Gisele Bonds/Courtesy

UC Berkeley reached a settlement agreement Tuesday with three campus students to streamline access to course materials and library holdings for students with disabilities.

The agreement makes getting access to course material quicker and less burdensome for students with disabilities. It also calls for expanding staff, improving accessibility of library websites and digitizing library books and scholarly journals.

The settlement came after a yearlong structured negotiation, a legal process that allowed the university and the students to reach a collaborative agreement. The students and their attorneys from the legal center Disability Rights Advocates met with campus officials from the university library and the Disabled Students Program, consulting experts and using focus groups to identify difficulties.

Getting required course material used to take as long as six weeks, said Rebecca Williford, an attorney at DRA. The new agreement calls for course readings to be available in 10 business days and includes a provision for specific requests for the digitization of library holdings with an average waiting period of five days.

“One big problem (was) those of us students who need screen readers to read at a decent pace,” said Brandon King, a campus fifth-year cognitive science student who participated in the negotiations. “We need to have our books in a visual format, and the library didn’t offer any way to get library books in a digital format before this settlement. So that part is huge.”

Before the settlement, students with print disabilities — visual impairments or learning disabilities, for example — had to submit their required reading list to the Disabled Students Program. The program’s staff members would then scan and digitize books into “alternative media,” an umbrella term for a variety of formats needed by students with disabilities like digital text, braille, large print or specific file formats for use with screen reader programs.

Tabitha Mancini, a Berkeley senior in the sociology department, was also involved in the negotiations.

“I was told (DSP will) only scan books on your syllabus,” Mancini said. “So I kind of went away for a couple semesters … the more I wanted to do research, I realized to be a good researcher, I had to have access to these materials.”

While the new system of distribution for course material is an improvement, it still presents challenges for disabled students, who must take additional steps and face waiting periods to receive course material in a format they can use.

DSP director Paul Hippolitus takes pride in the university’s participation. “Disability rights and advocacy movement started on our campus in the mid-’60s,” Hippolitus said. “We know about that history and cherish it.”

Williford and King praise campus officials for their collaboration during negotiations. But Mancini found the process of getting the university’s attention frustrating.

“They have the technology, but they lacked an organizational system,” Mancini said. “What’s ironic is that (UC Berkeley) is the home of the disability rights movement. I was given the runaround. I met a lot of resistance. Obviously, that was shocking.”

Though King and Mancini are graduating and only took part in the agreement’s pilot program, changes have already begun to appear.

“It was just so nice to go into a library and sit in the rows and work and say, ‘I can read these books and have this access,’” Mancini said. “It’s a very different feeling, because growing up you just get used to not being in these spaces.”

The new provisions will be implemented in fall 2013.

The settlement agreement can be viewed below.

Gautham Thomas covers city government. Contact him at gthomas@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @gautham_t.

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Action on the plan, a list of short-term improvements for Telegraph Avenue proposed by Councilmember Kriss Worthington, has been held over for the city council’s meeting on April 30th for further discussion.

The plan incorporates suggestions from groups like the Telegraph Livability Coalition. Improvements in the plan include outdoor merchandise tables for retail stores, increasing the visibility of parking and a monthly music festival. Worthington’s proposal estimates investment costs of about $50,500.

Gautham Thomas covers city government. Contact him at gthomas@dailycal.org.

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The immediate response for many people when faced with Northside as a living option is that it’s too far from everything else, i.e. Southside.

I’ll admit that was my original stance. But after living in the nether region north of campus for the past nine months, I’ve come to find that Northside has perks that far outweigh its distance from the familiarity of Southside.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I love Southside in a lot of ways. After spending my freshman and sophomore years down there, I appreciate the certain anti-establishment charm Telegraph radiates into the surrounding area. In fact, that grunginess was one of the main things that set Berkeley apart from other schools for me. It seems somehow more honest about the way things are, rather than taking the approach of most college campuses by covering up reality with layers of brick and pretty flowers.

But after two years watching my step on my way to class and holding my breath while passing through Sather Lane, Northside was a welcome — and literal — breath of fresh air. It’s not just about cleanliness, though. Whereas Southside has the feeling of being somewhat broken up — Telegraph, the Units, Frat Row and everything south of Dwight — Northside has the feeling of one unified neighborhood, where walking down Euclid in the morning means passing people sitting at tables outside of cafes with cute names like Hummingbird Cafe and Brewed Awakening instead of being harassed by proselytizing hippies and panhandlers the moment you walk out your door.

Dining options are just as varied as on Southside. In the span of the single block of Euclid leading up to campus, you have options ranging from Thai, Indian, Mexican and Mediterranean cuisine to burgers and pizza. And just around the corner, you’ll find the Hearst Food Court a considerable step up from Southside’s Durant Food Court/Asian Ghetto. And, of course, Berkeley’s famed Gourmet Ghetto is less than a 10-minute walk away, rather than the hike it takes to get there from Southside.

In keeping with Northside’s laid-back vibe, friends can kick back with a pitcher of beer and a game of pool at La Val’s. If you simply can’t be separated from the stimulating nightlife offered by Southside haunts like Kip’s, Triple Rock is just down the road.

Northside also offers a sense of security that’s glaringly absent from Southside’s crime logs. Whereas leaving the library late at night used to mean tightly gripping my keys in my pocket the whole way home, I no longer dread walking home after dark.

Then there are the co-ops. There’s no denying my bias toward the Berkeley Student Cooperative, as I’m a resident, but its members really are a community unlike anything else in Berkeley — or most places, for that matter. If you’ve never visited a co-op, check them out. (Not necessarily during a party, although I think you may find they are a great alternative to the Greek System variety.) Instead, try stopping by for dinner sometime. Any co-op will welcome you, and while there is sometimes a noticeable lack of meat, there’s always something delicious cooking in any co-op kitchen.

The co-ops are not for everyone, but a lot of people would be surprised by how easily they can adapt to living in a large, diverse household in which residents make decisions and contributions together for the good of the house.

For freshmen and sophomores, Southside may be the better option in order to be near friends and familiar places. But once you’ve made strong enough connections here at UC Berkeley, Northside offers a more laid-back alternative to the college lifestyle.

— Adelyn Baxter

Team Southside

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a senior living on Southside must be in want of good sense. It’s a pit, after all — crowded, dirty and noisy — what my friend’s dad, a longtime resident and a former Berkeley student, calls “Der Studentenland.” At some point, the prospect of another year of sleeping in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment owned by a disinterested, predatory landlord or the idea of navigating late-night crowds coming home from bars or parties simply becomes exhausting.

I’m a bit different from many of my fellow seniors. I started college and left before I finished my degree. Almost a decade later, I returned to finally get my B.A. Some things are drastically different, like the size of my tuition fees. The faces of the shops on Telegraph Avenue have changed, along with the physical landscape, like the hole where Raleigh’s used to be, the place I used to go with my friends and classmates for beers, burgers and shuffleboard.

But some things haven’t changed in almost half a century. In his 1966 novel “The Crying of Lot 49,” Thomas Pynchon describes his heroine, Oedipa Maas, crossing campus:

“It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She came downslope from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs, blond hair, hornrims, bicycle spokes in the sun, bookbags, swaying card tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for undecipherable FSM’s, YAF’s, VDC’s, suds in the fountain, students in nose-to-nose dialogue. She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take.”

There’s still soap in the fountain sometimes, students still in nose-to-nose dialogue, and Berkeley — the campus and the city — contains many alternate universes. Southside is an alternate universe for me, a place where life happens for my classmates but one that I’m no longer directly a part of. Leave for sedate Elmwood, or sleepy Northside, or join the families shopping and eating on Fourth Street or Solano Avenue, and you’ll be surprised at how different things are, how the energy in the air changes when you aren’t surrounded with the press of students striding from class to class and between cafes and lunch spots.

I miss it, though. Living on Southside is more than just the ability to roll out of bed 10 minutes before your 9 a.m. class: It’s packing into the Durant Food Court at midnight for a late, late dinner at Gypsy’s, snacks at Sweetheart’s or a doughnut at Kingpin. It’s movies at the PFA and basketball at People’s Park. It’s Moe’s, the best bookstore in town. It’s late-night studying at Cafe Milano, coffee on the terrace at Cafe Strada or the chance to dance the tango at Caffe Med. I even miss the raucous herds trooping past my old Dwight Way apartment at 2 a.m. on their way back from the bars. I can still go to Remy’s on Thursday evenings for tacos and beer, wander through the food trucks at Off The Grid and step into that other universe for an hour or two, but I’m only a visitor.

I’ll be leaving this university soon, but for everyone else, there’s still plenty of time in the future to move to a neighborhood where the shops are closed and the streets deserted by 9 p.m. There’s something vital about being in the midst of a place as inchoate and contradictory as yourself, to be unsure but attracted, like Oedipa Maas, living over, under and around your community of fellow students.

— Gautham Thomas

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Around 70 protesters gathered at People’s Park Tuesday evening to protest the death of Kayla Moore, who died in Berkeley Police Department custody.

Wielding banners and chanting slogans, protesters marched from People’s Park to the police station Downtown, face-to-face with police in riot gear. Though the protest was nonviolent, the crowd remained confrontational, calling for “vengeance for Kayla Moore,” among other loud chants.

Moore, a transgendered individual who identified as Kayla, was originally identified as Xavier Christopher Moore by Berkeley Police Department. Berkeley police had been called to detain Moore after responding to a disturbance call.

According to a statement from Berkeley Police Department, Moore “began to scream and violently resist,” later dying while under restraint.

Maxine Holt, who handed out fliers during the protest, said that she was participating partially because of local media coverage of Moore’s death, which she called “disrespectful.”

“I hope the cops release info about her death, that the coroner releases info and that the matter gets investigated,” Holt said.

Officer Jennifer Coats, spokesperson for Berkeley Police Department, stated on March 11 that an investigation is ongoing. The Alameda County Coroner’s Office has not yet released an official cause of death for Moore.

Berkeley resident Nate Pitts, who, like many attendees, arrived on his bicycle, said he was mostly at the protest out of curiosity.

“I wanted to find out more about these Anonymous Queers in Action … and show solidarity with the march,” Pitts said, referring to a Facebook post by a group called Anonymous Queers in Action calling for Tuesday’s protest.

Coats added that no arrests were made in connection with Tuesday’s protest.

Moore’s death is scheduled for discussion at a meeting of the city’s Police Review Commission Wednesday evening.

Gautham Thomas covers city government. Contact him at gthomas@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @gautham_t.

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Michael Tao/Staff

Isaac Lee, president of news for Spanish-language television network Univision, spoke at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism Wednesday evening in front of a small audience of faculty, students and professional journalists.

In a conversation with Lowell Bergman, a professor with the school’s Investigative Reporting Project, Lee discussed Univision’s unparalleled influence in the Spanish-language television market and how to balance good journalism with community advocacy. Lee also mentioned the network’s 2011 dispute with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and plans for Univision’s new English-language network, Fusion.

Born in Colombia, Lee is the son of Jewish immigrants who settled in Bogota. His upbringing, Lee said, gives him an understanding of the experience of second- and third-generation Hispanic Americans.

Only 42, Lee has already had a long career in print and television journalism. In 1997, he was appointed editor in chief of Colombia’s prestigious magazine, Semana, at the age of 26. He was announced president of Univision’s news department in 2010.

As president, Lee will oversee Univision’s involvement in the production of news content for Fusion, a new English-language “lifestyle and news” network. The program, a joint venture with ABC, will seek to serve English-speaking Hispanic Americans.

Questions from Bergman and the audience, however, returned repeatedly to the remarkable trust between Univision and its viewers.

Lee said he believes that his network has a clear responsibility to the Hispanic community and an obligation to uphold the public’s trust.

This sense of the public trust drove Univision’s decision to investigate the Rubio family’s background, Lee said. In 2011, a Univision reporter investigated the 1987 arrest and subsequent conviction of Rubio’s brother-in-law as part of a profile on the senator.

“You don’t decide to pick a fight or go after someone,” Lee said. “It always starts with a great investigative journalist finding a fact that catches his attention and pulls the string … When there were letters asking us to kill the story, (the story) became a must.”

Rubio’s staff later charged that Univision had offered to kill the story in exchange for on-air appearances by Rubio, though an analysis in the Columbia Journalism Review concluded that the accusations made by Rubio’s staff were unlikely.

Lee said that Univision believes in the “chronicle of the ascent” of the Hispanic community in the United States but emphasized that objective coverage does not preclude advocacy for the interests of the Hispanic community.

“Neutrality can only be on the side of the oppressor, not the oppressed,” Lee said, paraphrasing Elie Wiesel. “There are points in time when you need to know very clearly what is right and what is wrong … To be neutral is not safe, and history will not judge you well.”

Gautham Thomas covers city government. Contact him at gthomas@dailycal.org.

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The city’s Peace and Justice Commission drafted the letter, addressed to the UC Regents and other entities that cooperate in management and research at the laboratories. The letter cites the 1986 Nuclear Free Berkeley Act, a portion of the Berkeley Municipal Code that prevents the city from contracting with or investing in groups that engage in nuclear weapons work, and asks that the university no longer manage those labs in light of the “nuclear danger to the world.”

Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak and Laurie Capitelli voiced criticism of the letter at Tuesday’s council meeting.

“It was rather ironic that we were asking the university for a favor, and the attitude was, while I’ve got you on the phone, please stop managing the labs, because we have a nuclear-free ordinance,” Capitelli said.

In September and November, the City Council granted two waivers exempting UC Berkeley from the NFBA. The waivers greenlighted funding for the startup incubator Skydeck and enabled the city to store a sizable cache of emergency medical supplies with UC Berkeley.

The NFBA requires that council grant waivers whenever the city enters an agreement with UC Berkeley due to the university’s continuing relationship with Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Peace and Justice Commission administers the NFBA and recommends grants or denials of waivers.

“We asked the City Council from here on out, when a waiver is granted that bears on the university, a letter be sent to the university stating our opposition to their continued management of the labs,” said Peace and Justice Commission Vice Chair George Lippman.

Both Wozniak and Capitelli support focusing efforts on encouraging the federal government to reduce or eliminate weapons stockpiles.

Wozniak previously attempted to have the NFBA’s restrictions on investments and contracts removed. He suggested splitting the city’s boycott of the labs from the university.

“If they want to keep this clause, it should only apply to the national labs, and there should be a blanket exemption to the campuses that don’t do any weapons work,” Wozniak said.

Jasmina Vujic, UC Berkeley professor of nuclear engineering and director of the Berkeley Nuclear Research Center, described the university’s role in the national labs, however, as a moderating influence on the private companies that help manage the labs.

Capitelli also called adjusting the NFBA an issue to be visited sometime in the future. Changing the code would require a ballot measure brought either by the City Council or by a citizens’ initiative.

Nonetheless, the item passed unanimously in the council, despite concerns brought up from various council members that the letter be properly focused.

Gautham Thomas covers city government. Contact him at gthomas@dailycal.org.

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The report by the Alameda County Regional Auto Theft Task Force (ACRATT) shows increases in theft rates in almost all jurisdictions in 2012. Both UCPD and Berkeley Police Department, however, reported flat or falling levels of auto theft in 2012 as compared to those of the previous year.

Auto theft in Alameda County increased by 17 percent in 2012, according to ACRATT. Auto theft increased in 2011 by nearly 19 percent from the previous year, a sharp change from five years of steadily declining auto theft rates. In contrast, UCPD reported a decrease of 29 percent, and Berkeley Police Department showed a zero percent change in 2012.

Marc Hinch, a California Highway Patrol investigator detailed to ACRATT, theorized that the economic downturn may have been responsible for the uptick in auto thefts.

“Property crimes in general are kind of taking a back burner for many police agencies, thanks to budget cuts,” Hinch said. “Criminals are a bit emboldened. Depending on the area, there’s not a lot of resources to investigate, or manpower.”

Honda Accords and Civics from the 1990s remain the models most often reported stolen, Hinch said, owing to their popularity as well as the ease of breaking into the ignition system. Car thieves often use a “shave key,” a dummy key designed to start the car.

Hinch advised proper use of a steering-wheel lock to help prevent the theft of older cars.

“A lot of people put (steering-wheel locks) on but don’t lock them,” Hinch said. “A lot of times, we recover cars and find the lock thrown in the back seat. It’s not necessarily going to prevent a theft, but a lot of times it will move (thieves) on to the next one.”

Contact ACRATT’s 24/7 anonymous tip line at 510-516-2886 to report auto theft-related activity.

Contact Gautham Thomas at gthomas@dailycal.org.

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Jessica Lum/Courtesy

Jessica Lum, an award-winning visual journalist and graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, died Jan. 13 of cancer at the age of 25.

An editor of online news site Mission Local and photography site PetaPixel, Lum was a talented multimedia and photographic reporter who used her skills to tell empathetic stories of people throughout the world, from San Francisco’s Mission District to as far away as South Korea and Thailand.

From a young age, Lum, a Sacramento native, was known for her positive energy. Nick Hunte, a childhood friend of Lum’s who attended the same church, said he remembered Lum’s witty, sarcastic sense of humor.

“She did whatever she could to make us laugh,” Hunte said. “Even during her final years, she still kept that same spirit.”
Hunte also remembered her kindness.

“I remember early days when I went to summer camp with the church,” Hunte said. “She would go out of her way to check up on me. It wasn’t just for me — she did that for everyone.”

But when Lum entered her final year at UCLA, she received news over the winter break that she had metastatic pheochromocytoma, a rare form of cancer that is difficult to treat, according to a 2009 story by the Modesto Bee.

By the time Lum entered UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2010, she had decided to keep the details of her illness private. Her friends and colleagues in the journalism school were surprised and saddened to learn of her condition after her graduation from UC Berkeley last spring.

“Knowing her, I feel like she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to feel sorry for her or to think that she wasn’t capable of things,” said Lisette Mejia, Lum’s fellow editor at Mission Local. “She just wanted to be who she was, to take on things without people having this image of her.”

For her master’s thesis at UC Berkeley, Lum spent four weeks in the Colorado Desert in California at a settlement called Slab City. Her subsequent multimedia project, Slab City Stories, won the Online News Association’s Online Journalism Award in September.

Even as a temporary guest, Lum was able to leave her mark. A heartfelt post regarding her death on a Slab City website remembers Lum with respect and admiration.

“She lived with us for weeks at a time more than once to truly get a feel for who we are … She was a true Journalist. Recording the event through pictures and words that showed the soul of her subjects. She stayed true to her statement that she was addicted to … ‘above all: human beings’.”

Contact Gautham Thomas at gthomas@dailycal.org.

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Gautham Thomas is a news reporter. Contact him at gthomas@dailycal.org

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Berkeley Fire Chief Debra Pryor retired last Friday after a 27-year career with Berkeley Fire Department. She has served as the head of the city of Berkeley’s fire department since 2004.

Deputy Chief Gil Dong will take the helm until a permanent chief is hired.

Pryor was Berkeley’s first female fire chief and the second African American fire chief in the nation, according to a bio released by the city of Berkeley.

Before Pryor joined Berkeley’s fire department in 1985, she worked for the city of Berkeley as a clerk. Pryor became Berkeley’s first female fire fighter and worked as as a fire captain, department training officer and assistant fire chief, among other positions.

She received a master’s degree in public administration from California State University at Hayward in 2001.

In 2002, Pryor served as the fire marshal and then the departmental operations chief at Palo Alto Fire Department before returning to Berkeley when she was selected as the city’s fire chief in 2004.

Contact Gautham Thomas at gthomas@dailycal.org.

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