The event, independently organized by the Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholars Association, was created in the spirit of the widely popular TED conference, an annual event that brings the world’s leading thinkers together to share their passions with the public.

The seven-hour conference explored the theme of “Catalyzing Change” through three 90-minute sessions: “Dream,” “Create” and “Impact.” Each session had four to five speakers and began with an entertainment component that eased the audience into the atmosphere of each theme.

The “Dream” session started with a performance from the campus’s California Golden Overtones, an all-female student-run a cappella group.

Notable speakers during the “Dream” session were Kim Polese, chair of social finance startup ClearStreet Inc., and Erica Wides, the host and co-creator of a popular Heritage Radio Network cooking show.

Polese spoke about the movement to develop online education programs in an effort to make courses more readily available to students and to cut the cost of education. She called for “a revolution in teaching” and said she believes that online classes are a step in the right direction.

Wides, deploying wit and humor, livened up the crowd with her discussion of the organic food movement and the dangers of “foodiness.” She urged the crowd to live a foodiness-free lifestyle.

“Eat chickens, not chicken fingers,” she said. “Don’t drink from a bottle unless it’s alcohol, and eat fruit, not fruit bars.”

The other speakers for the “Dream” session included Eden Full, founder of Roseicollis Technologies Inc.; Curt Tofteland, founder of the Shakespeare Behind Bars program; and Robert Neuwirth, the author of two books on alternative social and economic structures.

Following the “Dream” session was a 90-minute lunch break, during which students could engage with other students and even the speakers about the ideas presented earlier. Outside Zellerbach Hall stood a mural called “Before I Die … ” that was composed of panels of black chalkboard, on which students could write down the things they want to accomplish in their lifetimes.

The mural, which attracted a lot of attention from the crowd, displayed actions such as “save a life” and “make my parents proud.”

The “Create” session followed the lunch recess and began with a performance by famed Emmy-winning flamenco dancer Yaelisa.

Highlights from this session included author of “The Male Brain” and “The Female Brain” and UC Berkeley alumna Louann Brizendine. Brizendine won the attention of the crowd with her animated PowerPoint slides and humor, impressing upon the audience that the brain is not unisex.

Dan Millman, author of “Way of the Peaceful Warrior,” spoke about a more internal change, addressing how to adapt to change and handle obstacles individually rather than as a bulk of blockages. He said that adversity and stress are sources of wisdom and compassion and that there are “hidden gifts depending on how we respond.”

“Life comes to us in waves and change,” Millman said. “We can’t predict what controls those waves, but we can learn to be a better surfer. We can always handle this moment, and the quality of this moment is the quality of our lives.”

Ananya Roy, a professor of city and regional planning and founder of the global poverty and practice minor at UC Berkeley, concluded the “Create” session with her piece entitled “(Un)knowing Poverty,” disputing the common yet inaccurate notion people have of poverty. Her work addressed the question, “Why do we see the dependent in this way, and why is our own dependency so unknown to us?”

She also addressed what she believed to be a common hole in the motives of many philanthropists who are empathetic to those suffering in developing countries yet “squirm with their encounters with the homeless panhandler of Berkeley.”

The final session, “Impact,” opened with a performance by famed Bay Area pianist Victoria Theodore.

This session featured Alex Filippenko, esteemed campus professor, speaking about the expansion of galaxies as a colossal change catalyzed by dark energy. He explained how, in tracking the galaxies moving away from Earth, one can see a change in patterns in the light of stars moving away.

The event also included 3-D robotics founder Chris Anderson, professor Karen Sokal-Gutierrez, futurist and author Cecily Sommers and media entrepreneur Mallika Chopra, and it concluded with a performance from Ambience, a student-run group that puts on glove lightshows.

Contact Virgie Hoban and Pooja Mhatre at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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Kim Polese, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and innovator, offered ideas about how to improve public education and combat the skills gap in her presentation at TEDxBerkeley.

The campus a cappella group Golden Overtones performed “Eye of the Tiger.”

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If the $500 million cut already made to the university earlier this spring were to double to $1 billion under an all-cuts budget, Yudof said the 10-campus system would be put on a path that could lead to a midyear tuition increase next January, employee layoffs, program closures throughout the university and – ultimately – a doubling of tuition to $20,000 a year.

Yudof’s testimony Friday marked the first time he has publicly detailed what a $1 billion cut to the UC could look like. Gov. Jerry Brown had predicted in April that tuition could rise to $20,000 or $25,000 under an all-cuts plan, and Yudof told the committee that he had looked at tuition projections until he was “blue in the face” and agreed that Brown’s prediction is “not far off.”

“The thing we fear the most is an all-cuts budget,” Yudof told the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review, which brought its hearing to the offices of Microsoft in Mountain View to hear the testimony of education officials and Silicon Valley business leaders.

During his testimony, Yudof – who opened his remarks by characterizing the UC system’s relationship with the state as a “bad romance,” in reference to the hit by pop star Lady Gaga – said the system is prepared to handle the initial $500 million cut. At UC Berkeley, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer has ordered $17.5 million to be cut from campus academic units and will tap into half of the campus’s $60 million central reserves to absorb its share of the $500 million systemwide cut. In total, UC Berkeley is expected to bear between $70 and $80 million worth of cuts while UCLA will absorb around $96 million.

But Yudof told the committee that if additional cuts come once the new fiscal year begins on July 1, the university will have little time to plan to absorb them and will most likely resort to “geometrical” increases in tuition and more program cuts.

“We are not flexible in the middle of the academic year … all things are not possible because we have made commitments to our students, our staff, our faculty,” he said, speaking in a sober tone. “It took over a hundred years to build these great institutions, but they can be destroyed.”

Yudof was joined at the hearing by several Silicon Valley business leaders, who all gave credit to the state’s public universities for producing the human capital that tech startups rely on for success, a rare pairing of public and private interests.

“We are at a point of no return,” said Kim Polese, a tech entrepreneur and member of Tech Net, a Silicon Valley lobby group. “Your choices will carry enormous impacts for years to come, and as you weigh those choices, I urge you not to make further cuts to UC and higher education. The impact of further cuts would be devastating to California’s economic vitality and to current and future generations.”

Polese, a UC Berkeley graduate, told the committee that large corporations like Genentech, Qualcomm and Amyris were all founded by UC graduates, and without California’s universities, the state’s economic future is at great risk.

The often dramatic concerns of the education and business leaders were somewhat mitigated by recent news from the state Department of Finance projecting a larger-than-expected influx of tax revenue this spring. In a report released Thursday, the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated the new revenue will trim the state’s $15.4 billion deficit by $2.54 billion, though finance department officials cautioned that until new costs are factored in, the state’s budget is still in flux.

Changes in population-driven services like schools, health care and correction facilities have to be factored in against new revenues, according to a statement issued by Ana Matosantos, director of the department. Those revenues will not be weighed until Brown releases his spring revision of the state budget on May 16. Until then, Brown’s plan to fill the state’s deficit remains unclear.

Though his original budget released in January proposed cutting $12.5 billion from state expenditures and levying $14 billion in voter-dependent tax extensions, Brown failed to garner the two-thirds majority vote required to place the tax extensions on the June ballot and only ended up signing $11.2 billion in cuts in March.

What remains to be seen is if Brown’s May revision of the budget resorts to an all-cuts approach to bridge the deficit. A profile of Brown in The New York Times published online Sunday cites sources who attended a private meeting of Democratic legislators where Brown defended his budget plan by saying he believes in the “Hernando Cortes approach … when you hit the shore, burn the ships. There is no Plan B.”

But for the University of California, the difference between $500 million and $1 billion in cuts could be devastating, considering that the cuts will come out of the $2.9 billion the university received in state general funding in 2010-11.

For now, the UC will have to wait for Brown’s May 16 revision of the budget to come out to see if its prospects have changed. And though the new $2.54 billion in revenue offers a small reprieve, it is not enough to fill the daunting deficit.

“(The new revenue) in no way lessens the necessity of continuing to close the rest of the budget,” said H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the state finance department. “There are a number of other factors that determine what the (deficit) will be on the 16th.”

Contact Javier Panzar at jpanzar@dailycal.org.

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