 My name is Dan Moguloff. I'm from the campus office of communications and public affairs and really thrilled to welcome everybody to what is our last campus conversation for the academic year. And joining us today, as should be evident, is Chancellor Carol Christ and Paul Alavisados, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. They're each gonna start off with just some few brief comments sort of about where we are and where we're headed here at this opportune time. And then again, just to encourage, if you have questions, write them down on cards, hold them up even during the conversation. Unfortunately, due to a unavoidable scheduling conflict, we're gonna need to end a little early as both of them need to be at a meeting at one o'clock in a distant region of the campus. So without further ado, Chancellor Christ. Okay, thank you, Dan. Hey, I'll stand up. I'm so delighted to tell you that the budget is balanced. So. So, and I wanna thank everybody in this room for all their hard work. This has taken a lot of financial discipline, but also a lot of creativity and imagination as we try to figure out ways of increasing our sources of revenue and our streams of revenue. So thank you for all that work. I want now to talk more about the capital budget than the operating budget. Rosemary Ray, who I think most of you know, the CFO has said often to me, Carol, I'm confident we can solve the operating budget problem. I can't solve the capital budget problem. And I wanna talk to you about some of the dimensions of it. First, our capital need. We have at least $4 billion in capital needs. That's 1.7 billion in deferred maintenance. I'm sure you see the evidence all around you in wherever you work on campus. We are now doing a seismic reassessment of all the buildings on campus. That project will take 24 months. We're in month 10 of that 24 month project. The reason, the last time we did this complete assessment of the campus was in the 1990s. Every time there's an earthquake, standards change, and more is known about what makes a building resilient and what makes it safe in the event of an earthquake. What we're finding as the results are coming in is that more of our buildings are dropping from good and fair to poor or very poor than we anticipated. So this is going to be a huge challenge for the campus currently. The policy of the office of the president specifies that any building that is not remediated up to a level of fair by 2030 has to come offline. If we don't have a huge funding source and that policy remains in effect, we wouldn't be able to operate the campus. So I want you all to understand the gravity of this issue. One of the great challenges of our capital planning is that we have limited fund sources for capital. So until 2006, every other year, there would be a general obligation bond issue on the ballot for higher education. That was our main funding source for academic buildings. Jerry Brown believed as a point of policy that we should not have general obligation bonds for higher education and that rather the university should use its own debt capacity and pay the debt service out of its operating budget. That indeed is one of the main reasons that the Berkeley campus got into so serious a deficit was that change in policy. We don't yet know what Gavin Newsom, what his beliefs will be about general obligation bonds for higher education. We are lobbying as hard as we can with the legislature and with the governor's office about how critical these are for the campus. So that's one fund source. Second fund source is debt capacity. We have very, very limited debt capacity as a campus. Currently, we have between the advantage of having balanced our budget as we have some. Before we balanced our budget, we didn't have any. But now we have between 150 million and 200 million in debt capacity, which sounds like a lot of money to an ordinary person. It's like a drop in the bucket when you think about our capital needs. So the two options that are open to us are obviously philanthropy, donor developed projects and we're working very hard on some of those. And then public private partnerships, which it's a vehicle that's mostly used with housing where you have a steady income stream. A third party takes out the debt, constructs the project and the campus essentially pays the debt service from the income from whatever is the income source. These are very frequently used around the UC system and the whole Merced Campus is being built with this instrument. But Berkeley has had relatively little experience of it. Blackwell Hall used this instrument. So big, big challenges on the capital side. On the academic side, it's deferred maintenance, capacity in some units as we've grown students but haven't grown our physical plant a lot and our need for seismic remediation. On the housing side, I believe, as I've said to this audience before, we have a huge crisis. And if we cannot address the shortage that we have of housing for our undergraduates, for our graduate students, for faculty, for staff, we are going to diminish, compromise the quality of Berkeley. It is that level of a crisis. And as some of you know, I've committed to doubling the number of beds we have in our housing system in the next 10 years. I don't think, some people understand the extent to which that's going to require very difficult choices about land use. If you think not for a moment about beds but think of the land that all of our current housing occupies and think just as a kind of rough rule of thumb we're gonna double our housing capacity we have to double that land. It means we're not talking about whether we use this lot or that lot. It means we're really going to be significantly changing use of land across the campus. You've all seen the controversy erupt about the upper Hearst structure, I'm sure. There will be an equivalent controversy about People's Park. There'll be an equivalent controversy about the Oxford tract. But unless we use the land we have for housing we're not going to be able to address this issue. Let me comment just briefly on two other things. First of all, I just met before this meeting with the working groups that are working on undergraduate diversity. They're gonna deliver their recommendations in two weeks. And I'm really thrilled at the progress that they're making and they gave me a kind of preliminary view of their recommendations and I think they're recommendations that are gonna really take the campus far. We are now setting up a group that is going to work in a similar way on graduate student diversity. Paul has already been working very hard on faculty diversity and I'm partnering with HR to work on staff diversity. And then finally I wanna say something about our comprehensive capital campaign. We will go public at the end of February 2020 that's less than a year away and we now have a decision as whether it'll be a five billion or six billion dollar campaign. So that's very, very serious resources that we hope to raise to bring to the campus. And our fundraising is doing very, very well. Right now we have a preliminary campaign prospectus that we are road testing with about 40 or 50 of our most generous donors to see what kinds of ideas have traction and which kinds have less traction. So why don't I stop there and turn things over to Paul. Well thank you. I would like to start by asking you a question if I may, which is were some of you involved in the startup of the UC path here at Berkeley? Could you just raise your hand? Yeah, there's a few of you. I just wanna start by pointing out that there were a lot of challenges starting UC path at all the other campuses that started it up, but we were able to start here at Berkeley without those kinds of huge disruptions and that was extremely hard to do and it required an incredible degree of dedication from our staff and also showed just how wonderful our staff are, how capable they are to have helped us launch something which has been so hard everywhere else. And to me it points out the extent to which, although we've been through a very tough budget period, we have an amazing community that helps this place to continue to function and be resilient even during periods that are quite difficult. And as the chancellor said, our budget is now, it's balanced. But we still have a lot of challenges financially, but nonetheless it is and so we're starting to see some of the benefits of having a little bit more secure of a financial situation. Over the past 15 years, the number of students on the campus grew by about 30%, but our faculty held absolutely constant. I'm very pleased to say that next year, we will be running between 75 and 80 searches for new faculty when in a typical year at which we were just staying constant in our faculty, we would run about 50. So that means we'll have between 25 and 30 extra faculty hired next year compared to previous years. That's a big accomplishment for us and it's an important down payment on growing our faculty. We need to do more of that as we go along. We also need to transform the diversity picture on our campus writ large, the chancellor just spoke to it. So just a couple of things to say about faculty diversity. We're absolutely thrilled with what happened in both the College of Engineering and now a set of searches being done in the life sciences. So that's the division of biology, College of Chemistry and College of Natural Resources. They have conducted searches across an entire range of disciplines like all of engineering and opened those searches up to be particularly diverse. And as a consequence, the faculty that we've recruited in those searches or that we will be recruiting shortly in the life sciences are a phenomenally diverse group of incredibly outstanding faculty. We also will be running a series of searches that are geared towards the experiences of underrepresented communities. We'll start with a cluster hire in Native American experiences and we have received now eight proposals from across the campus around different types of cluster hires that we might do around the experiences of underrepresented communities and we're working our way through deciding which and how many of those we can do and how we can stage them. So the ways in which we're searching for faculty are improving and are going to help us ensure that we have a more diverse faculty as we go along. I also, we're very much engaged right now in leadership searches and I wanted to just take a minute and talk with you about the academic leadership situation. So for example, this year we are running and we're mostly concluding right now seven major academic leadership searches. So those include the dean positions for public health and social sciences, the executive dean of letters and sciences. We've announced all those positions in the last few weeks, still open are searches in social welfare and College of Environmental Design. So those are searches which will wrap up in the next few weeks and you'll be seeing some announcements there. We were successful in hiring, we announced recently a new vice provost of graduate studies and we are in the final stages of recruiting an associate provost and dean of data science and information, our new division that we're creating. So that's seven leadership searches all running in one academic year. It points out just how much we need to be training future leaders and we are now pretty far along in our first faculty leadership academy cohort. We recruited a group of 18 extremely diverse and extremely talented people to join a leadership academy this year. They are busily working on an assignment that we gave them in addition to all the other things that they are learning as part of that. We asked them to help us think about the future of graduate education at Berkeley and to help us think about what is changing with regards to masters and professional degree students, what is happening with regard to doctoral education, how will Berkeley remain preeminent in 10 years in those areas of education which have been hallmarks of Berkeley's excellence for our whole history. And so I'll conclude by just saying, I feel at this moment that we have laid an important groundwork over the last two years for how Berkeley can really help turn a corner from a difficult budget situation into one where we are essentially creating a new model for what higher education is gonna look like even when all kinds of things happen that are unexpected to us, we will be resilient by working together. And I think it's a good moment for us right now. So we really have a lot to look forward to even as we are still on slightly shaky ground. Thanks to you both. Let's jump right in. A number of questions, not surprisingly, are about the housing issues and we'll just sort of start off with those. And the first are fairly specific. Will the Oxford track be protected from excessive development? I'm not 100% sure what excessive would be. So I think just how the balance, how you envision that right now. And the second is what's the timeline for People's Park in terms of the start of construction? Well, thanks for that question. I was going to say exactly what you said. I don't know what the person asking the question knows means by excessive. I know some people think any development is excessive. So, but I really hope with the Oxford tractor, I just got a wonderful letter from the College of Natural Resources Advisory Board this past week recommending to me that we use it as a kind of model, the housing that we put there of all the sustainability values that the college has and try to build a community around sustainability in the housing that we'll put there. It's very far from design right now, but and we still have to develop a plan to relocate the research uses that are on the track. Let me stop you there. So is the campus committed to replacing, relocating all the current facilities in the fields that are there right now? Yes, absolutely. We're committed to replacing or resituating all of those and resituating the ones that need to be within an easy walking distance of the main campus within an easy walking distance of the main campus. So we're deeply committed to that. The community garden that's on the north end of the site is going to stay there. We're not going to take that away. But we, it's our largest piece of land and we urgently need to put some house in there. And how many, about how many beds do we think we can fit in? It's really too early to say that, but you know, upwards of a thousand, it's a really big site. It's one of the sites we have that really can make a difference in our housing inventory. And the timeline for People's Park, how does that look to us right now? The timeline for People's Park is we already have submitted the RFP for the permanent support of housing to the community. So we're working on trying to find a developer who will do that piece of things. And then we hope to take the project to Regents at some point in the next six months or so for as a preliminary discussion item. Then there's the specific housing. So going back to the upper Hearst project and a recent campus communication, there was suggestion that, well, first of all, I think it was made clear that first in line for those apartments would be young faculty, junior faculty, but that rents could be as much as $4,000 a month. And so the question here is, is it realistic to think that students or I believe it says assistant professors could afford to pay something along those lines? It's a really good question. And there really are, I want to divide it into the two parts. First of all, there's a very exciting housing, a project opportunity that we're working with a donor. Now that will be on not university owned land because the costs of that will be very low. We'll be able to have a funding source for subsidizing the rents in the upper Hearst facility based on income with students. It's a little bit different because students often live more to an apartment so that the rents may not be as out of line. In fact, I don't think they would be with the current rates that we charge students. Got it. I'm gonna stay in this same terrain here for a little while longer. Question is, what's planned for the space where Tolman Hall is, or soon will be was? Can student housing be built there? I think it would be a bad idea to build student housing there. We've tried to keep student housing off the main campus because we really wanna preserve that for academic uses. We haven't yet decided what will occupy the Tolman site, although Paul and I have been having lots of conversations about it. Some possibilities are data science or what's going to be incredibly important as we try to figure out what to do in relationship to the buildings that are poor or very poor seismically is we're gonna have to have a place to decant faculty to. And so one of the building we already know is in poor seismic condition is Evans Hall. That is a very big building with a lot of people going in and out of it every day. So one of the things we've talked about is whether whatever goes on the Tolman site can be tied to what we do with Evans. But it will be an academic building and probably a building in some area of STEM. So Carol, you mentioned data science. I'm gonna step away for a second from land use and real estate, we shall return. But there was a question actually that came in, Paul. Maybe you could address about where things stand with data science. There was a rollout of the initiative and where are we and how are things proceeding? Well, so first, I think many of you probably know that in the fall when it first became possible to declare letters in science undergraduate major in data science, within a few days more than 1,100 students had signed up to be majors in that. And in fact at the graduation for, we will have students graduate this semester even though the major was only just announced because the students had been preparing so that they would be qualified in the event that the major was approved to organize people. And so it's clear that one thing that Berkeley, I think has done that's very important in this area is that we have grown data science from the bottom up from our undergraduate students and they are helping us do something which every university that's looking at data science is here knocking on the door wanting to copy. Our undergraduates, the second year students help in data science aid to mentor the first year students and our third and fourth year students actually form small cohorts should they want to and help faculty develop new data science curriculum for modules like if it's for example, archeology in data science or sociology in data science or chemistry in data science. Frankly, sometimes even our faculty don't know all the data science tools they need but the students now do. And so there's a kind of intergenerational cooperation around creating new content. So we have a really strong bottom up piece. We are committing a number of faculty lines to the data science area and we're launching essentially a very innovative cross cutting program. We're searching right now for the associate provost and as I mentioned, I'm hoping that that search will conclude and be announced relatively soon. And I'm looking forward to it being perhaps the single biggest academic transformation on the campus in the next 10 years. So momentum is building and you will see it grow in a wonderful way. So I want to stay with academic programming for one more question. And this one also came in from the audience today and that is what is your commitment to growing and supporting lecturers versus new, I guess, tenure or letter rank or faculty on a tenure track. As the budget situation improves, given they currently teach 40% of student credit hours. Yeah. So it is true that over the last period of time, the number of teaching professors, lecturers with security of employment and other kinds of lecturers have grown on the campus. They are contributing in a wonderful way to our campus. And I think we do need to give very careful thought to how we use, how we develop those positions on the campus and how we help them to grow. I also want to call out the fact that we have in many of the professional schools, professors of practice. These are people who are out in society, engaging in their profession, but come back and offer to our professional school students really vital kinds of education. So there are a variety of roles like this. And I think we need to be very, very systematic, both in how we honor people who are in those roles because they're contributing to our campus in a really outsize way. And also to be thinking harder about how to possibly grow some of those positions. So this will be a really big topic between the campus administration, all the departments and schools and the academic Senate. Next academic year, we've decided that we're gonna take a kind of deep dive into that topic next year. So that will be a really big discussion item for us. Great, so we're gonna now sort of go back to the real estate area, kind of, but also gonna touch on Sacramento, two third rails in one question. So this one is, is there a way for staff to help with lobbying Governor Newsom on the general obligation bond issue? And I'd also like to expand that a little, how are things in Sacramento these days? There's been a change in administration, there's been a at times, testy relationship with the system and the state capital. So talk a little bit maybe about how staff might get involved in some of this advocacy work, and also just what your sense of the state of play is up there. Well, first, let me start with the latter part of the question, the state of play. I think relationships with the legislature and the governor's office are much, much improved in part that is due to the incredible efforts of the campuses. I've been spending a lot of time in Sacramento, but so have our students and our faculty. And I would really welcome staff getting involved, particularly in visits to legislative offices because it's not just the governor who has to be convinced of a general obligation bond. It is a strong majority of each of the houses of the legislature. So whether you talk to your representative in your district or up in Sacramento or participate in one of our Cal days at the state capital, your efforts would be very, very much appreciated that legislators really listen to the electorate. And people are, though I'm certainly trying my hardest with lobbying, often student voices, staff voices, faculty voices are even more powerful than that chancellor's voice because they figure I've got a job that involves my going up there and saying those things. In terms of, who's the other part of the question? So I think that was about how people might get involved in terms of advocacy for the return to general obligation bond funding and also just in general. So I think we've got both of them. And if you, I urge you in whatever circles you travel and if you can say a good word about the university, that is golden for us. We want people to value the university. So, sorry, let me just grab these for a second. So two questions that are different subjects but have to do sort of the working life here on campus. The first one is what can be done to encourage UC to improve parental slash baby bonding leave for staff? Right now, moms have vacation time, sick time and disability at 60% pay for six months. Non-birth parents, dads and parentheses can only use sick time or vacation time. This, according to the person who's writing this, is an issue of equity and attracting and retaining top talent. Anything? Well, I think that the answer differs for represented and non-represented staff or represented staff. This would have to be part of collective bargaining. For non-represented staff, the campus has more latitude and I would suggest people feel, obviously people do feel strongly about this issue to send me and Joe Magnus a letter to me. I'm sure you're saying what you'd like to see. Yeah, so this next question may be something that's pretty specific but I think it's also pretty important but if we don't have firsthand knowledge, maybe ask the questioner to write directly to Joe. But will work fit? The wonderful wellness program for staff receive funding to continue after July one. The program is essential to staff health and well-being. I know that Mark Fisher and Joe Magnus are working on trying to identify funding. I don't know quite where the status of that is. I don't know if Mark is in the room. Do you want to say anything about? It's going to continue for the next year, yes. It's going to continue for the next year. Yay! Thank you. Any other good news, Mark? I'm going to move back down to the academic program. There's two questions here on the joint medical program with UCSF and I'm going to ask them together. First is the joint medical program students are an example of commitment to social justice, equity, and diversity. But its support from campus has drastically decreased. How can you support the program and its students? And the second and relevant question to that is what do you see as the most valuable contributions of the UCSF joint medical program to the UC Berkeley community? So let me say that the premise of the question is correct, the joint medical program is under resourced. We do have a joint task force between UCSF and Berkeley that is looking through it and trying to decide how we could keep it a healthy program. So there's a group, they're studying the issue, we're expecting to get some kind of report from them soon. I don't know what they're going to conclude. I do want to just, if I may, take the opportunity to say that we've been having at the Chancellor's behest a set of extensive discussions with UCSF about the UCSF Berkeley partnerships, more broadly speaking. And they are a transformative partner for Berkeley. UCSF is just unbelievably wonderful medical school, but they do not have computer science or bioengineering or mathematics, physics, a school of business, a school of law, a philosophy department. It turns out all those things are really needed for the world of medicine to advance. And at the same time, our faculty are deeply concerned with the future of human health. It's one of the signature initiatives that our faculty from the bottom up have been calling out as being important. So we have a natural partnership with UCSF. The joint medical programs are relatively small number, but very high quality program, but there are many other areas where we cooperate. For example, in doctoral education, in our bioengineering program, students are applying for the PhD program to both UCSF and Berkeley, and they're admitted jointly to UCSF slash Berkeley. They're not admitted to one or the other. And it turns out that's a very interesting model and we're investigating it much more deeply to see if there might be other areas where we could replicate that. So a couple of questions about the upcoming campaign and actually one that is interested in the intersection between the campaign and diversity. So the first is, can you discuss your goals for a campus led alumni engagement strategy? And I will also add on to that, Chancellor. How have things changed? There's a lot of talk about reforming the way we do philanthropy, where are we on sort of that continuum? And again, as the specific question about an engagement strategy for alumni. We have done a number of studies preparing for this campaign because we want this campaign to be as effective, to raise as much money as it possibly can. And one of those studies was about alumni engagement. And the Alumni Association, which does wonderful, wonderful work, but is a membership organization. In other words, it just serves people who are members of the Alumni Association who pay dues to it. So it doesn't really offer a comprehensive alumni engagement strategy. Anybody that works in fundraising knows that you begin by fundraising and then you move to fundraising. And so the advice we got, and it's advice that I took and we're acting on, is that we have to build a comprehensive alumni engagement strategy in-house. And so we're doing that right now to try to do things that would engage all alumni, not just those who choose to be members of the Alumni Association. In regard to reorganization of our development efforts for the campaign, Berkeley Development has become increasingly decentralized. And again, some of the advice we got that very much resonated with my instincts in looking at our program is that we need to become more integrated and more centralized in order to be as powerful as we can be philanthropically. Many donors with the largest capacity don't wanna hear how they can help the English department. They wanna know what the vision for the campus is and how they can have a transformative impact on the campus. Some of the projects that will be central to this campaign are really projects for the campus. They're adding 100 faculty positions, adding graduate fellowships, trying to strengthen our science and engineering facilities, supporting the undergraduate experience and particularly undergraduate diversity. So those are some of the themes that we're currently road testing with our donors right now. So I need to follow up. So I always hear that phrase, engagement, alumni engagement. What does that mean? What does it mean? It means opening our emails. It means... What's that basically? It means continuing to think about Cal wherever you are as a continuing resource in your life. And we don't do a very good job with engaging young alumni. And for them, it often means career networking, so having networking events. But it also means, I know Jim Milton is in the audience, so I hesitate to say this, but not having just football game watch parties but really bringing our faculty to alumni, really giving them a sense of engagement with what's going on intellectually on the campus. Speaking of that, I wanna stay sort of with fundraising. This question came in related. Could you go into more detail about diversity and what fundraisers should be focused on as we seek to raise funds in support of diversity at UCB? And I think this person is looking a little bit for the broader case about how it connects to our mission and the essence of who we are as an institution. When I talk to audiences about diversity, I talk a great deal about equity of experience. One of the things that I've been so struck by in coming back to Berkeley is how the experience of Berkeley is profoundly different for our students who come here with a relatively generous level of resources, both monetary and in cultural knowledge of higher education, and students who come with fewer of those resources. And I think we have to be committed to making the experience of being at Berkeley as equitable as possible for our students. So we should be asking ourselves, for example, our students are underrepresented students majoring in STEM disciplines in the same proportion as they're in the student body. Are they participating in study abroad? Are they enjoying internships? Are they participating in faculty research? And where they're not, we have to figure out what the barriers are and provide the resources for them to do so. I believe that in the long run, if Berkeley is not more representative of the population of the state in terms of its ethnic mix, we're going to lose credibility as a public institution. And we all know how unequal K-12 systems are across the state. This is a place where we should be able to take students from, recruit students from a variety of school systems and give them the same opportunity so that we can have a more diverse workforce and more equity of wealth distribution among ethnic groups. Got it. So unfortunately we have three questions that we're not going to get to so we only have two minutes left. And I really want to give both of you an opportunity to speak because before you leave, just a little bit to look ahead to the year ahead. Next academic year and the sort of goals and objectives you're thinking about as you begin to think about next year. Paul, do you, any thoughts about the year ahead of us? Well, it's going to be a really important year. We're continuing to do work around the finance reform topic and how monies are going to flow in the university. That will continue next year. We talked already about the issue of lecture and other titles and academic learning in those areas. That will be important. We'll also be doing quite a deep dive on online education and we'll be continuing. Can you talk about expanding the offerings when you talk about deep dive for that? Well, it could be expanding offerings and it could be about trying to find ways to help students to be resilient. One, for example, they may have a crisis and have to pull out temporarily or they have to go home for a period of time. How we can help highly impacted courses where we can't help everybody finish all at once. There are many topics that are there where we really need to think more holistically about how we are achieving things in that area. So there are just a variety of topics that I would say are core academic topics that are on our radar screen for next year and we are trying to be very systematic in developing those so that when we do have the campus discussion, it involves all the departments but also the academic senate and the administration and staff so that we're solving these problems in some reasonably community minded kind of way. So those are some of the topics I'm imagining will be very front and center next year. Chancellor, what do you think is gonna be on the front burner for you next year? People's Park. Yeah, good guess. More seriously, we're gonna be spending a lot of time with capital planning next year. We're in the middle of developing a new long range development plan as well as a new campus master plan. Those processes have already kicked off but we'll have lots of opportunities for engagement as both of those plans develop. I think capital planning is going to be just an increasingly important subject for all of us both in relationship to individual projects and more generally. How I think about the year ahead, we just approved our strategic plan and published it in December. And right now, the big questions are about implementation. So it's really being steady and focused about the goals that we've identified. For me, this is very importantly, diversity and the student experience. We're also gonna have an incredibly exciting year next year because we were gonna kick off the capital campaign and that's great and we're gonna have a lot of great gift news. Great, so before I thank our guests, I just wanna thank everybody for turning out for what were a great series of conversations. We don't have exact dates and guests starting in the fall but we'll let you know and hope you'll continue to come to what have been an excellent series of discussions. And also really thank Chancellor Chris and Provost Alavisados for a great conversation and we'll look forward to seeing you again next year. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.