UC Money Pie Is Cut Into Too Many Slices

Re “Physics Program’s Star Dims at Berkeley,” July 14: I am a retired UC Davis biology professor. The decline of physics at UC Berkeley is only one manifestation of a problem that pervades the entire University of California system. In all their wisdom, a long succession of UC administrators has followed the line that bigger is better, continually adding campuses to the system until it is now one of the largest in the world. In this effort, they lost sight of the fact that no state, nor country for that matter, can afford to support more than two or three top-level campuses. The UC money pie now has to be cut into too many slices to provide any of its campuses with faculty, laboratories, scientific equipment and library facilities on the scale required for academic and scientific accomplishment at the highest levels.

The expansion of the system was carried out with the laudable aim of increasing the availability of a UC degree to the state’s residents. However, the unintended long-range effect will be to reduce the UC system to the least common denominator -- just another huge degree factory of little distinction except for its grand size.

Stephen L. Wolfe

West Hills

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Your article was right on the money. As an engineering graduate of Berkeley and a former student of J.C. Seamus Davis, I found myself taking numerous classes in the buildings where the physics department was located. Each of those buildings was dilapidated and in serious need of repair. That statement applies to virtually all of Berkeley’s departments. It is not, as Chancellor Robert Berdahl states, an isolated problem.

Andy Chen

Cupertino