 Dean's and welcome to this campus conversation, a special edition of DEED. I'm Dan Moguloff from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Today, I'm honored to welcome four of the five deans from our very own College of Letters and Science. That's the biggest college of course at Berkeley. It encompasses three quarters of our undergraduates and half of our faculty and graduate students. With us today is Executive Dean Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Dean of Biological Sciences, Michael Botchan, Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Stephen Kahn, Dean of Social Sciences, Rocker Ray. Unfortunately, Sarah Geyer, the Dean of Arts and Humanities was unable to join us today but we'll be scheduling her for a later campus conversation this spring. Today, we're gonna be talking about the college's constituent elements, its priorities and plans, challenges and opportunities. And as always, we welcome and need your questions throughout the conversation. If you have a question, just post it to our Facebook Live site and we'll do our best to get to your questions as we proceed. Now to get going, rather than read each of these deans extraordinary resumes and believe me, they are, we're gonna go to start by going around the room and asking each of you to share a little bit about your background, your journey to and within Berkeley. And then once we get to know you all a little bit better, we'll dive into the issues and questions that our audience has. So Jennifer, let's start with you, introduce yourself. Who are you? How did you get to where you are today? Thanks, Dan, so much. And thank you all of you who are watching and being part of this conversation. So I am a Berkeley alum. I graduated in 94 in anthropology. I came as an out of state transfer student back at the time when that was a possible thing to do. And so I've really loved this campus for more than half my life now. I have always just been enchanted by the energy and the crazy optimism, the sort of disruptive opportunity everywhere. And I still make a big effort to always to walk if I can every day to walk Sproul Plaza and see if I can find a student group that's doing something I haven't heard of yet. I've been on the faculty for 22 years in demography and then sociology. And I just came into this role a year ago, most immediately before I was chair of the academic Senate. And so some of you remember me from those years, that horrible year when we were all stuck at home trying to say, we're gonna make it, hang in there, hang in there. I still think that's true. We are making it, so hang in there. So before I move on to Michael, I'm gonna throw you a little curve ball. So you've been DEA executive dean for a year. What's been the most surprising part? Ah, I think the most surprising part is, we have 81 undergraduate majors in the college and I have spent, I don't know, probably a third of my time on just two of them. And I think that the mismatch between, I'm not even gonna tell you, I'm gonna let you all guess which to occupy all of my time. But I think that, I think you don't necessarily know from the outside, you can see the list of all the things that are gonna fall into your portfolio, but the proportion of your time that each one is gonna take, you don't really know until you try it. Got it. Michael, your next step, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are. Well, that's a long story, Dan, but I'll start with my PhD in 1972. I was actually a graduate student here at Berkeley. I started at sort of the tail end of the free speech movement in the beginning of the Vietnam demonstrations here on campus and I got my degree in Hildebrand Hall in biophysics and it was, I had come from the East Coast and I have to say that my wife and I fell in love with Berkeley and everything that I can only repeat what Jenna just said, Berkeley is just a particularly exciting place to be for a scholar, for someone who's interested in research and I left Berkeley in 72 to postdoc with James Watson at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where I worked for eight years and turned down job offers everywhere until I got a tenure offer here in 1979 and focused on biochemistry and biophysics and molecular biology and became the department chair of the very large department molecular cell biology and as I transitioned to different periods in my life when I first thought that I knew everything about Berkeley which was basically life sciences and then became a dean of biological sciences six years ago when I realized that I was just beginning to really learn how wonderful a place this was because I had never been active in the academic center on the budget committee and just to see how glorious this place is still is sustaining in my time now. All right, I'm an equal opportunity curve baller. Here's your curve ball. What's changed most about Berkeley since you first crossed the threshold here? Yeah, well, you know, I'm pretty good on curve balls. Fast balls is not very good because of my eyesight. I think what's changed the most since the 70s is the fact that students have become much more concerned about careers. My era, you know, it was when I became an academic at Cold Spring Harbor and in a certain way getting grants and then moving to Berkeley, you know, you didn't have to, it was not hyper competitive the way it is now and students have more insecurity and I think faculty and this is not a secret to any of the deans here but we're so dependent upon our staff who are just so marvelous. And I think the dependence on staff for mentoring students and helping us do all the things that we're asked to do in many different ways is very, very different from what I remember when I started as an associate professor in 79, 80. Got it, fascinating. Next up, Dean Collins Steven, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got to where you're sitting today. Yeah, thanks Dan. So I came to Berkeley this spring. I started on the campus in May and I became the Dean of Mathematical Physical Sciences on June 1st. So I've only been in the job a few months. I'm the newest to this position of the deans in L&S. Prior to coming to Berkeley, I was at Stanford for 18 years and a professor there and at Slack National Accelerator Lab. And then prior to that, I spent eight years at Columbia. But coming to Berkeley is also coming home for me. I was a graduate student here in physics in the 70s. I got my PhD in 1980. And then I left for a while to Harvard and Columbia and then came back to Berkeley as a professor. And I was here between 84 and 95. So I have a long history with the campus and it feels very much like coming home. I should also point out that the last few years at Stanford, I was actually living in Berkeley. And so my familiarity became stronger with the town itself in the way it has changed over the years. I'm an astrophysicist, experimental astrophysicist and my faculty positions are in physics and astronomy. I'm used to building very large scientific projects. And I've kind of brought that sensibility a little bit to dealing with some of the issues here at Berkeley, which are a non-negligible list. So this has been a very challenging job and a very interesting job for me and I'm really happy to be back. All right, so you know what the fast ball or your curve ball is gonna be, of course, which is describe the difference or what your impression is now between Berkeley now and Stanford now. Many people see them as being opposites and many also see them as being institutions with a lot in common. Yeah, I think both are true. Of course, not being a logician, I can posit that. But yeah, so Stanford is very different as a, in many ways, as a private university. It has flexibility in some ways that we don't have here as a public institution at Berkeley. And the student body at Stanford is evolved over the years. It's become extremely difficult to get in as an undergraduate, something like 4% or even less of the applicants. And that's created a certain attitude among the students there that I don't find at Berkeley actually. So that's one of the positive things about being here. On the other hand, both are very strong research universities and in the fields that I work in and now that I oversee, they're both in the top five in all of our departments. And so, in that sense, they're quite similar. The faculty that I became familiar with at Stanford, I'm very much like and equivalently the faculty I know here at Berkeley, I very much like in those departments. So I think there is a lot in common even though there are differences. But having taught at all three universities, I must say I most enjoyed teaching at Berkeley. I just found the students to be more open minded to be a little less overconfident in themselves to some degree and that's been quite refreshing. That's a good answer and you can go on to the bonus round. Thank you. Last but certainly not least, Dean Rakha Ray. Rakha, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got to where you are today. Thanks, Dan. I grew up in India in a city called Kolkata and I came to the US for my undergraduate education. I went to a small women's college on the East Coast called Brynmar after which I went to Madison, Wisconsin for my PhD. I came to Berkeley in 1993 to be assistant professor of sociology and I never left. They will drag me out here. They'll have to drag my dead body out of Berkeley. Oh, that's a little dark, a little dark. But I mean, the reason I say this even jokingly is really something that my colleagues have alluded to. It's the students. I had never seen anything like this. I had never met anything like these students and I've never wanted to go anywhere else. And so as I became more senior, I was first the chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, then I became the chair of sociology, then I was part of the budget committee and I chaired that and then I became the dean here and that's sort of my trajectory. But all along, all along what has driven me is the desire to make sure that these marvelous students from whom I've learned so much, these marvelous students are able to thrive here at Berkeley. And so any position that I can take that can ensure that that is the case, I'm really happy to take. So that's my journey. And I don't play baseball. What about cricket? That I can understand. Okay, good. Oh, wow. I'll throw you one of those crazy spinny balls that cricketeers send to each other. I'm curious about whether you perceive a change in what students need to thrive between now 2022 and let's say 10 years ago. You know, what is consistent between, you know, 20, 30 years ago and now is that the students who come to Berkeley both want to do well and to do good. And that's really a remarkable feature of Berkeley students. If I can just take you back when I first got here almost 30 years ago, you know, I was young, I was ambitious. I was teaching my first class and I met, I was teaching an introduction to sociology class and a young man came to my office and he asked me, you know, would I help him achieve his goals? And I said, what is your goal? He said a C plus. And I was a little, you know, take it back because I was like, oh, okay. What do you want to do with your life? I said to him and he said he wanted to be a parole officer. And I said, why? And he said to me, because my mother was in and out of state institutions all of her life and she didn't speak any English. People in my community are in and out of a range of state institutions, penal and otherwise. And I want to be able to help them. And the best way to do it is by being a bilingual parole officer, right? So I've never forgotten that story because it began with the C plus and am I being astonished and understanding that no matter how impoverished a background somebody comes from when they come to Berkeley, they want to do good and they want to help their communities. And that has stuck with me forever. So I want to actually begin this question, my answer to your question by saying that thing has continued. And that makes me so grateful. What has changed? What people need? So what that student needed to thrive was really my hand holding, my reassurance, my faith in him and what students need now to thrive is a little bit more than that. There's a high level of anxiety, a very, very high level of anxiety, both about the material and about the psychological and social, I would say. So I think they need, our students need not to be food insecure, they need not to be housing insecure and they need to have some confidence that there is a job waiting for them out there. So they need hand holding still, but they need a deeper kind of mentoring, a deeper kind of reassurance is what I would say they need. You know, that's so interesting. That's so interesting. I actually want to ask the other deans to weigh in on that about what you perceive about the shifting sands in terms of student needs. Jenna, Michael, go ahead. You've got your hand. Well, I just wanted to say that that feeds back and amplifies what I said early on about how things have changed from the late 60s, early 70s to now where I said now students are much more concerned about careers. And I think Raka did a beautiful job of expanding that to where that anxiety comes from. It's not only careers, it's financial and future security. Yeah, Jenna. Well, Steve also had his hand up. I don't want to jump. Go ahead, Steven, go ahead. Oh, okay. Yeah, I was going to say that I agree with this perception and I think it's particularly acute now given all the things that have been happening in the world, which none of us could have predicted 20, 30 years ago would ever be a remote possibility. And that certainly I think leads to anxiety in all of us, which is most acute in people who are just coming out of their teenage years where they have the other pressures. But I do feel that college and in particular Berkeley presents maybe an issue for students because they've been increasingly brought up with sort of checklists like do this, that, this, and then you'll, then you'll get to where you need to be. And I think when they come to Berkeley, they find out that that's not the way the world works, that there is no prescription on how to succeed. You have to find yourself, you have to make your own opportunities. You have to discover what you're really interested in. And I think that's very hard on young people. And I think it's becoming harder and people are not learning those kinds of lessons until later in their life when it, in some cases, is too late. So, yeah. Jenna? It's never too late, Steve. Never too late to learn. Yeah, I think that what Rocket and Steve and Mike have said about the really important financial questions is very, is very significant and it affects our students quite directly as Rocket was saying around food insecurity or just the level of borrowing that many of our students have to undertake in order to get a higher education. And so, political questions around doubling the Pell, for example, are incredibly important for sustaining the wellbeing of our students. The other financial-sided piece has to do with the hardship that many of our department staff are facing, which over the last 30 years, we've seen a two-thirds increase in the number of students on the campus and in the College of Letters and Science. Those of you who are staff in our departments, you know that many of you are working with smaller staffs than you had 10, 20, 30 years, even 30 years ago, although the number of students has increased a lot. So that campus-wide we have increased staff, but we've certainly not done so in the departments on average. And so one advisor has a larger case load, one scheduler has a larger case load, one support person has a larger case load. And that, so finding us as a college and also as a campus as a whole, finding ways to increase support for the departments is really urgent, both for the well-being of the staff themselves, but also for the students that they serve so ably. And then, Mike, I'm just gonna say one more thing here and then I'll hand it over to you. And so all of that is really true, but I think there's also one other piece in this maybe relates to what also Stephen and Mike were saying, which is in addition to this core support, our students really need a clearer story. And one thing that we're really trying to do as a college and all of us are working on this in different ways is to help our students understand that how the steps that they're taking now relate to a future as a person leading a life of concern. How building step by step, what you do now, that there is a future that is there and you can't see it and there's not a formula, but it is there and you will make it. And like building that story starting like with what Rocco was saying about how this class is a part of that process. I think that's another thing that our students really need is for us to speak clearly that there's hope, not only hope, there is a future. So. Okay, no to self, there is help. I was glad to hear that this morning. Michael, what did you want to say? Yeah, well, I wanted to say something very positive. And I think the first thing that I'd like to point out is that Jenna has launched a really exciting initiative on the future of liberal arts and education at Cal with a really radical mission to really think about what it is with an undergraduate education that we remember ourselves about our own education and that it's an exciting time in our lives to be undergraduates and we're always striving to do better. And the other, and Jenna, you may want to elaborate on that sort of herky jerky description of what we're doing, but on the other side, I would say that this is probably the most exciting time, probably in a very long time, maybe forever in science, where the tools that we have to actually make basic discoveries that lead to the translation for all kinds of applications have never been greater. It really is, we have in life sciences, we have tools that I never could have dreamt of in the 70s, that you could sequence a human genome in multiplex with many in a day. I mean, my postdoc project, I was very proud that I could sequence 10 nucleotides in one particular place for a piece of DNA that I could clone after a year. This, and many of these revolutions in technology and in basic discovery have started here at Cal. So for the student who really is interested in this, this is way more vibrant than it ever was ever. Yeah, beautiful. So you mentioned the conversation or the initiative that Jenna has launched as a way to sort of set the stage to potential future change and evolution for the college. We're gonna get there in just a bit, but there's a question I wanna ask beforehand. But even before that, just for those of you who joined us later, wanna welcome you to this campus conversation with four of the five Dean's from the College of Letters and Science. As always, we welcome your questions, which can be posted to our Facebook Live site. So another question I wanna pose to all of you. I think I told you when we were preparing for this event, for this conversation, that one of the first things I did on campus 18 years ago was some consultation with the Executive Dean and the LS Dean's about what is LNS? What's the brand? What's the identity? What's the meaning of LNS? Is it just some sort of bureaucratic constructs, some loose amalgamation of departments that didn't fit someplace else? Or is it the way others feel like the strong beating heart of UC Berkeley? And so I'm gonna start with you, Raka. And say, what is LNS? And is your conception of what LNS today is today different than how it's conceived and how are you gonna close that gap? So I am one of those who thinks that LNS is the beating heart of Berkeley. I think that a liberal arts education prepares everyone to contribute more and to understand more and to live a better life. To me, the problem is not LNS, but the problem is people thinking that LNS is not enough. I think that both the depth and the breadth that a liberal arts education provides enables you to be a better engineer, doctor, lawyer, CEO, government worker, any of it. So I think that what LNS does is give you an understanding of how the world works. And it gives you the ability to write, to make an argument, to think critically. And really, if we can graduate students who can write clearly, speak clearly, think clearly, and analyze clearly, I think so much of the sense that we lack enough human capital would disappear. So yeah, I think it makes for a great citizenry and a great economic contributors. Thank you. Steven, I wanna ask you, I know you're a relative newcomer, a relatively new returning, I should say, but I think you're a great citizen. Newcomer, a relatively new returnee, I should say. What's been your impression of LNS's identity? And where do you hope it goes or do you think all's good on that front? Yeah, I think that there's even a national dialogue happening now on what is the meaning of higher education. And I think one of the things that has been sort of lost over the years is the distinction between training and education. And I think LNS, more than any other unit at Berkeley, does represent the world of ideas, all ideas. And it's about, of course, all of our courses convey particular pieces of knowledge and do train students in certain skills, but it's not really what the courses are about. The courses are about exposing students to ideas and getting them to think for themselves and evaluate their opinions and their understanding, their conceptual understanding of strong concepts. Many people often think that the technical fields, like as you mentioned, the Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, have more akin to engineering or other technical disciplines than they do, for example, to the liberal arts and the humanities. But actually, I don't think it's true. Physics and mathematics and astronomy and even Earth and Monetary Sciences are very much about ideas, are very much about trying to make sense of the world as we see it, which is the same kind of thing we engage in in the social sciences and the humanities and other things. And it is less about training certain things, learning how to do things in particular order. So that is why it is the beating heart of the campus. It is the center of what makes a university a university, basically being the core of ideas. Michael, I'm gonna leave Jenna the last word on this one, but so let me come to you, Michael, about LNS's identity and place within the campus community and the campus infrastructure. I can only extend what's already been said either explicitly or directly by others, but I think being an undergraduate in LNS is really a transition point in a person's life, a young person's life. And one of the key aspects of what will last from a college education is sort of defining who you are and being able to change. And to be a scientist, and I am a scientist and represent a very large community of people and life sciences around campus, understanding that what you understand now may need revisions and may actually require bold high-risk, high-reward changes in your thinking and the way you conduct your research is something that can only be deeply thought by example. And LNS does that in spades. And while Steve mentioned that we don't want it's not a place where you do column A, column B and column C, by studying Shakespeare or by studying French literature, you actually can become a better physician or become the better scientist interested in how to cure Alzheimer's. And that would take a very long conversation to explain in any detail, but I think one feels it viscerally just to think about it in that context. Thank you. Jenna, I'm gonna come to you with sort of last word on this part of it about LNS's identity and place in the university's world. Yeah, I wanna talk certainly about the undergraduate experience as my colleagues have done, but I wanna just first say one thing about why at the research level it makes sense to have a College of Letters and Science. So, Letters and Science, we have a very clear identity which is we are people who seek truth and we are people who seek to combat ignorance and we are people who ask, we put our focus on developing more interesting questions and more basic questions and more foundational questions. And as Mike said, those kinds of questions where we used to think we knew what the question was and now we've worked for 30 years and we found a better question. And the reason that it makes sense to have these 38 departments, these 81 majors, these almost 800 faculty in a college is not because they have disciplinary interests in common but because they share this common commitment to asking more foundational questions and because the truth is really complicated you can't study it in just in one way. It really is that complicated. It really is probably more complicated. If we could have double the faculty we would still maybe not be able to achieve all of our scholarly aspirations. But the reason that it makes so much sense for undergraduates is echoed in the fact that it makes so much sense at the research level. The truth is too big to approach it in small boxes. For undergraduates, there's tons of research that has demonstrated the importance of a broad education for life success. That students, when they encounter we require them to take lots of courses outside their major. And the reason we do that is that there's lots of evidence that that experience of being repeatedly exposed to something where you don't know what's going on builds really important capacities. It builds in students the ability to figure out what they're supposed to figure out. It builds in students that habit of learner's mind, that habit of beginner's mind where they come into a situation where they know they don't know what's going on and they have to figure out how to solve how to figure it out. And that practice of knowing that you don't know and accepting that you don't know and that you can find a path to knowing it's enormously productive. And as my colleagues have said, if you're gonna be an attorney, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, if you're going to be a union shop leader, if you're almost any profession or calling, whatever summons you to do, your summon to do as an adult, knowing that you can figure it out is a really valuable skill. And that's one of the most important things that this broad education offers. I wanna go to a question that came in from the audience just a little bit ago in just a second, but I wanna follow up with you, Jenna. What's your aspiration in terms of when undergraduates graduate and they go out in the world and somebody says, hey, where'd you go to school? Do you want them, do you hope they will, graduates from L&S will say, yeah, I went to UC Berkeley or I went to Cal. Or are you aspiring that they're to create even a stronger bond and identity to say, because I think engineering might first say engineering, that students will begin to say, yeah, I went to the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley, or is this something entirely superficial that just communications guy like me is concerned about? That is funny, okay. I had not, I thought a lot about what I hope, what I hope they will be able to do and what kinds of knowledge they will have, but what they will say I haven't thought about. I think right now they would say Berkeley and they would say their department. And I don't think that's a problem. I'm looking at Mike and Steve and Rocket that I think that's fine, right? I don't care actually, as long as they say they had a great time here at Berkeley. Rocket said it. We're all about, someone can say, well, I spent a summer in Switzerland at SIRM and it was really exciting, but it was my education at Berkeley that made it meaningful. Or I really enjoyed being in Jennifer Doudna's lab and helping the Sickle Cell Anemia project. It doesn't matter. Great. We are gonna get, I'm not forgetting the conversation and the initiative that's been launched, but I do wanna fold in a question that's come from the audience. And Rocket, I'm gonna let you maybe even counterintuitively take the first swing at the answer. And here's the question. How can we embed innovation and entrepreneurship into LNS's core curriculum? How do we engage LNS folks in startups since they have great subject matter expertise in global challenges that need solving? These applied innovation teams would benefit from their participation. Rocket, what's your thought about that? So, you know, I have this wonderful example of two entrepreneurs, Umair Khan and Charles Wong. Charles is of course very, very deeply involved with UC Berkeley Foundation and many aspects of Berkeley who started a course called I think Entrepreneurship for All or it's basically an LNS course. For entrepreneurs. It is specifically not for people in house and not for people in engineering because you can be an entrepreneur of nonprofit organizations. You can be an entrepreneur who wants to start a bake shop. You know, and so what they do is to take all of these ideas that LNS students, they never have less than a hundred students. They take all of these ideas that LNS students generate from the classes they've taken, from the questions they've learned how to ask and teach them that you can be entrepreneurial with these questions, with these ideas. So in fact, what we are seeing is we're teaching LNS students that what they do can also be entrepreneurial. So the question is asking about it the other way. How can we take LNS questions and embed them in entrepreneurs, I think. I mean, I've been experiencing it this other way and all I can say about how do we embed a spirit of LNS in entrepreneurship is basically that everybody should be taking classes in LNS. Beautiful, I like that. Yeah, Steven, please. Yeah, I wanna add to that a little bit. I think, you know, if you think about what makes for a successful entrepreneurship, number one, it has to start with some innovative idea, something that hasn't been done before. And number two, it has to involve a strategy and an analysis of what's required for the market to make the business successful, et cetera. And those kinds of processes are what we actually teach in our classes. They almost all the LNS classes involve analyzing a situation, figuring out what the salient points are, and then perhaps devising a strategy that comes from that understanding. So I actually think in LNS education is a superb introduction to entrepreneurship. I can't think of a better way to do it. I'm just gonna jump in one more time. I've just, my division has just created masters in computational social science. And the reason we've done this is because there is such a felt need in the tech world to have people who have the computational social skills, yes, but who have a deep social science training who ask the questions that social scientists ask. So I think that what the question is getting at, the question that was asked is getting at is how do we bring these things together? And it's clear that the world needs them to come together. And that's what we have been developing as well. Jen or Mike, would you like to weigh in on the question of embedding innovation and entrepreneurship into the core curriculum? Well, sure. I think that we already have done this in Life Sciences division. We have actually an undergraduate dual track major where students can get a degree in MCB and a degree in the Haas Business School. And the purpose of this is actually to give our undergraduate students career paths towards entrepreneurial activity in big pharma, in consulting and in starting companies. So it is part of our curricula. I had understood the question to be how can we embed liberal arts into companies? And I think- Well, Rocco turned it. I should say Rocco turned it. Rocco turned it. That's fine. She's terrific. You did a good job with that. And I think I can answer the question here by saying take a deep entrepreneurs who have companies whether they're startups or big should take a deep dive into what actually is going on in the Berkeley campus right now. Because I just named one that I'm involved in. It's called the Robinson Life Sciences Bio Entrepreneur Program. Got it. Jen, unless there's anything else I'm gonna move on to the next one. Good. So, Jen, at the beginning of the school year you put out what I thought was an extraordinary back to school message because it wasn't the usual bureaucratic blah, blah, blah and you pick up your cards here and register here and this date is that date. It was a call to intellectual arms, if you will. And I wanna read just a little bit of it for people who may have missed it. You said, public education, public higher education has been attacked by politicians who have sought to limit academic freedom and cut public higher education budgets across the country. And liberal arts colleges have become icons of the culture wars and victims of an ever greater focus on pre-professional skills. You shared that a survey found that 42% of Americans think that colleges and universities have quote a negative effect on the way things are going in this country. And you said outright, our College of Letters and Science is being buffeted by all of these forces as a liberal arts college in a research university that is both public and elite. And today, together, you called your LNS community together to engage these questions. Who are we? What do we stand for? What do we offer the state and the world? How is our role involving? And you said, let's get this conversation started. Let's set up working groups. And then depending on how it goes, let's explore potential changes to college requirements, regulations, and policies in support of a shared vision. Was there something, was there a tipping point? Was this something building? What led you to send this message and put it front and center as a priority for the LNS community? Yeah, was something building? Yes, I mean, something has been building for decades. The issues that you talk that you quote me as writing about there have been going on for decades. And the challenges to the college, I think are deep and important. My role, I said, I've been in this role for about a year, my role is new and it was created by the chancellor and the provost in order to integrate and elevate the college, in order to, in some ways, in order to have this conversation. Let me just stop you just for a second because you confuse me and you may have confused. I thought there's always been an executive dean at LNS. There has always been an executive, there's always been someone with the title of executive dean and that role has been very, very different. There's always also historically been someone with the title of the dean of the undergraduate division. That role of the dean of the undergraduate division was eliminated and their portfolio and the portfolio of the executive dean were combined and the executive dean was given this, this aspiration, this hope that we would be able to bring the college together around conversations about our identity and our future. And so particularly by taking the issues that relate specifically to undergraduates and the role of executive to put them in the single person, the aspiration was to say the College of Letters and Science has as part of its core identity that it is a college, that it is one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the world and yet that are, we've often not thought of ourselves as having that core collegiate mission at the center of our identity. And so this at some level, this project of what we're calling the L&S Futures Project in which we do are truly interested in having people come and be engaged in, I think to some degree, that is why this role was created, was in order to do this. I'm wondering, let me ask the other deans just put your hand up if you want to engage about the extent to which you perceive a threat to the very core of what you're about and what you've signed up for and how concerned you are. Yeah, Steven. Well, I think it's almost a cliche now to say that in the last few years, we've seen an attack on information and facts and in particular, a scientific understanding. I think the general public has been misled to believe that various theories can be mutually equivalent, independent of the extent to which they're based on any evidence or deductive reasoning. That's a direct threat to all of our fields because it undermines any element of arguing for truth over falsehoods. And even for the technical fields, which I think when I was studying physics in the 70s, it never occurred to me that people would consider it acceptable to espouse ideas which are demonstrably unphysical. You know, just in complete contradiction to everything we know, but that's what we're witnessing today. And so I think all of our fields are experiencing this. And yes, I agree with Jenna. This is kind of reached a crisis and it is very important for a university with the prominence of Berkeley to take a stand and to try to articulate what actually it means to be well educated. You know, Rocco, we're touching on sociological phenomenon and cultural phenomenon as the Dean of Social Sciences. I think you need to weigh in. Thank you, Dan, I will. I was actually going to say, I also want us to take a step back and to think about the fact that this is actually happening at a moment of great inequality. And so what people are doing is trying to figure out how to feel less unequal and one of the, or less dominated perhaps. And one of the problems really is that education, higher education has become perceived of as elitist, as less relevant, as more obscure, as not rewarding. So there are many, many things that have gone into, it's a complex that higher education has come to stand in for a much larger set of structural inequalities. And so it has become the butt of a lot of resentment. Right? So when we think about people who don't think about facts and who don't think about facts and who don't, you know, who, as somebody said to me, those may be the facts, but that's not how I feel. I think that that attack on what appears to be an attack on facts, on knowledge is really, it's really a reflection of vulnerability from some corners and other corners are using it, certainly. But it's a reflection of vulnerability and inequality. And part of what we have to do then as we, is to make knowledge seeking, knowledge attaining something that is not the purview of only a privileged few. So we have a task here as well. Yeah. So, you know, I think no matter how you cut it, no matter how informed people are, the role that L&S plays, the curriculum plays, is so central to the university, is so central to society and to the public we serve. And that raises a question. Many of the people who tune into these campus conversations are staff members. So what's their role? You talked a little bit, Jenna, before, about what seemed to be an imbalance between the number of staff and the extent of responsibilities. So talk to us a little bit, Jenna, perhaps start off and then I'll ask the other deans about how L&S is supported by staff and what their role is in this continuing evolution of the college and its mission and its curriculum. Yeah, thanks, Dan. Mike said this earlier, I just wanted to reiterate. We as deans, we come and go in our roles. It is our staff who actually know what's going on most of the time. In the departments, Rocca talked about being a department chair, I was a department chair that, department chairs come and go. It is the staff who know what is going on. The, so much of what is possible in the college is the results of the gifted, talented, hardworking staff. What is their specific role as we rethink what it is that we, what knowledge, skills and dispositions do we hope to inculcate in our students? Our staff again, have a very important role to play and I have strongly invite any staff who are interested to please, please, please write to me and play a direct role, but also there's many spaces for more informal, indirect roles. It is our staff who are very often on the front lines and working through, working with our students and helping support them to understand what challenges they're facing. It is our students who help our, it is our staff who help our students. And we offer 3,000 courses a semester, students get to pick four, who helps them, their advisor, which four of 3,000? So the staff really do so much of the essential frontline work that we really need their wisdom and knowledge in order to do a good job because they're the ones who, they see things directly and through a lens that we don't have. Yeah, Michael, go ahead. Yeah, I just like to add that if the question that you asked then really is, well, the question of, well, what do you deans do? What do you guys do? And just about everything I do relies on a staff person. So I can start with a lot of what we do is worry about money, you know, philanthropy. That's an important role that deans play. And we have assistant deans who actually know the ropes and what's possible and how to make appropriate asks and what to do to raise our financial base that way. Deans are involved in recruiting and retention. We have norms and things that help us get the best and the brightest and Berkeley does a great job recruiting and retaining faculty. It's actually exciting to see how rarely we lose faculty to our peer elite private institutions or public institutions. And we rely on staff to do that. That's a whole other bailiwick. I could run through all my responsibilities. Merit cases for faculty. We have HR people who actually know more about how this process works in the budget committee. And of course, Huwaka was and Jenna were deeply involved in the Academic Senate and the budget committee before they came. But, you know, I never had that knowledge that my staff person does. So I rely on her for that activity. So I could go on for the rest of the show to describe that, but it's an interesting question to ask. What's the job of the dean? Yeah. You're not going to just jump in. Yes, Huwaka, I was actually going to ask you because you also, and in addition to what you're planning to say, also if you could address something parallel to what you were talking about students. About changing needs in terms of what it takes to thrive. And how you might answer that same question insofar as staff are concerned. You know, the answer in that sense would be the same. That is what people need to thrive are both more intangible and more tangible rewards. More tangible and more intangible, both rewards. That is, there has to be a system whereby we can, you know, really show staff how valuable they are to us. You know, as both Mike and Jenna have said, staff are everything. To me, staff embody the best of the spirit of Berkeley. They keep things going. They fight for the rights of the vulnerable amongst the students. So many staff, I've had various staff offer homeless students shelter. I mean, I cannot even tell you how much staff, compassion and love and dedication staff bring to their work every day. They make the Berkeley world possible. So I think that, I think that like everybody else, staff is also more anxious. Their jobs have gotten, and here's one thing, one additional thing I actually wanna say. The jobs have gotten so, there's so much paperwork that has been added to staff jobs that I think we feel burdened, but they feel even more burdened. So if there was a way, and we could make the lives of staff easier by reducing some of the new sort of compliance and paperwork burdens, I think that would go a long way. So unbelievably, we've just about, I could talk to you guys for a long time actually, but I won't, I can't. And we've just about burned through all the time, but I wanna end on, go back to sort of the core and ask each of you, what's really exciting that's happening in your field, in your academic discipline? What's really got people sitting up and with their eyes wide open and excited? Michael, let me start with you. Okay, well, I think the most exciting thing, and we only have two minutes, so. We can go three. Oh, we can go three. Well, I think the most exciting, if I had to pick one thing, it's the new department that we're forming within the division, which is the Department of Neuroscience. And neuroscience has gotten to be a discipline that fuses both the study of the mind and the brain. So the brain is the physical apparatus that we have. And there's been a lot of progress in many different areas that involves chemistry, physics, engineering that have helped us understand how, and molecular and cell biology, how, and structural biology, how neurons work and what networks are in the brain. On the other side, there's the cognitive neuroscience that approaches questions that are at a much higher level. And ultimately, what's exciting about this new department, which will be increased the size of the division, is that mind and brain can eventually come together and we can really understand something about what it means to be sentient and conscious, which I think had been almost taboo questions for scientists to get at. Okay, that's my one thing. That's pretty exciting. Stephen, what do you got? Yeah, I think this is the most interesting time ever in the physical sciences. There have been a rash of really profound discoveries over the last 20 years or so that we're still trying to understand. In astronomy, we know that the matter we're familiar with represents only a few percent of all the matter in the universe. The rest of it is mysterious. We don't know what it is. On top of that, the universe is accelerating in its expansion, which is completely contrary to expectations and requires some new form of energy that we never really knew was there. In fundamental physics, many of the ideas that we expected to be confirmed by experiments like at CERN with particle accelerators have turned out to give negative results. We did discover the Higgs boson, which was a magnificent discovery, but a lot of other expected phenomena didn't emerge. We don't know why. In earth sciences, the gradual recognition of the importance of plate tectonics in forming all of the structures that we have on the earth is just profound as continuing to have impact on essentially all of the geosciences. And math is pure math. I mean, math is the department that in some sense excites me the most because it's really pure thought in its most innate form. And mathematicians are continuously coming up with ways to reinterpret the basic foundations of logic and of thought itself. So it's just a wonderful time to be in these fields and I'm really happy to be part of that. That gets a wow. Raka. Okay, so very quickly, if you open today's New York Times, you'll see Russia, Ukraine, the continuing after effects of January 6th, political polarization, the abuse of women and women soccer players, effects of the pandemic on students, all of these crises are human caused in different ways. And this, and though not all crises are human caused, there's a combination and climate change of human and non-human, I understand that. But the solutions to them will have to be human designed. And that's what social sciences try to do. Our faculty and students work together to understand and impart analysis, to and arrive at solutions. And so whether you take the questions of democracy or inequality, our faculty are working on them, they're innovating new methodologies to understand the extent of wealth disparities, they're reconceptualizing entire ways we have thought of the trajectory of say management practices. And I'm referring to Caitlyn Rosenthal's amazing book, Accounting for Slavery. But the thing I want to actually talk about that we don't talk about enough in the social sciences and that I think one of my departments is really focusing on is the concept of joy. Beyond analyzing problems, we also want to figure out in the social sciences, what kind of society do we want to live in? What is a good society? And what the Black Studies Collaboratory within African-American Studies is doing is they won this Major Melon Grant and they've brought together artists and scholars and community elders from Oakland and students to draw on the tradition of Black Studies to imagine and create the possibilities of joy despite living in ongoing conditions of inequality and injustice. To me, that is one of the most exciting things. The, in the middle of all of this to be able to create community and joy. So that's what I'd like to end up. That's so wonderful and so fantastic. And I happen to know that Jenna feels the same way because she slipped me a little note in the chat saying we should end there. Really, what can you add to that? I want to thank you all for your time. It's just like one of those conversations that makes it feel so amazing to work with and for people like you. So thanks again for joining us. Thank you everybody for joining us for this campus conversation. We'll see you soon in November with another introductory session with key leaders on the UC Berkeley campus. Have a great day. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dan. Thanks very much.