UC Berkeley opens in search of normal
Students resolve to adapt to remote learning, noroommate dorms and coronavirus testing
More than 31,000 undergraduates begin classes Wednesday at UC Berkeley, and even though just a fraction of them live on campus, students are seeking some semblance of a normal school year in this extraordinary time.
The question is whether they can find normalcy in a university turned upside down through remote instruction, no-roommate dorms and mandated coronavirus testing. (At least three students have tested positive since movein day Thursday, with 729 results pending.) And whether they will find anything like an ordinary year beneath the rubble of an unprecedented pandemicinduced financial hit of $340 million that has forced cuts across academic and other departments.
Many students believe they can. Or they’re doing all they can to try.
“I’m excited,” said Stephen Yang, 18, as his parents helped him unload his suitcases on Durant Avenue last week and move into the Unit 1 dorm. Yang could have signed in to classes from home, as many others will do. Housing contracts on campus are down by more than twothirds, to 2,187 from last year’s 7,202. But Yang chose dorm life at a campus so quiet you can hear the water running in Strawberry Creek.
“My major is business, and you need to network,” Yang said, noting that it’s hard to make those important connections from your bedroom in San Jose.
Flynn Gray of New York, also 18 and
“I’m excited — but I’m disappointed. I won’t get the same community experience. I think online classes aren’t the same.” Violet Tahsini, incoming UC Berkeley student
moving into Unit 1, paused briefly to explain why he chose campus living this year: “I wanted to get out of my house! I don’t want to live with my parents!”
It doesn’t get more normal than that.
And yet, in the chancellor’s Zoomed convocation Friday — in which she described the faculty’s extraordinary response to the crisis and affirmed the resiliency of the university — Carol Christ put it plainly:
“These times are without parallel in our lives.”
A year ago, the University of California’s flagship campus opened in a swell of optimism after Christ announced that the $150 million budget gap identified in 2016 was finally closed and the books balanced.
Now the gap is again wide open. There have been unanticipated extra costs — from setting up remote instruction to coronavirus testing — and lost revenue, in part from canceled housing and dining contracts. Across all 10 campuses, UC has refunded $300 million in fees for housing and dining, spokeswoman Claire Doan said.
In another revenue hit for UC Berkeley, undergraduate enrollment is expected to drop for the first time in eight years. The campus has added an average of 800 undergraduates a year since 2012, a Chronicle analysis of public records shows. This year, administrators expect to lose up to 350 students.
UC Berkeley officials say a budget gap of $65 million to $200 million is likely in fiscal year 2021. They expect to patch most of the $340 million hole with shortterm borrowing, federal funding and “human resource actions.” Those include hiring and salary freezes; early retirement; and 10% pay cuts for Christ, Athletic Director Jim Knowlton and the highestpaid coaches. There have also been 14 layoffs during the pandemic, and at least 59 custodians and dining staff received a notice to expect months of unemployment this semester. Across all 10 UC campuses, at least 300 workers have been laid off or will be, union officials said.
At most of the nine undergraduate campuses, instruction on the quarter system begins on Sept. 30 or Oct. 1. Only UC Merced and UC Berkeley start now. But for everyone, learning will be online.
That’s led some students to sue the university, including one at UC Berkeley and another at UC Santa Cruz, on grounds that online classes aren’t as good as inperson instruction, so they should get refunds.
Elise Johnson, whose freshman daughter Cameron moved into UC Berkeley’s Unit 1 the other day, can’t imagine what they’re complaining about.
“I’m not concerned,” she said. “I’m grateful.”
Johnson pointed to universities that have insisted on facetoface classes for this fall — like Notre Dame in Indiana and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — only to withdraw those plans as the coronavirus spread among students.
At UC Berkeley, faculty say they’ve worked for months to create online instruction so good that students — and parents — should relax about it.
“It’s easily been the busiest summer for curricular and pedagogical innovation that I have witnessed in my 28 years at Berkeley,” said Oliver O’Reilly, chair of the Academic Senate. And as a professor of mechanical engineering, he has had to find a new way to do everything from office hours to student projects. “All the scaffolding that I have put in place over two decades to help students engage and learn the material has been reimagined and replaced.”
Unlike the disarray that has come to characterize K12’s transition to online instruction, many universities are finding the forced shift as intellectual a challenge as field research. And many have been posting lectures online for years.
Some 1,000 faculty members at UC Berkeley enrolled in a “how to teach remotely” course this summer. Professors and administrators consulted with other universities on best practices and shared the results with the campus. They updated online tools and workshops for instructors. They developed FAQs — including “What is ‘remote instruction’ and how does it differ from ‘teaching an online course’?” (Answer: “Online” is created specifically for web instruction. “Remote” is an inperson course transformed for the emergency.) And they set up the Student Technology Equity Program to help thousands of lowincome students with home connection needs.
“It’s gonna be quite a journey that we will take together this semester,” Professor Leslea Hlusko says into a cell phone camera she has ducttaped to a tripod on a grassy hill overlooking the campus and the bay in the distance. Wrapped in a shawl against the wind, the professor records a fourminute welcome video for the freshmen and sophomores who will enroll in her integrative biology 35AC class. All 675 of them.
“This class gets revised every year, and it’s been through a couple of major revisions,” Hlusko says. “But I can tell you, none none has been as dramatic as what we have pulled together for you for the fall of 2020.”
UC Berkeley’s Semester in the Cloud program hauled 30 prerequisite classes out of the large lecture hall and onto the tiny screen. Examples include calculus, general chemistry, the 2020 general election, plagues and pandemics — and Hlusko’s human biological variation course.
In real life, it’s an inperson class with lab and discussion time for 430 students. To whip it into something far less threedimensional, and accommodate 56% more students, Hlusko carved it — with campus help — into a half dozen “intellectual experiences” that students will work on independently — plus a lab on Zoom. And instead of a final paper, students will collaborate in groups of four to create a visual project on biological differences “without falling back on the trope of human races.”
In her convocation, Chancellor Christ told the campus: “This may be a perilous time, but so, too, is it a time of creative ferment and possibility.”
Still, for some students beginning school now, hope is a hard sell.
“I’m excited — but I’m disappointed,” said Violet Tahsini, 18, as she emerged, sniffing slightly, from the parking lot on Durant Avenue that had been transformed into a mandated coronavirus testing center for students living on campus. “I won’t get the same community experience. I think online classes aren’t the same. And, usually, in class or in dorms, you have the opportunity to meet new people. I’m not going to get those new friends until we’re back on campus 100%.”
And yet, Tahsini said, maybe she’ll join a virtual campus club. She is also passionate about social justice and said the campus protests UC Berkeley is famous for just won’t be the same. “You’ll probably just have to post online,” she said.
Tahsini’s bleak mood is understandable. Even the chancellor may share a touch of it.
She’s teaching an online course this semester, too. The subject is Frankenstein.