KQED's Forum

The San Francisco Art Institute and the University of San Francisco announced this month that they’re planning to merge. Under the agreement, USF will acquire the cash-strapped 151-year old arts college and offer a program called SFAI@USF in the fall. The move is reminiscent of Northeastern University’s acquisition of Mills College in September 2021 as small colleges and arts schools deal with financial pressures compounded by Covid. We’ll talk about the implications for SFAI’s students and adjunct faculty, as well as for the broader arts community of the Bay Area, and look ahead at a new era for the irreverent contemporary arts school.

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Oakland’s school board is set to vote Tuesday on a highly controversial plan to permanently close or merge up to 15 schools over the next two years due to declining enrollment and lack of funding. “OUSD simply has too many schools and ... keeping these schools open negatively impacts all students and staff within OUSD,” district officials wrote in a statement. Students, staff, and parents have been protesting the move, and two teachers are waging a hunger strike in response. They say they were blindsided by the proposal and point to the fact that the move would disproportionately affect students of color and less affluent communities. We’ll preview the vote and discuss the future of Oakland’s schools.

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Russia is planning to release a video of a fake Ukrainian attack that it would use to justify an invasion, U.S. officials said on Thursday. The Kremlin has denied the charge. But according to Stanford intelligence expert Amy Zegart, so-called deepfake videos and photographs are among the biggest challenges facing U.S. spy agencies. We are living in an era when bad actors can cause “massive disruption, destruction, and deception with the click of a mouse,” she writes in her new book, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.” Zegart joins us to talk about the book and the future of espionage in an era of artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare.

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In a victory for the extreme right, Shasta voters have apparently chosen to recall Leonard Moty, a longtime Republican county supervisor and former Redding police chief. Moty and other moderate board members had faced a backlash from militia groups over COVID-19 and gun policies. We’ll talk to KQED’s Scott Shafer about the vote and what it means for right-wing movements, the GOP and politics in the state.

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Sam Liccardo is in his final year as San Jose’s mayor and he has passed a first-in-the-country ordinance on an issue he cares fervently about – gun control. The ordinance, which requires gun owners to carry liability insurance, comes a year after nine people were killed in a mass shooting at a Valley Transportation Authority rail yard in San Jose. Mayor Liccardo joins Forum to talk about the new ordinance and other issues important to San Jose residents such as how the city is addressing its homeless and housing crises, a new spike in traffic fatalities, a proposal to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections and San Jose’s status as tofu capital of America. And we’ll take your questions for the mayor.

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“We are all weird about money,” writes Paco de Leon in her new book, “Finance for the People.” Getting a grip on your finances often means learning how to deal with an unequal system, she writes. And, according to her, having money means having power — and that means it’s vital for all people to understand how to save, pay off loans and invest. This all begins with asserting your worth — something people of marginalized communities are systematically disincentivized from doing, in part because they’ve long been hurt by wage and revenue gaps. De Leon is the founder of The Hell Yeah Group, a financial firm designed to assist creatives with their finances, and is a creative herself. She joins us to talk about all things financial, and to hear from you: What’s affected your ability to get the money you deserve?

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The city of Santa Rosa is saying farewell to its bard. Santa Rosa Press Democrat columnist Gaye Lebaron has retired after a 65-year career at the paper and an estimated 8,500 columns. “Few newspaper columnists have ever been so closely associated with one city for so long,” writes the Press Democrat’s editorial board, “Herb Caen and San Francisco, Mike Royko and Chicago, Gaye LeBaron and Santa Rosa.” In addition to writing a daily newspaper column for more than 40 years Lebaron has also written several books about Santa Rosa and Sonoma County history. She joins us to talk about the county’s past and present and what it means to spend more than six decades writing about the place she lives and loves.

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Jay Dee, J Dilla, Dilla — Detroit-born hip-hop producer James Dewitt Yancey went by many names, but his rhythmic brilliance was always the same, whether he was producing for artists like The Pharcyde, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest or his own group Slum Village, to name a few. Today, 16 years after his untimely death at age 32 from a rare blood disease, the impact of his industry-changing sound is still heard throughout music. That impact, and the story behind it, is the subject of the new book “Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm” by Dan Charnas. Equal parts biography, musicology and cultural history, Charnas tells the story of Yancey’s genius, and how he took music’s rhythm standards of “straight time” and “swing time” and created a whole new standard: Dilla Time.

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This year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, set to kick off on Friday, have been called “the most complex Games ever” by the Wall Street Journal. The Los Angeles Times dubs them “the feel guilty Games.” The event is opening amid intense Covid-19 restrictions and concerns over Chinese human rights violations, like the persecution of the Uyghur Muslims and jailing of activists. Those have prompted President Biden to boycott the Games, though U.S. athletes are still competing. The head of the International Olympic Committee said last month that the Games “must be beyond all political disputes.” But as Georgetown University professor Victor Cha points out, the Olympics have always been political. He joins us to talk about the history of bans and boycotts surrounding the Games, and how China and the US are navigating this year’s event.

Guests:

Victor Cha , Vice Dean and Professor of Government, Georgetown University, former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. Author of "Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport."

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Early on in the award-winning documentary "Writing with Fire," a reporter named Meera Devi sits patiently before a police officer, demanding to know why he hasn't acted on a local villager's multiple reports of rape. Similar scenes follow, as Devi and her colleagues, journalists with India's only all-female, Dalit-run news network,  seek to hold officials to account for caste and gender-based violence, corruption and other abuses. We talk to the directors of "Writing with Fire," now shortlisted for an Academy Award, about the growing influence of the newspaper Khabar Lahariya and the women who run it.

Guests:

Sushmit Ghosh, producer and director, "Writing With Fire"

Rintu Thomas, producer and director, "Writing with Fire"

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