With the aim of establishing new media as a permanent field of study, online networking giant Craigslist.org announced a $1.6 million donation to the campus' Berkeley Center for New Media last Thursday.

The Craigslist donation, along with a matched $1.5 million in funds from a previous William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant, will help establish the media center's first endowed faculty chair, said David Blinder, associate vice chancellor for university relations.

Blinder added that $100,000 from the Craigslist grant will be used to fund lectures and programs in the center.

The donation represents the campus' role as a haven of alternative thought and how new media is becoming a permanent academic field, said media center director Ken Goldberg.

"It's another sense of recognition of Berkeley's history of alternative thinking, he said. "How do we take new things like new technologies and approach them not with the conventional wisdom. It says that new media, as a subject, is analogous to biology, geology ... that it is a timeless, very important and rigorous field."

Craigslist chief executive officer Jim Buckmaster said the campus' technical innovations and history of counterculture motivated him to donate to the center.

"It's hard for me to think of any single entity to which Craigslist and the Internet at large, or the Bay Area and the world at large owes more," he said in an e-mail. "Our top public universities are the best things we have for us, and supporting them is always important, but especially so at a time when private universities are using their unprecedented wealth in a predatory manner."

Though Craigslist typically does not publicize individual donations, the site has generally donated one percent or more of its annual revenue to charitable concerns, Buckmaster added.

The media center chair is one of 100 faculty chairs partially funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Last September, the foundation announced a record-breaking $113 million grant to UC Berkeley, for the creation of 80 faculty chairs at $2 million each, and 20 faculty chairs at $3 million each, Blinder said.

In the case of the media center, it will cost $3 million to establish a chair due to the field's relatively new and multidisciplinary nature, Blinder said.

"The reason is the bar was set higher for multidisciplinary chairs. The center for new media is a multidisciplinary program because it is pulling from all over the university," Blinder said. "Therefore, the recruitment of new faculty and the retainment of faculty working in that field is particularly difficult."

Goldberg noted that the multidisciplinary nature of the UC Berkeley center distinguished it from the more technology-based media centers of other campuses. He added that the visibility of the Craigslist grant bodes well for the center.

"The significance of how it recognizes this field and the Berkeley Center for New Media is priceless," Goldberg said.

Tags: DONATIONS, HEWLETT FOUNDATION