Transcript of Bear in Mind February 25, 2010: The Battle for Berkeley's Future

Dan Mogulof: Greetings and welcome to this edition of "Bear in Mind". I'm Dan Mogulof from the UC Berkeley Office of Public Affairs, and today we're going to be talking about everything, from the campus's financial situation to advocacy efforts now underway in Sacramento. Joining us are UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau; Janet Broughton, Dean of Arts and Humanities; Will Smelko, president of the ASUC; and George Breslauer, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor.

So let's just jump right in and I'm going to start with Will. This has been a difficult year for the university. We're struggling institutionally and individually. I wonder what you think is at stake - what's the fight for right now?

Will Smelko: First it's really our education here at Berkeley, and students across the board are seeing their classes at risk of getting cut, programs that they care about, the resources that they're getting back ... even services, whether it's health care or advising ... just all across the board, we're scared that we're not going to be receiving as much as we used to in the past or that we're putting in. People are looking at Berkeley. Their eyes are on us to see how we react to the situation and how we're able to handle such drastic and awful cuts that we're having to face. They're looking to our administration to see how we're battling this crisis. They're looking to the students to see how they handle it and react, and what happens to our faculty and whether they go or stay, and how we can retain them. It's quite an immense struggle, and it goes far beyond the borders of the little bubble that is Berkeley. I think it goes across the entire country.

Dan Mogulof: Bob, from your perspective, what's at stake right now?

Chancellor Birgeneau: First of all, I think Will said it very well, and I've gotten some dramatic reminders recently. I've been on the east coast in Boston and in Washington, and repeatedly people will come up to me and they say, "Berkeley is the single most academic institution in this country, and Bob, you have to make sure you lead it through this crisis." And of course we're doing our very best at that.

Dan Mogulof: Do you think it's about the public character in terms of what's at stake, what is it that you're fighting to preserve and protect here?

Chancellor Birgeneau: First of all, our public character is characteristic of Berkeley and it's critical, and the public character manifests itself in many different ways. One obviously is the make up of our student body. As people have heard me say repeatedly, we have more students on federal PELL grants than all of the Ivy League put together and we must preserve that. We must preserve access. We must make sure that a Berkeley quality education is available to the entire population of California. Of course that will have no meaning unless we offer at Berkeley the quality of education that one associates with the elite private universities like Stanford or Harvard or what have you. So that means we also have to work hard to have the resources to enable us to hire and retain the world's best faculty.

Dan Mogulof: Janet, you're out there in the middle of the academic enterprise. From your perspective, what's at stake? What are we fighting to preserve and protect?

Janet Broughton: The words I think we often use to sum up what we at Berkeley care about are access and excellence, and those words are more powerful than they've ever been before. As the Chancellor has just said, how to sustain both in the face of the astonishing budget cuts that we are suffering from is the challenge, I think, for all of us. I can hardly believe that the state would be willing to disinvest in what is one of the great, I think, one of the great achievements in human kind.

Dan Mogulof: George, Janet brought up the question of budget cuts, and you sit in a position where you have to make some very difficult choices on a day by day basis. So when you make those decisions, when you assess where to cut, what to preserve, and what to protect, what informs those decisions? What's at stake for you?

George Breslauer: We try to minimize damage to the academic excellence of the enterprise, and to the availability of the courses that students need. That entails, from the standpoint of my budget, it entails allocations for the recruitment and retention of faculty. It entails allocations for curriculum support - we call it temporary academic staffing ... GSIs, lecturers, to ensure that the curriculum is robust enough so that despite the budget cuts students will be able to get into the courses that they need. And then there's graduate student support that I also make allocations for, and I see these of equal importance because they are about access and excellence.

Dan Mogulof: Bob, last semester was punctuated, as you well know, by protest, controversy, some conflict. I'm wondering what your take-aways were and how they've influenced your hopes and plans for the spring semester?

Chancellor Birgeneau: Berkeley has a long history of activism, and I was an activist myself actually for much of my career including when I was a student, so obviously in general I have a positive view of students expressing their opinions on this sort of a difficult situation. However, obviously you can imagine that as a senior administrator it's our job to maintain order to make sure that students who want to go to class are actually able to go to class. So it was a mixed bag last semester. I think, that the September 24 march was an extraordinarily valuable one and I enjoyed going out there towards the end of the march and talking to some of the students.

As we go forward, of course, we have the marches coming up in Sacramento, and we will have continuing activities. We have an extraordinarily broad range of activities in Sacramento and hopefully they will catch the attention of the legislators and hopefully we will see a reversal of this progressive disinvestment in the UC system as a whole and in Berkeley in particular.

I do want to add also that however in the long run I think it's going to be important for the federal government to step up for public education in this country if we're really going to maintain the public character of our great research universities. For that reason I've also been spending some of my time in Washington, advocating on behalf of public universities generally, and I think with some success.

Dan Mogulof: Will, from the student body perspective - I know it's a large student body and it's hard to speak on behalf of 37,000 students here, but after last semester where do you think things are? What sort of take-aways have you had, and how are they influencing your work as president of the ASUC?

Will Smelko: On the whole, I think what's fantastic is that so many people are getting involved and educated. I know this isn't a crisis that's going to be solved by a couple of people. This is the state of California. It's our legislative structure, how we spend money at the federal level too, and where we invest in public education, and we need the public of California to know, we need students across the board to be educated and to know what's going on, to take it back to their family and their friends and to speak with their uncle who's an alumni (sic) of the UC system who can go talk to a legislator in their district.

Dan Mogulof: George, I hear a little bit in what Will's saying is that to an extent different perspectives are important in the midst of a crisis and I'm wondering about your view from California Hall about legitimate dissent. Is that something important or does it feel like a nuisance and a hindrance at some point?

George Breslauer: It's certainly part of the Berkeley tradition that students, staff and faculty express themselves whether in strong dissent or moderate dissent. Where we have to draw a line is when it comes to violence and occupation of buildings that prevent the normal curricular as well as business of the university from being conducted. But legitimate dissent that does not violate those boundaries is part of the DNA of Berkeley, and we don't view it as a nuisance, we view it as an opportunity to communicate.

Dan Mogulof: Janet, I'm wondering from a faculty perspective, maybe turmoil is too strong a word but all that's going on in an extracurricular fashion outside the classroom, are faculty able to balance their roles and responsibilities in the classroom in the midst of all that's happening? Is it something you sign on for when you come to UC Berkeley? What's your perspective?

Janet Broughton: I think it's very difficulty for many faculty to find a balance that feels right to them. On the one hand, we want very much to offer to students the education that they come here to receive, and we need very much to continue doing the kind of research that makes Berkeley such a great institution. At the same time, I think we all feel ourselves to be at an historic moment in the history of public education, and how to advance debate and engagement in these circumstances is something that I think each individual faculty member is figuring out for him or herself. I do think our biggest enemy would be complacency or disengagement. So I actually take great heart in the kind of passionate debate that we see, because to me that means that we really care deeply about this institution.

Dan Mogulof: We're going to move in just a second to talk about advocacy efforts and how we take the fight to Sacramento and the people of California, but before we do that, Bob, I'm wondering if you can give a basic assessment of where the campus stands right now financially.

Chancellor Birgeneau: We've been working really hard to try to bring our budget back. The reality is that this year and next, the state has now devolved down to 22 percent of our budget, so the challenge is how are we going to maintain Berkeley's access and excellence with the state providing only 22 percent? Unfortunately some of this is coming from increased revenue from students and so we've seen an increase in fees which is a tremendous challenge, especially for middle class students.

I might emphasize that for students who qualify for the Blue and Gold Opportunity Program that in fact even their self-help level will not increase significantly next year. Middle class students are tremendously challenged. We're going to see a gradual increase in the number of out-of-state students which I think will contribute positively to the educational enterprise.

Our fundraising is going very well. For example, for undergraduate financial aid Mary Ellen Himmel has led an effort where we've raised more than $100 million for undergraduate financial aid to help strengthen access for our students and we're very excited about that. Of course the Hewlett chair program is going to underpin our faculty and graduate students as it also provides graduate student support.

There's no doubt that we can spend our money more efficiently and more of our money can and will go into the classroom as opposed to being spent on administrative functions or wasteful purchases. We think we can save significant amounts of money by spending our monies more efficiently.

Dan Mogulof: You know, Will, the media tends to focus on the big numbers, the hundreds of millions of dollars that the system was deprived of, or the campus was deprived of. I'm wondering sort-of on-the-ground what's been the impact of the budget cuts on students on an individual basis. We don't hear enough about those individual stories and I'm wondering what you sense is going on right now.

Will Smelko: I think that's a great question, to put the personal face on how these budget cuts really affect people.

A couple of my friends last year have left, and they are potentially considering coming back but right now they just can't afford it. The interesting thing about those students though is that they fall largely within the middle class bracket. They just aren't able to afford the cost of the fees that it takes to go here. Other concerns which are just huge on the students's minds would be class sizes and lower division requirements that they have to take for their major and not having the resources, the instructors, whether their programs that they've been in for years get shifted into another department or under other leadership. It's tough. Those decisions have to be made somewhere. The cuts have to be made, we have to look at where we can save, where we can consolidate our resources, but in every one of those decisions it affects people's lives.

George Breslauer: If I can just build on that a little ... Fees are a redistributive mechanism, and the fee increases will protect the lower income students, but squeeze the middle income students, especially those who come from families making more than $70,000 a year. We're really aware of that problem. It cannot be fixed over night, but we hope over the long term to come up with a formula.

We're also tackling very specific investments in the curriculum in ways that will hopefully alleviate some of this pinch that students are facing. We had one task force that recommended a $2 million investment in reading and composition courses in order to make it possible for students to take those courses in their first year at Berkeley rather than the last years at Berkeley. We're going to take those funds from the incremental increase in student fees. We have currently a task force working on gateway courses and hopefully they will come up with a recommendation within the next couple of months on how we can increase accessibility for the gateway courses, for these are the pinch points. If students can't get into the gateway courses then they can't take the requirements for the majors since the gateway courses are so often the prerequisites for those courses.

Janet Broughton: I want to say a word as well about our staff. We feel at Berkeley that our staff are a part of our campus community and it's very, very difficult for all of us to see what is happening to people whom we have regarded as 'one of us'. Layoffs, partial layoffs, increases on workload ... these are enormously difficult personally. I think all of us know someone who has been laid off or who used to be full time and is now part time. I know there are unemployment stories across the state and across the nation, but to see them in our community is very, very difficult.

Dan Mogulof: You know, Bob, speaking of the budget, the Berkeley budget is extraordinarily complicated, and people have said that there's a certain lack of transparency, and there's a sense that before people can mount up, and make the case for the university, they want to understand more. Do they have a legitimate point?

Chancellor Birgeneau: Actually, they do. You might have expected me to say the opposite but in fact even for the chancellor the budget is really an incredible challenge, and I'm a numeric person. That's because of the extreme diversity of sources and the decentralization that characterizes our financial matters here. But I do want to reemphasize the fact that last May we found out that we were losing in total $120 million out of our operating budget. That is as transparent as it can be.

Dan Mogulof: You know, Will, as the Chancellor and the Provost know, we are working with the ASUC in trying to put together a forum on budget and finance. I'm wondering if students really care. Is it something that flies over everybody's head and they just want to know how it affects them on an individual level or a department level, or is there an interest in what exactly the financial foundation of the institution looks like, and how these decisions are made and how funds flow across the campus?

Will Smelko: Absolutely, they do care, and one part is education and that's what they're here for. That's just another component of them becoming educated and that's to find out how the university system works. And two is a question of priorities, and again when the hard decisions have to be made, the more information we can present to students about what we spend money on, how we prioritize our current spending is important, because when we're making these decisions, the more feedback we can get from them once they find out, "Oh, I didn't know we're spending this much money on this area, no one even uses it, students don't care," ... whatever comes out of that, it could be helpful.

Dan Mogulof: I think all that we're hearing is about a situation that is not sustainable. Though there are some glimmers of hope, because of fundraising and cost cutting, that still our focus has to turn to Sacramento. It sounds like you haven't given up on Sacramento.

Chancellor Birgeneau: On the contrary, actually. In fact I want to recount a story. I have a personal friend who's very close to the governor and who played a very important role in the governor's budget proposal which will treat us at least,...it hardly solves our problems but at least it reverses the decline. In talking to him, he said, "OK, it's time for the students to move from Berkeley up to Sacramento." The governor himself, and the people supporting him, actually are asking for student advocacy in Sacramento. We need students going to the offices of individual legislators. We need students informing the people in Sacramento that this is not acceptable, that the University of California is critically important to them and to the state as a whole, and that the legislature must support the governor in his proposed budget.

Dan Mogulof: So Will, I think we're really hearing a summons from the Chancellor and the entire campus community to jump into the fray. As you know, our office, Public Affairs, has been working with the ASUC and the Graduate Assembly and faculty members about advocacy efforts. There's a web site up on the California Alumni Association toolkit. We're going to be tabling on Sproul Plaza. Students have the time, the desire, the appetite to get involved, or does it all seem like something that is undecipherable and not worth the effort?

Will Smelko: Oh, the appetite and the desire's definitely there especially coming up in March where a lot of advocacy efforts are going to take place in Sacramento. That's something that's been a long time coming is to take all of our concerns and our arguments and our complaints about what's going on to them, where it really begins and ends. Their disinvestment in public education and in the UC system over time is what's caused this problem, and we need to go back there for immediate help. Like the Chancellor was saying, if we don't get to work on solving this problem now, if we face future drastic cuts, I am extremely concerned about the future of our institution. But I am excited because I know that the student initiative and the student interest is there to go to Sacramento coming up in March. They'll meet with their legislators and just meet with anyone they possibly can and tell them how valuable the UC education that they're receiving is.

Dan Mogulof: Janet, a question for you on the same front. You know there are differing perspectives, we've talked a little bit about dissent and now in the context of advocacy, do you think it's possible that we can and should find areas where we do agree and come together? Is there a possibility of unity, that we can take a unified message to Sacramento, and if so, what should that message be?

Janet Broughton: I know that we converge on a vision for the future of the university and of higher education in the state. I can't imagine that that's in question. And I think the common core of what we need to talk about is the value of higher education for the state. We're asking the state to reinvest and we need to explain why that's important to do. And I think that in some ways the answer has to do with the way in which innovation and the university drives the state's economy. That's been true for decades and if it's to continue the state does need to reinvest in higher education.

But I think that's only the beginning of the story because I think what the public university in California represents is fairness of a certain kind, opportunities for gifted young people from every walk of life. This is part of what's thrilling about being at Berkeley.

Dan Mogulof: One last question that I'll ask each of you to weigh in on. It's always seemed to me that one of the things that defines Berkeley, it's part of our DNA, is the abhorrence of the status quo. Good enough is never good enough, and in that sense we reflect the state of California, the frontier state. Do any of you feel that's in danger of slipping away, or are we going to be able to fight through and preserve all that's been good and great about this university. George?

George Breslauer: I'll put it this way. We have no choice but to be optimistic, because if we're not optimistic, we won't be able to seize opportunities that will indeed realize the optimistic vision. I think obviously California is challenged at the moment because of it's political gridlock. California's challenged because of its tax structure. And so we all have to worry about the future of the state of California, and derivatively of higher education in this state. When you look nationally at where the future of dynamic growth is going to lie, almost everybody who analyzes that says in those areas in which there are clusters of knowledge networks - so whether you're talking about the Harvard-MIT nexus in Massachusetts, or you're talking about Berkeley-Stanford-Silicon Valley, and so on - that's where the future dynamism of America's going to be. Also in Southern California, in that respect, and so I think that we have the basis for California's recovery coming from precisely that, and becoming sustainable for precisely those reasons, if we can overcome the political gridlock.

Dan Mogulof: What do you think, Will? Is the tint on George's glasses a little too rosy, or does that resonate with you?

Will Smelko: It completely resonates, and it's going to be a very long-term struggle. Like George was talking about, the problems are so vast and it has to do with California's structure of government, the initiative system, everything. There's so many problems that need to be solved and it's not going to happen within five years, 10 years, maybe 15 ... but the bright thing that I see that comes out of all this, in a crisis like this, is that it really forces us to look to the core of what we care about and what we value most as an institution, and it brings out those positive aspects the most.

Dan Mogulof: Janet, I hear in Will's optimism a little bit of a challenge that he's throwing down ... do you think we're ready to rise to it?

Janet Broughton: Oh absolutely, and I think Will has spoken beautifully on this subject and I have little to add. I would just say that this institution can, at times, seem very fragile. It was hard to build; it would be easy to tear down. But I do think that if we remain thoughtful and engaged and dedicated we will figure out how to make the changes that we need to make in order to sustain this great university.

Dan Mogulof: Bob, that's a lot on your shoulders in these times and I'm wondering how you're listening to all this and surveying the landscape.

Chancellor Birgeneau: Well, it's exciting, actually. I came to Berkeley as the chancellor and as professor of physics, now professor of material science and engineering because I believe deeply in public education and Berkeley sets the standard for public education, nationally and internationally. You know, Berkeley's been a great university for 141 years. I can predict confidently that it will be a great university 141 years from now, and people will judge us, and me quite frankly, for how well we see the university through this difficult transition period.

There is no silver bullet, as we've heard. We have to make progress on a whole variety of fronts - in Sacramento, federally, our alumni need to continue to step up and we need the community to come together. But as I said, Berkeley has always been a great university and it will be a great university and it's our responsibility to see us through this transition period.

Dan Mogulof: I want to thank all of you for what has been a very engaging conversation today, and I want to thank all of you for joining us for this edition of "Bear in Mind."

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