Berkeley Battles the Blues : Beset by Shriveling State Support, UC Students and Faculty Wonder When the Bloodletting Will Stop--and if the University’s Luster Is Forever Tarnished

FOUR MILLION FRUIT FLIES, NIBBLING ON CORNMEAL and molasses, are being bred inside bottles at Corey Goodman’s laboratory on the UC Berkeley campus. Their tiny central nervous systems, as small as particles of household dust, will be dissected under powerful microscopes, delicately sliced open to reveal cell patterns often headed for developmental catastrophes.

“I just find the mystery of how the nervous system gets put together a wonderful challenge,” says Goodman, a wiry 41-year-old professor of neurobiology who earned his doctorate at Berkeley and now mentors young minds there with the style of an encouraging older brother. “What makes us different, the way we are, has to do with some collection of cells that we know very little about.”

His research on the connections between nerves and muscles in Drosophila may provide insights into human neurological disorders and even psychiatric illnesses. That’s why the project has won large, prestigious grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health. But with or without an ultimate link to humans, the project already is recognized as the kind of intellectual and scientific work that UC Berkeley likes to brag about--especially this year, the 125th since its founding.

So why, then, is anxiety floating around Goodman’s fifth-floor lab like the pesky fruit flies that sometimes escape their bottles? Why does Goodman worry that there might one day be no one to maintain his super-cold refrigerators or keep his records? Why, during what was supposed to be a triumphant yearlong anniversary celebration, do he and most of UC Berkeley’s faculty, staff and student body just not feel in a party mood?

Like public colleges and universities nationwide, the nine-campus UC system has been facing big money problems. As demilitarization brutalizes the California tax base and Sacramento struggles with the state budget, the University of California may be facing its most serious crisis ever. By every measure, from student services to curricula to faculty quality, the shaky bottom line is threatening UC’s lofty claims of excellence, particularly at its flagship campus, Berkeley.

Visitors can’t immediately sense such an emergency in Goodman’s 3,200-square-foot lab, where 26 enthusiastic students, postdoctoral fellows and technicians keep raising and dissecting fruit flies while loud rock, classical and reggae music compete for in-house airwaves. But behind such bustle, the crisis is there. It’s in the students’ basic fees, which will rise to more than $4,000 a year next fall for in-state undergraduates, a 150% increase over fees four years ago. It’s there in the 5% temporary pay cuts that Goodman and most other UC employees and teachers will face starting in July. It’s there in the probable layoffs of support staff and part-time lecturers, in reduced class offerings, in the shutting down of entire graduate programs and in enrollment tightening that will worsen applicants’ current 1-in-6 odds of gaining freshman admission to Berkeley. It’s also there in the induced early retirements of 255 Berkeley professors, 15% of the total faculty so far. And, perhaps most important, it’s there in a definite unease about the future.

“What all of us worry about is, how many years does it go on?” says Goodman, sitting in his cozy office. “If you told me two more years, I’d say we can survive. If you told me four or five years, then we all get really discouraged.” His conversation, usually precise and enthusiastic, briefly stalls.

“The citizens, the Legislature, have to realize they have a very special resource here both for the state and the country,” says Goodman, rallying. “They have this institution educating people, training leaders. It is a public institution, and yet it is one of the very top places in the country. But it’s really very fragile. You can’t take it for granted. It’s easy for things to slip.”

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1868 BY GOV. HENRY Haight. The state took over a struggling private college in Oakland and moved it to a township that would be named for 18th-Century Irish Anglican bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. In his writings, Bishop Berkeley expressed a devotion to Manifest Destiny that must have appealed to the Golden State pioneers: “Westward the course of Empire takes its way.”

Until recently, such ebullient expansionism might as well have been UC’s credo. The Berkeley campus opened in 1873 with the completion of North Hall and South Hall. Photos from the era show only a few farmhouses on the downhill slope between the school and San Francisco Bay. North Hall was later demolished, but the Victorian brick-and-gabled South Hall remains at the core of the 1,232-acre campus, which also has a creek and redwood groves. The school today enrolls more than 30,000 students in about 200 undergraduate and graduate fields, including Norwegian, rhetoric, folklore, optometry, nuclear engineering and peace and conflict studies.

The university’s expansion to Los Angeles in 1919, and later throughout the state, matched the brazen spirit of the California dream. With the post-World War II population explosion, UC mushroomed, creating full campuses in Riverside, Santa Barbara, Davis, San Diego, Irvine and Santa Cruz, plus a medical school in San Francisco. It became the ultimate “multi-versity,” with Berkeley at the intellectual and emotional center. After all, only this campus claims the name Cal--as if the other eight shouldn’t share the nickname.

In 1992, a U.S. News & World Report survey declared UC Berkeley the best public university in the nation, although 15 private schools were judged better than Cal. (UCLA was the third-best public school, just after the University of Virginia, and was 23rd overall.) In a more scholarly ranking, UC Berkeley was listed among the top 10 universities in 30 of the 32 graduate fields surveyed and was among the top three in 16. And in case a visitor is ignorant of such glories, campus signs warn that cars of lesser mortals will be towed from the parking spots reserved for Berkeley’s eight living Nobel laureates.

Throughout UC’s bigger, better history, there have been tight spots, of course. Clark Kerr, Berkeley chancellor and then UC system president from 1952 to 1967, can remember most of them in recent history. Kerr, now 82 and an emeritus professor of business and economics, still conducts research on labor issues and keeps an office just off Telegraph Avenue. “The loyalty oath crisis in the Joe McCarthy days, that was a big one,” Kerr recalls. “The student revolts in the ‘60s during my career, that was another crisis.” (In fact, he lost his job as UC president as a result of that tumult.) But Kerr sees the current problems as much more serious. “The oath controversy and the student crisis were sort of specific issues that affected some parts of the university,” he says. “This crisis affects everybody.”

UC’s painful contractions started in 1991, when Sacramento began to grapple with California’s recession and deficit. The university’s cause wasn’t helped by Proposition 98, passed in 1988, which extended mandatory budget protection to elementary and secondary schools but left higher education out in the cold. Nor was it helped when, in 1992, the regents voted outgoing system president David P. Gardner a retirement deal that added more than $800,000 to his golden handshake. That launched a barrage of criticism, with UC administrators accused of not trimming enough out of the bureaucracy, of letting professors teach too few classes and of not eliminating overlapping programs among the campuses.

Since 1991, California has cut its funds for the UC system by $254 million, or about 12%. Berkeley’s share of that loss has been about $45 million. For the upcoming fiscal year, Gov. Pete Wilson is proposing additional systemwide cuts of $138 million. But Assembly Democrats, led by Ways and Means Committee Chairman John Vasconcellos, warn that much deeper cuts are inevitable unless the state extends the half-cent sales-tax surcharge, scheduled to expire on June 30. In one nightmare scenario, UC’s budget could lose an additional $220 million.

State tax monies represent only 40.5% of this year’s $810-million operating budget at Berkeley. (Grants, contracts, fees and money generated by housing, food services and such compose the rest.) But the state revenues support the most essential teaching and service missions on all the campuses. With fee hikes, deferred maintenance, pay freezes, layoffs and early retirements, those missions have been affected. Partly because of reduced classes and fewer teachers, most Cal students already take five or more years to graduate, and the changes promise to lengthen that time in the future.

From Kerr’s standpoint, the crisis couldn’t be coming at a worse time. The university is about to face its biggest enrollment pressure since the baby boom, as immigration and the birthrate push California’s population upward. As recently as 1989, UC was planning three additional campuses to handle the influx, but it now has abandoned that growth altogether, most recently canceling a proposed San Joaquin Valley campus. And it is also grappling with yet another ambitious goal: serving and representing an ethnically diverse population. About 63% of Berkeley’s undergraduates today are Asians, African-Americans, Latinos and American Indians.

Kerr puts Berkeley’s troubles into question form: “Can you make excellence and diversity work well together,” he asks, “when the state economy is worse than many other states?”

It’s a question, of course, that leads to many others, all easily avoided during good times: In an institution devoted to public education, who will be admitted, and what will they pay? What educational and administrative pursuits are expendable? What happens when private funds become more and more essential to a public school?

Much of American academia is watching to see what answers emerge. Robert H. Atwell, president of the American Council on Education, says it is a little early to know how much UC Berkeley will really be hurt by its current money problems. “It’s going to be hard for the whole UC system to maintain the kind of excellence they’ve perpetuated,” he says. “I think it will be whistling in the dark to think this will not be damaging.”

ON A SPRING AFTERNOON, WHEN FRESH BREEZES COME UP FROM THE BAY, Sproul Plaza can seem like a bit of 1990s academic heaven. The plaza’s main occupants are a friendly army of students, whose average combined SAT scores are 331 points higher than the 889 national average and whose style is somewhere between the Gap and grunge.

They bask in the sun with friends or listen to an all-women’s chorus sing early rock songs a cappella. They cram for tests as the carillon atop 300-foot-tall Sather Tower chimes a lunchtime concert. They cluster around the “free speech” tables, where the Korean Student Assn., Hermanos United, the AIDS Awareness Project and the Jewish Student Union peaceably inform hearts and minds.

But this plaza also often includes homeless people and crackheads wandering onto campus from increasingly scruffy Telegraph Avenue. And there is still student protest here, although the issues are more personal than in the ‘60s and ‘70s. For example, Berkeley administrators are greeted with signs objecting to Gardner’s retirement deal, fee increases and course reductions. Military helicopters once dropped tear gas on students here during the Vietnam War era. Today’s students feel they are being bombed with bad news about their education.

When Charlotte Gutierrez came to UC Berkeley directly from a San Francisco high school in 1984, her annual fees were about $1,300, excluding room and board. The first in her Mexican-American family to attend a four-year college, she originally received some financial aid but not enough to cover books and living expenses. After her junior year, the American history major interrupted her studies, in part because she had trouble paying her bills. For three years, she worked full-time to save money for school. Re-enrolled at Berkeley, she now holds a part-time job running a food concession at a local theater.

“I think the budget cuts have taken a toll on morale,” Gutierrez says during a break between classes at one of the neo-Beat coffee bars across from the plaza. “It’s not just that I’m old and jaded.” The lively, articulate student is angry about how fee increases have eaten up her savings. “It’s definitely been a struggle for me,” she says. “It’s really hard to concentrate on school when you have to work a lot. I know people have been doing this since the beginning of time, but it’s not a great situation.”

Counting fees, books, transportation and living expenses, the total expected costs for a full-time, in-state undergraduate will be about $12,400 next year. Administrators contend that is a good deal compared to many other top-flight public campuses around the country and certainly compared to private schools, where tuition is three or four times higher. Still, UC traditionally offered all qualified students a chance at an Ivy League-level education at bargain-basement prices, no matter what was happening in less golden states. Now, Gutierrez and her fellow students feel betrayed and angry because they think they are getting less school for more money.

In the fall of 1991, the number of classes and seminars offered at Berkeley declined by about 5% from the year before. Last fall, some restorations were made, but next year, Cal anticipates a cutback of at least 335 courses and sections (4.5% of the 1992-93 total). In some cases, the reductions simply mean more crowded classrooms; in others, whole classes and programs are vanishing from the curriculum. The Spanish department, for example, offered at least a dozen sections of beginning Spanish before 1990. In the ‘93-’94 school year, Spanish 1 was deemed expendable and will not be on the schedule at all. Admissions to three graduate programs in art, drama and library science have been suspended and don’t seem likely to resume. All this fuels long-simmering debate about teaching loads of Berkeley professors, who now average slightly less than two courses a semester. (The average UC pay for a full professor is $76,785, although associate and assistant professors make far less.)

And there’s the matter of library hours. At Doe Library, command center for Berkeley’s almost-8-million-volume collection--the fourth largest in North America--the doors now close at 10 p.m. instead of midnight, and they maintain limited hours during intersessions, the period between semesters that professors and graduate students used to cherish for research. State bond monies from a richer period are building an underground expansion to Doe but can’t buy books. Over the past four years, Berkeley’s chief librarian, Dorothy Gregor, has had to drop subscriptions to about 12,000 of her 100,000 periodicals and journals, and more pruning is ahead. “It seems to me, we are just quietly being eaten away,” she says.

Or not so quietly. The graduate program in library science, one of only three in the state, is battling hard for its survival. A few months ago, a panel of faculty and administrators found problems with the library school’s program. The school had trouble keeping deans and faculty, and bringing the school up to speed would require expensive new technology. With approval of Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, the panel ordered that no new library students be enrolled in the fall. The current 150 master’s and doctoral candidates can continue as university officials decide whether the school should be revived, reformed, merged with other programs or killed.

While its academic troubles began earlier, the library school now finds its fate tied to the worsening news about state finances. Its students, alumni and faculty fear the 75-year-old school will be sacrificed on the austerity altar. They allege that the real trouble is “privatization”--the move toward corporate or foundation grants, sponsorship and donations to replace state shortfalls.

Nancy Van House, the acting dean of the library school, admits that her program is more dependent on tax dollars than, say, Corey Goodman’s fruit-fly studies. Library training does not attract big research grants, and its alumni tend to be of modest means, not big-ticket donors. “Maybe we are being punished for lack of support,” suggests Van House. “It certainly looks that way.”

In the present climate, however, not even outside money sources guarantee protection from hard times. The civil engineering department, generally well-funded with grants from Caltrans, the Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy, can’t transfer funds earmarked for graduate research to support undergraduate classes. Nor can it offset the “brain drain” caused by the early retirement deals the system has offered twice since 1991.

Three years ago, the civil engineering department had 52 full-time professors. Then 14 took early retirement, and only five of those returned part-time. With fewer teachers and sections, enrollments in some classes have almost doubled; with fewer tax dollars, laboratory improvements have stalled.

Among the part-time “retired” returnees is 35-year veteran professor James K. Mitchell, an expert on soil stability whose work includes strengthening California freeways, testing moon-soil samples and a current project to stop the Leaning Tower of Pisa from tipping over. He says the department is feeling the pinch. The 65 students in a recent undergraduate class he taught didn’t get as much hands-on training as he would have liked. “What we’ve had to do generally is demonstrate rather than let them do it,” Mitchell says. Field trips to geological sites around the West were canceled due to lack of money.

“Given the situation, the morale is surprisingly good,” says Mitchell in his office decorated with pictures of the Leaning Tower and a lunar landing. “It can be demoralizing, though, to be hit by reduction after reduction and realize that you can’t do the things you want to do for a truly exceptional program.”

On the humanities side, African-American studies professor Barbara Christian, one of Charlotte Gutierrez’s teachers, can eloquently summarize the effects of UC’s budget crisis and the resulting Berkeley blues. There are her crowded classrooms--in Gutierrez’s class, on contemporary women writers, where there used to be 50 students, there are now 80. There is her office in Dwinelle Hall, where deferred maintenance means that walls stay cracked and ceiling tiles threaten to fall. There is the faculty discontent in reaction to the pay cuts, and there are the small irritations, like difficulties getting photocopies and letterhead.

Still, Christian says she’s less worried about Berkeley’s survival as an excellent school than she is about its character. Some days, she says, she spends more time counseling students about money problems than about the novels of Toni Morrison. “The students have a sense of a gloom, a sense that they are in a declining world.”

How will Berkeley’s fee hikes and an emphasis on privatization, Christian wonders, deepen that perception? What will happen to her students’ sense of “where they can go, what they can do, what they can aim for?”

Gutierrez asked herself such questions before she made a decision to return to Cal. She could have finished up her bachelor’s at San Francisco State, the local branch of the much less expensive Cal State system. Despite how much harder the equation of work plus school is at Cal, Berkeley’s mystique and quality lured her back. “There is still a great pride in being at Cal,” Gutierrez says. “I’m wondering,” she adds, “how much longer we can all feel that.”

CHANCELLOR CHANG-LIN TIEN, THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR COMING UP WITH answers for most of the questions swirling around Berkeley these days, occupies a second-floor wood-paneled office in old California Hall, in the middle of campus. In high bookshelves, he keeps technical volumes befitting his three decades as a mechanical engineering professor and a vice chancellor in the UC system. His decorating taste runs to Chinese art mixed with lots of stuffed teddy bears, symbolizing Cal’s Golden Bears sports teams. On a window ledge is a gift from Taiwanese admirers, a marble tablet inscribed with a poem in Chinese characters. One line, the Chinese-born Tien translates in his still heavily accented English, urges him to be “like a good rain to cultivate young minds.”

A small man, with a thick shock of black hair and an irrepressibly upbeat air, Tien moves with the quick bounce of the basketball player he was during his college days in Taiwan. When he was first appointed chancellor in July, 1990, some critics hinted that he was named to help calm anger over Berkeley’s now-discontinued policies that allegedly restricted the number of Asian student admissions. Through the unavoidable force of his sunny personality, he quieted many doubters. For his annual salary of $191,500, Tien has been a nonstop cheerleader for Cal, often ending speeches at formal academic conferences and alumni fund-raisers alike with a startlingly loud chant of “Go Bears!”

He acknowledges the free-floating anxiety on campus, but he prefers a more optimistic take. “It’s a fixed or shrinking pie,” he says. “We’ve got to move into new areas. We have to make tough decisions.”

Yes, Tien admits, privatization has reared its head, but it’s not always ugly--a new $32.5-million computer-science building and a $45-million business school will be paid for by private donations. But the graduate library school, he insists, will not live or die on grants and alumni support.

Tien rejects the Pollyanna factor in all this. “I’m not just optimistic,” he emphasizes, “I think I’m right. When we undergo change, it offers tremendous opportunity.”

Not that the chancellor doesn’t share in the anxiety at Berkeley. As the ‘93-’94 budget news has gotten grimmer, Tien has become downright testy with the UC hierarchy and Sacramento. This spring, all the UC chancellors were asked to consider yet another generous early retirement plan for professors. The meeting turned ugly as Tien cast the sole no vote on the scheme. He then threatened to resign.

For Tien, the buyout terms were unacceptable. With many of the Berkeley faculty in their late 50s, he feared a mass exodus of professors who could collect a fat UC pension and then join faculties at, say, Stanford or MIT. The crippling experience at the civil engineering department might be repeated all over campus. Tien withdrew his threat only after he was promised Berkeley could offer a separate, less generous package.

Then in April, Tien went on the offensive again. Breaking away from UC’s usual internal etiquette, which calls for Big Public Statements to be issued by the system president only, Tien and Berkeley faculty leaders held their own press conference. The idea was to kick off a separate, high-profile publicity and lobbying campaign against further budget slashes, predicting that California’s economy would never recover without a vital UC.

Tien was not smiling when he faced the television cameras. He noted the elimination of five of eight executive positions in just one division as evidence that Berkeley is doing “everything possible to streamline operations while we protect teaching and research.” He then sounded a warning: “When you tear apart a great university program, you cannot rebuild it overnight. It will take decades to restore.”

Away from cameras, Tien now insists that he has not succumbed to the fears around him. He is hopeful, he says, even though it will take a lot “to preserve this great institution, its excellence and diversity.” Tien credits his attitude to his days as a designer of heat-resistant tiles for space shuttles: “I think it’s my job to have this spirit. My field is heat transfer. It’s my job to take a lot of heat but still come back strongly.”

DESPITE ALL THE GLOOM, THE UNIVERSITY is still trying to celebrate its 125th birthday with panache. On March 12, the campus hosted a lavish convocation for Charter Day, the highlight of a continuing season of events honoring Gov. Haight’s farsighted decisions. In a 45-minute-long procession, students, faculty and alumni, all in formal academic gowns, marched into Zellerbach Auditorium. Banners for every class bobbed and waved, and a male octet belted out “Hail to California, alma mater dear.” Marc Weinstein, a senior philosophy major from Torrance, carried the colors of the Class of 1879.

Onstage, prominent alumni such as author Joan Didion and former California Supreme Court Justice Allen Broussard testified to Cal’s greatness. In his keynote address, UC system president Jack W. Peltason praised Berkeley for all its past glories, while the audience of more than 1,500 often nodded in agreement. Then Peltason made his pitch. “Universities are hardy institutions and are built for the centuries. We must keep that perspective in mind as we struggle with the problems and demands of today. In the midst of the distractions and difficulties of the moment, we need to begin writing the next chapter of our story. We must think about what we are going to do and become tomorrow.”

Out in the audience, Weinstein was depressed. In his four years at Cal, he had seen his fees increase while his scholarship money dropped. He saw classes he needed disappear and the bureaucracy become more impenetrable. Just before his own graduation, he still considered that he had received “a quality education all the way around,” but his enthusiasm for it was definitely waning. In fact, he had volunteered to be among the marchers at the Charter Day festivities hoping to reconnect to the old Cal spirit, the majestic tradition of excellence that has, up to now, kept UC Berkeley atop the academic heap.

“There was a lot of nostalgia about the past,” says the philosophy major. “The talk of history was definitely there.” But Peltason’s call to the future just didn’t cut it. “It depressed me,” Weinstein laments. “When they talked about the present or future, there was the sense that we are in big trouble. It definitely was not talk about celebration, but of panic.”