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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Tuesday:

Capital improvements

On Tuesday afternoon, the board’s Committee on Grounds and Buildings will discuss ongoing capital building projects and funding for future projects. For the 2013-14 fiscal year, the university is requesting $788.5 million in state funds for capital projects, including projects to address seismic issues and fund new buildings to accommodate enrollment growth. The committee will also get an update on the projected growth of student housing on the Santa Barbara campus and discuss a building project on UCSF’s Mission Bay campus.

Wednesday:

Budget and tuition levels

On Wednesday morning, the Committee on Finance will review the status of the 2012-13 budget and will discuss approving the 2013-14 University of California budget for current operations and capital improvements. The committee will also address issues regarding the drop in state funding and the need for other sources of income for the university.

Since 1990, the state’s contribution to the university per student has fallen by more than 60 percent. For the first time, in 2011-12, funds from student tuition and fees exceeded funds to the university from the state.

The proposed budget calls for an expenditure increase of $584.3 million to a variety of areas, including enrollment growth, financial aid, funding for a new medical school at UC Riverside, increased merit compensation for faculty and deferred maintenance costs of $25 million, among others.

The committee will also discuss the approval of professional degree supplemental tuition for several programs in the system that had previously not charged the additional fees. Professional degree supplemental tuition is paid by professional students in certain programs on top of regular fees to support programs with higher costs. The committee will discuss charging the fees for four programs for the first time: games and playable media at UC Santa Cruz, physician assistant studies at UC Davis, information management at UC Santa Cruz and translational medicine at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.

Private funding and nonresident enrollment

The Committee on Educational Policy will discuss private fundraising for the university, which amounted to $1.56 billion between July 2011 and June 2012.

The committee will also discuss a recommendation from the UC Commission on the Future to increase nonresident enrollment at the university. Currently, the UC system does not exceed 10 percent nonresident student enrollment systemwide, through a cap was never formally voted on.

Compensation

In a closed session Wednesday afternoon, the Committee on Compensation will discuss collective bargaining matters and the potential for salary adjustments for members of the Senior Management Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Then, in a regents-only closed session, a salary adjustment for the lab’s director will be discussed.

Litigation and building purchases

In another session Wednesday afternoon, the Committee on Finance will have a closed session discussion on ongoing and settled litigation against the university and building acquisitions. One of the suits it will discuss is litigation filed against various UC Berkeley administrators and others for the police response during last fall’s Nov. 9 Occupy Cal demonstration, when officers used batons on protesters.

Thursday:

Hospital partnership

On Thursday, the Committee on Health Services will discuss establishing a limited liability company between the UC Davis Medical Center and Dameron Hospital in Stockton, Calif. The LLC would be formed “for the purpose of owning and operating a 202-bed general acute care facility in Stockton,” according to the regents’ agenda.

The committee will also consider introducing new guidelines for Student Health Centers and counseling and psychological departments of those Centers.

Retirement and financial transfers

On Thursday morning, the Committee on Finance will discuss transferring the Center for Executive Education at the Haas School of Business to a nonprofit entity. According to the meeting agenda, the move would enable Haas to increase revenue.

The committee will also discuss the state of the UC Retirement Plan.

Jame Applegate covers higher education. Contact her at japplegate@dailycal.org.

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Despite some faculty and student contention and a rocky financial start, the University of California’s controversial online education initiative is advancing this semester.

The UC Online Instruction Pilot Project — an initiative to develop and offer online classes — has introduced its first class and will add over two dozen more courses throughout the UC system over the next few semesters on a rolling basis.

The project was designed to increase funds for the university and ease the burden on overloaded classes. Its first course, preparatory calculus, is being offered at UC Merced this semester. From its onset, the pilot has generated excitement about the opportunities associated with it — along with doubts and concern about the impact of online learning on the quality of public education.

A rough start

Consideration of online education at the UC began in 2009, when the UC Commission on the Future was developed to create a fiscally sustainable university despite dwindling resources.

UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Christopher Edley, who also acts as a special adviser to UC President Mark Yudof, spearheaded the project and said he “should be shot” if he was unable to obtain millions in private funds for the project.

Fast-forward three years later, and the program is now in full swing — but with less than $750,000 in private funds and a $6.9 million loan from the president’s office to make up for the rest. According to UC spokesperson Steve Montiel, the loan will be paid back by fiscal year 2018-19.

Although Edley essentially failed to gain the promised millions through outside funds, UC Vice Provost for Academic Planning, Programs and Coordination Dan Greenstein, who  oversees the project on a daily basis, said he remains confident that the program has been developed as a sustainable business model.

Although the pilot courses will initially be offered to UC students only, the pilot’s financial success depends on outside student enrollment, which Greenstein said should generate enough revenue to pay back the loan and provide funds to departments offering the courses.

Concerns and contention

Yet the dependence on outside students to take the courses, along with the difficulty of measuring classroom quality and success, have caused political science professor and Berkeley Faculty Association co-chair Wendy Brown to doubt the pilot’s effectiveness.

Brown said in an email that she is not always against online education but is “opposed to converting a first class university education into a set of on-line courses produced and delivered on the cheap and then pretending this hasn’t downgraded the education students are paying ever more for … (and) selling such courses to unwitting students in far-flung parts of the world who believe they are buying a Berkeley education.”

Similar concerns are shared by UC Berkeley sophomore David DeSmet. DeSmet took Chemistry 1A and 1B — which may both be offered online next fall.

“I would be worried that if I’m taking a Berkeley class and anyone can sign up for it, regardless of their caliber, how can I tell that I’m taking a Berkeley-level class?” he said. “I feel like you can make it work, but you would lose the student experience.”

Students and faculty have also expressed concern over professors’ ability — or lack thereof — to connect with their students online.

Bob Samuels, president of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers, a union representing non-senate faculty and librarians at the university, said the online classes will be overseen by professors who “are not very involved in undergraduate instruction” and may support the program to “bring revenue to their department.”

Moving forward

Greenstein is aware of concerns but maintains that research put into the program will ensure a high-quality learning experience and keep the university on the level of other elite research institutions.

“Sure there is great skepticism — change is hard,” Greenstein said. “But this is not an edge activity any longer — if anything, we’re playing catch up.”

Universities already involved in online learning, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, Stanford University and Cornell University, are challenging the idea that online courses are for vocational colleges or working students.

MIT recently introduced MITx, which allows students to obtain a credential for a “modest fee” proving they have mastered a free online class, according to the program’s website.

At UC Berkeley, pilot supporters hope the courses will “democratize education” by providing UC-quality classes to students around the world.

Dan Garcia, a UC Berkeley computer science lecturer who plans to offer an online class in computing next fall, maintains that trial and error is all just part of the research process.

“Remember, this is an experiment at the root level,” he said. “It’s taking baby steps to see how (online education) works.”

Garcia also said the pilot is “a win-win-win-win” for several reasons, including the opportunity to use his computing class to train high school teachers for instructing public school students in AP Computer Science.

“This is really empowering and democratizing education,” he said. “We want to help and teach the world.”

With a sizable loan and support from many university officials, the pilot project is now on its way. But it remains unclear how the university will measure the quality of the pilot’s classes.

“I think we’re very interested in the UC defining quality for its undergraduate program,” Greenstein said.

Jessica Rossoni covers higher education.

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The creation of the group — outlined in Newsom’s August Economic Growth and Competitiveness Agenda — aims to make recommendations for the governor and state legislature geared around funding for higher education. The group is set to hold its first meeting in San Francisco on Sept. 15 and will meet periodically until November, according to Francisco Castillo, Newsom’s deputy chief of staff for communications.

The group consists of leaders from the public sector, such as UC President Mark Yudof, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed and California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, as well as individuals from the private sphere, including Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and Crowell and Moring senior counsel Michael Kahn. Castillo added that he is “certain” more individuals will be added to the group.

“The lieutenant governor wanted to make sure that we have a wide range of representation when we form these working groups,” Castillo said. “The private sector was an essential component, which is why we included the private sector, union reps and UC officials to have a dialogue amongst each other as to how best we can turn our finances and higher education system around.”

The group resembles a statewide version of the UC Commission on the Future, whose membership also included figures from the public and private sectors. The commission, whose stated goal was to ensure the university’s continued fiscal viability despite difficult economic times, published its final report on Dec. 6, 2010.

Jeremy Pilaar is the campus’s legislative liaison for the University of California Student Association and is currently the only student sitting on the group.

Pilaar said that he is not concerned about being the only student voice in the group and that he hopes to help find new sources of revenue for the state. He added that the UCSA is involved in a campaign to reform Proposition 13 — which, with a few exceptions, caps state property tax rates at 1 percent of a property’s value — in an attempt to target Sacramento rather than the association’s past strategies, which have targeted the UC Board of Regents, a perspective that he plans to bring to the group.

“(I’m looking for) ways to think outside the box and move past piecemeal reforms,” he said. “I’m going to be preaching coalition building and raising revenue for the state.”

Recommendations made by the group will aim to influence what actions the state legislature and the governor will take with regard to higher education. Because members have not yet convened, most have only a broad understanding of what the project will involve.

“It seems to be in the spirit of reaching out in all directions, with the three segments cooperating and looking for ways to reverse state disinvestment in higher education,” said UC spokesperson Steve Montiel.

Claudia Keith, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs for the CSU system — which has already experienced $650 million in budget cuts — said that the work group will allow for a dialogue between different leaders in the state to discuss funding in higher education.

Kahn, a UCLA graduate who has previously served in over a dozen state appointments, including within the California judiciary, said that the opportunities he has been given are due to the education he received through the UC system. He added that the group could work to ensure that similar opportunities exist for future students.

“If the other activities (Newsom has) engaged in in the jobs area are any indication, I think it will be a powerful voice,” he said. “I’m optimistic that given the lieutenant governor’s past efforts that we will be able to come up with some good ideas and that they will be given genuine attention.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg3WO19miKs&w=560&h=345]

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The Committee on the Whole will begin Wednesday’s meeting in the morning with public comments. With the the board slated to vote on a recommended 9.6 percent fee increases on Thursday, there has been a flurry of contention and outcry, and during this portion of the meeting, concerned individuals, including UC Berkeley student leaders and university workers will have the opportunity to comment on the fee increase as well as other university related matters.

In addition, this portion of the meeting will include opening remarks from UC officials including the Chairman of the Board Sherry Lansing, UC President Mark Yudof and Chair of the Academic Senate Daniel Simmons.

-The Committee on Educational Policy will meet Wednesday morning, where issues regarding the university’s fall undergraduate admissions outcomes will be discussed, including the diversity of the incoming class and the increase in non-resident students admitted as part of the UC Commisison on the Future recommendations.

- The Committee on Long Range Planning will meet later in the morning to discuss the annual University of California Accountability Report, which measures performance at both a campus and university level in meeting key goals across a diverse range of areas.

- Early Wednesday afternoon, the Committee on Investments will meet to vote on the proposed adoption of an expenditure rate for the university’s Total Return Investment Pool.

- The day’s open sessions will conclude with a meeting of the Committee on Finance, which provide an update on the university’s Working Smarter Initiative — an an ongoing administrative efficiency initiative — and whether it is on track to achieve its goal of $500 million in positive fiscal impact over five years.

- On Thursday morning, the Committee of Finance will meet again to vote on action items including the  UC Office of the President budget, endorsement of alternative revenue strategies and a proposed 9.6 percent fee increase to cope with the state’s cut to the UC.

Aaida Samad is an assistant news editor.

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Over the past three years, the number of California resident enrollment has been steadily declining, while the number of out-of-state and international students has been on the rise — a 14.4 percent increase for out-of-state  students and a 4.6 percent increase for international students, respectively, since the 2009-10 school year.

Systemwide, a total of 39,989 admitted freshmen plan to enroll for fall 2011, of whom 88 percent are California residents, while nonresidents represent a total of 13.9 percent, as compared with 10.7 percent in fall 2010. Currently, less than 6 percent of all UC undergraduates are nonresidents, according to a UCOP statement.

“Even with the significant fee increases that we’ve had in the past, the demand for access to the university continues to grow,” said Patrick Lenz, vice president for budget and capital resources for UCOP. “We’ve seen that campus growth almost at every single campus, and we’ve seen increase in underrepresented students being admitted to the university.”

According to Walter Robinson, campus assistant vice chancellor and director of undergraduate enrollment, the number of out-of-state and international students attending UC Berkeley has been increasing to offset a lack of funding for students due to the UC being overenrolled by about 11,000 students systemwide.

He added that the initial increase in nonresident students was necessary to offset the budget deficit from the state and bring the overall campus nonresident population to about 20 percent within the next few years.

“We started this whole trajectory of setting a nonresident enrollment target so we wouldn’t have to reduce the total number of entering undergraduates,” Robinson said. “Without the nonresident fees, we would have to reduce our total number of Californians by more than the number we’ve currently reduced them by.”

While UCLA has the same percentage of international students enrolled as freshmen for the 2011-12 school year — 11.4 percent — out-of-state students make up only 6.9 percent of the incoming freshmen, as opposed to UC Berkeley’s 18.4 percent.

However, Robinson said some nonresident applicants may be at a disadvantage as compared to California residents. Though the campus reviews applications holistically — where each application is read in its entirety and scored by a reader — nonresident students must be determined to be academically equal to or stronger than California residents.

Additionally, while the university has a way to evaluate California students based on their honors coursework — which is approved by the university — nonresident students who complete honors coursework often do not receive the benefit of those classes simply because the university has no way of evaluating those classes.

“When you compare the nonresident admits, you will see students with, by and large, stronger academic indicators,” Robinson said. “They usually bring a larger number of academic subjects, and many of those courses are honors, but we just can’t count them.”

Robinson said that though different campuses have used different strategies to offset their overenrollment, UC Berkeley chose to increase its number of nonresident students because it is more attractive than other campuses to those students.

Allie Bidwell is the news editor.

Correction(s):
A previous headline for this article incorrectly stated that admissions data showed an increase in nonresident students on campus. In fact, enrollment data showed the increase in nonresident students.

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