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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Javier Panzar/Senior Staff

UC President Mark Yudof spoke at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, answering questions about his tenure as president and the complicated problems that public higher education has faced in recent years.

Yudof, who is set to step down in August after almost five years in office, leaves behind a mixed legacy including both tuition increases and improvements to financial aid programs. Only months after taking office, Yudof faced a plunging economy and harsh statewide cuts to the UC system.

Tuesday’s event was part of a speaker series on California’s future and was organized by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy research institution.

Among the several topics discussed at the event, Yudof addressed his relationship with Gov. Jerry Brown, the challenge of delineating responsibilities between individual UC campuses and the UC Office of the President and most importantly, he said, the burdensome pension obligations that affect the UC system’s finances.

“There are many challenges facing higher education,” Yudof said. “The first is, of course, financial issues and the budget.”

He also addressed what he considers other pressing issues, including the fact that the UC system should be enrolling 30,000 more students than it currently does while also providing more opportunities for low-income and underrepresented students.

These problems do not have simple solutions, Yudof said. He noted that reforming the UC’s pension system and increasing graduation and transfer rates are multifaceted issues that require an executive.

Yudof also talked about the role of online education in the UC system, tentatively proposing a program in which students rejected from the university could take a year of online courses with the intent of transferring. But this would have its own set of financial aid implications for students who cannot afford computers, Yudof said — another example of the complexity of improving educational outcomes.

His advice to the next UC president, who has not yet been selected, was to continue searching for nonstate sources of funding and, more importantly, to understand how to work with the other regents and chancellors of the university.

Finding any remedy was only “10 percent of the solution,” Yudof said. “The other 90 percent is selling it to people.”

He also lent his own advice to incoming students.

“Study what interests you,” Yudof said. “Make sure you call your parents at least once a week. Find a subset of people on campus who share your interests, because universities can be large. They will help you keep your sense of belonging.”

Contact Sophie Ho at sho@dailycal.org.

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The Berkeley Forum/Courtesy

The Berkeley Forum hosted a panel on the federal fiscal crisis Wednesday evening, bringing together prominent speakers from both ends of the political spectrum to discuss pressing political and economic issues facing the nation.

The panel, the first of its kind hosted by the forum, featured former secretary of labor Robert Reich, former policy director of the Romney campaign Lanhee Chen and Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy Henry Brady.

The panelists agreed that the deficit was a problem but differed on how big of an issue it is and when it should be addressed.

A major point of debate was the federal sequester, which Reich characterized as “very, very dangerous” while Chen played down its effects.

“We finally have a mechanism in place to reduce spending,” Chen said. “It’s hard to cut spending because, let’s face it, everyone likes stuff.”

In one of the more dramatic moments of the evening, Brady turned to Chen and pointedly asked if “Romneycare” was really the same as “Obamacare,” a major criticism Mitt Romney faced during the course of his campaign.

The question received large laughs from the audience, which filled the lecture hall to capacity as nearly 150 students, faculty and community members crowded into the room to watch the debate.

The panel, moderated by Jason Willick, the assistant opinion page editor at The Daily Californian, had lighter moments as well, as the speakers joked about their political differences and agreed that today’s fiscal issues are serious no matter which side of the spectrum one is on.

“The issues that divide us … are hard for most Americans to understand,” Reich said. “One of the things driving animosity is that Americans are working harder but (earning less). Most people are frustrated and angry.”

He noted that wealth inequality has not been this severe since the 1980s, if not the Great Depression.

Fred Wilkinson, a retired physician who lives in Berkeley, said he attended the talk because, as a political junkie, he enjoys the sort of debate the Berkeley Forum provides, especially when it comes to health care.

“I’m frustrated, and I don’t know if there’s a solution,” he said. “I was impressed (with the panel). I thought the questions elicited significant responses (from the speakers).”

UC Berkeley freshman Arturo Gutierrez said he heard about the event on Facebook and, as a political science major, was personally interested in the topics discussed.

“It seemed really interesting that both sides could agree on a lot of the issues,” he said.

Wilkinson echoed these sentiments, saying that he was especially interested in what Chen, a conservative Republican, had to say.

“I thought he melded in very well,” he said. “He didn’t seem as right or as conservative as one might expect.”

In one somewhat surprising moment of accord, Chen agreed with Reich when an audience member asked why a flat tax wouldn’t be a good solution to ongoing fiscal problems. Both said that it was not a prudent solution for the nation. Chen noted that the Romney campaign seriously considered such a proposal but concluded that a flat tax wouldn’t make sense for the nation’s fiscal needs.

“I was appreciative of how moderate and reasonable (Chen) is,” Reich said after the talk, noting that he had never met Chen before.

The Berkeley Forum plans to host similar events later this semester on other topics like gun control, said Pierre Bourbonnais, the president of the forum and a former member of The Daily Cal.

“The idea started my freshman year over a conversation I was having with a friend of mine about free will and determinism,” he said. “The idea was to organize a panel on campus, bringing together a philosopher, neuroscientist, physicist and a psychologist to discuss free will  — basically three or four people from different fields.”

He added that the forum was created in the spirit of the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard or the Yale Political Union.

“Many colleges, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, have prominent undergraduate organizations that put on debates and panels with famous and distinguished speakers,” he said. “In the long term, we see ourselves having top experts from academia and journalism as well as leading cultural and political icons.”

Chen said afterward that the appeal of the campus community was a major reason he decided to participate in the panel.

“There’s lots of great thinking (at UC Berkeley) … and to be part of that community was very attractive to me,” he said.

Sara Grossman is a news editor. Contact her at sgrossman@dailycal.org.

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Andrew Kuo/Staff

UC Berkeley students have initiated a campaign for an oil tax to generate funds for education, among other government entities.

Californians for Responsible Economic Development — the student-run committee — hopes to repeat the success of Proposition 30 by focusing on mobilizing students.

The California Modernization and Economic Development Act would implement a 9.5 percent severance tax on oil and natural gas extracted in California and expects to create between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in revenue. The new revenues will be dedicated to increasing funding for education, state parks and county governments, according to the campaign’s website.

California is the fourth-largest producer of crude oil in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2012 report. But according to UC Berkeley student and communications director for the group Sofie Karasek, the Golden State is the only major oil-producing state that does not have a significant severance tax on oil and natural gas.

John Ellwood, a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, expressed concern regarding the impact of the proposed legislation on consumers. Although such severance taxes in theory pass their costs on to producers rather than to consumers, he said that in practice this is often not the case. Additionally, due to the political and economic strength of oil producers, he does not expect the initiative to succeed.

“I’m personally in favor of the proposal, but I don’t see the politics of it,” he said.

The initiative was recently endorsed by the UC Student Association, according to the campaign website. UC Berkeley student and campaign manager Harrison Tibbetts said he expects support in the coming weeks from California State University and California community college student associations.

If the initiative passes, $300 million will be allocated to K-12, and $900 million will be allocated to higher education institutions in the hopes of restoring tuition to 2010 levels.

California businesses would receive about $440 million in subsidies from the tax to transition from traditional energies to carbon-free and reduced-carbon sources of energy, according to the campaign’s website. An additional $66 million annually would be allocated to California state parks, land conservation and the reduction of user fees, while $2 million to $6 million would be allocated to county governments.

“Our proposal is more of a jobs bill,” Tibbetts said. “We want to create socially responsible programs that won’t create new expenses but rather encourage new investments.”

Greg Hayes, communications director for Senate Appropriations chair Kevin De Leon, D-Los Angeles, said the senator philosophically agrees with the proposition’s goals. But due to recent tax increases and other bonds expected to be introduced to the Legislature this year, Hayes said that at this point, the state needs to focus more on fiscal discipline than another tax increase.

“We want to make sure we do the types of things that ensure economic growth first,” Hayes said.

Even with the success of Prop. 30, passing the legislation will not be easy. In the next few months, the committee will have to raise significant sums of money and quickly establish widespread grassroots support.

“The question is, do you have a lot of money?” Ellwood said. “To get on the ballot, you need millions to sign, or you need the social demand. But citizens of California have just raised their taxes. I don’t see them supporting another tax hike.”

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org.

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The campus community is mourning the transfer of longtime campus figure Bruce Cain, who took up a new position at Stanford University in June after 23 years with the University of California.

The former executive director of UCDC made his way down the bay to take a new position teaching political science and running the Bill Lane Center for the American West, an interdisciplinary unit that sponsors research and holds conferences on history, culture and policy in western North America.

Cain said he decided to leave campus primarily for new opportunities and resources and not because of an increased salary. He said he will be earning “only slightly more” at Stanford than he did at UC Berkeley. His earnings in 2011 totaled $234,237.66, according to The Sacramento Bee’s database of public employee salaries.

“I felt like I had one more job in me at age 63, and there was nothing more I could do for Cal or UC,” Cain said.
As the executive director of UCDC from 2005 to 2012, Cain led efforts to implement an alternative financial model for UCDC based off student fees rather than state funds. Cain said after the center became more financially stable, he could sense that he would not make a difference for the university anymore.

The interim director of the center is Melanie DuPuis, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

“I am really saddened at his leaving — he was an enormous contributor in a variety of ways,” said Henry Brady, dean of the campus’s Goldman School of Public Policy, who has known Cain since the two were graduate students. “He created a model that ensured that UCDC really delivered and didn’t just rely on funds from UCOP. We’re really lucky to have him.”

Cain came to UC Berkeley in 1989 as a professor of political science from the California Institute of Technology. In addition to serving as executive director of UCDC, Cain was director of the Institute of Governmental Studies on campus between 1999 and 2007.

He garnered a number of awards during his time on campus, including the Morris and Edna Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service in 2000 and an award from the campus College of Letters and Science for distinguished research mentoring of undergraduates in 2003.

“He cared a lot about scholarship and the UC and cared a lot about undergraduate students,” Brady said. “He’s just one of those people — when he spoke, you’d stop and say, ‘I just gotta listen to this guy.’”

Cain said his favorite memories during his time with the campus “will  always be” of the people he interacted with.
“It’s the colleagues you work with and the students you teach,” Cain said. “Alas, the colleagues age and pass on, but the former students are scattered all over the country, and they keep in touch. Watching how many of them have risen to important positions … has been very gratifying.”

Contact Geena Cova at gcova@dailycal.org.

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It should be noted that the amount of this generous gift equals the amount by which the campus Intercollegiate Athletics, or IA, overspent what it generated last year.  It is important to note that the campus does not clamp down on IA’s overspending, but instead the campus provides IA with subsidies from student fees and from the Chancellor’s Discretionary fund – not just last year, but each and every year.

IA has drained campus coffers of over $88 million from 2003 to 2011, funds that could have been used instead to support the university’s core mission of “undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, research, and other kinds of public service.”

On Nov. 5, 2009, the UC Berkeley faculty passed by an overwhelming majority the “Academics First!” Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate resolution that recommended IA t cease its continual violation of what was the existing UC policy (Chapter A-783-1 of the UC Accounting Manual) that set forth IA should operate as a self-supporting auxiliary.

Yet these last few years have seen the IA continue overspending with impunity, in excess of $10 million annually, while telephones were being yanked out of faculty offices in many departments on campus as a cost-saving measure and while the campus library system was being forced to cut 25 percent of its staff over the last five years, as its national ranking, according to the Association of Research Libraries, tumbled from third down to eighth from the 2002-03 to 2010-11 academic years. Even the Chancellor’s Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics admitted in its July 6, 2010 report that “the rest of campus has suffered physically … in real threats to the ability of the faculty, staff and students to learn and to work, such as 63 chronic roof leaks … and antiquated laboratory facilities.”

To respect what the faculty of UC Berkeley recommended when they passed the Academic Senate’s resolution, as well as what was the established UC Policy, this generous gift to the IA should replace the campus subsidies for 2012-2013 school year.  This donation should liberate the students from the burden of paying fees directly to the IA that enabled it to overspend what it generates and should free up the precious Chancellor’s discretionary funds to support the core academic mission which is under siege financially. Restoring the campus’s library system which has suffered more than $5 million in budget cuts over the past five years according to the university librarian, seems like a good place to start.

Brian Barsky is a UC Berkeley professor of computer science and vision science.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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The donation — the fund’s largest to UC Berkeley to date — will help support a wide range of programs for intercollegiate athletics as well as the construction of infrastructure and the renewal of current facilities, according to campus spokesperson Jose Rodriguez.

“The campus is honored to recognize Lisa and Doug and to affirm our shared ideals in the historic treasure that is Memorial Stadium,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said in a statement released Monday.

Birgeneau added that the gift “has tremendous potential to inspire many more of our alumni and friends to contribute and help meet Berkeley’s greatest needs.”

The fund, which was established in 1992, has previously donated to the Haas School of Business, Goldman School of Public Policy and the College of Letters and Science, among other UC Berkeley institutions.

“This … is another expression of our commitment to both the academic and athletic mission of the greatest public university on the planet,” Douglas Goldman said in a statement released Monday. “As the fourth of five generations to have attended and supported Cal, I very much hope that our gift will inspire others — alumni and friends — to step up and do likewise.”

The newly renovated Memorial Stadium, which is slated to reopen Sept. 1, will contain a new 1.5-acre gateway dubbed the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Plaza, thanks to the donation.

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Gracie Malley/Staff

In a recently-published study co-authored by a UC Berkeley Haas School of Business professor, statistical research methods widely used by researchers were proven instead sometimes to yield false results.

In the study, Leif Nelson and researchers Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn from the Wharton School of Business ran a test case where they used computer simulations to demonstrate how listening to different songs such as “Hot Potato” and The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” can make people feel older or younger.

The authors manipulated the variables in their experiment to show that experimental subjects who listened to “Hot Potato” felt older afterward while those who listened to The Beatles felt younger.  This experiment reveals how easy it was for researchers to make decisions to collect only some data or exclude certain observations and therefore draw false conclusions about the relationship between the results and the causes, which were actually a matter of chance.

“The problem (the study’s authors) document is not that researchers are being dishonest or intentionally biased, but that researchers are using a statistical methodology that is not sensible,” said Professor Robert MacCoun of the Goldman School of Public Policy, who teaches a graduate course on research design and data collection.

Among 2,000 psychologists surveyed in their study, one in 10 research psychologists have introduced similar types of false data into the scientific record, according to a joint study conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nelson and his fellow authors offer several solutions to solve the problem of ambiguity in their study, asking authors to include observations or data that they chose leave out of their final results. They also ask journal reviewers to oversee that researchers follow the guidelines described in the study.

While the study’s suggestions have not been implemented in any formal manner, Nelson said he has been contacted by fellow researchers from a variety of disciplines who have started to practice the guidelines laid out in the paper.

Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor at UC Santa Barbara, said he likes the report’s recommendations but is not convinced they are ideal solutions.

“I am not persuaded it is the ideal. I think what is required is an open repository that logs the experiments, initial hypothesis and associated measurements that come before conducting the experiments,” Schooler said.

Although their views on how to solve the problem vary, all three researchers of the study agree the findings do not necessarily reflect that the discipline of psychology is flawed.

“Despite the potential of false positives, it’s important that the field is finding its flaws and trying to get better,” Nelson said.

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Gage Skidmore/Courtesy

Independent United States presidential candidate Buddy Roemer will speak at the Goldman School of Public Policy Tuesday.

Roemer, a four-term congressman and former governor of Louisiana, will speak in Room 105 of the public policy school at 6 p.m. He was a congressman from 1981 to 1988 as a “Conservative Democrat” before serving as governor from 1988 to 1992. He now works as the CEO of Business First Bank, a community bank in Louisiana, according to his campaign website.

He is participating in Americans Elect, an online national primary that will place a nonpartisan nomination on the ballot.

Roemer has begun a tour of speaking at various colleges, and will stop at the University of the Pacific and UC Davis before speaking at UC Berkeley.

Alisha Azevedo is the assistant university news editor.

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