At UC Berkeley: new chancellor, old challenges
Selling beer at Cal football games. Shrinking the number of players on men’s teams. Offering naming rights for UC Berkeley’s gleaming Cal Memorial Stadium.
Campus officials identified these ideas and more on Monday, not only as a way to extract the money-losing athletics department from its $22 million hole in three years, but also to help all of UC Berkeley close its larger, $110 million
deficit by 2020.
As students from all around the world poured back onto campus Monday, the famed university released budget proposals showing that undergraduate education expects to reduce expenses this year by 6 percent, or $1.2 million; athletics by 4 percent, or $3.5 million; and administration by 2 percent, or $7 million.
UC Berkeley’s money troubles have emerged as its most visible problem — a gargantuan gap that is down from the $150 million hole revealed in early 2016. Its mandatory debt payments, in part from having to maintain the 149-year-old school, have tripled in the last eight years. But a large chunk of the payments, 20 percent, come from the $470 million Memorial Stadium complex that opened on campus in 2012.
Money isn’t UC Berkeley’s only headache. The University of California’s flagship campus is awash in tensions over free speech, sexual harassment and a shortage of student housing.
But beyond the stressful mood, faculty and students say there is hope — that Carol Christ, 73, the new chancellor and the first woman to lead UC Berkeley, has the smarts, temperament and trust to fix the problems and restore morale.
On Monday, Christ greeted incoming students and their families for the first time as chancellor. “Welcome to Cal!” she told startled students with a smile and an extended hand. And to their parents: “Thank you for entrusting us with your son!”
She told The Chronicle she hadn’t yet heard that selling alcohol at football games had been included in the athletic department’s financial plan.
Booze at games is a growing trend for raising revenue, and more than 30 colleges already do it. Even the NCAA allowed beer and wine sales at the College World Series in 2016.
But Christ — who would have to sign off on such a plan at UC Berkeley — is not yet sold on the idea. “I’ll have to think about it,” she said. “I’d like to get the opinion of the (campus) police.”
The academician is new to the job, but she’s worked at UC Berkeley for most of the last half century. Many faculty appreciate that, and say she’s an insider who understands UC Berkeley’s culture and politics far better than the outsiders who preceded her.
Christ (her name rhymes with wrist) began as an English professor in 1970, then served as department chair and in other administrative posts for more than three decades before Smith College hired her as its president in 2002. She returned to UC Berkeley in 2013 to direct its Center for Studies in Higher Education. But as the campus’ problems escalated — as did the perception that Chancellor Nicholas Dirks could not lasso them to the ground — Christ was tapped last year to serve as his second-in-command. After Dirks announced he would step down this summer, Christ accepted the top job in March.
“This is a campus I’ve loved my entire life. I feel that I have a great deal of freedom to do what I think is right without thinking of reputation,” Christ told The Chronicle in a wideranging interview last month.
She’ll decide soon whether the campus should help athletics pay the seismic retrofit portion of its stadium debt — a plan certain to be unpopular with faculty, given coaches’ million-dollar salaries and the fact that Dirks gave athletics $23 million of campus money last year alone. But Christ says contributing to the stadium may be fair, since non-athletes and the public also use the stadium.
But more to the point, she may have no choice, said John Cummins, a former chief of staff to four Berkeley chancellors who oversaw Cal athletics in the mid-2000s and continues to study the finances.
“There’s no way that athletics can pay that debt. They just don’t have the money,” Cummins said. “She’ll have to pick up a portion of the debt.”
Getting faculty buy-in would be a true test of Christ’s political skill. One strategy would be to give over Cal’s Art Deco Edwards Stadium to academic purposes, and find somewhere else for the track and soccer that use it now.
Christ said she’ll also decide whether to change how UC Berkeley complies with Title IX, the federal gender equity law — a shift that would shrink the rosters of men’s varsity teams and increase them for women’s. The campus is the only Pac 12 campus that complies by adding women’s teams when there is interest — like this year’s new sand volleyball team.
As chancellor, Christ has promised to slice the deficit nearly in half this year, to $57 million. The plan is for nonacademic departments to reduce expenditures by 4 to 6 percent, while academic departments will cut 1 percent.
“She’s been very impressive,” said sociology professor Michael Burawoy. “She is so prepared to talk with everybody.”
Another reason many faculty members like Christ: She’s already secured enough money — pledges, anyway — to cover 52 percent of this year’s deficit reduction goal. Her plan is to raise more money faster in these ways:
Monetizing UC Berkeley’s real estate. When the campus eventually begins building more housing, “you put retail on the first floor,” said Christ, who has led an effort since last year to figure out where to put the additional 6,900 students it needs to house. Options include People’s Park and other sites.
Adding more self-supporting master’s degrees like the School of Information’s online data program for working professionals, which raised nearly $5 million this year.
Expanding “concurrent enrollment,” in which students outside of UC Berkeley can attend classes if there is room. They pay $750 a credit but don’t earn a degree. About 450 students, often from other countries, participate each semester.
“Decisions will be painful, and not everyone will agree with the priorities. But she’s sensible, knows what she’s doing and cares about the mission of the university,” said Eric Schickler, political science chair and one of the professors who pushed an aborted vote of no confidence in Dirks last year.
Born in New York City, Christ grew up in suburban Ramsey, N.J., the daughter of a phone company employee and a nurse. Of the four children in her family, only Christ pursued academia. Her brothers went into public health and air conditioning. Her sister became a bartender.
“I was good at school, and kept doing it,” laughed Christ, who calls herself the blue sheep of her family — a Democrat in a clan of “very right” Republicans.
That may help explain her decisive approach to debate over free-speech so contentious that the Berkeley College Republicans have sued the university in federal court, accusing the campus of censoring conservative speech. The suit was filed after administrators canceled two conservative speakers last spring, Ann Coulter and David Horowitz, and from the last-minute cancellation in February of another, Milo Yiannopoulos, as rioters threatened his safety.
Christ promised to sponsor “point-counterpoint” lectures this year in response.
“Too often we think that free speech is talking into a megaphone in Sproul Plaza,” she said. “What I want to do is different. If Ann Coulter comes back, I want her in dialogue with someone with very different views. There are ways of talking with one another (when) we profoundly disagree.”
As for the rising number of sexual-harassment claims and the administration’s lighthanded treatment of harassers — which prompted UC President Janet Napolitano to increase oversight of discipline decisions in such cases across UC — Christ said she will have no problem complying with a new 60-day deadline for investigating claims.
“It’s essential,” said Christ, who served as the campus Title IX coordinator in the early 1980s. “Our investigations take too long.”
Chronicle staff writer Janny Hu contributed to this report.