But this column is not about the pros and cons of infrastructural projects. It’s about personal construction — self-improvement. In the tradition of German philosophy, there is an idea of soul-searching and maturation that is referred to as Bildung. Inherent to Bildung is personal transformation. On an abstract level, this means cultivating selfhood — unfolding the manifold possibilities of identity.

You see, there is no better time than summertime to revamp your personality, mental outlook and skills. Forget spring. Renewal and growth are best suited for the long days of summer. The months between May and August are always slightly off-kilter from the rest of the year. Friends you might normally see every day are absent. Maybe living back at home feels strange. Maybe staying on campus feels even stranger. The heat in the air slows every moment, making you move sluggishly throughout the day. There are fewer obligations, fewer stresses, more tan lines. These mellow few months are thus the perfect time for some metaphoric construction.

Self-development is a never-ending process because no one is ever completely happy with who they are. The school year inhibits this process, sometimes delaying it for months. Academics hinder self-cultivation with projects and assignments and midterms, which force the process to go in a specific, predetermined direction.

Here is where self-construction comes into play. Those aspects of your personality that you find distasteful? Bulldoze them. Schedule the demolition for today. The passions that lie deep inside you? Lift them to the surface with a crane. Add layers. Add levels. Strip away the parts that no longer serve you. Become the edifice you have always wanted to be. And because this is a personal project, obviously, no trespassers are allowed. Spend some time alone each day to analyze what requires development. Work sites are never pretty, but the displeasing sight will be worth it in the end.

Construction must be done authentically. It is not enough to simply give the illusion of renovation for others to see. Poor workmanship will inevitably crumble as soon as you are shaken. And just as upgrading a building requires digging deep into its electric circuitry, delving into yourself requires a careful examination of your own mental wiring.

This self-examination process was one that I experienced myself a few summers ago as a high school student taking classes at UC Berkeley. It was a weird summer. Between not knowing anyone and being in strange Berkeleyland, I had a lot of time on my hands to explore the area and explore myself. At some point during those few months, I started understanding more about my identity. There is almost nothing more confusing than figuring out you are not the person you think you are. For the longest time, I had identified as straight. With a bit of introspection, I realized that my sexuality was far from hetero. This conclusion was not a result of me staring up at a majestic construction site. Neither was it one realized without denial, sadness and frustration. I didn’t figure out my whole identity that summer. I didn’t come close and probably never will. What I did gain, however, was the smallest semblance of self-awareness.

German philosophers thought that Bildung was all about self-education — reading books and engaging in intellectual conversations. I love those things. But cultivating selfhood contains another angle altogether: removal, relaxation and reflection. Discoveries about yourself are not usually made in the midst of activities or socializing but on a tranquil summer walk or just as you fall asleep for a midday nap. There’s no guarantee that you will realize your true sexuality like I did, but there’s a good chance you might learn more about yourself along the way.

Forgive my countless construction metaphors, but the parallels between humans and buildings are too great to ignore. Take façades, for example. A building’s pretty exterior indicates nothing about its interior strength, just as a person’s façade is irrelevant to her character. Like buildings, we require periodic reconstruction and re-examination. In the same way that a building quivers during an earthquake, we are prone to tremble under life-shaking circumstances. The key to not collapsing from it all is by building up your Bildung. With a steady internal structure, you can withstand anything.

Contact Kimberly Veklerov at kveklerov@dailycal.org.

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It’s an accurate description of the record, which Gavigan released online in April. Saving Private Rhymes is the equivalent of spending time with Gavigan himself. Gavigan, who transferred to UC Berkeley from Stockton, Calif., his hometown, raps and speaks with a friendliness that belies his openness. The first track, “Me Llamo,” is boisterous and bombastic with an undeniably infectious hook. This intro sets the tone for the album, which maintains a consistent emphasis on positivity — a disposition that Gavigan stresses is essential.

The rapper, who was raised with three siblings by a single mother on welfare, claims that humor is a coping mechanism for him. “If we didn’t have humor, we would just be miserable,” Gavigan said. “It’s what brought us through. It continues to bring me through on a daily basis.”

Gavigan’s humorous outlook is most evident on tracks like “On My Grind,” a song about one of the most prevalent coping mechanisms — caffeination — and “R2-D2,” whose title is a reference to the “Star Wars” droid. In fact, Gavigan, who is something of a movie buff, drops pop cultural references with incredible ease. In “On My Grind,” for example, he mentions Keyser Soze, a character in the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects.” In another verse, Gavigan compares his caffeinated self to “the Great Cornholio” of “Beavis and Butt-Head” fame.

For all the comedic emphasis, Saving Private Rhymes doesn’t parody hip-hop. Gavigan, who has been recording since he was 7 years old, penning lyrics since middle school and performing in a Wu Tang-style rap group called Legion of Doom, is an avid member of Students for Hip-Hop at Cal and CalSLAM. With a roster of influences that includes Coolio, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, pre-2008 Kanye West and even Enya, ’70s country, Simon and Garfunkel and Tears for Fears, Gavigan is a music and media fiend. He pays homage to his interests and passions in this album, from coffee to movies to Stockton. The hip-hop artist’s preponderance for liveliness, however, doesn’t preclude him from addressing darker themes.

Some of the most personal songs on the album, like “Pure Imagination,” “Find My Way” and “Salutations,” find Gavigan mining his life experiences, or the life experiences of people close to him, for inspirational fodder. Prison bars entrap us in “Pure Imagination,” but, as the title suggests, the imaginative faculties are indeed necessary to understand Gavigan’s metaphor: The song actually addresses abortion. “Find My Way” also addresses sexual assault, domestic abuse and drug dependence.

“Salutations” is a warm shout-out to friends and family, including Gavigan’s war-veteran grandfather, who passed away in the midst of the recording of Saving Private Rhymes, and his artistic, polyglot uncle, who committed suicide when Gavigan was a young child.

Despite some heavy themes, Gavigan remains an optimist. “Even the crap I’ve been through has shaped me in some profound way,” the musician said. “You just have to come to grips with it, and art is a great way of doing that. You have to flip it into something positive.”

It’s no coincidence that “Salutations” is the last song on the album. With a title that is itself a film reference, Saving Private Rhymes is a pop culture-referential record that never really wants to bid the listener adieu. It ends on a “hello,” and we know it won’t be long until Second Nature rhymes again, whether in a dorm room or onstage.

Contact Natalia Reyes at nreyes@dailycal.org.

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One of the selected plans was submitted by the Berkeley Student District Campaign, a group that aims to give students more representation in city government through the creation of a district with a student supermajority. A student supermajority would increase the likelihood of a UC Berkeley student being elected to Berkeley City Council.

“It’s important to note how historic of a move the council took last night (by) indicating that one of their top proposals is one submitted by students,” said Shahryar Abbasi, ASUC external affairs vice president. “It’s quite a shift in the discourse and the dialogue.”

About 45 UC Berkeley students, including Abbasi, attended the City Council meeting in support of the campaign. While seven different plans were considered at the public hearing Tuesday night, only two did not include a student-majority district.

The only remaining competition to the Berkeley Student District Campaign is the “simplicity” plan, which focuses on straightforward district divisions. The plan’s author, Eric Panzer, openly endorsed the Berkeley Student District Campaign’s plan and said that he hopes his proposal will be considered only as a “worthy alternative.”

The City Council may favor Panzer’s plan due to its clarity, according to ASUC External Affairs Vice President Redistricting Director Noah Efron.

“There are certainly some council members who want clean lines on their map,” Efron said. “The council still has full control.”

Throughout the hearing, multiple City Council members expressed their support for a student-majority district, which has never existed in the city of Berkeley. The only UC Berkeley student to ever hold a seat on the City Council was current State Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, who served from 1984 to 1992.

The plans were made possible by the passage of Measure R last November, which amended the existing city charter to eliminate the 1986 boundary lines and adjusted the district boundaries to reflect the city’s updated population.

According to ASUC External Affairs Vice President-elect Safeena Mecklai, a student district would allow students a say in major city issues like safety, economic development and other issues that impact students and residents equally.
“I think we would benefit from more voices of young people,” said Councilmember Jesse Arreguin last night. “It accomplishes the goal but keeps a lot of major neighborhoods intact.”

The next public hearing, during which the City Council is slated to select a plan, will be on July 2.

Though the meeting will take place during the summer, Mecklai said the campaign plans to build a coalition of students to attend and express their support.

“We certainly took (last night) as a great victory, and it certainly feels more tangible now than it ever has,” Efron said. “(But) until we hear that they have officially adopted it, we won’t be celebrating.”

Contact Claire Chiara at cchiara@dailycal.org.

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Many majors are put into classification schemes that limit the options of academic interest. There is often a dichotomy between the average humanities major and the average science major. Yes, clear distinctions tend to help with categorization, but defining majors by either being in the humanities or sciences is fallacious.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “humanity,” in reference to the academic field, to be “the branch of learning concerned with human culture.” But shouldn’t this definition apply to all majors, then? In chemistry and physics, aren’t we simply studying the effects of humanity and how to better our species and interact with other species? I think that the distinction between humanities and sciences is a bit misleading because it assumes the field of science does not deal with humanity, when in reality science and certain fields of study are all about humanity.

The deciding factor in the debate of whether or not to major in humanities is money. People are generally steered away from majoring in the nonsciences with the justification being that humanities majors do not make as much money as science majors do. But is money really the true matter at hand? I think that worrying about a future salary while still in college is stressful, not to mention extremely petty. Money talk simply fuels the capitalist society in which we live. Before prematurely taking money into account, I find it valuable to reexamine why one pursues an academic career.

Do we go to school to get a better salary or to gain insight as to how we fit into society? Although the former is true, the latter exemplifies the bottom line: Society has normalized higher education. In high school, it feels like the next logical step to reaching adulthood is to enroll in a college of some sort. If we are expected to attain higher education, then we should have the freedom and support to explore different academic fields and focus on whichever pertains to us most. And I also think that it is healthy to leave the postcollege worrying until postcollege, regardless of finances and jobs.

In comparison to a science major, the average humanities major is faced with high unemployment rates and lower average wages. Although this is definitely something to take into account, having motivation will play a stronger role in changing such statistics. Our generation is typically pressured to go into supposedly successful fields such as medicine, law and scientific research — perhaps this will change in five to 10 years, because there might be an abundance of doctors and lawyers vying for the same jobs. Be motivated, and have a passion for what you study and enjoy doing, for young passion and eagerness will help you in the future.

So do all humanities majors go on to become professors in their fields? Definitely not. But many undergraduates in the nonsciences tend to enjoy their field so much that they seek a doctorate in the subject. People have admitted to me their fear of an overpopulation of people with doctorates in the humanities and not enough demand for them. While graduate school is a viable option for students in the humanities, don’t feel limited to a postsecondary education. But if you do find yourself seeking to continue onto a graduate program, the investment can be justified if you have an immense passion for the subject. If you want to go to graduate school for the humanities, do so if the fiery passion is there.

Am I worried about my future? Yes, but who isn’t? Before worrying about post-college, worry about college. I am trying to make the most of my time here at UC Berkeley and enjoy the humanities path. By exploring my academic interests in interdisciplinary fields, I have had the opportunity to further my knowledge of how society functions, and that is something I find invaluable to all “humanities” majors.

We, as college students, have the privilege to explore and choose our futures. Don’t feel obligated to classify yourself in the humanities or sciences binary. Challenge normative and capitalist ideals of the future — your future.

Contact Matthew Kirschenbaum at mkirschenbaum@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @mpkirschenbaum.

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1. People’s Park

Lively. Eclectic. Colorful. Everyone’s got his or her own take on People’s Park. Is it a good place to post out with a few hours worth of peaceful reading in mind? Probably not so much. But an afternoon spent here is bound to be far from boring.

2. Willard Park

Located on Hillegass Avenue and Derby Street, Willard Park is the main neighborhood park in southeast Berkeley. On sunny days, it draws a mixture of students, families and dog owners. On that note, if you’re not huge on canines this might not be the right spot for you — we can guarantee that at some point you are likely to be visited by a four-legged friend looking for a back rub.

3. Live Oak Park

The hidden gem of Northside.  Tucked into a huge oak grove with a trickling stream running through it, Live Oak Park feels like a hundred miles away from the bustle of campus. Plus, it’s literally up the street from Cheese Board, a location that’s pretty hard to beat. Grab a slice and soak up some nature. You deserve a break.

4. Memorial Glade

The campus “park” is a great spot to sit down to catch a breather between classes and do some people-watching. If you’re there at the right time, you might be able to catch the Cal Quidditch team practicing. Just be sure to keep an eye out for erratic Frisbees, thrown by people who supposedly “know what they’re doing.”

Do you have any favorite parks (or, at the very least, grassy areas) in Berkeley that we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments!

Image source: charlottel under Creative Commons

Contact Corrine Platten at cplatten@dailycal.org.

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“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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You’re happy for your little bro/sis, of course. It might be their dream school! It’s got the exact program they want, or maybe it’s just far enough from home to be extra appealing. After all, they’ve probably seen how much fun you have going here and wouldn’t mind doing the same. If you’re graduating it probably won’t make a difference to you. They’ll just be following in your footsteps and becoming your legacy! But if you’ve still got a few semesters to go, will that kid from home bother you?

Think about it. Will you really be able to avoid them here? Sure, you’ll probably have different classes. And it’s not like you’ll have to see them 24/7, with the huge campus and student body and all that. But are you going to live together? Chances are your parents would prefer it to keep the baby bear safe. Will you introduce them to people? You’d probably look like a jerk if you didn’t. Would you mind if they hit if off with your group of friends and started hanging out with them? Uhhh … that’s pretty awkward.

But we’re not trying to get you down or say it’s a bad thing to have family here! In the long run, it’ll probably be really nice for both of you to have a little piece from home here with you. You’ll be able to continue mocking each other and stealing each other’s things even while at school. Back to basics. Homesickness? Chances are it’ll be close to nothing; your baby sib is here.

Just be sure to balance time spent with one another and time spent apart. Once you find that balance, we’re sure having your sibling here will be great. From all of us at the Clog, congratulations to our future Golden Bears! We can’t wait to meet you. But be prepared for incoming freshman jokes next fall!

Image source: ulianne under Creative Commons. 

Contact Erum Khan at ekhan@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter @erumjkhan.

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