In February 2012, the campus stood on the verge of capturing a $60 million grant from the Simons Foundation to launch a theory of computing institute. Its competition, several elite East Coast private universities, equated the problems facing the campus with a death spiral. Why, they wanted to know, would the foundation consider giving such a large sum of money to a campus that in a decade would be a shadow of itself?

Having been posed the question, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau gulped as he sat across a table from the foundation’s decision-makers. Completely unprepared for such an assessment, he paused for a full 30 seconds before unleashing a 30-minute lecture on the ongoing vitality of UC Berkeley.

“I told them everything,” he said in an interview last week. “I told them about our public character, I told them about our comprehensive excellence, I told them about our financial aid strategy.”

UC Berkeley’s proposal, which drew from a variety of fields, including molecular and computational biology, and incorporated the star power of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, won the grant, beating out top-flight private universities like Harvard and MIT.

This triumph is emblematic of the excellence UC Berkeley has achieved under the leadership of Birgeneau, who is stepping down this summer. Worldwide rankings place it among the top universities on the globe, it has maintained its status as the premier public institution in the United States and its faculty members and students continue to win the most prestigious awards academia offers.

But the success has come at a cost, to both UC Berkeley itself and the University of California as a whole. For many, the path charted by Birgeneau through the state’s disinvestment has threatened the fabric of the UC system and alienated members of the campus community. To some, it has gone so far as to jeopardize the very idea of the public university.

Because of its stature, UC Berkeley has a unique ability among the UC schools to generate revenue through fundraising, private partnerships and nonresident tuition dollars. In a two-day strategic planning meeting shortly after he took office in 2004, Birgeneau decided to capitalize on this advantage in order to maintain what he calls the campus’s “comprehensive excellence.”

But this strategy — a mixture of increased lobbying for federal research grants, a drastically expanded private fundraising enterprise and a sharp increase in out-of-state students that yielded unprecedented nonstate revenue for the campus — favored UC Berkeley ahead of the rest of the system. By leveraging UC Berkeley’s brand, Birgeneau set the campus apart from the other nine UC campuses.

“(Fundraising) is campus-driven: You’re always counting on the allegiances and often the heartstrings of the donors,” said David Blinder, who spearheaded fundraising efforts as the campus’s associate vice chancellor of university relations and vice president of the UC Berkeley Foundation. “Their affiliations are to the campus rather than to the broad, amorphous thing that is the University of California.”

In the last fiscal year alone, the campus has raised $408 million through programs like the Campaign for Berkeley.

UC Berkeley’s prestige gives it a leg up on the fundraising competition, and Birgeneau has not shied from exploiting this advantage — a policy with which Birgeneau, who says he values the Master Plan’s multitiered structure, sees no problem.

“Ultimately, the responsibility of the UC Berkeley chancellor is to ensure that Berkeley continues to set the standard for public education nationally and internationally,” Birgeneau said. “My first responsibility is to ensure that … California has at least one public institution that is as good as the very best private institutions and sets the standard for the world.”

Birgeneau further articulated his vision of UC Berkeley’s primacy in a 2012 white paper he co-authored that called for many decision-making functions to be devolved from the central Office of the President to individual campuses. Although he said the proposal was not intended to give UC Berkeley or any other campus special status, it strained the unity of the 10-campus UC system. Among many controversial points, the paper’s proposal to create decision-making boards specific to each campus opened the door to differential tuition between campuses — a proposal that was shelved by the university’s 2010 Commission on the Future due to concerns it would irreparably destroy the system’s nine undergraduate campuses’ equal-footing relationship.

In addition to being a coalition of campuses, the UC system is also a coalition of undergraduate and graduate institutions. At UC Berkeley, the relationship between undergraduate and graduate programs has struggled — and in some cases, this relationship has been severed almost completely.

In the face of state disinvestment, graduate programs have ratcheted up tuition rates and subtly pivoted away from the campus. Combined living and tuition expenses at the UC Berkeley School of Law now top $72,000 for California residents, placing it in the neighborhood of its private peers. Meanwhile, graduate programs in the sciences have increasingly looked to sponsored projects as a way to obtain research money.

“All of the attention in access has tended be on undergraduate education,” said Judson King, director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley.

In pursuit of financial security, the campus’s graduate programs have emulated the operations of their counterparts at schools like the University of Virginia. Virginia’s Darden School of Business, for example, has relied largely on tuition and fees to finance itself self-sufficiently for more than a decade.

“What a lot of places are doing is selectively quasi-privatizing certain schools, like law and graduate business schools,” said University of Virginia professor David Breneman, an expert in the economics and financing of higher education. “But they don’t like to talk — UVA doesn’t like to talk about anything but it being a public university — but we’re moving away from the meaning that it’s largely publicly financed.”

Instead, the reliance on student fees and donations has meant that graduate programs have come to look more like privately financed arms of a public university.

In order to demonstrate to donors that he was serious about maintaining UC Berkeley’s comprehensive excellence, Birgeneau fully committed the campus to his alternative funding push.

“First and foremost, it was important for our constituents to have the confidence that nobody was going to be retreating from Berkeley’s standards,” said Blinder, who left the campus for a similar position at The Scripps Research Institute this year.

But the focus on money created an atmosphere in which Birgeneau spent so much time away from UC Berkeley pursuing additional revenue that students and faculty members alike came to see him as aloof from the needs of the campus community. The tension came to a head during Birgeneau’s controversial handling of the November 2011 Occupy protests — an episode he said he regrets — when many in the faculty called for a no-confidence vote in his leadership.

Other policies also created conflict on campus. Operational Excellence, a cost-saving initiative that Blinder credited with demonstrating the campus’s commitment to financial efficiency to donors, often became a target for its layoffs that campus workers perceived disproportionately affected nonsenior management roles.

Increased admission rates of nonresident students became an equally frequent focus of campus dialogue. During protests, activists decried the immediate effects of the out-of-state influx while analysts considered the policy myopic. A recent paper co-authored by professors Bradley Curs of the University of Missouri and Ozan Jaquette of the University of Arizona found that increased enrollment of nonresidents at public research universities, including UC Berkeley, has limited socioeconomic and ethnic diversity.

“It undermines the university’s long-term case that it is a public university and needs public support,” said Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, who called the pursuit of nonresident students “expedient revenue-hunting.” “These things represent short-term solutions to long-term systemic problems that need to be worked through.”

All these policies and decisions, and the reactions to them, are manifestations of the fundamental tension that underlies Birgeneau’s term as chancellor. His nine years in California Hall have been at some level a prolonged dialogue on what it means to be a public university.

On the one hand, the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education founded the UC system on the public ideal, according to which the population of the state invested in the education of its younger generations. This is the ideal that many faculty members and students aspire to and the principle that has guided the movement against state disinvestment of the past four years.

But as the state disinvested from the UC system regardless and UC Berkeley began raising money from other sources, Birgeneau has sought to maintain what he calls the “public character” of the university.

“Saying it’s a public university means it is available and accessible to all residents of the state depending only on their having the academic qualifications for admission,” King said. “The idea of public education is that it is available without regard to personal or family (financial) resources.”

By this metric, Birgeneau claims to have preserved public character. Although middle-income enrollment has decreased 9 percentage points from 2000 to 2010, 38 percent of UC Berkeley’s student body receives Pell Grants, and in December 2011, the campus implemented the Middle Class Access Plan, which caps parent contribution toward undergraduate education for students with family incomes of between $80,000 to $140,000.

Birgeneau’s appointment in January as the leader of the Lincoln Project — a three-year initiative organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences aimed at defining the future of public higher education — affords him a platform from which he can continue exploring higher education reform, this time on a national level. Though his methods have at times been controversial, his peers in public higher education refer to the successes of the campus during his tenure as the “Berkeley Miracle.”

Endorsing his work at UC Berkeley, the academy wrote in a press release announcing the move that Birgeneau “has launched initiatives at UC Berkeley that are the models for public colleges and universities elsewhere.”

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo and Curan Mehra at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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In the face of deteriorating state funding, the university has stepped up its efforts to raise private funds. But it remains unlikely that philanthropy will be able to completely make up the shortfall in state appropriations, said Daniel Dooley, senior vice president for external relations for the University of California Office of the President, in a statement.

“Private gifts are furthering every part of the university — and we are so grateful for the support,” Dooley said. “As our state funds have fallen, we’ve seen donors step up to create more endowed faculty chairs and student scholarships, gifts that go right to the heart of our funding challenges.”

The funds raised will go toward a number of university initiatives, including research, financial aid and student scholarships, according to the 2011-12 annual report on the university’s private support.

“Strong philanthropic giving is impacting virtually every aspect of the university,” the report states. “It would be hard to underestimate the value that private gifts and donations have for the university, both in terms of their immediate impact on UC’s academic and research missions, but also for their positive influence on UC’s future.”

At UC Berkeley, $410.8 million was raised in the 2011-12 fiscal year, an increase from the $328.8 million raised in the 2010-11 fiscal year, according to the report. The campus raised more than any other in the UC system.

In 2008, the campus began the Campaign for Berkeley, an initiative aimed at bringing in more private money. The campus has to raise around $400 million in the next year to reach its goal of $3 billion by June 2013.

In this fiscal year, the campus completed the Hewlett Challenge, a $113 million matching grant initiated by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2007 to endow 100 new faculty chairs. The challenge was completed in November with all chairs funded, more than two years ahead of schedule.

“The new endowed chairs will be critical in reinforcing the distinction and quality of Berkeley’s world-class faculty and graduate students,” the report states.

Sara Khan covers academics and administration. Contact her at skhan@dailycal.org.

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The Hewlett Challenge, launched in 2007 to endow chaired faculty positions, has allowed the campus to establish 100 new chairs and raise more than $220 million in endowment funding. The chairs are a valuable addition to the campus because holding on to top-tier faculty is critical for the campus to continue being one of the best in the world. Given the state and university’s fiscal atmosphere, the challenge represents one feasible way in which the campus can remain on par with its private competitors in faculty retention.

Similarly, the campus’s progress on its eight-year philanthropy project is a good sign. As of Aug. 31, the Campaign for Berkeley — which is set to conclude next year — had raised $2.6 billion of its $3 billion goal. That apparent success shows how adept UC Berkeley is becoming at garnering large amounts of private support — an important skill that will be even more critical if the state’s recent divestment from higher education becomes permanent.

While campus officials should be praised for meeting their fundraising targets so well, any increase in private money to a public university should be met with some amount of caution. Raising the level of private support to an institution that is supposed to serve the best interests of all Californians raises an ethical concern. The campus’s allegiance should not shift away from the public and toward its donors. In the university’s current situation, UC Berkeley has little choice other than to seek more private funds, but doing so nonetheless presents a fine line on which campus officials must tread very carefully.

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The campus completed the unprecedented Hewlett Challenge two years earlier than anticipated by raising $110 million in private donations to be used for faculty chair-holders, their departments and their students.

Started in 2007 by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the dollar-for-dollar challenge committed $113 million in endowment funds — the largest private gift in campus history — to the campus to endow chaired faculty positions. For each position that the campus funded, the foundation matched that amount.

The foundation’s website said the endowment was given to “help ensure that California’s preeminent public university remained competitive with the nation’s best private universities.”

David Blinder, campus associate vice chancellor of university relations, said the joint effort between the campus and foundation was a rallying point for UC Berkeley.

“(It was) a chance to celebrate and bring together senior leadership of the campus with key donors,” Blinder said.

Since budget cuts have reduced the amount of funding the university receives from the state, the campus has increasingly looked to private donations to replace lost funds. In addition to the Hewlett Challenge, the campus began an eight-year philanthropy campaign, called the Campaign for Berkeley, in 2005 to raise $3 billion in private funds. As of Aug. 31, the campaign has raised $2.6 billion.

Of the $113 million endowment from the Hewlett Foundation, $110 million is used to match funds raised for faculty positions, and $3 million has been set aside for the campus to establish a professional infrastructure to manage the endowment.

Each chaired faculty position requires funds of between $1 million and $1.5 million. The $1.5 million amounts are used to fund distinguished chairs whose works span multiple departments, according to Jose Rodriguez, campus campaign spokesperson.

Rodriguez said the Hewlett Challenge presented a special opportunity to go beyond the way a faculty chair is traditionally funded. The endowments raised through challenge are different because they support not only the faculty chair-holder but also the academic department and graduate students.

To date, 69 of the faculty chairs have already been appointed, with the remaining 31 chairs already established but awaiting appointments, according to Rodriguez.

“This challenge demonstrated a rare opportunity for a campuswide fundraising effort,” Blinder said. “It was across the campus that people stepped up and approached potential donors and established interest and personal connections.”

Contact Geena Cova at gcova@dailycal.org.

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Although deans typically only serve five-year terms, the 2012-13 school year is Shortell’s 11th year in the position. He agreed to stay on this year to see the school through meeting its fundraising goal of $110 million as part of the campuswide Campaign for Berkeley fundraising effort, which aims to raise $3 billion and is set to end in 2013.

Under Shortell’s direction, the School of Public Health reinstituted the undergraduate public health major, developed Berkeley’s first largely online degree program and increased its percentage of underrepresented minority students.

Although there was initial skepticism about whether a public health undergraduate major at Berkeley would be successful, Shortell worked with faculty members and campus officials to re-establish it in 2003 after a more than 40-year hiatus. It has since became extremely popular and is currently an impacted major.

“It was a great service to the UC Berkeley campus for all those undergraduates who want to go pursue a health degree — MD, nursing or dentistry,” said Patricia Hosel, assistant dean of external relations and development at the school. “There weren’t many pathways for them to get those pre-med and health courses.”

He also helped pioneer the school’s online master’s of public health degree program — currently in its second semester — which is geared toward midlevel professionals currently working in health settings who seek additional training but do not have the time to take off from work. The online degree program was the first of its kind at Berkeley.

Additionally, during Shortell’s tenure, the school was able to significantly increase its percentage of underrepresented minority students from 9 percent in 2005 to 25 percent this year through outreach to undergraduate feeder schools and obtaining more financial resources to reach out to these students.

“We have also raised nearly $110 million of philanthropic funds over the past five years,” said Shortell in an email, “and are hopeful of securing additional funds needed to build (a) new home for our school.”

If the construction of a new building to house the school is not made a reality by the time Shortell steps down, it is something some faculty members hope will be accomplished during the term of the next dean.

A search is already under way to find Shortell’s replacement, who will take over on July 1. Nominations and applications are open not only to current faculty members but also to those qualified outside the school and are due mid-January.

“(Shortell) teaches strategic planning, and he has definitely had a vision for this school,” said Joan Bloom, a campus professor of health policy and management. “I think that would be important for a new dean to understand the place of the school within the campus. Those are important functions. We can raise funds. We support the campus.”

Contact Megan at mmesserly@dailycal.org.

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Though Berkeley has engaged in major private fundraising campaigns for the last 30 years, not long before the first major one began in 1985, state funding accounted for roughly half of the campus budget. Currently, state funding represents just 11 percent of the campus budget, corresponding with a transition in the role of private funding from functioning solely as a safety net for when state funding is insufficient for big projects to supporting more central campus needs.

“Fundraising provides an extra padding, or margin of excellence, on top of state funding,” said C. Judson King, director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. “What has changed is that the pad has become larger and the base of state funds smaller. Private funds are indeed taking some of the roles that state funds used to cover completely.”

According to statistics from the Voluntary Support of Education survey, UC Berkeley raised $283.35 million in donations in 2011, the 18th-largest amount among schools in the United States.

To date, the campus has engaged in three primary private fundraising campaigns. Keeping the Promise, which ran from 1985 to 1990 and raised $469 million, and the Campaign for the New Century, which raised $1.44 billion between 1996 and 2000, collected the most money any public school had up to that date.

Now, the campus is nearing the end of its biggest campaign yet. The Campaign for Berkeley, which began in 2005 and is set to end in 2013, has raised $2.6 billion of a $3 billion goal as of Aug. 31, according to campaign spokesperson Jose Rodriguez.

Overall, in private funding, Berkeley remains behind UCLA and UC San Francisco, which were ranked eighth and ninth in the survey and garnered $415.03 million and $409.45 million, respectively, in 2011. And all three high-earning UC campuses remain far behind private universities like top earner Stanford University, which received $709.42 million in donations in 2011, compared to Berkeley’s $283.35 million.

The survey found that private contributions to colleges and universities across the country increased by 8.2 percent in 2011, with $30.3 billion in donations overall.

Though the UC system fares very well against other public schools, individual campuses’ inability to compete with fundraising numbers from elite private schools like Stanford has made schools like UC Berkeley vulnerable to losing faculty to higher-paying institutions.

“At all levels, UC faces increasing competition in recruiting and retaining high-quality faculty as disparities in compensation with UC’s competitors, especially elite private universities, increase,” reads the university’s 2012 Accountability Report.

According to Associate Vice Chancellor for University Relations David Blinder, who is the campus’s main administrator in charge of fundraising, private funding plays a key role in positioning UC Berkeley as a competitor with larger private institutions.

“The private gifts that we bring in, especially when they are permanent gifts in the form of endowment gifts, gives us an important position in that competitive landscape with our peer institutions,” Blinder said. “When you look at Berkeley peers, it really is the private schools like MIT, Stanford and Ivy League schools.”

Private funding has played a particularly important role in funding the creation of endowed faculty chairs, according to King.

The largest example of this in recent years has been a $110 million gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded in 2007 that aimed to create 100 endowed faculty chairs. Likewise, the Campaign for Berkeley intends to apply $390 million of its total to creating additional chairs.

Still, the transition to additional reliance on private funds has been one of the university’s more contentious moves.

Critics of increased reliance on private funding are concerned by the impact it could have on the character of the university as well as the long-term feasibility of relying on private money.

In 2004, the UC, CSU and then-governor Arnold Schwarznegger announced the Compact for Higher Education, calling on the UC and CSU “to seek additional private resources and maximize other fund sources available to the university to support basic programs.”

The Academic Council of the University of California Academic Senate passed a resolution in October 2005 asserting that the university’s work to seek private funds to augment state cuts could alter “its academic and public service missions with impacts that are not fully understood.”

King said this kind of funding also raises issues for researchers who receive private funding from companies.

“The question is, what is the person thinking of when they shower?” King said. “Is it the university or the company? Greater and greater dependence on private sources affects the university. The trick is using them in ways that don’t significantly affect the essential character of the university.”

According to Blinder, a donation from a business to fund research benefiting that business does not fall under what the university classifies as philanthropy. Donations from companies are strictly monitored, he added. He said the objective of private fundraising for the campus is to create a long-term support structure rather than replacing lost state funds in the present.

“This is not about making Berkeley a private institution,” he said. “But it is clear that private fundraising, whether you see it in terms of tuition or private philanthropy or research funding, is going to be more and more what constitutes our financial resources.”

Jamie Applegate covers higher education. Contact her at japplegate@dailycal.org.

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Over the course of fiscal year 2010-11, the UC received almost $1.6 billion in private support — an increase of over $250 million compared to the previous year, according to the UC’s Annual Report on University and Private Support. But a March 9 summary of UC Office of the President external relations activities from December 2011 to February 2012 from UC President Mark Yudof denotes a change.

“For the 2011-12 fiscal year on a systemwide basis, a total of $775 million in overall private support was received through the second quarter, almost exactly where the University stood last year at this same time,” the document states.

According to UC spokesperson Dianne Klein, a full report on private support to the UC for the 2011-12 year is not yet available.

Still, a recent survey found that overall private donations to universities have been on the rise in 2011.

In addition to gains in private support from 2001-02 to 2010-11 cited by the annual report, a February Voluntary Support of Education survey conducted by the Council for Aid to Education found that charitable contributions to colleges and universities across the country increased 8.2 percent in 2011, reaching a total of $30.3 billion in donations.

The council ranked UC Berkeley eighteenth in the nation in its ability to obtain private donations, behind UCLA, San Francisco and a variety of private universities. UC Berkeley is ranked first in growth of private donations made to a university from 2005 to 2010, with an increase of 54.6 percent. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked second, with a 49.1 percent increase.

According to UC spokesperson Brooke Converse, the renowned medical programs at UCLA and UC San Francisco may contribute to their success in obtaining donations in addition to already strong alumni bases.

UC Berkeley began its push for increased private aid in 2005 with the inception of its fundraising project, the Campaign for Berkeley. The campaign’s goal is to reach $3 billion in donations by June 30, 2013, and as of Jan. 31, the campaign had received over $2.3 billion in donations with less than two years to go.

So far, 33 percent of the campaign’s funds have been directed to the campus endowment.

In addition to the Campaign for Berkeley, the campus launched the New Alumni Challenge in 2009. The campus is encouraging this year’s graduates to donate with the promise that their contribution will be matched through a 2 to 1 ratio, as opposed to a 1 to 1 ratio from 2009 to 2011.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the UC had received $175 million in private support through the second quarter of the 2011-12 fiscal year. In fact, it was $775 million.

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Birgeneau, who became chancellor in September 2004, presided over the campus during years in which state funding to the university plummeted and tuition increased dramatically. He worked to account for decreased funding by calling upon the federal government and private donors to pitch in, as well as launching an initiative to streamline administrative costs.

Under Birgeneau’s leadership, the campus saw a marked increase in private donations — one of the most significant being a $40 million donation from the Li Ka Shing Foundation to build a new biosciences building on the west end of campus.

The Campaign for Berkeley, launched publicly in 2008, seeks to raise more than $3 billion by 2013. As of December 2011, the campaign had already raised more than $2.3 billion, according to its website.

Birgeneau set his sights on gaining federal financial support in February by proposing a plan that would redirect $1 billion in federal aid over 10 years to public research universities like the UC. The plan has yet to gain legislative traction but could give an additional $30 million a year to UC Berkeley through federal funds that would be matched by the state government and private donors.

In addition to raising private and federal funds, Birgeneau initiated the controversial cost-cutting Operational Excellence initiative with the original goal of saving $75 million annually in administrative costs. The initiative — which began in 2009 — has resulted in the elimination of 280 staff positions, creating contention between campus administrators and protesters. According to a January report, the initiative could save the campus as much as $112 million this year.

But the protests Birgeneau has seen since becoming chancellor have extended well beyond contention over Operational Excellence.

He presided over the campus during a highly publicized 21-month tree-sit in protest of the removal of oak trees, which garnered national media attention and stalled the construction of an athletic center at Memorial Stadium. In a media conference call Tuesday, he recalled the tree-sit — which ended in September 2008 — as a “remarkable social phenomenon.”

Most recently, protesters called on Birgeneau to resign multiple times following criticism surrounding the administration and police’s handling of the Nov. 9 Occupy Cal protest.

Birgeneau’s leadership has also been marked by political activism, including staunch support for the DREAM Act.

UC Berkeley became one of the first public campuses in the state to begin a scholarship specifically for undocumented students after the first part of the California DREAM Act was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in July. Birgeneau said in the call that after stepping down, he will continue advocating for the passage of a federal DREAM Act that would give undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.

However, his political activism has also drawn criticism from some who say that, as the campus’s top-ranking administrator, he should not express controversial political opinions.

In 2008, after Birgeneau publicly announced his opposition to Proposition 8, then-Berkeley College Republicans President Josh Curtis said “schools should teach not what to do when it comes to politics but … should provide the tools for students to figure it out.”

Birgeneau said in the conference call that when he interviewed for position of chancellor, he told the committee that he had strong opinions on providing access to education for low-income and the “most disadvantaged” students.

“I said if (the UC Board of Regents) appointed me as chancellor, they should prepare for the fact I would not be reluctant to express my opinion on issues that might be controversial,” Birgeneau said. “I have tried to stay in the gray area in fairness because I represent the entire community, but I feel that university chancellors and presidents have an obligation to provide moral leadership.”

Senior staff writer J.D. Morris contributed to this report.

Amruta Trivedi is the lead academics and administration reporter.

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The Voluntary Support of Education survey conducted by the Council for Aid to Education found that charitable contributions to colleges and universities across the country increased 8.2 percent in 2011, reaching a total of $30.3 billion in donations. UC Berkeley — which ranked in the top 20 earners along with UCLA and UC San Francisco — has increased its efforts toward raising private funds through a campaign emulating those of private universities.

David Blinder, UC Berkeley’s associate vice chancellor for university relations, said that with state funding having dropped to a total of $220 million this year, funding from private donors has become an important part of the way the campus funds itself.

UC Berkeley ranked 18th in the survey, with a total of $283.35 million in donations in 2011.

“Tuition is now a major source of revenue in a way that historically it wasn’t for public colleges, as well as philanthropy,” Blinder said. “Philanthropy was always key in the private university world. That was their life blood, whereas we had traditionally relied on public support. We did need to learn from the privates.”

In 2005, the Campaign for Berkeley was created with the goal of raising $3 billion by 2013, in order to channel funds toward undergraduate scholarships, faculty chairs and research, among other endeavors. Campaign spokesperson Jose Rodriguez said $2.34 billion had been raised as of Dec. 31, 2011.

A similar five-year fundraising campaign at Stanford University — The Stanford Challenge — raised $6.2 billion upon its conclusion in February, enough to build or renovate 38 buildings, provide funding for 139 new endowed faculty positions and create 366 new graduate fellowships.

Stanford ranked first in the survey’s list of top fundraising universities, with a total of $709.42 million in donations received in 2011.

Despite the increasing importance of private funding, UCLA spokesperson Phil Hampton said it should not be seen as a major solution for tight budgets. UCLA ranked eighth in the survey as the top fundraising public university, garnering $415.03 million in support in 2011.

“It’s important to know that private giving cannot be seen as a replacement of state funding,” Hampton said. “Most gifts come with restrictions and are intended for specific uses — uses that aren’t funded by direct state support.”

Private support for university needs that are not funded directly by the state — such as endowments and capital projects — increased 13.6 percent in 2011 and “follows declining or stagnant levels of giving in recent years,” the survey states.

Private fundraising might be more difficult for public universities to engage in because of a lack of alumni awareness of a need for such funding, according to John Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley.

“The fact is it will be very difficult for nothing but the name-brand, elite public universities to generate large donations to help subsidize the operating costs of the vast majority of public college and universities,” Douglass said in an email. “The alumni of public institutions on average come from less affluent parts of society and have less to give.”

However, Blinder said that much of the success of UC Berkeley’s fundraising campaign has been motivated by an increasing awareness on the part of donors that public universities need more financial support to replace lost state funding.

“For a while, it was difficult to get that message across,” Blinder said. “We are a state university, and we’re committed to the mission, but at this point, the figure is that just over 10 percent of our budget is coming from the state.”

Jamie Applegate covers higher education.

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The UC’s endowment assets — which are composed of money or property that is donated to the university — experienced a rebound of nearly $1 billion in the 2009-10 fiscal year. This could affect students financially and academically by providing faculty with additional support and students with more financial aid options in a time of declining state support, according to David Blinder, UC Berkeley associate vice chancellor for university relations.

“With state support declining, we are encouraging private donors to give private support,” said UC spokesperson Steve Montiel. “Private support is necessary, even more so with these times. It’s never been seen as a replacement for state funding.”

According to Blinder, after the stock market crashed in 2008, the UC’s endowments dropped nearly $1.8 billion, and the campus’s endowments dropped over $540 million during the 2008-09 fiscal year. The rebound for last fiscal year resulted in a growth of over $255 million for the endowment at UC Berkeley, according to the UC Annual Endowment Report for the fiscal year ending in June 2010.

According to the report, the total UC Berkeley endowment value rose from a total of approximately $2.35 billion in 2009 to approximately $2.6 billion in 2010. According to Jose Rodriguez, campus endowment campaign spokesperson, the 2010-11 fiscal year’s audited endowment value will not be known until October 2011.

According to Rodriguez, spendable funds are pulled from the endowment income, not the endowment principal.

Blinder said funds from the endowment are used for everything from basic campus operational costs to funding fellowships and scholarships both in academics and sports. Students benefit from endowed funds through the campus’s ability to support its faculty and through financial aid endowments, he added.

“When we have endowments for faculty support, we are able to compete with the very best universities across the country for recruiting faculty and also retaining faculty,” he said. “Berkeley is always a favorite target among the wealthier private universities for outstanding faculty.”

According to Rodriguez, UC Berkeley’s total endowment is composed of two parts. The UC Board of Regents — which manages an endowment for the whole UC system — manages a portion of the systemwide endowment that goes to the campus, and the UC Berkeley Foundation manages the other portion of the campus endowment.

Blinder added that roughly two-thirds of the campus’s endowment is managed by the board and the other third is managed by the foundation.

According to Blinder, fundraising for endowments is done on a campus-by-campus basis rather than as a collective effort throughout the UC. He added that fundraising for the campus endowment has been a challenge.

“(Raising awareness is) a challenge for us because, unlike our private peers who have for a very long time been sending a message out about the importance of endowment-giving, our constituencies have always thought that the core operations of the university are so generously funded by the state,” he said.

Over the course of the campus endowment campaign — The Campaign for Berkeley — hundreds of millions of dollars have been given in the form of fellowships and scholarships support, Blinder said. Those are directly benefiting the students who are either coming to the campus or are already here and depend on that support.

Looking to the future, Blinder said he expects that the endowment will continue to grow as donors become more aware of the importance of endowment-giving in light of decreased funding from the state.

“I’m sure it will (continue to grow) as the word gets out about how the state has been pulling back its support of the UC system,” he said.

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