The State of Equity and Inclusion at UC Berkeley

The State of Equity and Inclusion at UC Berkeley
Chancellor Tells of Campus Equity and Inclusion: the Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Robert J. Birgeneau
The Daily Californian
3 March 2009

Some of you may know that I am a serious movie buff. Like you, chancellors also enjoy an occasional respite from their responsibilities and after physics, my favorite activity is watching movies. The awarding of the Best Picture Oscar to "Slumdog Millionaire" and Best Actor to Sean Penn reminded me once more that our society is yearning to become more inclusive and to see the marginalized succeed. The good news is that at Berkeley, we continue to be leaders for equity and inclusion and to work for the success of this noble ideal.

The joyous celebration of the inauguration of our nation's first black President that took place on Upper Sproul Plaza showed clearly that there is a great deal of good will for Berkeley to be a welcoming community that embraces everyone. Through the overwhelming turnout of some ten thousand students, faculty, staff and community members who came to Upper Sproul, we shared our principles of community and our happiness at this historic moment of change for America.

We continue to make good progress on many fronts. The portfolio of the Vice-Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, created some eighteen months ago, is now well launched. Vice-Chancellor Gibor Basri has been preparing a ten-year strategic plan for equity and inclusion, which he will soon release to the campus. We have created a multicultural center that is operating well in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, with a commitment to finding a permanent home in plans for a revitalized Lower Sproul Plaza. Our recent faculty hires show a marked increase in the number of underrepresented minority and women faculty hired. As we increase staff development opportunities and create career paths, this will help our underrepresented minority staff advance in their careers. The increase in funding for Pell Grants announced in the recently passed federal stimulus package will be especially helpful to our underrepresented minority students. All this is good news.

Sadly, the bad news is that we still have a long way to go to call ourselves a truly inclusive community that extends equal rights to all. There have been a number of troubling incidents on campus. This fall, in a story also reported by The Daily Californian, racist comments were made by a member of the crew team in the presence of a black intercollegiate athlete. These comments were followed by inappropriate retaliation. Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim graffiti have appeared on and near campus and conflicts between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists have continued to mar relations among our students.

The passage of Proposition 8 has left our LGBTQ community without the full rights granted to other citizens under our nation's Constitution. Our undocumented students still have no pathway to citizenship. Gay students have reported that they continue to be subjected to crude, homophobic insults, on and off campus. Although the Oscar Grant incident is not directly related to the campus, many members of our campus community, especially our students, have been deeply disturbed by the death of this young African American at the hands of a BART police officer.

Most recently, there have been scurrilous attacks with outright misrepresentation of facts by print media, bloggers and even some of our own faculty and staff against Associate Chancellor Linda Williams, the first African-American woman to serve on the Chancellor's Cabinet in Berkeley's 141-year history. Discouragingly, this is moving us in the direction of another recent Oscar-winning movie, "Crash." Many members of our African-American community are rightly outraged by the media harassment of a successful and accomplished black woman and see these actions as creating a chilling climate for all African-Americans on campus.

In spite of these setbacks for equity and inclusion, I am by nature an optimist and confident that our yearning for a more inclusive and equitable society will prevail. Berkeley has always been motivated by serving the public good and I can see no higher ideal than working for equity and inclusion for all. Perhaps, some day, the fruits of our efforts for a more just society will too be the subject of an Oscar-winning movie.