“We need your help,” the message reads, directing intrigued users to the website of The Open Access Initiative at Berkeley.

In stark blue lettering, the initiative lays out its cause: “Public funding demands public benefit … We should not give our rights away for free.” And finally, “We must not lose access to our own research.”

This local effort is part of the broader open access movement, which has gained momentum in recent years. The movement is especially appealing to science and technology researchers who say their work is being used for the profit of publishers that contribute little to the research or editing process.

Open access has even garnered support at the state and federal levels, including in the Obama administration, which mandated in February that all science papers funded with federal dollars be made accessible to the public within a year of publication.

In California, a bill recently introduced in the state Assembly, AB 609, would require public institutions like UC Berkeley that receive state funds for research to make the results of that research freely available online to the public.

“(My job) is to tell people that this is an issue,” said state Assemblymember Brian Nestande, R-Palm Desert, who authored the bill. “This research acts as a building block for learning and innovation, and we need to provide access to it if we want our students to be the best and brightest.”

A broken system

The University of California recently announced its support for AB 609, saying in a statement that the increasing cost of journal subscriptions often restricts access to research results, which “runs counter to the spirit in which UC faculty, researchers and students undertake their scholarly activity.”

“I think we have a system that’s broken,” said university librarian Tom Leonard. “Libraries were established in the first place for people to use freely, so if we have a situation where libraries can’t afford to buy these publications, it really flips the library idea on its head.”

Currently, the university spends around $30 million annually on access to 7,500 academic journals, according to UC spokesperson Steve Montiel. He noted, however, that individual campus libraries may purchase other titles on their own.

Brain Research, published by Elsevier, and The Journal of Comparative Neurology from Wiley are the most expensive journals to which the university subscribes — it spends $300,000 on those two journals alone, Montiel said.

Figures like these have compelled researchers, administrators and librarians to demand policy changes, citing wasteful spending of taxpayer money and the moral obligation of researchers to provide the results of their scholarship to the public free of charge.

The way UC Berkeley biology professor Michael Eisen sees it, there is no reason academic texts should not be publicly accessible. In fact, he says, researchers should be “embarrassed” if they publish studies — oftentimes funded by taxpayer money — in closed-access journals, unavailable to other researchers or interested members of the public.

Eisen likens this role of the publisher to that of an obstetrician who delivers the “baby” of the researcher. The obstetrician then says, “I deliver the baby, I own the baby and you can pay a certain amount of money every year to keep the baby.”

“It’s exactly this kind of business transaction involved in the publishing business,” Eisen said. “They play a role in the process of delivering ‘the baby,’ but at the end of the day, the parents own the baby, not the doctor.”

Access denied

While Eisen and others in academia have been pointing fingers at the publishing industry for years, those outside the traditional academic sphere have begun to take up the cause.

Most prominent was open access activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this year after being charged with multiple felonies for downloading millions of academic articles on the online database JSTOR with the intent of making them freely available on the Internet. Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison if convicted.

Many were horrified by this apparent case of prosecutorial overreach, and Swartz quickly became the movement’s martyr, of sorts.

The Open Access Initiative, founded by UC Berkeley undergraduates Tony Chen and Rodrigo Ochigame, is attempting to make the case for open access to those who might normally be uninterested in such issues. The initiative has been reaching out to students as well as faculty and staff members to impel them to take action on moral grounds.

“We believe knowledge is a fundamental human right,” Chen said. “At this well-endowed and prestigious institution, we have access to these materials, but many people do not have access like we do.”

As things currently stand, an individual can only access academic articles in closed-access journals if he or she pays for a subscription or has access through an affiliated university or organization. UC Berkeley students have unlimited access to many journals — including those aggregated in JSTOR and other publication databases.

According to Library Journal, the most expensive journals are those related to science, technology and medicine. The average price of a subscription to a chemistry journal, for example, is more than $4,000 — and that’s for just one journal. Many journals are focused on narrow topics like space physics or heterocyclic chemistry, forcing researchers to subscribe to multiple journals to access the full range of research in their fields.

Even more concerning is the rapid rate of increase in journal prices. Between 2012 and 2013, the average journal price rose by 6 percent — on top of the 6 percent that prices increased in the previous year, according to Library Journal.

“(Publishers) should be paid for their role in the process, but the simple idea behind the open access movement is that there’s no reason why publishers should control research literature — it serves no one’s interest,” Eisen said. “The system exists only because we let it exist.”

However, some publishers say there is good cause for these price increases.

Journal price increases reflect increases in global research budgets and outputs, said Tom Reller, Elsevier’s vice president of Global Corporate Relations, in an email. He noted that countries around the globe are investing more in research, which in turn has resulted in more articles being submitted to and published in journals.

Elsevier is the largest publisher of academic journals, publishing more than 2,000 journals, including some of the most prestigious, like The Lancet.

In 2012, Elsevier was the target of an international boycott by scholars who accused the publisher of hindering public access to research because of the exorbitant price of many of its journals.

“I don’t think those costs have ‘shot up so much’,” Reller said. “In fact, on an article-by-article basis, the costs per download have declined each year as electronic dissemination continues to proliferate and improve.”

Reller emphasized that Elsevier supports open access, citing the company’s nearly 40 fully open-access journals and more than 1,600 hybrid titles that accept open-access articles.

However, according to Nestande, a lobbyist from Elsevier’s parent company, Reed Elsevier, indicated that the company was opposed to AB 609. The Association of American Publishers also publicly testified in opposition to the legislation, Nestande said.

Challenges moving forward

Because it seems unlikely that publishers will lead the charge for open access, activists and researchers like Eisen have taken up the issue for themselves.

Eisen was one of the first promoters of open access and, in fact, is the founder of the Public Library Of Science, which publishes the biggest open-access journal in the world.

According to Judson King, director of the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, the basic difficulty with open access is finding a financial model that works.

“There are costs, so who is going to pay them?” he said. “The word ‘open access’ means the user of the information does not pay — anyone can get ahold of the information without having to pay it.”

The PLOS model, in which authors pay a relatively minimal fee up front to get their work published, is becoming the most common form of open-access journal, King said. Grants that fund the original research can be used to pay this fee as well. Eisen hopes that, eventually, universities will cover the costs, repurposing just a portion of the millions they already spend on access to subscription-based journals.

However, while open access has been largely successful in the sciences, the movement has been almost nonexistent in the humanities.

“It’s very clear what open access means for science, (which gets) published in journals,” King said. “It’s less clear what that model would be for books, and the humanities (publishes) much more books.”

Currently, fewer open-access publishing outlets exist for humanities than for the hard sciences, said Molly Van Houweling, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and an expert on intellectual property.

Additionally, humanities and social science journals have not increased in price nearly as much as science, technology and medical journals, making price increases not as much of a concern for researchers in those areas. As a result, open access has been less embraced within these fields, although many humanities researchers say they are theoretically supportive of such a policy.

“I think my UC Berkeley colleagues across all disciplines do scholarship at least in part for the purpose of disseminating it to society at large and benefiting the public,” Van Houweling said. “The challenge is figuring out how to accomplish that using sustainable publishing models.”

However, Eisen says PLOS has already done that and is a “profitable nonprofit.”

Millennials leading the charge

While many scholars have expressed support for open access in years past, the movement’s current momentum can be traced to the place where open access exists — the Internet.

In the age of Wikipedia and Reddit, in which trading information and ideas has become expected, some believe it is inevitable that the open access movement has struck the right chords.

“The reason why open access has gained popular currency is that we’re seeing a rise in the culture of collaborative technology,” Chen said. “Journal and journal database prices have increased at an alarming rate as library funds have shrunk. The Internet publishing model has rendered these paradigms antiquated.”

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

The post Campus joins movement demanding access to research appeared first on The Daily Californian.

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.

The post Birgeneau leaves legacy of complicated commitment to public mission appeared first on The Daily Californian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tight pockets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brown could not be directly reached for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward

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

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

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

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

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

The post Relationship of Dirks and Brown could define future of state’s public higher education appeared first on The Daily Californian.

In a Monday report published via the campus’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau outlined a plan that would give each UC campus greater control of its affairs. Administrators George Breslauer, Judson King, John Wilton and Frank Yeary co-authored the document. Under the proposal, the regents would delegate control over campus-specific administrative matters — including capital projects, academic programs and salaries — to governing boards. While the solutions presented in the document are welcome motivators for a conversation that must continue, as the report’s authors intended, the solutions do not reflect the UC’s collaborative legacy or spirit.

Streamlining the decision-making process to better serve each UC campus’s needs has definite benefits. The report is correct in stating that the UC system needs to adapt to “fundamental and ongoing changes” to remain academically excellent. But the cost at which Birgeneau and his co-authors suggest upholding the university’s position as the greatest institution of public higher education in the world may not be worth the benefits.

That this proposal came from administrators at UC Berkeley is no great wonder. Of course an idea for increased autonomy over campus decisions would come from the most renowned and one of the most financially secure institutions in the system. The report’s plan is bereft of any sort of altruism toward fellow campuses. As the UC system’s crown jewel, Berkeley stands to benefit greatly from increased autonomy — the campus is in a better position to compete for state and private funds than perhaps any of its sister schools.

But UC Berkeley is at its best when it lifts up every other campus toward excellence. The system was designed to facilitate this sort of collective brain trust. Though the plan outlined by Birgeneau and his co-authors would retain a symbolic connection between all campuses in name, the suggestion increases practical competition and erodes the inherent, intangible camaraderie among every University of California.

In the end, the report did what it aimed to — create a new branch of dialogue regarding issues assaulting the system, with figures like UC President Mark Yudof and campus professor Yale Braunstein immediately throwing their voices against the proposal. Again, though, plans to promote UC excellence must never unfairly advantage powerful campuses over less fortunate ones in achieving that goal.

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