Mills College campus will house hundreds of Berkeley students

OAKLAND >> Days after announcing it’ll stop issuing academic degrees in a couple of years, Mills College is forging new ties with U CB er kele yin its bid to financially survive while shifting its mission.

In a letter to the school community Thursday, Mills President Elizabeth Hillman announced a new program in which Mills will host 200 of UC Berkeley’s freshman students at its Oakland campus starting this fall.

UC Berkeley calls it the Changemaker in Oakland Program.

Indeed, Mills is undergoing major change. It’s preparing to cease operating as a stand-alone liberal arts college and transition into an “institute,” although it remains unclear exactly what that means.

The UC Berkeley program will “provide a new source of revenue that will help support services for Mills students during our transition period,” Hillman said.

“These students will have their own dedicated classes and residence halls, but there will be opportunities for Mills and UC Berkeley students to interact through co-curricular activities,” Hillman stated in the letter.

Chinyere Oparah, Mills’ provost and dean of faculty, said in a news release that UC Berkeley students will experience a “constant flow onto the Mills campus of local organizers, activists and policymakers” and that school leaders “anticipate cocreating activities, shared events, with our working group of Berkeley faculty and programmers.”

According to UC Berkeley’s announcement of the program, it’s a way for some of its first-year students to enter the university in small group settings.

UC Berkeley already allows a cohort of students on its campus to take core classes together a first semester, giving the students the feel of “a small liberal arts college, with the resources and opportunities of a large research university.”

Similarly, the new program would add 150 students from Cal’s College of Letters and Science and 50 from its Rausser College of Natural Resources to Mills’ student body of just over 960.

But the two school communities would not be entirely enmeshed.

The UC Berkeley students will live in Mills’ residence halls either in single rooms or, if they

prefer, with another Cal roommate. They will take classes with their own instructors, appointed by UC Berkeley Extension.

Those students will have the option of taking a class at the main UC Berkeley campus, with a shuttle available between it and Mills.

School leaders said the new program could lead to more opportunities for “cross-registration” between the schools.

“We expect that further information about the program, including the potential of cross-registration, will be announced in the coming months as details are finalized,” Hillman said in a letter to students. “Meanwhile, UC Berkeley and Mills will seek to build on the existing association between the two institutions.”

The program wouldn’t be the first tie between UC

Berkeley and Mills.

A previous agreement between the schools allows Mills students to take one course each semester at Berkeley, and Berkeley students who identify as women or gender nonbinary to take one course per semester at Mills.

But the new program would be open to first-year Berkeley students of all genders, meaning it would bring more men to campus. That’s caused a stir before. In 1990, students swayed college administrators to reverse a decision to make Mills coed.

When the college’s leaders started talking more openly several months ago about the possibility of further merging with UC Berkeley as a way to solve the challenges for each university — Cal’s shortage of student housing and Mills’ low enrollment — some students raised the alarm that such a symbiosis would essentially make Mills coed.

In interviews earlier this week with this news organization, students said they were drawn to Mills in part because of its commitment to women’s education.

“I have appreciated the focus on women and nonbinary students,” said Cassandra James, slated to finish her bachelor’s degree this winter and her master’s degree next year at Mills. “It empowers you, lets you step into your power and knowledge … in a safe space. The men on campus — since the grad school includes men — they know they’re on sacred land.”

Students, alumnae and staff have been organizing over the past week to push Mills’ board of trustees to reverse its decision to stop issuing academic degrees.

College officials have said they’ll work to transform Mills into an institute but haven’t explained what that means other than that firstyear students won’t be accepted after this fall and degrees won’t be given in 2023.