Pol Rebaque/Staff

“Cloyne Court — Silence in an insane world,” wrote famous composer Ernest Bloch in Cloyne Court Hotel’s guestbook in 1944.

With 149 UC Berkeley residents during the school year and a reputation for hosting well-attended parties, the student housing cooperative now commonly referred to simply as “Cloyne” is, for many, no longer thought of as the tranquil oasis Bloch described.

Current house garden manager Ariel Cherbowsky has recently set out to restore what Cherbowsky’s manifesto called Cloyne’s “naturalistic charisma” by calling for residents to become involved in its garden. In his recently released 50-page work, titled “A Guide to Growing Cloyne Court Community Garden: A Hopeful Manifesto,” Cherbowsky makes a history-based critique of a current culture that he sees as being harmful to the land it occupies and outlines an idealistic vision for the cooperative’s future.

Cherbowsky’s manifesto begins 300 years ago with the land use of the Huchiun Ohlone tribe of Native Americans, tracing history through Spanish missions and subsequent European land speculating.

“It is actually a pretty solid piece of scholarship,” said Cherbowsky’s friend and current Cloyne resident Jake Rosen.

In the manifesto, Cherbowsky discusses maps and architectural reports, interprets logos and provides psychological diagnoses, developing a narrative that laments the spiritual loss of a land battered by what the manifesto calls the “trash of the intoxicated and the tossed junk of the inconsiderate.”

Cherbowsky, whose mother is a plant ecologist and father is a psychotherapist, has long been interested in how human relationships and ideas affect local ecology.

When Cherbowsky moved into Cloyne, he was inspired by the expansive space of the property but quickly encountered a major obstacle — the garden he saw potential for cultivating was directly adjacent to the paved courtyard, the primary site of Cloyne’s parties and social events.

As Cherbowsky swept up the broken glass and trash from Cloyne’s courtyard for his weekly co-op work shift, he began to think about the state of the house’s relationship to the land it was built on.

When Cherbowsky became co-manager of Cloyne’s garden in spring 2012, he began to investigate the role the garden played historically in the house’s culture and think of how the garden might reshape it in the future.

Ru Apt, a garden manager at Kingman Hall, a neighboring co-op a block away from Cloyne, reflected on the importance of a cooperative housing garden in maintaining larger groups’ values.

“The garden adds to the house’s image as sustainable, connected to the earth and mindful about food production,” Apt said.

Cherbowsky said that he couldn’t properly approach gardening in Cloyne without understanding the history of the way the land had been shaped in the past. He started to research old maps, journals, photographs and history books, in addition to sources as diverse as a student-created video ethnography from the 1990s “cloynarchy” era and a thesis on pre-Spanish Bay Area ecology.

“I want people to have conversations about how the land has changed so that we can transition to talking about how we want to interact with and influence our present-day landscapes,” Cherbowsky said.

Some house members disagree with Cherbowsky’s view that Cloyne’s parties are destructive to the property. Cloyne’s current social manager, Monica Finc, says that what she called Cloyne’s “party culture” is an integral part of the house, fostering a sense of unity that can be difficult to find in a large residence.

While Cherbowsky’s manifesto is filled with pictures of the trash-covered soil in Cloyne’s garden, it also depicts some of the natural beauty of the trees and plants that are thriving there.

In order to encourage positive additions to Cloyne’s natural landscape, Cherbowsky has passed a request through the house’s council to create funding for a system of land grants. Anyone from the house or surrounding community is invited to submit an application requesting funding, materials and land for gardening projects to take place within the property.

“Ari’s manifesto is a great example of the sort of member involvement that the coops thrive on,” wrote Graham Stanley, the live-in facilities manager at Cloyne, in an email.

Cherbowsky says he hopes that through his project, residents of Cloyne and the surrounding community will be encouraged to try to understand the history of the land they live on and feel empowered to shape it.

“It isn’t the only perspective,” Cherbowsky said, “but I have weaved together these stories in a way I thought would move people to become interested in how this land has come to its current form.”

Contact Micah Fry at mfry@dailycal.org

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Janet Yellen, vice chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and a professor emerita at UC Berkeley, is one of two individuals currently being considered by President Barack Obama to replace Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve.

Yellen is a professor emerita of economics at Haas School of Business, and if appointed, she would be both the first female and first UC Berkeley professor to serve as chair of the Fed.

Larry Summers, who was previously U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, director of the National Economic Council and president of Harvard University, is also being considered. Obama is expected to select either Yellen or Summers for the position at the end of August.

Yellen received her doctorate in economics from Yale University in 1971 and began her career at UC Berkeley in 1980 as a macroeconomics professor at the Haas school. In 1985 and 1988, Yellen received the school’s Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching.

“Janet was always a phenomenal teacher — partly because she worked very, very hard at it,” said David Levine, an economics professor at the business school, whom Yellen mentored. “She thought about literally every word she would say. As she has moved up in government, this level of thoughtfulness and reflection has always been increasingly important — and as a high official of the Federal Reserve system, where literally, the placement of a comma can move the markets.”

Yellen’s experience working at the Fed includes serving as a member of its board of governors and as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was also chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers.

While Yellen and Summers rival each other in academic and government experience, their economic values are on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.

Yellen advocates economic regulation, supports the usage of stimulus plans to boost the economy and is expected to continue Bernanke’s policies if appointed. Summers supports policies of economic deregulation, but following the economic crisis of 2008, he has openly stated that he wants more regulation of Wall Street transactions.

Although Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy, acknowledges that Yellen and Summers have “tremendous ideological differences,” he said they would both know how to handle the responsibilities of the Fed, like knowing when to ease up on monetary expansion.

Campus economics professor Brad DeLong, who worked with Summers as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury when Summers was treasury secretary, enthusiastically supported Yellen’s appointment but has been vocal about his preference for Summers for the position.

“Larry Summers has an edge as the most creative thinker likely to successfully think outside the box should outside-the-box thinking be called for, and least likely to bind himself to an institutional consensus past its sell-by date,” DeLong wrote in a New York Times article.

Andrew Rose, an economics professor at the Haas school, has known Yellen for 28 years and says that Yellen is very persuasive, easily forms a consensus and is very calm and collected.

“One of the gripes about her is that it isn’t clear how well she will respond to a crisis, but we went through the Loma Prieta earthquake together in Barrows Hall,” Rose said.  “We really both thought that the building was going to collapse, but she stayed quite calm during the earthquake, which is a pretty impressive thing.”

Brady also believes that if Yellen is appointed to the chair position, her well-developed inner circle will allow her to transition smoothly into the position.

Contact Sophie Mattson at smattson@dailycal.org.

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Alex Mousouris/Staff

After laughing and chatting in close-knit circles, it’s finally time for a group of Nigerian state legislators in the living room of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy to hear the day’s lecture — a lecture that aims to bring them one step closer to implementing better public policies in their state.

The group of 40 legislators from the Delta State House of Assembly in Nigeria arrived in Berkeley on July 29 to take part in a newly designed two-week executive leadership program focusing on governance and policy development in areas such as housing, higher education and sustainable energy. They will be returning for the next two summers to participate in additional two-week training programs.

The Honorable Victor Ochei, speaker of Nigeria’s Delta State Legislature, said that when the House Assembly was originally looking at educational programs abroad, they were choosing between various prestigious schools, including UC Berkeley.

“We thought Harvard was the best, actually, but Goldman was the top-rated school,” Ochei said. “Here in Berkeley, it’s different because the style is more open and more practical. For every time there’s a lecture, there is a field trip. ”

Staff members at the Goldman school said they view the program as an exciting opportunity not only to teach theoretical public policy frameworks but also to see how those theories are put into practice by active world leaders. The school also partners with the Jiangsu province in China, Kochi University of Technology in Japan and the Civil Service Bureau of the Hong Kong special administrative region to create similar programs.

“We want to implement international policy and understand how other countries are thinking in order to be able to work with them,” said Sudha Shetty, assistant dean for global alliances at the school.

Different issues are addressed each day during the two-week program, providing a comprehensive education in each area of public policy the leaders wish to reform.

Wednesday’s itinerary included a discussion with Henry Brady, dean of the public policy school, concerning the dynamics of higher education and what it does for society. The discussion was followed by a group field trip to Sacramento to see California legislators in action.

On another day, legislators worked on developing innovative ways to engage Nigerian youth in issues like job access and education, which, according to the Honorable Barr Princess Pat Ajudua, has posed a significant challenge.

“The youth are restless — restless from unemployment and lack of education,” Ajudua said. “When youth get out of school and find themselves without a job, they turn to all kinds of criminal things to get money to leave their parents and get married and lead a good life.”

Because of the program, Ajudua believes that the Assembly has already learned strategies to confront the issue, such as instating more facilities provided for youth to go to school, financial grounds for students to get an education they otherwise could not afford and initiating new training programs for teachers.

Despite the seriousness of the political problems the program aimed to tackle, the atmosphere in the lecture hall was both academically rigorous and social. Assembly members shared many laughs and side conversations between PowerPoint slides on global governance.

“So far, the program’s been fantastic,” Ochei said.

Contact Andrew Dickey and Nico Correia at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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The investigation, which is still ongoing, began after several students came forward to report that some students had continued working and shared answers on the spring final for Computer Science 70 after the exam had ended. Recent discussion regarding the incident by was sparked by a post on social news website Reddit on Saturday.

According to students and members of the teaching staff, the crowdedness and logistical difficulties of Haas Pavilion, where the exam took place, made it easier for students to cheat. Although the staff members were aware that the Math 54 class would be taking an exam at the same time, they expected the room to be able to accommodate the 1,000 students taking their exams.

However, the crowdedness forced GSIs to check identification after the exam, causing exam collection to take 15 to 20 minutes. CS 70 students also sat in the back, making it difficult to hear any announcements from the room’s single sound system.

“The Haas Pavilion was so echoey — no one could actually hear,” said Dhruv Garg, a campus junior majoring in electrical engineering and computer sciences. “(When the professor said time was up), it wasn’t clear whether her instructions were targeted towards just her class or everybody.”

According to GSI Chenyu Zhao, witnesses brought the cheating incidents to the attention of the teaching staff after the exam. Within an hour, the professor posted on the class’s forum, notifying the class of the incident and urging the class to take responsibility.

“The cheaters are going to be hurting the grades of all the honest students in the class,” Professor Sahai wrote. “They deserve no mercy or loyalty after doing such a despicable act to their fellow students.”

The electrical engineering and computer sciences department’s academic dishonesty policies recommend that cheaters be failed for the corresponding courses and that students be expelled after a repeat offense. According to the Center for Student Conduct, if students fail to resolve the incident with their professor, they will receive an alleged violation letter to either accept their sanctions or go to a hearing.

Ultimately, less than 2 percent of the class was found to be guilty. For those who confessed before grades were turned in, grades were readjusted to remove points possibly gained on an extra question. Those who still have not confessed, according to Sahai, will at least fail the class, and the university will decide the subsequent punishment. The investigation is ongoing.

Students said that the cheaters had no justification for their actions, given the professor’s helpfulness and fairness throughout the semester.

“The professor and GSIs threw homework parties, which were very helpful,” said Alex Danilychev, a campus sophomore and computer science major. “We also had extra credit opportunities throughout the semester. I could’ve easily gotten three times the extra credit I got if I wanted to.”

The students had a range of responses, varying from surprise to anger, compelling them to report anything suspicious they witnessed. According to the professor, more than 20 people came forward with reports.

“There was a positive side in that the discussion that happened afterwards generated a shared sense that something was wrong and not acceptable,” Sahai said.

Contact Mary Zhou at mzhou@dailycal.org

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Robert Bellah, a renowned professor emeritus of sociology at UC Berkeley, died Tuesday of complications following a heart valve operation. He was 86.

Bellah is famous for his concept of American “civil religion” — the idea that there is a kind of abstract institutionalized religion at the center of American culture and that a large part of what it means to be American can thus be conceived of as a religious experience.

This idea, first outlined in the essay “Civil Religion in America,” in 1967, sparked a rich interdisciplinary debate and was of vital importance in the fields of sociology, American history and religious studies.

At UC Berkeley, Bellah was known to his students as a respectful but uncompromising intellectual force.

“His seminars were mesmerizing since they were so unpredictable,” said Mark Juergensmeyer, a former UC Berkeley graduate student and a current professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. “He always respected your opinion and would engage with you until you came to a meeting of minds.”

Juergensmeyer was a student and later an instructor at UC Berkeley during Bellah’s tenure.

“As you watched him, it was almost as if you could see the wheels of his mind turning, thinking it through, trying to make sense of the mysteries of our social life,” he said.

Bellah, born in 1927, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950 with a degree in social anthropology, going on to receive his doctorate in sociology and Far Eastern languages from Harvard in 1955. His research was primarily concerned with the sociology of human religious behavior.

After postdoctoral work at McGill University, Bellah taught at Harvard before moving to UC Berkeley in 1967 to serve as the Ford professor of sociology. He retired from teaching in 1997.

In 2000, Bellah received the United States National Humanities Medal from then-president Bill Clinton for his profoundly influential work, not only in the social sciences but also in the field of religious studies.

Bellah authored a large body of works, including “The Broken Covenant” in 1975 and “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life” in 1985. His most recent and ambitious work, “Religion in Human Evolution,” came out in 2011 and sought to illuminate the emergence of culture and religion through human evolution, beginning with the Big Bang and ending in the sixth century B.C.

According to Juergensmeyer, Bellah was working on the sequel to “Religion in Human Evolution,” tracing the development of religion from the sixth century onward, when he died.

“He would not be satisfied with pat answers or easy explanations and would take a problem and gnaw on it, work it out,” Juergensmeyer said. “Sometimes it felt like you were falling into a washer-dryer, but you would always come out of the encounters changed, enlightened and ennobled as a result.”

Matteo Bortolini, a professor at the University of Padova, is currently writing a book about Bellah.

“I was stunned by his generosity and from the way he respected my work,” Bortolini said. “I dare to say that, on his side, our relationship was a way to think about his life and make some kind of an appraisal of all his life.”

Despite concerns about the state of the world, Bellah’s attitude was fundamentally one of optimism and hope.

Bellah, a practicing Christian, said in a 2012 interview, “We need to respect the fact that none of our traditions have all the truth, that there is truth in every tradition — and we can be instructed and learn from every tradition.”

Contact Micah Fry at mfry@dailycal.org.

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Classrooms in the affected areas were closed and emptied, but most of the building remained open.

Custodial staff members are cleaning up the flooding, and students will be allowed back into the areas by 5 p.m. today, according to Christine Shaff, director of communications for UC Berkeley’s Department of Facilities Services.

Shaff said that although there is ongoing construction in the affected bathroom, it is unrelated to the incident.

The flooding is unlikely to cause water damage, Shaff said.

Contact Madeleine Pauker at mpauker@dailycal.org.

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Simone Anne Lang/File

In the wake of record-high freshman admissions numbers to UC Berkeley this year, the Units 1, 2, and 3 residence halls may see some student floor lounges turned into quads and some doubles turned into triples.

This year, 5,979 freshmen submitted a Statement of Intent to Register at UC Berkeley — an increase of 614, or 11.4 percent, over last year’s numbers, according to data released by the UC Office of the President. These numbers put next year’s freshman class on track to be the largest the campus has ever had.

While UC Berkeley has seen its fair share of housing reconfigurations to fit an increasing student population, the coming influx could be one of the biggest, said Marty Takimoto, director of marketing and communications for Residential and Student Service Programs.

“Over the past two to three years, we have averaged between 100 percent and 97 percent occupancy for all university housing,” Takimoto said. “For the upcoming fall, we’ll definitely start at more than 100 percent occupancy.”

In past years, floor lounges were used for temporary student housing to accommodate additional students at the beginning of the school year or while individual residence halls were closed for renovations.

RSSP currently anticipates about 50 more students than the current total occupancy, but according to Takimoto, that number will change moving in the fall, as some students receive late admissions offers — resulting in late housing applications — and some defer their enrollment during the summer. This makes it difficult for RSSP to accurately assess how many beds it will need.

Despite an increasing student population, campus housing guarantees have always been met for entering freshmen, transfer and extension students, Takimoto said.

“While we have additional students to house for the 2013-14 year, the numbers have not become unmanageable, and we anticipate being able to house them all comfortably and safely,” he said.

The growing student population may have also led to a spike in housing applications for private residence halls. Josh Ferrari, community manager at The Berk, one such residence, describes Berkeley as a late market, with potential tenants rushing to find housing around the end of July and early August. This year, however, the rush to grab spots began between May and June.

“There’s definitely an increase of people getting their housing secured early,” Ferrari said. He described both private dorms his company manages, The Berk and Wesley House, as being near capacity.

Students who applied for housing on time have been receiving their permanent housing contracts, while those who applied late will most likely be placed into overflow housing. According to Takimoto, RSSP is working to fill existing triples first in order to make lounge quads a last resort.

Ilaf Esuf, an incoming freshman who plans to live in either Unit 1, 2 or 3, said she would be disappointed if there were any last-minute changes but that her housing situation is secondary to the overall UC Berkeley experience.

“I care more about going to Cal than I do about my living arrangements,” she said in a Facebook message.

Contact Andrew Dickey at adickey@dailycal.org.

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Mary Zheng/Staff

Amid the increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks faced by universities, UC Berkeley is doubling its efforts and allying with other UC campuses to address security risks.

UC Berkeley was previously underfunded for an institution of its size but will increase investment in its central information security program from $1.5 million to $3 million for the next fiscal year. Universities face the extra challenge of protecting intellectual property and the security data of a heterogeneous population while preserving the openness unique to a research institution.

UC Berkeley faces millions of attempts at breaching vulnerabilities every week, according to Larry Conrad, UC Berkeley’s chief information officer.

“Unfortunately, universities are a worldwide destination for hackers,” Conrad said. “To steal a Social Security number or credit card number, you get some financially stable people (in universities) you can leverage. Research universities also create new knowledge — there’s intellectual property, value on the new market.”

These cyberattacks are also becoming more sophisticated, and phishing attacks — which trick people into revealing accounting credentials by replicating login pages and stealing credentials — have seen an increase. According to Paul Rivers, UC Berkeley’s system and network security manager, hackers monitor UC websites so they can replicate login pages as closely as possible.

The number of cyberattacks campuses face may also depend on the size of the institution and significance of its research. UC Riverside receives thousands of attacks per year — compared to UC Berkeley’s millions — and its budget for next year will be far less than double that of UC Berkeley, said Bob Grant, director of technology at UC Riverside.

While corporations also face cyberattacks, the information exchanges in universities entail a more open but more vulnerable environment. Unlike corporations, campus networks allow virtually anyone to connect to a server and access the Internet from outside.

The research focus of universities also brings unique challenges for researchers and professors who want to protect intellectual property. Hackers may not always have the motivation to steal research to make their own patents — sometimes, they only look to take advantage of the information.

Handling stolen intellectual property is also more difficult because of international hackers and the challenges that come with obtaining cooperation from foreign countries, according to Brian Carver, an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Hackers often launch attacks from multiple locations or change locations, making it complicated to trace the origin of the breach.

Looking ahead: taking steps to ensure improved security

In 2009, hackers broke into University Health Services databases, gaining access to 160,000 people’s personal records for six months. Afterward, the FBI and UCPD combed through records extensively to ensure that all students were aware of the security breach and that firewalls were secure.

Now, the campus’s Information Services and Technology department plans on doubling its funding, an investment that will bring the institution up to par with its peers. Currently, the UC Privacy and Information Security Initiative is also seeking to have an advisory board for both the UC president and for each university by 2014 to guide discussions about issues of privacy and information security.

“It really does take a village to try to respond to this,” Conrad said. “The threat is too pervasive. The (other universities) help identify where the exposures are and do a good job of disseminating the info.”

However, each individual will also have to play an active role, as the most important thing for departments and researchers to do is remain aware of what data they have that could be breached, Rivers said. IST has also emphasized clear data classification standards that inform departments of the level of security their data requires.

Hackers target not only high-security computers but also devices as common as personal laptops. Just having anti-virus software does not suffice these days, Rivers said. IST offers a program called Secunia PSI that individuals on campus can use to see whether they have the necessary updated protection.

“Hackers may look for any kind of data system to get into, whether sensitive or not,” Rivers said. “So they spread out and establish capability on the campus network … That’s the basis by which our security standards require patching your system. People wonder, if it’s just my personal laptop, why does it matter to the university? Well, that’s why.”

In 2010, the university moved to create an overarching security policy. The initiative will establish a systemwide advisory board, train campus privacy leaders and form a consistent balancing analysis — a framework for decision-making when competing privacy interests, university values or obligations exist. The university hopes to fully implement the initiative in the next five years.

Despite these steps, the initiative strives to refrain from turning the university’s security program into that of a corporation. Corporations have more restrictions on accessing web servers and may perform stronger monitoring because they regard the computers as company property. According to Rivers, the university does not want to become a “Big Brother” but aims to maintain strong security alongside uninhibited autonomy.

However, security breaches remain a problem for universities. On July 24, Stanford University experienced its own security breach in its information technology infrastructure. Stanford is still investigating the source and impact of the breach but has urged all students to changed their passwords.

“Due to the emergence of so much new technology and the ever increasing amount of data we store it is of great importance that we make security a priority,” said UC spokesperson Brooke Converse in an email. “It is critical that the University be a good steward of information entrusted to it by students, faculty, staff, and community.”

Contact Mary Zhou at mzhou@dailycal.org

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Anthony Bongco/Staff

During the years most young adults spend completing college, UC Berkeley student Steven Czifra was serving a four-year sentence in solitary confinement.

By all accounts, Czifra had a rough childhood. Born into a family of addicts, he was smoking crack at age 9, in juvenile hall at age 13 and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison at age 14.

Now, as a 38-year-old transfer and re-entry student of English literature at UC Berkeley, Czifra has become an advocate for California state prison reform, protesting the use of solitary confinement. Most recently, he went on a hunger strike in solidarity with inmates of Pelican Bay State Prison, in which thousands of prisoners have been on hunger strike for 21 days as of Sunday.

In total, Czifra has spent eight years of his life in solitary confinement. When Czifra was 17 and serving a prison sentence for carjacking, he says he was found guilty of initiating a prison fight, which landed him a four-year term in solitary confinement. When he was 24, he says he took a plea bargain for another four years in solitary confinement after being found guilty of spitting on an officer and in violation of California’s three-strikes law.

While he was imprisoned at a Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, Czifra spent 22 and a half hours in his cell each day and was only allowed 90 minutes outside of his cell, which he would spend alone in a concrete, windowless pen. Czifra continues to suffer from severe anxiety and insomnia as a result.

“You take a person, you put them in a box, you don’t let them see the sun for eight years, you don’t let them talk to anybody or have fun,” Czifra said. “You don’t let them eat or make mistakes. The fact that I’m not a raving lunatic is a miracle.”

A few years after being released from prison in 2003, Czifra enrolled in a 12-step program, where he met his partner of seven years, Sylvia Garcia. Czifra began working odd jobs but found that they did not fulfill his academic ambitions.

“I owned a tree-trimming business, I was driving a tow-truck, I was swinging a hammer,” Czifra said, “and the entire time, I knew that I had other gifts that were being underused.”

Czifra originally received his GED in prison because of the promise of getting coffee and cookies in the prison quad. In his early 30s, he failed community college twice. The third time around, at the age of 34, he received straight A’s, helping him gain admission to UC Berkeley.

Today, Czifra lives in Albany with his partner and his 6-year-old son, Shane, whom he lovingly calls “the most incredible human being” he has ever met.
On an average sunny Tuesday afternoon, Czifra and his son spend the day bowling, playing with Legos and making lunch. Afterward, Czifra heads to his afternoon classes and does his homework for a few hours before having dinner with his family.

“If I could use one word to describe our family life, it would be ‘peaceful,’” Czifra said.

The 2-year old Czifra (left) is shown with his two siblings, Joy and Johnny.

Prison activism

Despite the joys that come with pursuing an education and having a fulfilling family life, Czifra still faces the lasting psychological effects of spending eight years detached from human interaction.

“The dominating theme of my life is overcoming anxiety,” Czifra said. “Unless I stop and think everything through, my life is an earthquake. I was by myself during the time when I learned how to be with other people … when my emotional and mental systems were forming.”

Czifra was introduced to the prison hunger strike movement by his friend and UC Berkeley peer Danny Murillo, who was also kept in solitary confinement.

In recent weeks, Czifra, Murillo and other members of the campus organization Human Rights of the Incarcerated at Cal have been holding demonstrations in support of the statewide Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition, which began in Pelican Bay State Prison on July 8. Last Monday, Billy “Guero” Sell, a state prison inmate who had participated in the hunger strike, committed suicide after allegedly being denied medical attention.

Leaders of the movement are demanding that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation comply with core demands, which include ending group punishment, changing policies that force prisoners to snitch on gang members and expanding privileges for inmates in solitary confinement.

“The reason why I’m in this movement is that I’m in California and I care about my community, and this isn’t happening in Palestine or North Korea,” Czifra said. “This is happening here.”

The nine-year old Czifra (left) poses with Johnny.

A scholarly take on prison reform

When speaking about how he spends his time at UC Berkeley, Czifra says he is thankful that he is in a place that allows him to combine his activism for prison reform with his academic scholarship.

Last fall, Czifra began attending a prison studies independent reading group taught by UC Berkeley academics in the ethnic studies and gender and women’s studies departments. There, Czifra explored the intellectual meaning behind mass incarceration in society.

Patricia Penn Hilden, professor emeritus of ethnic studies, developed a bond with Czifra during the class and began meeting with him independently to discuss literature.

“I introduced him to my husband, who is a professor of comparative literature, and they talk about Descartes once a week,” Hilden said.

Czifra said that he read the classics while incarcerated but was unable to apply the knowledge he gained in a prison setting. Now, he is able to articulate his ideas with people from all backgrounds — both within and outside of the prison system.

“There’s nothing he likes more than diving headfirst deep into the pool of the literature,” said Victoria Robinson, a lecturer on campus in the ethnic studies and gender and women’s studies departments. “It is probably the thing that got him through his years in prison and solitary confinement.”

Czifra says that when he first started college, he wanted to teach inmates literature after graduating, but now, he says he is considering other careers, ranging from being a lawyer to a professor of literature. After an unexpected journey from solitary confinement to UC Berkeley, Czifra says he’s certainly not afraid of taking a chance.

Steven Czifra, at age 38, poses in a Halloween costume with his partner, Sylvia Garcia, and his 6-year old son, Shane.

Contact Sophie Mattson at smattson@dailycal.org.

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The campus is testing the platform during a three-month trial period that began July 8. The BlueJeans platform allows up to 25 people from around the world to communicate face-to-face over video from any wireless electronic device, including smartphones and tablets. It also connects to other videoconferencing applications, meaning Skype and Google Plus users can call each other for free via BlueJeans.

“Our goal is to make a video call as simple as a telephone call,” said BlueJeans CEO Krish Ramakrishnan over a BlueJeans face-to-face video call. “You can use it for whatever purpose you think you need to use it for.”

For the pilot period, UC Berkeley paid a small, fixed fee for students and faculty to test BlueJeans until Sept. 30. If the pilot period elicits a positive response from students and faculty, UC Berkeley will make plans to establish a permanent service deal.

Students may be able to attend and participate in lectures remotely with BlueJeans if they are not physically able to attend class and the instructor chooses to broadcast the class online.

“If you have a study group and can’t make it, you could still study with your friends online,” said Timothy Liu, a UC Berkeley alumnus who graduated in 2010. “I did do research at Cal, so I think it would be useful. More often than not, the professor is busier than the student, so remote collaboration might be helpful.”

Visiting professors who are unable to physically travel to UC Berkeley can also broadcast virtual lectures through BlueJeans, and students can view the lecture by logging into the virtual meeting room. Professors can also easily reach out to alumni for fundraising, and job interviews can be scheduled more easily and more frequently.

“You’re taking something that has always been done within the four walls of a room and making that more accessible,” Ramakrishnan said. “Two months ago, a researcher connected from Antarctica and showed off his research over BlueJeans.”

Users do not need to sign up or download an application to use the service. All they need is a Meeting ID and a passcode to join a meeting on the BlueJeans website. Signing up on the BlueJeans website is required, however, to host a meeting.

According to Ramakrishnan, BlueJeans exchanged a similar service with other universities, including Cornell, Yale, MIT and Carnegie Mellon universities, all of which have signed up for longer-term use of BlueJeans. Ramakrishnan said that executive MBA students at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania use BlueJeans to complete their group projects amid busy schedules.

Contact Lydia Tuan at ltuan@dailycal.org.

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