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The School of Law and the School of Medicine are done with commencement, but the bulk of our ceremonies are coming June 11 to 15 — meaning your family and friends may be dealing with the Fix 50 highway repair project in central Sacramento.

So, as you’re preparing for your visitors, be sure to tell them about the construction project, which is underway 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the westbound direction. Traffic delays of 30 minutes or more have been reported — worse than the backups that occurred during Stage 1 (eastbound).

Want a sure way to avoid the traffic all the way to Davis? Make your way to the Amtrak depot in downtown Sacramento and take the to Davis! Ask the conductor for a free transfer to , which provides service between the depot and campus via on weekdays and on weekends.

More about commencement

Deadline extended for communications survey

is taking responses to its communications survey through Friday (June 6).

That’s a week later than originally announced, but shows how Staff Assembly is trying to get as many responses as possible. The survey is intended for staff; you're encouraged to submit your own response and spread the word to your colleagues.

The survey stems from the systemwide Staff Engagement Survey, a 2012 project of the Council of UC Staff Assemblies, or CUCSA. It was administered at all UC locations except the medical centers, Hastings College of the Law and Associated Students UCLA. According to the Davis campus Staff Assembly, the revealed many staff members here believe communications on campus need improvement.

“Survey results indicated that we have some less than satisfactory results with regard to receiving important information from campus leaders as well as staff feeling able to openly and honestly communicate their views upward,” Staff Assembly officials said.

They announced the follow-up, online survey in the May 16 edition of the Staff Voice newsletter, saying they wanted to find out “how you receive your information and what helps or hurts your efforts to communicate.”

The is available online and on paper. For the latter, contact Staff Assembly by telephone, (530) 752-0988, or email.

Nominations due for ‘structural inequality’ book

The official call went out this week for nominations for the 2015-16 Campus Community Book Project. The theme, as previously announced, is “structural inequality.”

“The topic can be summed up as a condition where one group of people are attributed unequal status or impacted negatively in relation to other group(s) of people in system(s),” said Mikael Villalobos, who coordinates the book project for the Office of Campus Community Relations.

“In particular, we’re looking for books that also consider systems (education, health care, employment, judicial/criminal, immigration, government, voting access, etc.) in the inequality, such as ‘structural inequality in education’ or ‘structural inequality in the judicial system’ or ‘structural inequality in health care access.’”

The deadline for nominations is July 11, by email to Villalobos.

Other criteria, for all book project selections:

• Compelling and thought-provoking to engage us in dialogue about contemporary controversial issues and to raise questions that have many possible answers.
• Well-written, accessible and engaging to a general audience.
• Short enough to be read within the time frame usually allotted for coursework.
• Provocative and intriguing to as many members of the community as possible, to invite diverse participation and integration into discussion groups and courses across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
• In print in paperback, and affordable (book must be available in paperback by spring of the year before the project, or, in this case, by the spring of 2015).
• Written by someone who could give an author’s talk during the span of the project.
• The author is a guest to the campus.

The 2014-15 book project followed the same process, starting the theme choice: “disability-disability issues.” The selected book is Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin, a university professor with autism.