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Challenges — present and projected
29 January 2003
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This is the second half of an interview the Berkeleyan recently conducted with Catherine Koshland, the current chair of the campus Academic Senate. In last week’s exchange, she described the job of the chair (“demanding and multitasking”); discussed the development of new academic initiatives on campus — one outcome of the Strategic Academic Plan she helped nurture; and spoke of the importance of collaboration between faculty and administrators in developing campus policies and priorities. Two primary responsibilities of your office are maintaining academic excellence and conducting program reviews. Do these two charges overlap? These reviews are conducted on rotation? It also occurred to some of us that we need to rethink the structure of the reviews, the kinds of questions we ask, the kinds of data we collect. If we collect certain data annually from every department, for example, you won’t have departments scrambling to pull in all of the information we ask for at the time of the review; it will be available in a regular way. Then the faculty can focus their attention on identifying, say, three to five key questions that they (or the provost or dean) would like to explore. And would that give you the ability to adapt the review process to a variety of external changes? While this campus is stellar at individual, investigator-focused work, we are less successful at institutionally supported, large-scale, collaborative efforts. Part of the strategic initiative process was to begin to develop mechanisms that would allow us to be more responsive … by creating linkages among faculty, where faculty could begin talking about things ahead of time, providing some support for interdisciplinary work, asking them to think through what it would take for them to be successful in these enterprises. And then, we hope, the collateral benefit would be that when NEH, or NSF, or NIH has a call for proposals, we would be in a better position to respond. What toll do you think the ongoing budget crisis will take on the campus? If things worsen, and it becomes likely that programs may be cut, what role will the Senate have in making those tough choices? The governor’s budget proposal allocates no dollars at all next year for faculty salaries. For a while there Berkeley was way behind its comparison universities in that area; then we caught up, and now we’re behind again. Does that make it harder to attract top faculty candidates? It’s been suggested that some thought might be given to simply eliminating programs that are judged not to be world-class. Is that a live option? What’s your assessment of Berkeley’s progress in hiring women and underrepresented minorities to the faculty? In what way? It can be very subtle. There are issues of collegiality, of comfort, that come into the picture — such that when you bring someone different into the existing mix, you are perturbing the system in ways that aren’t always comfortable for the people who are there already. Now, there are faculty on this campus who are utterly committed to having a diverse faculty, student body, and staff, who are working very hard in that direction, and who understand that doing so enhances our excellence, doesn’t dilute it. But we have a ways to go in terms of education and in terms of equity. It’s not easy to get out there and make sure that your hiring pool is diverse, and that you’ve made your environment attractive — so that the people you most want to attract will choose to go with you and not with one of our competitors. But we’ve had some great successes, and there’s no reason to think that we won’t have more. You’re very committed to Berkeley. What’s the source of that commitment?There’s a special energy here, one you can feel when you walk across the campus. Even in the most exasperating situations, Cal is a deeply rewarding institution in which to work. With its rich history, its great scholarly and athletic traditions, its engaging, independent, and creative students and faculty and dedicated staff, it’s hard not to be committed to its present and its future. That may sound corny, but for me it’s true.
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