William Powers Jr. entered UC Berkeley just as the Free Speech Movement began in 1963.

Since then, Powers has held many titles, ranging from professor of law to 28th president of the University of Texas at Austin — and, now, 2014 UC Berkeley Alumnus of the Year.

“He’s a great leader, a visionary,” said UT Austin spokesperson Gary Susswein. “He’s very easy to talk to and open-minded. He listens to students and faculty to make sure everyone has a voice.”

Powers joins a list of prolific Alumnus of the Year recipients, including writer Joan Didion and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

During his undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, Powers was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry in 1967. After graduating, Powers joined the U.S. Navy for three years before graduating from Harvard Law School magna cum laude.

In 1997, Powers joined UT Austin as a professor of law before becoming dean of the law school in 2000 and the university’s president in 2006.

“He’s been one of the best presidents in UT Austin history,” Susswein said. “He’s not only committed to (UT Austin) but to higher education in general.”

Even though Powers has moved to Texas, he remains in touch with his California roots.

Powers met UC Berkeley physics professor and former chancellor Robert Birgeneau through the Association of American Universities when he became president of UT Austin. Their friendship grew stronger when Birgeneau discovered Powers was a UC Berkeley alumnus.

“I admire a lot of the work he’s done,” Birgeneau said. “He’s set a very high standard for the alumnus of the year.”

One of Powers’ many contributions to the Texas campus as president was founding the School of Undergraduate Studies, Susswein said. The school allows students to experiment with different courses before officially declaring their major.

Powers also worked to raise the four-year graduation rate of UT undergraduates and to increase diversity among the student population.

Powers’ support of holistic admissions and affirmative action was taken as far as the U.S. Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case that considered the constitutionality of using race in university admissions.

He committed to making the student body at UT Austin a more accurate representation of the diversity of the state, Birgeneau said.

Birgeneau said that when he served as chancellor of UC Berkeley, he and Powers would discuss the best ways to balance intercollegiate sports and academics.

“I like him because he’s a very straightforward person. He’s not pretentious. He’s a really decent human being whom you can trust,” Birgeneau said. “That’s the kind of Berkeley undergraduate all of us really admire.”

Contact Lydia Tuan at ltuan@dailycal.org.

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Carli Baker/Senior Staff

For the first time in five years, Mark Yudof will wake up Monday a free man. No longer will the outgoing UC president have to deal with angry accusations of screwing over students or unfairly bargaining with unions or ignoring the cries of protesters.

No longer will he be responsible for overseeing a $24.1 billion budget or managing a massive bureaucracy that supports more than 220,000 students and 170,000 faculty and staff.

After presiding over the UC system during five of the most tumultuous years of its history, Yudof stepped down Sunday to make way for former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. His departure signals the end of what may be the most significant chapter in Yudof’s decades-long career as an educator and administrator.

From blue collar to top-floor office

The president’s office is on the 12th floor of the UC headquarters building, an unassuming tower in the middle of Downtown Oakland where system administrators oversee programs that affect the broader UC system.

Yudof’s office is spacious and simple. Maps and certificates hang on the wall behind the desk, a traditional wooden worktable with a few colonial touches, including an hourglass, a quill feather and an inkwell.

But before the big desk and the colonial touches, Yudof was entirely blue collar.

The son of an electrician, Yudof completed his undergraduate education in just three years at the University of Pennsylvania and worked part time to pay for school, something he said has helped him better relate to the average worker.

Many of his detractors, however, may not be aware of his humble past. During an hourlong interview with The Daily Californian, Yudof recalled meeting with a group of union representatives who accused him of not understanding the struggles of working a physically demanding job.

“I looked at them and I said, ‘You know, I think I do understand, because when I went to undergraduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I pushed gurneys for three years,’” Yudof said. “Otherwise, I would not have been able to afford to be there.”

After graduating, Yudof practiced constitutional law for much of the late 1960s and 1970s. He worked with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and represented professors who he thought unfairly had their First Amendment rights curbed.

In 1971, he began teaching law at the University of Texas at Austin, where he spent the next 26 years in teaching and administrative positions. For the last 16 years, Yudof has led the universities of Minnesota, Texas and California.

Students “immediately assume if you’re in my job you must be someone who comes from a rich, hoity-toity-type family,” Yudof said. “Not true. I wish they’d know that.”

Tenure in office

In June 2008 Yudof stepped into an office that had been fraught with problems. His predecessor, Robert Dynes, announced his resignation in 2007, two years after it came to light that millions had been spent on extra pay and perks for administrators. Then, shortly after entering the position, Yudof was handed the first in a series of massive state budget cuts to the UC system.

“I knew we were in an economic downturn — I understood that,” Yudof said. “But I’m not a great prognosticator. We lost a billion dollars, and all of a sudden we’re bleeding.”

As budgets were slashed, tuition for Californians rose from a little more than $7,000 in 2008 to more than $12,000 today, and students throughout the UC system protested en masse.

Yudof said he harbors no ill will toward the protesters. However, impeding a public body such as the UC Board of Regents from meeting represents a lack of civility, he said.

“The real narrative is, you have the greatest public university in the world reacting to a billion-dollar reduction in their appropriation,” Yudof said. “And that we’re not building rock-climbing walls, and we’re not paying the top salaries to chancellors.”

Still, deconstructing what Yudof calls the “grand narrative” — the idea that the UC system is prohibitively expensive for poor students and that the administrative Office of the President is overrun with unnecessary bureaucracy — has been a challenge.

Yudof’s colleagues praised the job he did as president. Bruce Varner, chair of the UC Board of Regents, said Yudof helped increase efficiency and build an appropriate relationship with the board.

“In one word, he stabilized things,” Varner said. “At the end of the day, he’s a very caring leader and always cared about the students and their welfare.”

Even as tuition has soared, financial aid programs have expanded. In 2009 Yudof oversaw the implementation of the Blue and Gold opportunity plan for lower-income undergraduate students. At the time, the plan ensured that most undergraduates eligible for financial aid whose families earn less than $60,000 annually paid nothing in tuition. Today, the cap has expanded to include families whose income is below $80,000.

Former UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who stepped down in June, said that the campus tried to minimize student debt and maximize accessibility and that Yudof’s efforts helped with that process.

“I think students who don’t necessarily fully appreciate this were very well served by him during his time,” Birgeneau said.

Challenges and criticism

Still, UC Student Regent Cinthia Flores said she would have appreciated a more thorough investigation into how to save money and raise revenue before the regents raised tuition. Additionally, Flores said, she wished there had been a better avenue for students to share their input on closing the budget shortfall.

The budget wasn’t Yudof’s only challenge. The UC Student Health Insurance Plan, the university’s attempt to have a systemwide health plan for all 10 UC campuses, experienced massive changes after it was discovered that the program was carrying a deficit of more than $50 million. Yudof said he hopes students will not have to pay for what he says are past actuarial errors.

Retaining top faculty has been difficult as well. According to Yudof’s State of the UC report from May, faculty salaries lag an average of 11 percent behind comparator institutions. Earlier this year, USC lured away two prominent neuroscientists — and their research funding — from cross-town rival UCLA, for example.

Attempts at tackling other challenges have seen mixed results. Yudof said the financing model for higher education is broken, and one of his efforts to fix the flawed model, online courses, has failed to catch on as he had hoped. “An Introduction to Information,” for example, one of a handful of online courses offered at UC Berkeley last fall, saw its enrollment drop nearly 25 percent over the course of the semester.

Yudof said he thought faculty and student opposition prevented online classes from catching on faster.

Labor relations, too, have been a challenge. Although eight unions have agreed to pension reforms, a union representing health care and service workers, AFSCME 3299, has yet to reach a deal on a new contract with the UC system. The university announced Tuesday that after months of negotiations, it will implement its latest proposal without agreement from the union.

“It’s an assault on collective bargaining,” said Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME 3299. “It’s an attack on the workers that make the university run. I don’t think we’ve been in a worse place than we are today.”

The legacy

Even with these challenges, Yudof says he hopes over time that his problematic “grand narrative” will clear.

“What I was trying to do was provide virtually a free education for as many students as possible,” Yudof said, “but those who could afford to pay, to charge them more. And all that got lost in the grand narrative.”

Mitchell Handler covers higher education. Contact him at mhandler@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @mitchellhandler.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that UC tuition is more than $15,000 for the current academic year and was more than $8,900 in 2008. In fact, base-level UC tuition for resident undergraduates is $12,192 for the current academic year and was $7,126 for the 2008-2009 year, not including campus-specific fees and the cost of the university-run health insurance plan.

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According to a report released last week, sales of luxury seats from the Endowment Seating Program declined during the March-to-June quarter, falling by 77 seats. Fewer than two-thirds of the 2,902 available ESP seats have been sold since the initiative was launched.

Despite a year-to-year improvement from June 2012, the low figures represented a deeper problem underlying the Memorial Stadium project and held serious ramifications for what the funding plan aimed to do going forward. This has since changed, as the renovation funding plan is now ahead of schedule. More broadly, however, the paltry receipts from the ESP symbolized many of the stadium retrofit’s initial  flaws.

To begin with, the idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an athletics facility and a football stadium for a school that has won a division title exactly once since 1975 was perhaps too lavish. When the decision to move forward with the project was made in 2009, lowered interest rates (a result of the 2007-08 financial crisis) and the glory days of the Tedford years of Cal football lent the Memorial Stadium retrofit a sense of optimism.

In that light, making the stadium as seismically sound as possible was not only a worthy goal — particularly because the structure sits directly on top of a fault line — but it also reflected the hopefulness of the moment. Yet was it really a wise decision to spend the rough equivalent of the GDP of a small nation on a top-flight athletics compound?

New UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance John Wilton (who came to campus in 2011) recognize this and have taken steps to mitigate some of the damage that has already been done. Wilton reached out to professors from the Haas School of Business to evaluate a new plan developed by Intercollegiate Athletics for the stadium’s finances. The report the Haas professors released in March of this year addressed the previously grim fiscal reality and outlines creative steps the campus can take to generate alternative revenue.

The Haas report outlines many of the administration’s new tactics to bring the renovation funding plan back onto the path of financial sustainability. These include utilizing the stadium’s capacity as a rental space and revamping the ticket sales strategy. The new direction Dirks and Wilton seem to be taking is a positive one, to be sure, but the stadium’s financial future is far from certain.

Former UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau and former vice chancellor of administration  Nathan Brostrom were ambivalent about providing the details that were the basis of their initial revenue estimates — projections that have proven to be excessively optimistic, as the Haas report acknowledged. Disconcertingly, the authors of the Haas report note they were “unable to obtain detailed explanations of the process by which the original (revenue) forecasts were made.”

The current administration appears poised to pursue a different strategy.

Whereas Birgeneau and Brostrom’s picture of the Memorial Stadium renovation contained rosy revenue forecasts, Dirks and Wilton should be upfront with the campus community about the size of the obligation we need to meet. As stakeholders in the university, we are owed further explanations about the colossal debt obligation that our campus faces and what the options are available to tackle the problem.

At present, the quarterly reports on the stadium are easily accessible only by clicking through the clunky CalBears.com website, and Dirks has yet to fully address the students directly about the stadium’s muddled finances.

Publicly engaging the student body and making resources such as the quarterly reports more readily available would go a long way toward bringing the campus up to speed on the issue.

The post Flawed from the beginning appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Contact Mitchell Handler and Libby Rainey at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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Jacob Brown/Staff

The University of California released its annual report on systemwide employee compensation for the 2012 calendar year today.

The 2012 gross salaries of more than 191,000 career faculty and staff employees, as well as part-time, temporary and student employees, are disclosed in a searchable database on the UC website.

The database includes big-name UC figures like:

• UC President Mark Yudof: $600,599.00
• Former UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau: $445,716.00
• UC Berkeley professor Alexei Filippenko: $247,676.20
• UC Berkeley professor and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich: $246,199.84
• UC Berkeley professor Ananya Roy: $147,161.15
• UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo: $329,451.07
• Former Cal Football coach Jeff Tedford: $2,146,581.24
• UCLA visiting professor James Franco: $12,249.84

Shirin Ghaffary is the executive news editor. Contact her at sghaffary@dailycal.org.

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J. Hannah Lee/Staff

The UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facility will implement a one-time fee increase of $3 per month for all nonstudent members starting Sept. 1.

RSF officials say fee hikes are necessary, as the cost of running programs and facilities has risen considerably in several years, but membership fees have not increased.

UC Berkeley faculty and staff fees will increase annually from $420 per year to $456 per year. Community members, defined as people who are not associated with the university, will see their annual fees increase from $744 to $780, and fees for alumni will rise from $648 to $684 per year.

For community members, the fee increase will not affect short-term memberships, day passes or the Cal Star Program, a membership plan for individuals with disabilities. The $10 semester membership fee UC Berkeley students pay to use the facility will also not increase.

“This increase is needed to offset rising costs of current operations,” said director of recreational sports Mike Weinberger, who cited a mandated 2 percent raise for all nonunionized university employees, implemented by former chancellor Robert Birgeneau in March. He said that benefits and salaries are the facility’s largest expenses.

“Cal Rec Sports does not have the power to shift the costs to currently enrolled students,” Weinberger said. “The only (guaranteed) funding we get from the university comes from campus-based fees, so we have to come up with the money elsewhere.”

Enrolled students pay compulsory campus-based fees, which are used to fund the university’s programs and facilities and cannot be changed without a student government referendum. Referendums passed in 1981 and 2006 authorized some of the fees currently funding RSF operations.

Weinberger added that a membership fee increase was planned even if a referendum from earlier this year, the health and wellness referendum, had gone into effect. The referendum would have increased student fees by $40 per semester to help fund the RSF but was nullified in May.

Ted Friedman, a Berkeley resident who has been using RSF for 15 years, said the RSF’s new price, when compared to other gyms in the area, is still a bargain.

“This is one of the best gyms in the Bay Area, and if there’s a need to keep it running, I’m OK with paying a little extra,” Friedman said.

Contact Dennis Vidal at dvidal@dailycal.org.

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The increase will affect nonrepresented staff members at the university — staff unaffiliated with unions — which include librarians, human resources and public affairs staff, among others. Despite the planned increase, staff  members at UC Berkeley have only been authorized a 1 percent increase in salary to account for a 2 percent increase authorized in March as a market adjustment. The universitywide increase will also exempt senior UC management.

A similar universitywide salary increase of 3 percent was authorized in October 2011, but it was merit-based and given only to staff who received satisfactory performance reviews and had salaries of less than $200,000. According to UC spokesperson Brooke Converse, there has not been an unconditional universitywide salary increase in five years.

“We want to make sure that all our faculty and staff is valued,” Converse said. “The president (Mark Yudof) believes the staff deserves it.”

Converse said UC President Mark Yudof wanted to implement the increase now because staff pension contributions will go up from 5 percent to 6.5 percent on July 1. Providing the salary increase could offset some of the costs.

Robert Powell, chair of the UC Academic Senate, said that many of the faculty members he has spoken to about this salary increase are in favor of it.

However, unlike the other UC schools, UC Berkeley will not receive the full 3 percent increase due to a 2 percent salary increase for nonrepresented staff in March.

In an email in March, then-UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau said the 2 percent increase at UC Berkeley was an effort to align the compensation of the school’s nonrepresented staff with the marketplace and retain quality personnel.

“In fact, at present our non-represented staff is, on average, 11 percent behind the market as of 2012, and we are experiencing challenges in recruiting Bay Area talent to important positions here on our campus,” Birgeneau said in the email. “My primary goals in this effort are to recognize our staff, strengthen our workforce, and ensure the future of UC Berkeley.”

The funds for the universitywide salary increase will come from each campus’s 2013-14 budget.

The estimated cost of the systemwide program for core funded programs is approximately $54 million, according to Converse.

Contact Jane Nho at jnho@dailycal.org.

Clarification(s):
A previous version of this article may have implied that the UC would be receiving additional funds for the salary increases. In fact, no additional allocations will be made to fund these increases. The funds will come from each campus’s 2013-14 budget.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a 3 percent increase in salary was approved for faculty and nonrepresented academic personnel. In fact, the salary increase is 3 percent for nonrepresented staff and 2 percent for faculty and nonrepresented academic personnel.

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that staff pension contributions will go up 6.5 percent on July 1. In fact, they will go up from 5 percent to 6.5 percent.

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Slideshow of the graduating class of 2013 set to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Steve Wozniak’s speech and interview with Gerald Stanley Weissberg.

Check out the article about the general commencement.

The post Class of 2013 Graduation Commencement appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Kevin Foote/File

Apple Inc. co-founder and entrepreneur Steve Wozniak delivered the commencement address to UC Berkeley’s class of 2013 on Saturday, recounting his time as a student on campus and imparting advice to about 3,900 graduating seniors and 21,000 other attendees.

In the first commencement at Memorial Stadium in more than 40 years, Wozniak encouraged students to stick to their principles and take risks. He also spoke his mind on a wide array of topics, from the tassels on graduates’ caps to his philosophy about happiness.

“H equals S minus F,” Wozniak said. “Happiness equals smiles minus frowns. That’s what life’s about.”

His most resonant advice, however, was more concrete.

“You’ve got to trust in yourself and know what your internal passion is,” he said. “And that’s what’ll drive you to success. When you have success, are you going to become a different person? … Or are your ideals going to be with you forever?

“Now’s your time to change the world and to think different,” he added.

After meeting Steve Jobs in high school, Wozniak matriculated to UC Berkeley in 1970 but withdrew a year later, eventually founding Apple with Jobs in 1976. He returned to the campus years later, earning his degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1986.

Wozniak is the latest in a line of prominent commencement speakers, including Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt in 2012, former White House chief of and then-U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright in 2000. Wozniak was chosen to speak by a survey of graduating seniors earlier this year, according to Lila Blanco, associate director of university events and ceremonies.

The speech drew generally positive reviews from the graduates and parents in attendance.

“It’s really cool how someone that successful came from Berkeley — and to see that he took so many risks to get where he’s at right now,” said graduating senior Jaron Liclican. “That’s what’s important for all of us here, all of us graduates. The next step is taking that risk and doing that which inspires you the most — your dreams.”

But other students were disappointed by what they perceived as Wozniak’s reluctance to tell students uncomfortable truths.

“His speech is very postmodern,” said graduating senior John Knox. “It is something that’s very fitting for our generation that likes to pave its own path and decide its own truth. It seemed pretty hedonistic.”

Wozniak was not the only speaker on Saturday. Outgoing Chancellor Robert Birgeneau opened the ceremony with a speech that trumpeted the socioeconomic and cultural diversity of the graduating class, noting the university’s policy of offering aid to undocumented students.

Following Wozniak’s speech, 18-year-old graduate Ritankar Das received the University Medal, an award given to each year’s top graduating senior. Das graduated with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology and has earned a 3.99 GPA.

“His accomplishments are just incredible,” said graduating senior Raquel Valles. “He’s really an inspiration.”

Contact Chris Yoder at cyoder@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @christiancyoder.

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Dear Cal Students:

Convocation season is upon us, and it is once again a time of transitions — both joyous and bittersweet. Like you, I am also transitioning as I step down as your chancellor at the end of this month and return to being a Berkeley faculty member. I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for making my service as chancellor such a fulfilling one.

In the course of nearly nine years as chancellor, I have had the great pleasure of interacting with what are undoubtedly the most “engaged and engaging” students anywhere. Having taught at several other institutions around the globe — including Yale, MIT, Toronto and Oxford — I have come to appreciate that Berkeley students are very special. It has been a great joy to meet and connect with so many exceptionally talented students who not only have a passion to learn and a drive to excel but also the ambition to give back and change the world for the better. I have found Berkeley student energy empowering as well as inspiring.

You have made your mark on this campus, on our community, our state and indeed, the world. On campus, you have partnered with the administration to create a vibrant multicultural student center. You forged a unique partnership with the university to transform Lower Sproul Plaza, completely revitalizing student activity space. You educated me on greenness and sustainability, and your ingenuity has shown what marvelous things one can do to make our campus greener. Your passion for responsible stewardship of our planet is reflected in the many green energy projects in which the campus is engaged.

You have supported our local community in numerous ways through the Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund, beautifying neighborhoods through artwork, providing community health services to the needy and volunteering for thousands of hours as tutors in neighborhood schools. You have made Cal Teach a thriving program on our campus.

The passion of your convictions has had a remarkable effect. We worked together assiduously to pass the California DREAM Act and make possible scholarships and financial aid for undocumented students. You registered voters and advocated convincingly to help pass Proposition 30, thereby mitigating further state cuts to higher education in the current budget.

On a global level, many of you have traveled to far regions of the world, bringing your knowledge and creativity to help alleviate poverty. Your inventiveness has already resulted in projects that will improve life in impoverished areas of the world.

I undertook the chancellorship with a commitment to sustaining Berkeley’s unique public character and ensuring that our academic excellence would be affordable to students of exceptional talent from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Together, we have sustained and enhanced robust financial aid programs not only for students from low-income families but also for the middle class. Berkeley became the first public university in the United States to create a Middle Class Access Plan. Despite increasing tuition, we have been able to ensure that Berkeley undergraduates are graduating with the lowest student debt among all public teaching and research universities across the country.

I have enjoyed working closely with the ASUC and Graduate Assembly leadership throughout my entire tenure as chancellor. Our student leaders are deeply committed to working in the best interests of our student body and the university. Whether on issues such as student mental health, campus climate or, most recently, the Student Health Insurance Plan, their constructive collaboration made possible a myriad of accomplishments.

We have also had many good times together. Mary Catherine and I have loved greeting our new students in the fall at the outdoor receptions at University House and cheering with you at football games in the student section of Memorial Stadium. Watching student performances, whether athletic or artistic, has lifted our spirits. Celebrating your successes at scholarship receptions, at award events and at graduation has made us tremendously proud of your achievements.

You have touched us profoundly, and we have been inspired by you. We wish you all the very best for the future and will watch with great interest and pride as you go out and make an impact on the world in the powerful way that only Berkeley graduates can.

GO BEARS!

Robert Birgeneau is the chancellor of UC Berkeley

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