Armed with insect repellant, but glad for the gradual cooling, a
hundred of us had gathered (as reported in the last three posts) in a small amphitheater on a hot, humid (90o
Fahrenheit) Tuesday evening July 2nd at the Sierra Lair of the Bear Camp Gold near Pinecrest
Lake. The central Valley was sweltering in a heat wave nearing 115O F,
while Death Valley approached its all-time 134o F high.
We anticipated a provocative presentation by a dark-matter,
boson-chasing physicist, Dr. Bob Jacobsen, who inexplicably is the new Dean of
Undergraduate Studies at Berkeley.
Entitled “Cal in this century: What does it take to be comprehensively excellent?”
it proved to be a rollicking if somewhat disjoint discussion of the issues that
UC Berkeley faces in the coming decades.
Jacobsen started by asking what people call the school. He noted that if you were an undergrad at
Cal, it is usually called ‘Cal’; if a graduate student, you probably know it as
‘Berkeley’ – the outside world more formally says ‘University of California at
Berkeley, or UCB.’ Ninety percent of our
crowd seemed to call it ‘Cal,’ including my wife who was both undergrad and
grad there.
The audience, mostly Cal alumni and families, nonetheless posed
questions and perspective widely applicable across America today. One issue: “I am a third generation Cal grad;
why can’t my kid, who has great grades, get admitted?” A second one: “Tuition
costs seem to have gone nuts since I was there:” and a third: “They’re letting
foreigners in to get their higher tuition fees.
Can I match the fees and get my kid in?”
The questions kept coming.
“Berkeley used to have great teachers – do they still?” “Why did they build UC Merced instead of
strengthening Berkeley?” and “All the
money seems to go for buildings.” The
crowd pressed on: “Why don’t you add classes and more students?” and “What’s
the story on student loans?” followed by “Tell us about the university’s stance
about on-Line education,” and “How does Berkeley compare to the other UC
campuses?”
Strangely to me, there were no questions about the athletic
programs, the lack of parking, or the graduate schools. The answers, not always satisfying to the
group, revealed a complexity I’d not often thought about, but they are issues
that certainly bedevil higher education today.
Jacobsen did not wish to talk about the wider University
of California (UC) system (there are ten total UC campuses); he said his
primary (and nearly singular) focus was with Berkeley. He did, however, make the strong point that the
UC system is unique, since no other state university system desires that each
campus exhibit autonomy and independent research leadership. SUNY in New York has similar campus autonomy,
but not the emphasis on independent research.
The UC family includes nearly 250,000
students, 20,000 faculty and researchers, and 210,000 total staff, plus 1.7
million living alumni. There is no question
– certainly with this crowd – that the Berkeley campus, established in 1868, is
the flagship — envisioned as a "City of Learning.”
Today, Berkeley proudly and rightly
views itself as the world's premier public university and a wellspring of
innovation, occupying a 1,232 acre campus with a sylvan 178-acre central core
in downtown Berkeley near Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco. Jacobsen, an avuncular jovial man, began with
statistics, intoning that “Cal has 28,150 undergraduate students, more-or-less,
a roughly constant number for the past forty years. There are about 6,350
graduate students as well, and some 85 buildings on campus. The campus has about 70% of the student body
living on-campus, versus a mere five percent some fifty years ago.“ [1]
To the question about ‘getting my kid
in’ Jacobsen was unsympathetic, explaining that the campus is land-locked, completely built
out. Adding more students is totally
impractical, which he described via examples of abortive attempts to add
students, only to find they couldn’t register for needed classes, couldn’t find
housing, etc. Everyone seemed to know
that there is virtually no parking on campus; we didn’t know that the ‘parking space for life’ granted to Nobel
Laureates still had to be paid for by the Nobelist at the same rate as any
other parking sticker. The privilege
just guarantees that piece of pavement cannot be used by someone else.
[1] Jacobsen’s precision if not his accuracy was
quite good. The website has slightly
different numbers: 35,699 students as of Fall 2012, including 25,574 undergraduates and
10,125 pursuing graduate degrees.
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