Officers are blocking vehicle access at a UC Berkeley-owned farm that “Occupy the Farm” protesters have camped out for more than two weeks, the Oakland Tribune reports. Update at 12:10 p.m. ET: UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof confirms to KCBS-TV that UC police put concrete barriers in place this morning at the two vehicle entrances to the property. The protesters want the land in Albany used for...

May 9, 2012 Dear colleague: Governor Brown is set to release his revised State Budget on Monday, May 14. At this critical time in California’s budget process, the Governor and legislative leaders need to hear from UC supporters that the University of California has been cut enough: It’s time to begin reinvesting. I am asking members of the UC family and our advocates who object to further cuts...

BERKELEY, Calif. — The Simons Foundation, which specializes in science and math research, has chosen the University of California, Berkeley, as host for an ambitious new center for computer science, the university plans to announce on Tuesday. The foundation’s $60 million grant to establish the center, to be called the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at U.C. Berkeley, underscores the...

President Mark Yudof recently held a web chat with UC faculty and staff to answer their questions on a variety of university issues. The March 2 event, moderated by staff advisors Penny Herbert and Kevin Smith, can be viewed online. The following is a selection of key questions edited for publication. [More]

I write today to address, once again, the moral and ethical imperative for all of our University of California students, faculty and staff members to foster a climate of tolerance, civility and open-mindedness. I am prompted to do so because of a number of recent incidents that undermine this imperative. University campuses are proper venues for collisions of ideas and viewpoints. Conflicting viewpoints...

A judge temporarily barred UC on Tuesday from releasing a widely anticipated report of its investigation into the Nov. 18 pepper-spraying of student protesters by campus police. Videos of the protest at UC Davis went viral, including now-infamous footage of one officer pacing before a line of huddled students for about 15 seconds as he coats them with the chemical irritant. [More]

A years-long and closely watched lawsuit claiming discrimination against women in athletics at UC Davis is over – and both sides have declared victory. The parties announced Thursday that the university has paid $1.35 million to help defray the fees of attorneys representing former students who initially sued over their exclusion from the school’s intercollegiate wrestling program. The wrestling...

The donation from Dr. Jonathan Fielding and his wife, Karin, is the largest single gift the school has ever received. By Anna Gorman, Los Angeles TimesFebruary 16, 2012 Jonathan Fielding works 70-hour weeks in a relatively obscure and overwhelming job: He is Los Angeles County’s top public health doctor. Friends and colleagues have long praised his professional contributions to the field. But to their...

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday (Feb. 7) upheld a lower-court ruling that Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional. Supporters of the ban, which was approved by voters in 2008, will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Legal experts at various University of California campuses are available to discuss the impact of the ruling and...

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients’ brains. Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds of words...