Dear Cal campus community:
As we look forward to a new academic year, let me warmly welcome new and returning members to the Berkeley campus. The joyful excitement of new students, the eager anticipation of new faculty, and the renewed energy of staff, faculty and students returning from a summer break all signal the arrival of the fall semester and an exciting year ahead.
About 4,200 new freshmen 2,200 transfer students and 2,800 new graduate students will be arriving on campus this fall. They are being joined by 29 new faculty and many new staff who filled our ranks this past year. Please help me welcome them all to our Cal family.
Our undergraduate class this year is as remarkable as ever, bringing many of the brightest and highest achieving students from across California to Berkeley. This year’s class has more international and out-of-state students than ever before, representing a greater geographic diversity and contributing to a broader mix of cultures and perspectives among our student body. For academic as well as financial reasons, we are gradually shifting our enrollment balance over the next four years from 11% to 20% non-resident and 80% California resident. This increase is being accommodated by reducing the over-enrollment of California students for whom we do not receive funding from the state, and will bring us back steadily to our budgeted enrollment targets for California residents. In addition to meeting our educational goals, this change will generate additional revenue for the campus, which we are using to improve services for all of our students. For example, we are making available more Reading & Composition courses and gateway courses, beginning this year with mathematics and sciences, to ease the way for undergraduates to earn their degrees in four years. This has been very well received by our students.
This year our percentage of underrepresented minority students has increased slightly; however, we need to do better. To address this, we will be using some of our increased fee revenue from the out-of-state students to invest in outreach programs to underserved communities; this should strengthen our underrepresented minority numbers in the future. I note that this year we have a record number of Pell Grant recipients, that is, students whose family incomes are about $45,000 or less. Indeed, we now estimate that 37% of our undergraduate students come from low-income families. We have more Pell Grant recipients than all of the Ivy League universities plus Stanford combined! This is a clear indicator that our carefully balanced fee and aid structure has allowed us to continue to be highly accessible to those from families of very modest means. Middle-income families, however, are finding it more difficult to meet the costs of university, and we will be working hard to find ways to make college education more affordable for these families. Our undocumented students continue to face seemingly insurmountable challenges and we are continuing to advocate for them on the political front.
In Berkeley’s custom of being on the leading edge, we have broken new ground for universities with our “On the Same Page” program in the College of Letters and Science (L&S) with its focus on personalized medicine this year. L&S students can look forward to intellectually challenging and stimulating discussions of this critically important and highly controversial topic.
Our new graduate students continue to be among the very best nationally and internationally. 189 National Science Foundation Fellows have chosen Berkeley, the largest number at any university in the country. Also, of the 150 students just announced to receive graduate fellowships in Science, Mathematics and Engineering from the Department of Energy, 19 are at Berkeley, more than at any other institution. When these are joined by our Ford Fellows and Javits Fellows in the humanities, it is evident that we are attracting top graduate students in all disciplines who are coming to Berkeley to work with our distinguished faculty and earn their degrees from our world-class programs.
We are very excited about the gifted new faculty who are joining our ranks, although this year we have fewer new faculty than in recent years because of our decision to limit severely our faculty hiring last year in response to the budget crisis created by the sudden deep reduction in our state funding. We have already approved 67 new faculty searches for this year to continue to renew our faculty. Our retention of faculty has been strong in spite of concerns that our difficult budget situation would result in significant faculty losses. Although our faculty are being aggressively pursued by other institutions, and we had some 100 retention cases, we have been largely successful in keeping these faculty and are not experiencing an excessive drain.
One of my responsibilities as Chancellor is to approve promotions to tenure and to our highest rank of “professors above scale.” This year, reviewing the files of our distinguished senior scholars and talented younger faculty across all disciplines has been particularly uplifting. The superb caliber of these outstanding faculty, as scholars and teachers, bodes very well for Berkeley’s future and its continuing comprehensive excellence. Our research funding continues to increase – last year it topped $700 million – as our faculty pursue leading-edge research in all fields and open up new educational opportunities for our students. I am confident that we can continue to look forward to top rankings for our academic excellence such as we received through the just-released Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities for 2010. In this particular ranking, based primarily on the physical, life and social sciences, we ranked second in the world after Harvard, followed by Stanford, MIT and Cambridge. If the arts and humanities, in which Berkeley is outstanding, had been included, we might have fared even better! In all rankings, our academic excellence is consistently rated among the best in the world.
We are very pleased to have had over 300 new career staff join us over the past year. Due to deep budget cuts and natural attrition, we have lost some 900 staff positions in the last eighteen months. Regrettably, as staff retired or left the university, we could only fill those staff positions that were critically essential. The furloughs, staff reductions and increased workloads have made it a particularly difficult year for our staff. I am deeply proud of our staff, their loyalty and dedication to supporting our faculty and students, and their essential contributions to the excellence of this great university.
Our budget challenges have made us realize that we need to operate much more effectively as a campus. Last year we launched Operational Excellence (OE), a transformational change effort in our operations which we expect over the next three years will reduce our expenses permanently by at least $75 million a year. This fall, we are engaged in designing processes to meet the Operational Excellence Report recommendations for operational effectiveness in the areas of procurement, organizational simplification, informational technology, energy management and student services, enabled by a new financial model for the campus and a high-performance culture. The OE initiative, which has involved large numbers of our staff, faculty and students, is being looked upon as a national model, and we are excited by the transformational change it will bring to make Berkeley one of the best-run universities in the world.
Our Campaign for Berkeley continues to be a great success. We have now raised over $1.8 billion in private funding toward our $3 billion goal. In spite of the lingering recession, we raised $313 million last year, a strong indication that our donors have confidence in our future. I am especially proud that we were able to secure a $16 million gift from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund to support equity and inclusion. With matching funding, this gift will grow to more than $32 million. We have doubled the research thrusts of our Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative and given it form and content and are appointing a new leader for this important effort. We will also be adding, over time, 32 new courses to our American Cultures program.
We have many building projects underway on campus to renew our aging physical plant and provide the 21st century facilities needed for a great teaching and research university. Almost all of these are being funded through private-public partnerships, including among others, the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, the Helios/Energy Biosciences Institute building, and the new home for the Blum Center for Developing Economies which will open this year. The Student Athlete High Performance Center and the renovations to Memorial Stadium are totally funded by privately raised funds specifically committed to these projects. The Lower Sproul renovation project, supported by a student fee referendum that was passed in the spring, will be launched this year, a very exciting development for our students.
The past year, in which we saw a precipitous 20% withdrawal of our funding from the state of California, was a particularly challenging one. Our staff and faculty helped us meet the budgetary challenge by accepting a year of reduced pay through furloughs. The good news is that the furlough program is ending. We were able to balance our budget through a combination of revenue generation and expense reduction that included difficult measures such as the reduced faculty hiring mentioned above, voluntary exit programs for staff coupled with a staff hiring freeze, lay-offs and other budget reductions. We have strived particularly to minimize reducing our curriculum and essential services to students.
Regrettably, offsetting the loss of state funding also required that fees increase substantially. An unprecedented fee increase of 32% approved by the UC Regents added to a growing activism and anger at the budget cuts that turned into protests and demonstrations across many UC campuses, including our own. In response to the November 20th protest at Berkeley, I commissioned an independent review by the Campus Police Review Board. Led by Professor Wayne Brazil from the School of Law, the Board issued a report in June that will help us and our campus police to work more closely with our campus community to improve communications and police processes. I hope that this year we can work together as a campus community with a better understanding and respect for our rights and responsibilities.
Adding to the budgetary difficulties, Intercollegiate Athletics experienced an unacceptably large deficit. We have already taken steps to begin reducing the deficit through better financial management and expense reduction. Two reports have been received, one in draft form from an Academic Senate Task Force, the other from a Chancellor’s Advisory Committee of faculty and alumni which I appointed to advise on a sustainable financial model for Intercollegiate Athletics. Both reports are quite consistent and we will be acting on their recommendations in the fall. In spite of these challenges, we are very proud that our Intercollegiate Athletics teams have ranked 9th in the Directors Cup for overall best performance nationally. Our crew and rugby teams, which are not part of the cup standings, have also performed extremely well, both winning national championships. We are looking forward to another exciting fall of cheering on our outstanding student athletes.
I am especially proud of the way in which we have seen our campus through this most difficult budget. Our multi-layered strategy to increase revenue through fees, non-resident enrollment, private fundraising and better financial management measures together with Operational Excellence has put us on a firm footing to stabilize our budget over the next several years. Barring further draconian reductions from the state, this will place us on a solid path to financial sustainability.
Our biggest challenge remains our state funding which has dropped to its lowest level ever in our history as a share of our overall budget. Clearly, we must convince the state to meet its responsibility to the people of California. We must all continue to advocate for increased investment in public higher education. Our Government and Community Relations staff, along with myself and other UC leaders, are working tirelessly in Sacramento. Although the state of California has not yet reached agreement on a budget for 2010-11, I am hopeful that our situation will not worsen, and indeed, could improve.
In spite of the challenges, Berkeley continues to stand out as one of the world’s finest teaching and research universities. I am privileged to be your Chancellor and look forward eagerly to meeting our new students, faculty and staff, to welcoming everyone, and to working with all of you for a successful new academic year. Encouraged by the motto of our great university –FIAT LUX – Let there be light – we will look to the future with vision and confidence as we continue to advance the frontiers of knowledge.
GO BEARS!
Robert J. Birgeneau
Chancellor, UC Berkeley