Transcript of Bear in Mind September, 2007:
The Hewlett Challenge, the Energy Biosciences Institute, and the role of equity and inclusion at a public university

Narrator:  Times are changing at UC Berkeley. The unprecedented $110 million Hewlett Challenge gift, the launch of the Energy Biosciences Institute, and new proposals to increase financial aid for the students – just a few of the developments that will define the university’s mission and identity of years into the future. Coming up on this special edition of “Bear in Mind,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau joins Dan Mogulof from the Office of Public Affairs for a wide-ranging discussion of the major plans and priorities that are shaping the Cal campus.

Dan Mogulof, Office of Public Affairs: Chancellor Birgeneau, thanks for joining us and thanks for helping us turn the tables. Usually in “Bear in Mind”, you’re the one who asks the questions and today we’re going to put you in the hot seat. We want to talk a little bit about initiatives, developments on campus, and look to the year ahead.

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau: I’m delighted to be here with you, Dan, it’s always fun to do these interviews with you.

Mogulof: On Sept. 10, you announced the largest gift in the university’s history, a $110 million dollar challenge grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Talk to us a little bit about exactly what it entails, what you think the outcomes will be, and why it’s important.

Birgeneau: Needless to say, we were all extraordinarily pleased when the Hewlett Foundation informed us that they were going to give us this grant. It’s actually $113 million altogether, $110 million of which will be used as a challenge grant to create 100 chairs and $3 million to improve our investment strategy, to ensure that the $110 million plus the match of $110 million, making a total of $220 million, will be well invested. The $110 million will end up leading to the creation of 80 chairs funded at the $2 million level which will be broadly distributed across the entire university, and another 20 chairs funded at the $3 million level which will be used for various interdisciplinary kinds of programs, whether it’s the Berkeley Diversity Research initiative or energy research or computational biology, or what-have-you.

Mogulof: So, for people who aren’t familiar with what exactly it means to fund a chair, is that money then that goes to faculty compensation? What happens with that money? What does that mean to fund a chair?

Birgeneau: An important part of this is we’ve actually changed the model for how chairs are handled here at Berkeley. In the past, funding for chairs was typically rather more modest, the endowment was less, and the entire income from the chair went to the chair holder to help support that person’s scholarly research. What we realized, in our discussions with the Hewlett Foundation, is that we needed a new model in which, of course, the chair income would support the scholarship of the chair holder, but would also contribute to the commons, that is to say, would help underpin the financial health of the university. So in this case, the first $25,000 of the income will go as a scholarly allowance to the chair holder. The next $25,000 will go to support a graduate fellowship, and the remaining, which may be $50,000, or maybe more depending on the chair, will be used for faculty salary support over and above the state funding.

Mogulof: Take us behind the scenes. How does it work? Does the Foundation come to you, do you go to the Foundation, and what do you say? What’s the case that you make? How does that work for a grant that size?

Birgeneau: This turned out to be really an uplifting experience, I must say. From the day I arrived here as Chancellor it was clear that we face a really significant challenge at Berkeley and indeed at all public universities because of the incredible success that the elite private universities have had in raising funds, in raising an endowment. So in conversation with various people, including one of the persons I knew on the Hewlett board, I learned that they were concerned about this issue for public universities and might be open to an approach. So I basically first talked to Paul Brest and a few of the people working there about my concern about the health of public education at the university level in the United States, and how I thought the Hewlett Foundation might help. And to both my surprise and joy Paul Brest and Susan Bell actually followed up this meeting by coming up to Berkeley, discussing it further, and saying indeed they thought the Hewlett Foundation would be interested in helping us.

Mogulof: What’s the recognition? What’s the special case…I mean, what concerns you about public education in the United States? Why did it matter and why did it matter to the Hewlett board to try and preserve and protect it?

Birgeneau: When you come to California, in coming here to Berkeley where we have…it’s not that we’ve suffered from lack of state support. Actually the state funding has gone up at the rate of the cpi (consumer price index), but the marketplace for universities has become incredibly more complicated, in part because of the admirable and incredible success in elite private universities in raising really quite significant funds. And so although the state has funded us, I think, at a level they would view as generous, it no longer provides the resources that we need to attract and retain the very best faculty here at Berkeley, or at least will need in the future.

And so faculty are willing to make sacrifices and to take lower salaries to be at a great public university, but there’s a tipping point, and in our view we were rapidly approaching that tipping point.

Mogulof: What is it that you see as so vital to preserve about a public university? What’s the heart of the case there?

Birgeneau: There’s not a single sentence answer to that question, but Berkeley distinguishes itself in many different ways. The statistic I like to quote all of the time is that if you look at the economic cross section of our undergraduate students, then more than a third of our undergraduate students receive federal Pell grants, which means that their family income is under about $40,000 a year. It turns out that at Berkeley we have more Pell grant recipients than all of the Ivy League universities put together. To me, this is a really dramatic illustration. We represent the conduit into mainstream society of extraordinarily talented people from very modest backgrounds who could never imagine going to a Harvard or a Yale or a Princeton, and so it’s our obligation as a public university to guarantee that every single qualified person in California, independent of their financial means, can get the same kind of education here at Berkeley that they would get if they went to Harvard or to Yale or to Princeton.

Of course there’s more than that. We also have an ethos here at Berkeley of a real commitment to public service, so after the students come here then we also educate them in how to give back to society. And also much of our research is publicly oriented. For example, the major thrust we have now on global climate change and energy conservation is ultimately public service research. It’s using our best talents to solve one of the most important problems facing all of society.

Mogulof: So you’ve delineated some characteristics that define and differentiate this institution, but you also mention the fact that not all faculty here…really, it’s just a matter of money for them, that some of the reasons that they stay here at Berkeley go beyond the financial. Can you back that up? Do you have any anecdotes? Do you have any data that suggests that might be the case, that there’s something special that holds faculty here on this campus?

Birgeneau: I happen to have a very dramatic example of this that happened very recently, where several of our outstanding mid-career faculty were being recruited by an east coast university. Each one was offered an academic year salary of about $100,000 a year more and they were offered discretionary funds, each one separately, at the level of $4 million…each. This is astounding since we have set aside altogether $15 million a year for our 1,500 faculty. I met with two of them, they came into my office, we sat down, exchanged pleasantries, and then I said, “So what’s the issue?” Immediately one of them launched into a speech about the poor state of the undergraduate laboratories he was teaching in. He didn’t want to talk about a salary. He didn’t want to talk about his discretionary resources. He wanted to talk about our teaching facilities. As soon as he did that, I said to myself, “I’m going to do whatever I can to keep this person at Berkeley.” And that differentiates, I think, in many ways our faculty from those of other institutions.

Of course ultimately their salaries mattered, but we came a reasonable compromise there. And their own laboratories mattered and supports of their graduate students, but they sufficiently enjoy being at Berkeley, they sufficiently like the kind of students that we have here, that we just had to come as close as we could to providing them the kind of environment they felt that they could be happy in and that they could teach in the way that they wanted to be able to teach.

Mogulof: The Hewlett grant is a challenge grant, it’s a $110 million challenge grant which, if I do my math correctly, means that it could yield as much as $220 million. Do you see that as a vote of confidence in the alumni community and the community of donors who supports this institution, or do you think it’s really a challenge to meet that goal?

Birgeneau: I’m of course hoping that it won’t be a challenge, but one of the important features of this grant is that these chairs are being broadly distributed, and so this is going to provide a motivation to every single department to begin participating in helping, in part, to underwrite their own financial stability. So this will not just be a central administration responsibility, this will be a community responsibility. So I think that this grant is going to fulfill many purposes and of course the Hewlett people understood this as well. I’m quite confident that we will raise the money. I’ve now had a number of conversations where people ran to me, who have heard about this in advance, and said to me, “This is just great, and I was thinking of doing ‘x’ but now I’m going to come up with the matching funds and create a chair.”

Mogulof: Understood. When you say distributed broadly…every department, every college, every school?

Birgeneau: Every college, proportionately. So, for example, 17% of the faculty here at Berkeley are in Arts and Humanities, and so 17% of the chairs will be in Arts and Humanities. Of course, if it turned out ultimately that some faculty failed to raise the matching money that at a certain stage we would then have to open those chairs up to other possibilities. But I’m hopeful that each of the colleges and schools will be successful.

Mogulof: Is one of the reason the Arts and Humanities component is important to you because those are disciplines that tend to be left on the side in terms of some of the partnerships we’re forming here on the campus, with government, with the private sector, and that don’t necessarily share in the benefits of those sorts of research endeavors that have become common on campuses across the country?

Birgeneau: That’s one reason, but I would say that Arts and Humanities and social sciences together are at the core of the university. We must have great Arts and Humanities and we must have great social sciences. Otherwise we’re a technical institute, and I used to work at a technical institute…I like being at a real university. Pardon me, I take that back about MIT, it was a great place! But much of the appeal of Berkeley is our combination of breadth and depth. You can have any question about anything, except perhaps if your dog’s ill and then you go to Davis to the veterinary school, but otherwise we have people who are world experts in every single subject and that creates a culture that I think is a very appealing aspect of Berkeley. So I wanted to make sure that every single faculty member would have the opportunity of participating in this, and that we would be supporting the entire university, not just part of it.

Mogulof: We were just speaking about research partnerships which brings up the subject of the Energy Biosciences Institute and that’s the proposed institute that being funded by the $500 million grant from BP. We’re now in September and the expectations had been that the contract would be signed by July. What’s the delay? Is there some cause for concern here?

Birgeneau: No, not surprising. This is history-setting and given all of the public attention to this, and also because of our own values and standards, we wanted to make sure that all four participants are happy with the agreement that we end up with. So we’re just carefully working through all of the details of the contract and dotting “I”s and crossing “T”s. I think, in the end, the program will be much the better for it because we’ve tried to think of every kind of possibility. Of course it will turn out that there’s some strange thing that we will never have thought of, but I think everyone’s entered this with such positive feelings and wanting to make it work, so I’m confident that we’ll wind up with an agreement that 98% of our faculty will be very happy with.

Mogulof: Now, as I’m sure you remember, some of the critics of the BP partnership, of the Energy Biosciences Institute, were afraid that the university was going to simply roll over and sell out and not protect its values and its principles. You seem to be suggesting that part of what’s happening in terms of the negotiations around the contract is all the institutions are really standing up for what’s important to them.

Birgeneau: Absolutely. Steve Chu and I, of course, have talked. I’ve been on the phone, interacting with Richard Herman, the Chancellor of the University of Illinois. I’ve also interacted with Steve Coonen, the Vice President for Research at BP, so we’ve all been actively involved.

But let me come back to this public service because in much of this discussion several things got lost. One is, as a public institution, it’s our obligation to address the deleterious effects of global climate change and the economic effects of not being energy self-sufficient. It’s our view that in order to fulfill our public mission, to do this effectively, we can’t just do ivory tower research. It’s actually a critical component of this field that you couple to a large energy company, and so whereas because of the coupling to a large energy company some people try to misrepresent that as selling out, actually it’s the exact opposite; it’s guaranteeing that we will fulfill our public mission.

Mogulof: In a recent article in “California Magazine”, Chris Somerville, who’s the expected director of the Energy Biosciences Institute actually said that he thought that the university would wind up having a greater influence on BP than visa versa. Do you agree with that?

Birgeneau: Yes. Because in the end this research is going to be dominated by the university participants. At the time we signed the contract, or not signed the contract but signed the  initial agreement, BP employed, I believe, four biologists. I don’t know how many hundreds there are between Illinois, ourselves and the Lab. We play a dominant role in this. And we were going to pursue this line of research anyway and BP came along after we had worked out our own strategy for how we wanted to pursue it, certainly between the laboratory and the university. I think that therefore in the end we will play the dominant role. But BP will provide incredibly valuable guidance to help us decide when we have to go one way or another, which way is going to actually be successful and have the impact on the climate that we hope it will.

Mogulof: I don’t want to dwell too much in the past, but looking back last year the debate was quite passionate about the EBI. Do you see that debate as being important and influential in any way or was it just sort of a speed bump on the road to a completed contract.

Birgeneau: You know, it wouldn’t have been Berkeley if there wasn’t such a debate. I mean, this is part of what I love about Berkeley actually. And in the end, it played a very useful role because it ended up leading the faculty to vote formally that no one group of faculty could prevent another group of faculty from doing the research because the first group objected to the source of the funding. This really sets a very important precedent and defines academic freedom very precisely.

Mogulof: Now one of the other parts of the process that I don’t think a lot of people are aware of was the inclusion of faculty representatives and student representatives in a consultative role during the contract negotiations. What’s your view? Have they had good substantial input? Have they affected the way things have unfolded?

Birgeneau: My understanding is that the faculty have been outstanding, and I’ve gotten a few emails directly from the faculty just raising issues that I ought to know about, and so as far as I know it’s only been positive. There have also been consultations with the graduate students…they have not been as formally involved. I’ve also met with the graduate student leadership and that’s also been quite positive. But you know, we were consulting with the faculty and the Academic Senate from the very beginning of this process and so having the faculty involved in the actual negotiations is not new.

Mogulof: It didn’t escape a lot of people’s attention that BP chose to partner with three other public institutions and I’m wondering if you see this sort of research in some way connected to the essence of what this institution of Berkley is all about?

Birgeneau: You’re absolutely correct, that we have commitment to working on problems which are important for society, which have huge implications for society. When people talk about global climate change and the crisis that we’re facing they talk about how the energy companies may make huge amounts of money out of this. They forget about the fact that the people who will suffer the most overwhelmingly are the poor. There are billions of people in this world who live on less than 50 cents a day and that 50 cents will disappear if the temperature goes up by 10 degrees, and so this is a commitment to solve a problem which ultimately will alleviate global poverty, amazingly, and there is a direct connection between them.

Mogulof: You mentioned complex societal problems and the role a public university plays, and I’m going to try to connect, to segue to a rather important appointment you made and that’s the new Vice chancellor of Equity and Inclusion. Tell me a little bit about the man you’ve selected to fill that role and what your hopes and expectations are.

Birgeneau: I couldn’t be more pleased that Gibor Basri, Professor Gibor Basri has agreed to take on this responsibility. We had a national search, we got to talk to outstanding people from around the country, from Texas, from Massachusetts, from  Minnesota, from Washington, etc. We heard some really interesting viewpoints on these challenges of diversity, equity and inclusion, and we got to see a number of outstanding people as well. In the end, the committee decided that our own Gibor Basri, who is an outstanding astrophysicist, interim head of the department of Astronomy, but also with a long proven track record of work in the area of equity and inclusion and who was passionate about leading Berkeley in this area, that he was the best candidate. And he’s the kind of person I love to negotiate with because I asked him if he was willing to take it on and he say yes instantly. He didn’t say, “Yes, I’ll take it on if you increase my salary by $75,000 and you do this and you do this and you do this,” right? This is the kind of faculty member that I was talking about before, where their first commitment is to Berkeley as a public institution and only secondarily do they think about themselves.

Mogulof: Let me play devil’s advocate for a second. There’s been a lot of criticism about the creation of this position. There are those who’ve claimed it’s window dressing, it’s lip service, it’s about being politically correct…what’s your response to that? Where does this come from? Why put this at the top of your priority list?

Birgeneau: If it was just being politically-correct it wouldn’t have attracted the amount of attention that it has, much of it negative, so the easy thing to do would have been to do what every other university has done which is to create someone down in the bowels of the university responsible for equity and inclusion. From my point of view, it was critical to have an appointment at the vice chancellor level because the vice chancellors collectively discuss every single decision that affects the university, whether it’s building a new building, or creating a new scholarship program, or creating new kinds of courses, or how we assign faculty positions, or what-have-you. So I felt we would not make the kind of progress we needed to make if equity and inclusion were not at the table for every single decision. So we needed to create the position at this level. This is, in fact, the diametric opposite of window-dressing. This is, in fact, opening up the windows so everyone can see in and see in from the vantage point of equity and inclusion.

Mogulof: Let me push it to you a little bit…where does this come from? Why is this so important to you? Is it something in your background? Does it have to do with your vision for what a public university needs to be in a world with radically changing demographics, or in a state with radically changing demographics? Where does the impetus come from?

Birgeneau: You know, I once took one of these political tests to measure where you sit politically and it was multidimensional and it had one axis which was fairness, the measurement of the commitment to fairness, and I came in at the extreme of fairness. It comes from many motivations, partly my own personal background, of course, but also that I feel deeply that we need a society in which everyone is treated fairly and justly and that simply isn’t the situation in California or anywhere else, for that matter.

Secondly, I know, again from personal experience, that there’s an extraordinary pool of talent out there which never gets tapped because for whatever reason, people come from backgrounds where there are barriers put up which prevent them from moving forward, and we need to examine those barriers and find ways of ensuring that we access all of the talent possible.

Mogulof: So now that you’ve talking a little bit about where you fall on the fairness spectrum, it makes a little more sense about two recent op-eds that you wrote over the summer, one having to do with your advocacy of legislation in Sacramento that would have the state government match private gifts to support financial aid for undergraduate students, and another one about the Dream Act. Now let’s start on the second first. What is the Dream Act and what did your op-ed say?

Birgeneau: My op-ed on the Dream Act really, a source of that was my concern over the debate on immigration law as a whole and I was actually encouraged that President Bush understood what the issues were and was acting in such a humane fashion to guarantee that people who fled desperate lives to come to the United States, even if they had come illegally, that we need to try to find ways of treating them fairly. Of course it collapsed, as we all know, and I was quite disturbed at some of the language that surrounded that collapse, what I really thought was mean-spiritedness. People had forgotten that this was a country of immigrants after all. So I don’t personally see any way, and certainly I don’t personally have the solution to solve this problem in one fell swoop, but I tried to think through what affects us directly here in California, what affects us here in Berkeley? And then I realized, also from talking to some people, that there is in California something like 20,000 high school students who graduate each year from high school who got brought here, let’s say, when they were 5-years-old. Basically the only society they know is California and they turn out to be undocumented. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re undocumented. Then they apply to university. The best of those get into places like Berkeley. Then they go to apply for financial aid, find out they are undocumented, and then find out that they are in an extraordinarily difficult situation. So there is both federal and state legislation to treat these people fairly and basically, if they’ve come from such difficult backgrounds and have achieved at a level that got them into Berkeley, therefore overcoming barriers way beyond what people from more conventional backgrounds typically have overcome, then my view is just as a matter of fairness we need to provide these people both with financial aid, so they can complete their education without undue hardship, but also a pathway to citizenship because we need these people. We don’t have an infinite pool of talent. It’s a competitive world out there and to throw away all this talent from these exceptionally talented people is…it makes no sense whatsoever to me.

Mogulof: Now the second op-ed was also about access. It had to do with your vision for a unique partnership between the state and private philanthropists. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Birgeneau: I mentioned early on that we have more students from financially-disadvantaged backgrounds here at Berkeley, specifically those on Pell Grants, than all of the Ivy League schools put together. Nevertheless, if you’re a poor kid and you do go to an Ivy League school, basically that school is able to cover all of the costs. I think Princeton led the way on this and that’s again very admirable. Here at Berkeley, because we have so many, because we have 7,500 students in this situation, with the financial aid resources that we have available we can cover all the costs except the first $8,000. And the student himself or herself must provide that $8,000 through a combination of work, work-study, and loans. That’s called the self-help level and that’s determined largely by the cost-of-living in the Bay Area, not by fees. So when we project forward many of our projections show, baring some miracle, that $8,000 is going to gradually increase, that five years from now it might be as much as $12,500. So now we write a letter of admission to some young girl whose family income is $20,000 a year and say, “Congratulations, you’ve been admitted to Berkeley, we love you, we’re going to do whatever we can to make it possible for you to come here, but by the way, the next four years you’re going to have to provide $50,000 on your own.” And so will that be a tipping point, will that young lady say, “I just can’t imagine that and I’m not willing to take on that much debt so therefore I’m going to go to the local community college and not take advantage of my admission to Berkeley?”

My view is that we cannot let that happen. In order to guarantee it won’t happen, we need new sources of income and one possibility that I’ve been discussing up in Sacramento for the last two years is to create a new program, analogous to the Hewlett program actually, but in this case financial aid for undergraduates, that is a matching program, but in this case instead of the Hewlett Foundation providing the match we’re asking the state government to provide the match. So this would be only to create an endowment for needs-based financial aid, that is, for young people from extreme financially poor situations. And so I estimate that for the University of California system that if the government would put up $150 million per year over the next seven years, and the UC System, campus by campus, would raise the matching money, that that would then give us an endowment which far into the future would guarantee that we can continue to fulfill our public mission of providing an education to every talented Californian, independent of their income.

Mogulof: So you’ve drawn the connection to Hewlett. I get a sense that of a chancellor who’s struggling with a financial model, who’s trying to find new ways, and it may seem ironic but I get a sense from what you’re saying that we’re going to need private contributions to maintain the public character of the institution.

Birgeneau: That’s my quote! That’s exactly correct. In order for us to remain a preeminent public institution…of course we can easily become a second-rate public institution, but then we will be betraying our commitment to the public. The public, the average person, deserves the same quality of education as they would get  if they were upper middle-class or upper-class person going to one of the elite private universities. It’s our obligation as a public institution to provide a world-class education and we do that here at Berkeley, but we will not be able to do that for the indefinite future based on at least the current trend in public funding. So we have this irony that we are not going to be able to meet our public obligation of providing world-class education to any person, independent of their ethnicity, or financial means, or sexual orientation, or what-have-you, unless we have private support supplementing, and it must be on top of the public support.

Mogulof: The other thing that’s interesting here, you’ve talked about Hewlett and we’re talked about your initiative with the state and the Dream Act, and also to a certain extent about the creation of the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion position, and a lot of that seems to be focused or revolving around undergraduate education, which isn’t something that you hear folks talk about a lot. Where does that fall in terms of your priorities and how you see Berkeley as it stands right now…undergraduate education?

Birgeneau: We often don’t get credit, certainly not in “US News and World Report”, for the quality of the undergraduate experience that we provide here at Berkeley. We educate 24,000 young people at any given time. More of our undergraduates go on to get Ph.D.s than any other university in the country. Historically more of our undergraduates have gone on to join the Peace Corps than any other university in the country. Our undergraduates have a huge impact on society, so of course our undergraduates are extremely important to me and I want to make sure, first of all, that the most talented young people can come here as undergraduates and ideally that they can leave here without burdensome debt.

Mogulof: Three years ago, in your inaugural speech, right around the time you started here as chancellor, you mentioned three values that were at the heart of your vision for the institution. They were leadership, connection and inclusion. Can you connect the dots between some of the things that are happened now on campus and those values as you set them out?

Birgeneau: So this entire conversation that we’ve just had, indeed, is about leadership, connections and inclusion. Leadership, in terms of Berkeley playing a leadership role, whether it’s in global climate change, or in inclusion, or in financial aid for undergraduates, or in advocating for young people who are brought here, not quite against their will but with no knowledge, and they find themselves not citizens and no pathway forward in the only country that they’ve ever known, so that’s about leadership. Leadership is about George Smoot’s Nobel Prize and for us having the very best faculty here who are doing world-class research.

Connections…that’s what we’ve been talking about is connections, whether it’s partnering with BP, partnering with the Hewlett Foundation, or what-have-you, or partnering with society as a whole. On the connections front, I might mention, I was down in Oakland several weeks ago and had a wonderful meeting with Mayor Dellums where we talked about connections and how he went through the challenges that he faces as the mayor of Oakland, and he’s of course a graduate of Berkeley, and we talked about ways in which the university could connect to the leadership in Oakland and to the people in the community of Oakland, so that’s another example of connections.

Inclusion means that everybody who’s a member of our community should feel included. Every single person, again independent of what their background is, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, should feel not only that they’re included but that Berkeley belongs as much to them as to any other person.

So basically I can’t say that I was all that brilliant in pronouncing those three words when I was writing my inaugural speech, but I thought these reflect my own values and my values, in many ways, are those of an elite public institution and therefore I projected them onto the university. So far it seems to be providing a strategy which I hope, at least, that people will agree is working pretty well.

Mogulof: So let’s go out with a really tough question. Rumor has it that last year you reserved rooms in Pasadena right around the time of the Rose Bowl. Did you have any conversations with your travel agent this year?

Birgeneau: This is just a false rumor, but after the beginning of this season and in particular the Tennessee game I’m quite hopeful. I will say publicly now if during my term as Chancellor I never get to go to the Rose Bowl it will be a disappointment unless, of course, I’m going to the national championship.

Mogulf: Great, you heard it here first. Chancellor, I want to thank you for your time and thanks for joining us on this special edition of “Bear in Mind,” and we’ll see you again next time.

Birgeneau: Thank you so much!

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