SB 160 divests ASUC funds from companies affiliated with the Israeli military. The Judicial Council originally issued the gag order around 8 p.m. Saturday evening, demanding silence on the case from all parties involved. The gag order came after the ASUC rescinded its previous decision to approve a settlement of charges against SB 160 that removed any clauses that required the ASUC to divest its funds.

“While the judicial procedures allow for a gag order to be placed any time, I believe that their reason was not sufficient to overstep the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” said Noah Ickowitz, a petitioner in the case, SQUELCH! party chair and a former Daily Cal columnist.

In an email obtained by The Daily Californian, Associate Justice Scott Lara thanked all parties involved for their patience during the gag order and stated that currently, “the confusion about trial procedure and the judicial process between the parties has largely been cleared up.”

Members of the ASUC Judicial Council could not be reached for comment as of 4:30 p.m.

On Friday, the Judicial Council voted in favor of a settlement between the petitioners and the bill’s author, Student Action Senator George Kadifa. The settlement would have removed clauses that petitioners had said were unconstitutional. Petitioners alleged that the bill had not been approved by the appropriate ASUC committees and was not passed by the necessary two-thirds vote. Two ASUC officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the gag order, were sharply critical — even angered — at what they called the council’s freehanded use of the gag orders, which the officials said was an overreach of the council’s authority.

The original charges will now go to trial, and the Judicial Council will rule on their validity. The trial for Ickowitz-Freeman v. ASUC Senate & SB 160 is scheduled for Wednesday at 11 a.m. at a location to be determined.

UPDATE at 6:12 pm: The trial will be held at Anna Head Hall and is open to members of the public.

Staff writer Jeremy Gordon contributed to this report. 

Contact Shirin Ghaffary at newsdesk@dailycal.org

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Birgeneau, who became the campus’s ninth chancellor in September 2004, said he stayed longer than originally intended due to “the extraordinary circumstances facing the University of California that emerged with the financial crisis and steep loss of state funding.”

Dirks has been described by his peers as a “soft-spoken intellectual” with a strong hand in running administration. Although Dirks was chair of anthropology, one of the more radical departments at Columbia, he has still shown himself to be a firm administrator.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of the outgoing and incoming chancellors. The two come from different countries, experiences and fields of academic study, so it remains to be seen how the voice of the campus will change in the coming months.

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Brown decried Dirks’ $50,000 salary increase over that of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau at a time of fiscal austerity for the university.

The public spat — emblematic of the troubled relationship between the state and university — appeared to set an uneasy tone for the start of Dirks’ tenure.

But when Dirks assumes office on June 1, he may find an unlikely ally in Brown at a time in which state funding has fallen to constitute just above 10 percent of UC Berkeley’s budget.

Dirks and Brown have quickly developed a close friendship. Privately, the two call each other, dine with their wives together and have long conversations about the history of the Indian caste system.

“We like talking to each other,” Dirks said of Brown in a recent interview with The Daily Californian.

Both Brown and Dirks have been called “big-idea” leaders. Both have followed in their fathers’ footsteps and entered public service. Both have spent time studying Asian cultures — Brown having studied Zen Buddhism and Dirks being an expert on Indian history and culture.

“Nick is a very interesting man in himself,” said Peter Awn, dean of the School of General Studies at Columbia University. “Like Brown, he really is an idea man. I think that Brown will get a kick out of that.”

Dirks’ arrival coincides with a critical time for the university in its relationship with the state.

“Nick is a very
interesting man in himself.
Like Brown, he really
is an idea man.” – Peter Awn, Dean
of the School of General Studies
at Columbia University

Both the passage of Proposition 30 and the flurry of new legislation related to higher education being introduced in Sacramento hint at the potential for a reset in recent trends.

For Dirks, Brown represents an opportunity to bridge unstable ties between the university and the state. For Brown, Dirks is a leader who shares his steadfast commitment to cost efficiency as a solution for the university’s problems.

(Sharon Liu/Staff) Sources: Columbia Spectator; Berkeley News Center; LA Times

Tight pockets

At January’s UC Board of Regents meeting, Brown — who has become markedly more involved in the state’s higher education system — called for the university to cut back on what he deemed excessive spending.

The governor voiced the need for limitations on executive pay, student unit caps and a move toward expanding the university’s online program in the name of cost-saving.

“Teaching costs have to be brought down,” Brown said at the meeting. “I won’t tell you how to do that, but you need to figure it out.”

According to Gareth Lacy, a spokesperson for the governor, Brown remains “absolutely committed” to holding the line on tuition hikes.

“Students should not be the default financiers of higher education in California,” Lacy said.

Brown’s recommendation follows his deep cuts to social services, including millions of dollars of reductions to programs such as state child care and college scholarships.

Brown could not be directly reached for comment.

Like Brown — who famously chose to sleep on a bare mattress on the floor of his simple apartment during his first term as governor rather than in the governor’s mansion — Dirks has developed a reputation as an administrator dedicated to cost efficiency even in the face of public concern.

At Columbia, where he served as the executive vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Dirks helped push forward an administrative restructuring of the faculty of arts and sciences. In 2011, the consulting group McKinsey & Company, which was hired by Dirks and Columbia President Lee Bollinger, made recommendations about how to implement this structural streamlining.

“His goal administratively was to increase efficiencies, quicken decisions and to try to build more collaborative relationships among the various deans,” Awn said.

But the program drew significant criticism from both students and administrators. In 2011, the former dean of the undergraduate Columbia College, Michele Moody-Adams, resigned abruptly. Both The New York Times and the Columbia Spectator reported that her decision to step down was related to her concerns regarding the administrative overhaul.

“Dirks is thought of as positive in some ways, but he’s also seen by some undergraduates as someone who is centralizing power and taking it away from individual schools, especially the undergraduate school,” said Jared Odessky, an elected student representative on the Columbia University Senate. “The problem is, when allocating financial resources, a lot has gone to the top.”

Dirks’ management of the program was in part facilitated by the administrative flexibility afforded to him by the private nature of Columbia — a comfort he will no longer benefit from at UC Berkeley.

“One thing I’ll say about University of California is there’s a high level of transparency,” Dirks said. “I’ve never had transparency like this in my life.”

“I’ve never had transparency
like this in my life.”
-Chancellor-designate Nicholas Dirks

While administrators at private schools like Columbia have more maneuvering room, by virtue of being at a public school like UC Berkeley, administrators are required to be more cautious, according to Director of the campus Center for Studies in Higher Education C. Judson King.

“I’m fine with the transparency and the open records, but sometimes it makes it more difficult to make decisions,” said UC President Mark Yudof. “Of course it may be easier to make a decision at somewhere like Harvard than Berkeley, but at the end of the day, we have a public university with a public mission.”

Still, Dirks hopes to spark dialogue with the campus’s active community. He said he plans on holding regular fireside chats and meetings with student groups during his visit to the campus in May.

(UC Berkeley NewsCenter/Courtesy) Dirks shakes hands with Chancellor Birgeneau after being confirmed by the UC Board of Regents in late November of 2012.

“I like that professor Dirks is really engaged with students — he’s very open-minded, intelligent and trustworthy,” said Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab, who sat on the chancellor search committee.

Creative solutions

Both Dirks and Brown have a history of looking for outside partners to help finance state and university programs.

Recently, Brown secured a deal with a China-based investor to help pay for a $1.5 billion development deal in Oakland. During a trade mission last week in Beijing, Brown also sought support from China for the state’s recently approved high-speed rail project.

As the senior administrator working on the development of global outreach, Dirks was a fundamental force in seeking international support for Columbia, according to Kathy Okun, vice president for university development at Columbia. Under his leadership, the university established five global offices to represent it.

(Joy Lee/China Post/Courtesy) Dirks speaks to students at Doe Library in November of 2012.

“It is critical to engage Berkeley’s global community — and in order to do just that, I recently  completed a tour of Asia, where I met with the Berkeley Clubs in Mumbai, Delhi, Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Dirks said.

Over the last decade, UC Berkeley has put increased emphasis on garnering private support through different campaigns, initiatives and a shift in alumni relations. Haas School of Business development efforts, such as the thank-you letter event, are among the many programmatic efforts toward closing this gap through a cultural push toward philanthropy, said David Blinder, former associate vice chancellor for university relations.

“Ironically, we need more private money to sustain our public character,” Birgeneau said.

“Ironically, we need more private money
to sustain our public character.”
- Chancellor Robert Birgeneau

In 1987, the state funded 54 percent of the university’s budget. In 2012, the state supplied only 11 percent. Over the last eight years, total yearly private giving has increased by around $80 billion.

Although UC Berkeley still lags behind its private peers, with an endowment about half the size of Columbia’s, the university’s efforts have significantly increased in recent years, said Vice Chancellor of University Relations Scott Biddy.

“We are not simply wringing our hands,” he said. “We are working hard to sustain our excellence … and to ensure that Berkeley competes academically at the very top tier on the global stage — one of the ways we do this is by raising private gifts.”

The new chancellor’s history of engaging with alumni and donor communities comes to the University of California at a time of heightened stakes. His experience as a fundraiser at Columbia may be key in Brown’s advocacy for the university to seek a larger degree of financial independence from the state.

As vice president, dean and primary fundraiser of Columbia’s faculty of the arts and sciences, Dirks raised more than $900 million of the $5 billion Columbia Campaign — the largest campaign in Columbia’s history.

(Chris Taggart/Courtesy) Dirks and his wife, Columbia associate professor of history Janaki Bakhle, pose with Columbia trustee William Campbell.

“In order to have successful philanthropy, you need two things: big ideas and people who make those big ideas happen,” Okun said. Dirks has both, she said.

Like both state and university administrators, Dirks agrees that the university needs to search for new sources of revenue. But he remains reluctant to embrace Brown’s leading proposal that the university take on a more expansive online education program.

In January, Brown proposed a budget that allocated $10 million for the development of online education, calling for the university to take advantage of new forms of technology to improve graduation rates and increase access to the university.

Although Dirks helped create online extension programs at Columbia, he has come down against the use of such programs as a one-stop solution to the university’s financial problems.

“The emphasis of online education should be on enhancing the learning experience, not thinking of it as some great fantasy for revenue production, which is completely untried and untested at this point,” Dirks said.

Looking forward

As both Brown and Dirks move forward, they will have to negotiate what in recent years has been a testy relationship between their two institutions.

“Although the state is only (about) 10 percent of our budget, our relationship with the state is important,” Birgeneau said. “We need to keep it straight.”

Between their shared history of controversial efforts toward fiscal discipline and their search to find more sustainable sources of revenue for the university, the brewing friendship between Dirks and Brown comes at a true inflection point for the university.

“Governor Brown and I are having so much fun talking that we haven’t had the chance to think about the next Prop. 30,” Dirks said. “But we will.”

Contact Alex Berryhill and Shirin Ghaffary at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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“I’m standing in solidarity with campus workers,” said UC Berkeley student and UC United Students Against Sweatshops spokesperson Amanda Mendez. “The university right now can’t afford to give workers a raise, yet we can afford a $50,000 bonus for the chancellor.”

Mendez said she saw firsthand how undercompensated and overworked UC employees are through her own experience as a student employee at Peet’s Coffee on campus.

In the past, employees were expected to contribute 5 percent of their salaries toward their pension plans. The two-tier pension system increases that contribution for new employees to 7 percent and 6.5 percent for current employees beginning in July.

The protest comes three weeks after UC President Mark Yudof announced in a letter that the university will not be able to implement salary increases for staff during the current fiscal year.

After the mock funeral procession at Sather Gate, protesters marched to California Hall in an effort to voice their concerns to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.

Debra Harrington, the campus’s employee and labor relations director, accepted the mock coffin protesters had made. Harrington told the protesters that the chancellor understands the concerns of organizers and that the administration is currently trying to end the bargaining process in a timely manner.

“The Berkeley campus is committed to bargaining in faith,” Harrington said to the protesters. “Bargaining is actively is occurring right now, and we are hoping for an amicable and early resolution.”

The protest came to a close shortly after Harrington went back inside, ending with a unity clap and plans to mobilize further with worker sit-ins and additional demonstrations.

“I think it’s really disappointing that the chancellor sent out a representative,” said labor organizer KB Brower. “They lie to our face and say that they care, but they haven’t been acting in a timely fashion. They’ve known our demands for a year.”

The rally had relatively low turnout compared to a similar protest more than a month ago, in which more than 100 students and service workers blocked the intersection of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue in a systemwide AFSCME 3299 union picket against the reduced pension plan.

Shirin Ghaffary is the lead academics and administration reporter. Contact her at sghaffary@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter at @sheesnaps.

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The peak of the event was a noon rally on the steps of the Capitol building in which representatives from the UC, CSU and community college campuses voiced their demands to legislators. Despite the recent passage of Proposition 30, which prevented midyear tuition hikes, speakers voiced concern over long-term tuition increases, decreasing Pell Grants and newly proposed unit caps.

“I’m here today to make sure the state doesn’t decrease funding for public education,” said ASUC Senator and SQUELCH! presidential candidate Jason Bellet.  “Prop. 30 didn’t solve the problem — in many ways, it’s a Band-Aid for a much larger wound.”

Gov. Jerry Brown’s Prop. 30, which passed in November, stopped a $250 million cut to the UC system by imposing taxes on sales and earnings above $250,000. The education funding received from the proposition is set to expire in 2019.

“Even though I’m about to graduate, funding for public education is still going to impact my younger brother and cousin,” said UC Berkeley senior Hannah Benet, a participant in the rally.

An oil-severance tax proposed by state Sen. Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, was hailed by protesters as a possible long-term solution to UC system’s financial woes. The bill, SB 241, would place a 9.9 percent oil-severance tax that would raise nearly $2 billion for public education.

The event drew noticeably fewer participants than it has in previous years. During a similar event last March, thousands of students converged on the state Capitol, and around 100 demonstrators participated in a subsequent occupation of the Capitol building, resulting in 72 arrests.

“Honestly, I thought there were going to be a lot more people,” Benet said. “Most of my friends are very anti-protests — they don’t know much about these issues. The fact of the matter is, there is no other way to do this. You have to participate.”

Benet was one of only a few UC Berkeley students on an ASUC-funded bus taking students from the campus to the Capitol. She cited a lack of outreach and the weakening of student activism on campus as reasons that many students were not as active as she hoped.

“There were less people involved than last year, but more people were engaged with the issues.” said External Affairs Vice President Shahryar Abbasi. “Overall, this was a great event. Students were targeting their efforts in constructive conversation with legislators.”

After the rally ended, more than 80 small groups of student leaders met with state legislators in private lobbying sessions. According to Abbasi, delegates from the university were able to speak with legislators including California State Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, who was receptive to Assembly bills increasing Pell Grants as well as establishing more aid for undocumented students.

According to Abbasi and Safeena Mecklai, the ASUC deputy of Vote Coalition, the next step will be to follow up with legislators by rallying students at UC Berkeley to call their representatives.

“It’s unclear how today’s day of action will ultimately impact policy change, but the very fact that they know that we’ll be back on March 4 will keep our legislators accountable to students,” Bellet said.

Shirin Ghaffary is the lead academics and administration reporter. Contact her at sghaffary@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter at @sheesnaps.

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Yudof described the university as being in “fundamental disagreement” with the claims launched in a report published last April by the California Association of Scholars, an organization that aims to combat liberal bias on college campuses. The report, titled “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California,” condemned the UC system for what it found to be left-leaning political polarization in its curriculum and staff.

“I’ve been hearing a lot of deny, deny, deny about the problems,” said co-author of the report and professor emeritus Charles Geshekter of the California State University, Chico.

One of the main problems the report alleges is a lack of political diversity among UC staff, particularly in the social sciences and the humanities.

The report also criticizes certain course descriptions for being too politically charged, citing one modern U.S. history course that mentions “slave labor and violent land acquisition” as an example of agenda-setting.

Geshekter and the report’s other co-author, professor emeritus of UC Santa Cruz John Ellis, said such rhetoric violates UC Board of Regents policy that “the University remain aloof from politics and never function as an instrument for the advance of partisan interest.”

The University of California Academic Senate released a response to the report in July discrediting the use of anecdotal evidence. Senate chair professor Robert Powell defended the UC system’s commitment to political fairness, citing its politically blind hiring policy and a 2008 survey in which 83 percent of UC students said they felt respected regardless of their political beliefs. The senate called attempts to influence course content “a serious threat to academic freedom.”

“I don’t think it’s true that we’re indoctrinating students,” said Martha Olney, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley. “I think what we’re all about here is teaching people how to think.”

Powell additionally questioned the intentions of the publishers of the report.

“If there’s a political agenda anywhere, it’s with (the California Association of Scholars),” he said.

Peter Wood, president of the organization’s parent, the National Association of Scholars, asserted that the report is nonpartisan. Wood further said that the goal of the organization is to advocate for quality higher education, which in part means questioning whether the UC system is a politically neutral space.

Despite being disregarded by the UC administration, the California Association of Scholars said it will continue to urge the regents to discuss issues of politicization at the next regents meeting in March.

Shirin Ghaffrey covers higher education. Contact her at sghaffrey@dailycal.org.

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The survey is part of a larger University of California-wide effort to measure climate across its 10 campuses. A total of 430,000 UC community members will be invited to participate in the survey, making it the largest university-wide survey known to the administration.

“We want to hear about what’s working and what isn’t working” said Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri, who is co-chair of the system-wide survey effort. “Campus climate means ‘Do you find this campus a welcome and inclusive place that lets you accomplish your goals?’ We’ve never had a system-wide survey that was focused on that.”

According to Basri, the survey was prompted in part by repeated heated incidents between Jewish and Muslim organizations surrounding the UC Berkeley Divestment bill as well as the “Compton Cookout” at UC San Diego.

Salih Muhammad, the former President of the Black Student Union, called the UC-wide survey a “decent effort.”

“The administration must find effective ways to move from data collection to an improved campus climate,” he said.

The survey consists of questions geared at studying campus climate at both UC Berkeley and the UC at large. Data from the survey will be gathered primarily online, although participants can request a paper version. The survey will take about 25 minutes to complete and participants will remain anonymous.

In order to incentivize participation, the UC Office of the President is offering over $40,000 in various raffle-style prizes to those who complete the survey. The total budget for the survey is around $600,000, with a majority of the funds being spent on analyzing the data.

The campus is aiming for at least 50 percent participation from the UC Berkeley student body, Basri said.

The university hired Susan Rankin, an associate professor of education in the College Student Affairs Program at Pennsylvania State University, to analyze the results. Her consulting firm has administered similar surveys at over 100 other universities. Rankin, along with a team of faculty members, students, and staff developed questions for the survey.

Rankin will use data from other university surveys as a point of comparison for results from the UC Berkeley survey.

After the responses are analyzed in the upcoming fall, UC President Mark Yudof has mandated that each campus come up with at least three action steps in response to the findings. The administration plans on repeating the survey sometime in the next four to five years to measure the success of the changes implemented.

“In my experience, slowly but surely, awareness of campus climate will ensure that we will be a better institution if we take care of this stuff,” Basri said.

Shirin Ghaffary covers academics and administration. Contact her at sghaffary@dailycal.org.

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At a symposium hosted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Monday evening, Birgeneau announced that he will be heading an initiative called The Lincoln Project: Excellence and Access in Public Higher Education, which will be funded by the academy. Birgeneau will be tasked with researching and proposing solutions to problems of funding for public universities.

“I chose the academy because it is predominantly an academic society, independent of the government, so it can really act in a neutral way,” Birgeneau said of the Cambridge-based policy research center.

Birgeneau will be joined by other academic, corporate and institutional leaders, including Levi Strauss CEO Robert D. Haas and President of University of Michigan Mary Sue Coleman. In addition to publishing scholarly reports, Lincoln Project members will host national conferences to engage in dialogue with elected officials, policymakers and the broader public to influence education policy.

As the senior visiting scholar of the initiative, Birgeneau hopes to expand the reach of the committee to the private sector. He noted that public universities must find outside sources of revenue during a time when government funding is increasingly running short.

“I believe that state public education is too important to be left to the state,” Birgeneau said.

Birgeneau will spend the first half of his expected three-year unpaid term with the project investigating financial issues and hopes to spend the latter half implementing solutions. He will also maintain his teaching and research positions at the UC Berkeley department of physics.

Though Birgeneau faced some criticism as chancellor for his response to campus protests and implementation of departmental cuts under Operational Excellence, academy President Leslie C. Berlowitz affirmed her confidence in Birgeneau’s commitment to accessible public education.

She cited Birgeneau’s creation of the Middle Class Access Plan, which caps parent contributions for middle-income families, as a sign of his commitment to increasing affordability of public education. Berlowitz also commended his implementation of the UC Berkeley Dream Act Scholarship, which provides up to $8,000 of financial aid annually for undocumented students.

“Chancellor Birgeneau is widely respected by his peers and understanding of the importance of problems we’re facing,” Berlowitz said.

Birgeneau’s term as chancellor ends at a critical time for the campus’s financial well-being. State funding only constitutes about 11 percent of UC Berkeley’s budget, down from 28 percent eight years ago, according to a report from Birgeneau at the symposium on Monday.

“All of us need to contribute,” said Birgeneau. “The federal government should take this responsibility to maintain our public character, corporations need to step up and we need more generous support for foundations.”

Shirin Ghaffary is the lead academics and administration reporter. Contact her at sghaffary@dailycal.org.

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At the meeting, Brown, an ex-officio regent, suggested further fiscal discipline to make up for shortfalls in state funding. His proposals included reducing students average graduation time, lowering administrators’ compensation and decreasing faculty benefits.

Brown assumed an unusually active role in the financial committee’s discussion, at one point quoting Cicero’s “On the Republic” to describe the university’s current fiscal situation as part of a larger class conflict between the “elites and the plebeians.”

In response to the governor’s request for further fiscal discipline, Regent Richard Blum pointed out that UC faculty and executives continue to have significantly lower salaries than their counterparts at private universities — a trend that Blum said will “only result in the UC becoming a junior college.”

“You have to ask yourself, do you want the UC’s campuses to be as good as they have always been?” Blum said.

California Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, warned the regents that Brown’s budget proposal is unlikely to pass if Sacramento’s demand for stable tuition levels is not met.

“If the discussion with the members of Legislature has the same tones as present here, I do not think you will be successful with the outcomes you want” Perez said. “Over the last several years there have been 900 million in cuts. Fee increases have been 1.4 billion. The fee increases are disproportionate to the disinvestment of the state.

According to Regent Sherry Lansing, current chair of the board, increasing tuition for certain graduate programs remained a possibility for dealing with fiscal difficulties — a statement that drew sharp criticism from  Student Regent Jonathan Stein and Perez. Still, she said, undergraduate tuition increases in the 2013-14 school year are highly unlikely.

Lansing praised the president and speaker for facilitating “healthy discourse,” which she said is productive in helping find alternative sources of revenue to state appropriations.

Contact Alex Berryhill and Shirin Ghaffary at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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The move follows public outcry over the logo, which erupted last week after The Oakland Tribune published a story about the redesigned logo, which university administrators said had been in use for nearly a year.

“While I believe the design element in question would win wide acceptance over time, it also is important that we listen to and respect what has been a significant negative response by students, alumni and other members of our community,” UC Senior Vice President for External Relations Daniel Dooley said in a statement.

More than 50,000 individuals had signed an online petition calling for the logo’s removal.

“I’m glad they changed their minds” said UC Berkeley junior Kyra Baldwin. “The old logo was a very unclever look, designwise. And I study design. It looked like something that was a corporate logo without reflecting the university’s image.”

Jason Simon, director of marketing communications at the UC Office of the President, said he was surprised by the sheer volume of complaints as well as the delayed reaction of the responses, as the controversial logo had been in use for more than a year before the onslaught of criticism.

According to Simon, the university has no immediate plans to introduce any new logos but will focus instead on gradually phasing out the current redesign, which has already been removed from social media websites.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a vocal critic of the redesign, applauded the university’s decision as a step forward in positive public engagement with critics of administrative policy.

“It was nice, for a change, to hear the administration respond appropriately to the chorus of voices,” Newsom said. “You get to a point where you think your voice doesn’t necessarily matter. This is not tuition, access or quality, but it is symbolic of the frustration people have.”

Despite general support for the decision, some, like UC Berkeley senior Andrew Ludwig, remain skeptical.

“It’s nice to know that our activism counts for something,” he said. “Unfortunately, it seems to be only for something trivial.”

Contact Shirin Ghaffary at sghaffary@dailycal.org.

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