UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau hopes to call upon state governments and private donors to match federal funding to public research universities in a new proposal.

The proposal, which is still in its initial planning stages, would redirect $1 billion in federal funds over the course of 10 years to support public universities and was announced at the campus Graduate Assembly meeting Thursday.

Birgeneau has already started communicating with state legislators for preliminary support for the proposal, according to campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore.

The proposal calls on states and private donors to match federal higher education funding for public research universities, which currently totals about $30 billion annually, according to a UC Berkeley News Center article.

“It is an incentive for states to get funding and to give them an incentive not to cut,” Gilmore said.

Under the plan, the federal government would allocate up to an additional $130 million a year to California, up to $30 million of which would go to UC Berkeley, according to the News Center.

However, federal funding is already a primary source of campus revenue, second only to student fees, said Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande. The university receives federal funding largely through grants, which total about $6 billion, according to UC spokesperson Steve Montiel.

Birgeneau stated at an August press conference that because of the decrease in state higher education funding, the federal government should increase funding to the country’s public research universities.

“The United States is now the only Western country where the federal government does not invest directly in its flagship public universities,” he said at the press conference. “Our great public universities … are a national resource, and … their support cannot be left to the states alone.”

However, campus Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab said Birgeneau’s proposed plan fails to address the problem of why the state has limited funding for public education.

“It is a two-part issue,” Navab said. “There is the decreased funding for public education, but there is also a limited amount of revenue the state has, and until there is more money going into education, it will always be education versus something else.

Amruta Trivedi is the lead academics and administration reporter.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly cited campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore as the source in its claims that the federal government spends about $30 billion annually on funding higher education and that the plan would allocate up to an additional $130 million a year to California, up to $30 million of which would go to UC Berkeley. In fact, the information was actually from the UC Berkeley News Center.

The article also incorrectly stated that UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has plans of making an official proposal of this new funding plan in Washington DC. In fact, while Birgeneau has plans of going to DC, there are no plans as of yet to present this proposal in front of Congress.

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