Thursday’s town hall meeting with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and other administrators brought numerous issues facing the campus—and the UC system as a whole—to light. While most of the forum focused on the effects of budget cuts, a wide variety of topics were discussed, ranging from the redevelopment of Lower Sproul Plaza to the democratization of the UC Board Regents.

The chancellor first mentioned raising close to $60 million for the campus by replacing 2,500 in-state students with out of state students, who currently pay more than three times as much in undergraduate fees. The campus is over-enrolled by 2,500 students, meaning that it does not receive state funding for these students.

“Rather than leave those seats empty our goal is to replace them with out of state students,” Birgeneau said.
Birgeneau then spoke about a “surprisingly well received out of the box solution.”

The solution would involve creating a hybrid model of public funding for universities throughout the nation.

“We’ve called on the Obama administration … we’ve appealed to them to save public education,” Birgeneau said. “If the the federal government were to invest in public education half of what they spent on AIG, then that would be enough to permanently solve the problem for about the top 20 public research universities.”

The chancellor said he had received the support of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

At the forum, Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard touched on another issue: the effects of the cuts on low and middle income families. He said that in a seemingly counter-intuitive way, the increased fees could help lower income students financial aid because a third of student fees goes to aid, Poullard said.

“While lower income students will be covered the bad news is that middle class students are not,” he said.

Members of the Third World Liberation Front asked the panel about their support for a Multicultural Center as part of a new Lower Sproul Plaza.

While the chancellor said he needed to see a detailed financial plan before making a commitment, he said the campus will match student funds as each of the phases of the redevelopment come along phased way.

Poullard addressed the growing level of unrest in the audience.

“There is a certain level of ribbing and cynicism that I would expect from this event,” he said. “I ask for grace and patience as I hear things and I will extend grace and patience back to you.”

Many questions addressed different paths of activism students should take to protest the cuts. The scheduled UC systrem wide strike, which has 960 signatories  as of Friday at noon, came up many times during the forum.

Birgeneau told the forum he personally did not support a strike and later said in an interview he thought it would be an ineffective measure to combat the cuts. He mentioned that legislators in Sacramento had viewed the September 24 walkout with “disdain”.

“They said ‘Oh, its only Berkeley’,” he said.

Earlier that evening, Birgeneau and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer advocated for a march on the state capitol and for students to lobby their local legislators.

“I hope that literally … there will be hundrends of thousands of supporters demanding that the legislature reverse its polcies and support higher eduation,” Birgeneau said.

Towards the end of the forum student organizer Blanca Misse rallied the crowd, telling the panelists that they are going to need to stand with students as they protest the budget cuts in Novemeber.

“I don’t know how big the strike in November is going to be, but the one in March is going to be hella big,” Misse said. “Be ready to be with us in the picket lines, to tell the regents and to tell the president that we are not going to take it.”

In a letter responding to a Visalia Times-Delta editorial piece, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said the university’s strategy to increase funding for the school will not reduce enrollment opportunities for students from the Central Valley.

The editorial accused UC Berkeley of refusing admission to California students who would require financial aid and giving their slots to full-paying students from out of the state or the country.

Birgeneau addressed the Central Valley, assuring families that they should not be concerned that their children might not be able to afford Berkeley.

“If they earn a place at Berkeley, they will not be turned back, and we will ensure that they have the means to earn a UC Berkeley degree,” he wrote.

But Birgeneau also wrote that UC Berkeley will have to increase the amount of out-of-state and international students. The campus is overenrolled by 2,500 students, which means the state will not supply funds for that number. Instead of cutting the seats altogether, Birgeneau says they will be filled with those who can pay the full cost of their education—out-of-state and international students.

“We are frankly shocked that Berkeley would so blatantly betray its own values,” the Visalia Times-Delta wrote in response to the campus decision.

The debate about the initiative is ongoing, both sides arguing to uphold the accessibility and prestige of one of the nation’s most reputable public universities.

As part of its new training program, the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory will accept four apprentice electricians on Nov. 2.

The training program was set up by the lab and Alameda County, and apprentices in the county can fulfill some of their required 8,000 hours of training at the lab.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s chief operating officer Jim Krupnick and business manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Local 595 union Victor Uno came up with the idea, and  The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Northern chapter of the National Electrical Contractors Association sponsored the apprentice training program.

UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy will a $5 million grant that officials say will “help protect the prestigious school’s national standing during the economic crisis.”

The grant is from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, which has now invested a total of $15 million into the public policy school.

“With this generous new gift, the Goldman School will increase its international outreach, incorporate more science and technology, especially information technology, into the curriculum, and expand its ability to train future policy leaders as well as policy analysts,” said Henry Brady, the school’s dean, in a statement.

Wednesday the Senate confirmed three nominees for the Interior Department and Energy Department of the Obama administration, including one nominee who is a professor at UC Berkeley.

Arun Majumdar, a professor of engineering and materials science at Berkeley was confirmed as director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Majumdar was the associate laboratory director for energy and environmental sciences at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

He became the associate laboratory director in February and has been a member of UC Berkeley’s faculty since 1997.

According to the New York Times, Majumdar said he would like the agency to become “a robust engine of American innovation.”

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Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said Tuesday that Cal will admit as many as 600 fewer California students per year in favor of out-of state applicants, to offset a 20 percent funding cut from Sacramento.

A task force of faculty and administrators recently recommended upping the percentage of nonresident freshmen from the current 14 percent to 23.2 percent for the coming fall semester.

The state has historically covered much of the university’s cost of educating resident students, but Sacramento has been opting out of this commitment. Nonresidents pay higher tuitions that fully cover UC’s cost of educating them, according to Birgeneau.

Birgeneau said he understands that people will be angry about Berkeley’s substituting out-of-state students for residents. But, he said, “that upset needs to be directed to Sacramento.”

Also, according to UC President Mark Yudof’s office, the UC system will be admitting 2,500 fewer in-state students next year, regardless of whether it admits more out-of-state applicants due to budgetary limitations.

eScholarship launched a redesigned Web site today, with numerous digital publishing services available to the university community and a research platform for scholars across the globe.

The new eScholarship, previously known as UC’s eScholarship Repository, offers a publishing platform that enables departments, research units, publishing programs and individual scholars associated with the university to have direct control over the creation and distribution of their scholarship.

eScholarship, which started in 2002 as a collaborative effort between the Berkeley Electronic Press and the California Digital Library, currently consists of more than 30,000 publications. Its purpose is to offer the university community an alternative to traditional scholarly publishing channels and to support the widespread distribution of UC research.

“Our relaunch of eScholarship reflects the enormous value we see in recasting the institutional repository as an open access publisher,” said Catherine Mitchell, director of the publishing group at the California Digital Library. “There is significant need across the University of California campuses for a sustainable infrastructure to support the publication and dissemination of research.”

Books published in eScholarship are now eligible for a combined digital/print publication service provided by UC Publishing Services, a joint program of UC Press and the California Digital Library.

The site redesign has been focusing heavily on improving the quality of access to eScholarship publications. The new site is optimized for Google searches, PDFs can be viewed in their without downloading and research can be shared easily through social networking sites and RSS feeds.

Popular Science named UC Berkeley professor Ting Xu as one of their “Brilliant 10” ranking of young researchers in the world.

Xu, 35, developed a technique of building up polymers from the molecule level on up. Xu’s work would completely alter data storage devices. The information from hundreds of DVDs could eventually be stored on a chip the size of a quarter.

More recently, Xu is using her nano-scale construction technique to make solar cells the thickness of a pieces of paper. These cells would be much more efficient than current devices.

Also on Popular Science’s list is UC Santa Cruz anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy, 33, for his study of the effect of food on human evolution. He showed that potatoes and other starchy vegetables were important for fueling a larger brain. He used evidence from early human teeth and the modern human DNA that controls saliva.

Other scientists who made the list include Virginia Tech engineering professor Dennis Hong made for his study of robotics. Thirty-three-year-old Carlos Guestrin of Carnegie Mellon University created an algorithm which could be widely used to stop waterborne disease or design self-adjusting chairs.

The head of the UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science stressed the benefits of the UC system in an open letter as state legislators look to resolve a $1.1 billion shortfall.

Acting Executive Dean Janet Broughton highlighted parts of the California economy that crucially depend on quality higher education. She also tied UC contributions to democracy and the betterment of society.

Broughton claimed that one fourth of all California biotech firms were founded by UC graduates or faculty. UC research websites echo that sentiment with their report that one in four US biotech companies are within 35 miles of a UC campus.

Besides business creation, the UCs offer even more important improvement to society, according to Broughton. UC Berkeley, for instance, offers students a multitude of language programs and a library system among the best in the world. The level of schooling available at California public universities has rarely been available to any but the very wealthy.

Broughton goes on to explain how democracy itself is dependent upon a UC style education. She asserts that “tough-minded” yet “open-minded” citizens are needed to properly engage in public service and that the UC system provides these kinds of individuals.

UC Berkeley Law students launched a new initiative Oct. 13 that will push for an end to alleged executive abuse of power and impunity. Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (BAAT) hosted a panel of prominent lawyers and legal academics at its kick-off event yesterday to discuss the alleged “torture memos” written by the Bush Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, including UC Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo.

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