UCLA.
Posted June 7, 2010 1:10 PM
I noticed quite an outpouring of grief and and surprise on Facebook from friends, labor activists and colleagues on today's death of John Delloro, reportedly of a heart attack.
Posted June 5, 2010 7:17 PM
It will be C. L. Max Nikias, currently executive vice president and provost at USC. He will succeed Steven Sample, who previously announced he would retire on Aug. 2.
Posted March 11, 2010 8:09 AM
Former U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth Starr is leaving as dean of Pepperdine University Law School to become president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Posted February 15, 2010 1:46 PM
Ten USC Annenberg graduate students who work on the Annenberg News21 team will produce Web-exclusive multimedia reports for the SoCal Connected website at KCET.
Posted February 10, 2010 5:27 PM
The former UCLA assistant professor of information sciences and Internet culture figure was located by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department on January 16 — but the news is only now getting out.
Posted February 3, 2010 4:27 PM
I have to wonder if the Times' near-total surrender of its award-winning tradition of covering a major local industry — cutting-edge science — helps explain why the New York Times beat the locals on the apparent suicide of a world-class Caltech scientist.
Posted January 28, 2010 9:32 AM
Jonathan Glater, a legal affairs writer for the New York Times, has joined the UC Irvine School of Law as interim director of academic support. He's the fourth ex-journalist on staff.
Posted January 25, 2010 11:31 AM
Former KNBC anchor Tritia Toyota, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at UCLA< has a new book on Chinese American political power in the San Gabriel Valley.
Posted January 12, 2010 12:18 PM
L.A. Times editor-at-large Jim Newton is now teaching a course in journalism ethics at UCLA, part of his appointment as a senior fellow in the School of Public Affairs. In...
Posted January 12, 2010 12:07 PM
Northrop Grumman's decision to leave Los Angeles marks the end of an era, say scholars William Deverell, Daniel Lewis and Peter Westwick in a Visiting Bloggers post at LA Observed.
Posted January 7, 2010 11:04 PM
Neon Tommy checks in on the long-suffering effort to relocate residents of the LAX-adjacent neighborhood where you can stand at the corner of 99th and 99th.
Posted January 4, 2010 10:58 PM
Phil Wallace got into the details of the Trojans' self-imposed sanctions at Native Intelligence, and also wonders whether it will be enough to keep the NCAA from coming down harder....
Posted January 3, 2010 10:23 PM
Paul Frommer, a professor of clinical management communication at the USC Marshall School of Business, got the gig to create about 1,000 words for the Na'vi, who inhabit the moon...
Posted December 24, 2009 10:52 AM
The National Autonomous University of Mexico, said to be the largest in the western hemisphere, has operated out of the Mexican consulate here for three years. But now UNAM has...
Posted November 30, 2009 11:46 AM
The Trojans dominated in a sloppy game by both sides, but what they'll be talking about for days (at least) is this: USC throwing a touchdown bomb one play after...
Posted November 28, 2009 10:58 PM
Anh Do, a former columnist for the Orange County Register and vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News (the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the U.S.), will be the managing editor...
Posted November 18, 2009 10:28 PM
The first L.A. Times/USC poll will run in Sunday's and Monday's papers and will cover a bunch of topics. Some of the findings the Times is teasing: 51% of Calfornia...
Posted November 6, 2009 5:46 PM
Six statewide polls will be conducted between now and the November 2010 election, to be called the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts & Sciences/Los Angeles Times Poll....
Posted November 4, 2009 1:04 PM
Clearing the decks for the new week: USC president Steven Sample announced that he would step down in August, after 19 years. Honors student Melody Ross, 16, was shot and...
Posted November 1, 2009 11:55 PM
When USC freshman Adrianna Bachan was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver at 3 a.m. last spring, the 18-year-old had a high level of alcohol in her system, according...
Posted September 30, 2009 5:46 PM
With fall quarter classes starting today, protests over budget cuts and employee furloughs are expected at many University of California campuses, including at UCLA. LAT...
Posted September 24, 2009 7:33 AM
Firefighters from Tuolumne and Calaveras counties knew well the history and scientific treasure that was at stake when the Station Fire threatened the Mount Wilson Observatory. They made it their...
Posted September 5, 2009 1:25 PM
Tim McOsker, who was the chief of staff for Mayor James Hahn, is taking a leave from the Los Angeles law office of Mayer Brown to become Senior Director for...
Posted August 18, 2009 12:10 AM
USC Annenberg plans to announce tomorrow that Kit Rachlis, the former editor of Los Angeles magazine, will be a Senior Fellow at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. As...
Posted August 13, 2009 4:32 PM
Steve Greenberg picks up on the lost story of the California budget mess. The crunch and the political fallout of kids being kept out of college in California — and...
Posted July 28, 2009 1:22 PM
Los Angeles Magazine is out with its annual Best of LA issue, and #16 among its 101 favorite things is "Blog by an ex-LAT staffer." By that they mean Craig...
Posted July 24, 2009 4:22 PM
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza takes over August 1 as the dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University. He's also the editor of The Zeleza Post and...
Posted June 27, 2009 3:15 PM
A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal has sided with Jet Propulsion Lab scientists who are resisting a government requirement that they detail past and present financial...
Posted June 4, 2009 2:42 PM
Both new assistant professors come billed as multi-media journalists. Seattle Times news producer Robert Hernandez and new media researcher and author Andrew Lih, whose new book is "The Wikipedia Revolution:...
Posted May 11, 2009 7:59 PM
SoCal Minds is a new blog that bills itself as presenting "Intriguing research, ideas, activity, people -- tracked from universities, cultural-intellectual institutions in Southern California." Recent posts have come out...
Posted May 1, 2009 12:19 AM
Fifteen digital journalists from 10 states have been selected for the inaugural class of the Knight Digital Media Center’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Local fellows are Julia Scott, who blogs...
Posted April 27, 2009 3:35 PM
Josue Luna, husband of the woman charged in the hit and run death of USC student Adrianna Bachan, was arrested Friday afternoon while entering the U.S. from Mexico at the...
Posted April 18, 2009 4:27 PM
Irvine's new law school — the one that was, then wasn't, and now is run by Erwin Chemerinsky — got a huge number of applicants for its first class and...
Posted April 16, 2009 3:43 PM
Peter H. King has been the Los Angeles Times city editor, California columnist, roving reporter and a writer of big stories over almost 30 years at the paper. He's jumping...
Posted April 15, 2009 10:25 PM
That's the good news, of course. The bad news is that it even came up — blame "an ill conceived and unfortunate prank." From: Office of the Provost Subject: Pathogen...
Posted April 15, 2009 9:47 PM
Editors at UCLA's student paper "begrudgingly" ran a full-page ad for Haagen-Dazs wrapped around today's front page, and say in an editorial that it's a "regrettable but relatively unavoidable consequence...
Posted April 7, 2009 11:37 AM
Essentially nobody voted anywhere in this week's special election to pick Mark Ridley-Thomas's successor in the 26th state Senate district. But in the precinct that covers the USC campus, the...
Posted March 26, 2009 10:54 PM
Cinny Kennard, Managing Director/Managing Editor of National Public Radio’s West Coast production center in Culver City, found a good exit gig. She's going to USC Annenberg as senior fellow at...
Posted March 17, 2009 7:26 AM
NeonTommy.com at USC Annenberg is an "online digital news Web site created to fill a void in local and national news while providing news and commentary across multiple platforms—audio, video...
Posted February 10, 2009 10:30 PM
The Bruin Rangers, UCLA's official women's rugby club team, held their annual Prom Dress Rugby game on Thursday. "I got into rugby because I got tired of getting yellow cards...
Posted January 9, 2009 9:09 PM
Credit to the UCLA student newspaper, which sent a reporter and photographer to China for two weeks for a series of stories that began today on UCLA's presence there as...
Posted November 19, 2008 2:32 PM
One of my favorite assignments ever while at the Daily News (pre-web so I can't link) was a profile of Robert Jastrow, the brilliant physicist who, in addition to helping...
Posted November 13, 2008 2:18 PM
Andrea Ghez, the UCLA professor of astronomy and physics who showed that a monstrous black hole resides at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, was named a 2008 MacArthur...
Posted September 22, 2008 9:39 PM
Here's the most interesting blog post I read all day. Political scientists at UCLA who asked students to rate the faces of hundreds of American candidates found that Alaska Gov....
Posted September 11, 2008 10:42 PM
At noon today Eli and Edythe Broad will break ground on another local institution with their names on it: the Eli and Edythe Broad California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM)...
Posted September 3, 2008 9:10 AM
On an average day, USC theater students Peter Vack and Troian Bellisario bring in $100 performing lines from "Romeo and Juliet" on the New York City subway. "Several people thanked...
Posted August 25, 2008 12:03 AM
When OJR suspended publication last month, the move ended a ten-year run in which the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications was a high-profile player in the emerging...
Posted July 10, 2008 10:50 PM
The Online Journalism Review had survived for ten years under the stewardship of USC's Annenberg School of Communications. No more. Editor Robert Niles posted today: I'm pleased to say that...
Posted June 16, 2008 5:45 PM
They were pretty happy out at JPL today after scientists guided the Phoenix lander to a spot near the north pole of Mars, just one degree of tilt off perfect...
Posted May 25, 2008 11:54 PM
At yesterday's unveiling of a plaque for UCLA legend John Wooden at the Coliseum, Vin Scully told a fun story about how Wooden was one of the first people he...
Posted May 21, 2008 11:25 AM
Officials at the California Science Center in Exposition Park are reportedly miffed about an email from a top doctor at the UCLA Medical School, putting down the museum's skills as...
Posted May 20, 2008 9:22 AM
Anthony Pesce, next year's editor in chief of the student newspaper at UCLA, and photo editor/columnist Dharmishta Rood won a Knight News Challenge award to "create online publishing software geared...
Posted May 14, 2008 12:41 PM
For the past few months Kareem Abdul-Jabbar posted to a blog on LATimes.com. As of Monday, it has moved to Abdul-Jabbar's own website (with sound, so turn down your speakers.)...
Posted May 13, 2008 10:20 PM
Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald is a hero of the anti-Semitic crowd for writing that Jews have evolved as a tribal elite that conspires against the interests...
Posted May 9, 2008 12:21 AM
The host of the long-running "Connie Martinson Talks Books" gave nearly 3,000 tapes of her cable show to Claremont Graduate University. "It's a pretty extraordinary gift," said Rick Wartzman, director...
Posted May 7, 2008 9:20 AM
As reported Saturday, Geneva Overholser was just announced as the new journalism director at USC Annenberg....
Posted April 14, 2008 9:16 AM
Geneva Overholser, former editor of the Des Moines Register, will be introduced Monday as the new director of the journalism school at the USC Annenberg School of Communication, according to...
Posted April 12, 2008 6:16 PM
Loyola Law School Dean David Burcham has been named provost at Loyola Marymount, a new position at the law school's parent institution. The new interim law dean is Victor Gold,...
Posted January 11, 2008 12:28 PM
An open letter from Athletic Director Mike Garrett. Excerpt: It gives me no pleasure to write a letter of this kind, but there are issues facing our university that you...
Posted November 28, 2007 9:53 AM
USC alumni don't want to gather on campus Saturday mornings, touch the statue then get on a bus. They want to walk to the stadium. Skepticism abounds over the Times...
Posted November 28, 2007 12:14 AM
The newly reinstated dean-to-be of the future UC Irvine law school will be next year's commencement speaker at the rival Chapman University law school. The dean there, John Eastman, has...
Posted September 17, 2007 9:01 PM
Liberal legal scholar and pundit Erwin Chemerinsky will become dean of the new UC Irvine law school after all. Chancellor Michael V. Drake spent the week in North Carolina —...
Posted September 17, 2007 11:39 AM
Video of the columnist addressing journalism graduates at today's USC Annenberg commencement, at LAist....
Posted May 14, 2007 2:28 PM
Full professors at Harvard average $177,400 a year, those at Yale $157,600. Which full professors in California do you think make the most? Here's the top 10 from the newest...
Posted April 19, 2007 9:12 AM
From Roy Rivenburg in Sunday's LAT: When a vampire expert allegedly seduced a tipsy UC Irvine student four years ago, he inadvertently set off a chain of events that now...
Posted February 25, 2007 4:22 PM
Jonah at la.foodblogging got invited to the private club on a corner of the Caltech campus in Pasadena. The first formal dinner at The Athenaeum, in February 1931, celebrated the...
Posted February 13, 2007 2:15 AM
Records containing the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of students, faculty, employees and some applicants since the early 1990s may have been accessed. The online intrusion went on...
Posted December 12, 2006 12:23 AM
USC says that Zach Fox, already elected once as spring editor of the Daily Trojan but blocked by administrators, can run again. He tells Jacob Soboroff on video over at...
Posted December 1, 2006 9:09 AM
The Grill downstairs in USC's Commons was shut down by the county health department after an inspection turned up insects. After closure for 48 hours and fumigation, the dining area...
Posted November 30, 2006 12:55 AM
Zach Fox edits the USC student paper this semester and was reelected by the staff to do it again in the spring, but he quit last night after the university...
Posted November 29, 2006 2:33 AM
For the fifth year in a row the University of Southern California has more international students than any school in the United States. The Open Doors report says the 6,881...
Posted November 13, 2006 2:26 PM
This weekend — apparently for the first time ever — both L.A. pro football teams play in the Bay Area on the same day: USC at Stanford and UCLA at...
Posted November 1, 2006 1:19 PM
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes extensively on what he sees as the abuses of copyright and the law's dampening effect on free exchange of ideas and art. Just because he's...
Posted August 26, 2006 12:34 PM
After El Vaquero reported accurately last month on two suicides by students in the nursing program, Glendale College president John Davitt complained that the story reflected poorly on the institution....
Posted July 13, 2006 10:10 AM
Boi from Troy is checking out a report that the male yell leaders won't be back on the sidelines at Trojans football games this fall. Known officially as “yell leaders”...
Posted June 29, 2006 2:55 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's commencement speech Friday at UCLA praised his mother Natalia for supporting him and addressed the news that African American enrollment is down. "I worry for the future....
Posted June 19, 2006 2:51 PM
Unable to conclude the search for a chancellor at UCLA, the University of California today said that professor emeritus of law Norman Abrams will become acting chancellor. Abrams has been...
Posted June 15, 2006 4:16 PM
My favorite blog reading is not about politics or Los Angeles (or even ice hockey.) What I enjoy is eavesdropping on aficionados in some field I know nothing about. Hence...
Posted June 6, 2006 6:57 PM
Joseph Aoun, a linguist and dean of USC's College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, will be announced later this week as the new president of Northeastern University, the Boston Globe...
Posted May 31, 2006 8:15 AM
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