 Greetings and welcome to campus conversations. I'm Dan Moguloff from the university's office of communications and public affairs. And today I'm honored to welcome Chancellor Carol Christ for this special end of semester edition. We're gonna be talking about the usual wide array of interesting issues and areas of concern and challenges and opportunities and also about where we've been and where we're headed. And as always, we welcome and need your questions along the way. And if you'd like to pose a question for the Chancellor, just post it to our Facebook live streaming site and we'll do our very best to respond. Let's get started. Carol, welcome and thanks for joining us today. Oh, thank you, Dan. So why don't we just start share a little bit about what you're thinking, what you're, as you look back on the semester that's passed and the one that's coming our way after the winter break, what's on your mind these days? Well, it's been such an unusual semester, a strange semester in many ways. First of all, there was the incredible joy of coming back together in person. I think the beginning of the fall semester felt, the campus felt more alive, more populated than any semester since the beginning of the pandemic. And I kept feeling so much joy on the part of students particularly, but also faculty and staff of just being together again. So that was really just wonderful. And then of course we had the incredible highlight of this year, just a few weeks ago of hitting the $6 billion mark in our campaign some 14 months early ahead of schedule. So that's really exciting, extraordinary generosity on the part of our friends and donors and I'm, so excited for all the ways in which that, that campaign strengthens the campus and reaches the campus. But then of course now we're all in the middle of the strikes and the multiple strikes. And that is really challenging for our undergraduates. It's made the end of the semester which is a very tense time for any student as you come to terms with final assignments, final papers, final exams, feeling like the absence of the GSIs in particular, they're so important a part of their instruction. And challenging also for the faculty many of whom are doing heroic things to try to offer as much of the instruction that the students have the right to expect as they possibly can do. So it's a challenging time right now. I wanna thank the students and the faculty for all of the efforts they're putting in a period of challenge for them. Thanks for those opening thoughts. I'm gonna like to drill down to on each of those three things you mentioned the pandemic, the campaign and the strike and just starting with the pandemic it's interesting I always had to check through my email archives this week looking for an old email and I saw I was writing to somebody in April of 2020 yeah in a few weeks we'll be back to normal and I was like what the heck was I thinking? I'm wondering just as we step back a little bit whether you think the impact of the pandemics have passed as far as the university is concerned whether you're starting to see the contours of a new normal emerge or whether it's still in flux. How are you thinking about the institution and the pandemic these days? Well I think it's certainly the last two of what you said I don't think the pandemic will ever be in the rear view mirror. First of all, COVID-19 is going to be an endemic disease we just will have to learn to live with it and whenever you have a historic pandemic if it's whether it's the Black Death or the influenza epidemic of the at the end of the First World War or this pandemic it changes the consciousness of that historical period and I feel there's so much evidence for the way in which it's changed our consciousness. I just recently read a wonderful book by Elizabeth Stroud called Lucy by the Sea which is about the experience of a woman who had lived in New York goes up to Maine with her ex-husband during the early days of the pandemic and lives there for the pandemic and it brought me back to how the pandemic felt in those early months the sense of fear the sense of just not knowing what this was the sense of vulnerability. I think we still haven't come to terms with a psychological impact of the pandemic all of our institutions all of our intimate relationships all of our less intimate but friendly relationships have been changed by the experience of the pandemic and so we have so much repair work to be done to do and so much building community to do and I think that the pandemic has had an impact on people that often we don't even realize as we start to try to rebuild community we won't it won't be the same as before in part because of the experience that we've been through it creates the sense of fragility that this could happen again and we also have become to look on a different side of this very much more adept at remote ways of doing things if we had been doing this before the pandemic we would be in person in an auditorium and now this has become part of our toolbox we use virtual ways of having meetings having meetings at distance making presentations faculty have discovered digital tools that they're not going to discard because the pandemic is less present as constant in our lives than it was before so things are changed things are changed both because of the trauma that I don't think we've yet finished processing and things have changed as a result of the of just the ways in which digital tools have become even more a part of how we conduct many many kinds of business so it's up but it almost sounds like there may be two opposing forces which is you know in the wake of the pandemic people you know rebuilding community coming together but still the persistence and the persistent existence and utilization of virtual tools that sort of keep us apart we're how do you see that balance in terms of the university oh my goodness that's such a hard question I really believe in the university as an in-person community but I know that people's working habits have changed many people find great convenience in working remotely I notice you're probably not in a university office right now I am obviously but so it's really changed people's sense of how they do work and where they do work and I think it's been an extender of contact I am in a number of you know international university presidents groups they don't meet in person they meet on the screen and it's actually with the exception of the ungodly times in which we have to accommodate everybody's time zone it's actually better I love not getting on a plane and you know going sleepless for 18 hours and landing someplace and being there for two days and coming back again that's that's great so I just think it's it's a very complex and in historical terms it's a pretty intense and change over a relatively short period of time when you think about historical change yeah that's you know that's a good point it feels so long and it feels so short it's been sort of a time warpage I wanted to ask you about the campaign before I do just for people who joined us late we're having our end of semester conversation with Chancellor Carol Chris we welcome your questions as always they can be posted to our Facebook live streaming site so the campaign 14 months early six billion dollars it seems like a good chunk of change were you surprised I'm very surprised I mean it's surprising in two ways first of all when we decided on the six billion dollar goal we thought it was a really a stretch goal we thought it was going to be hard to make it was you know almost twice as much as the university had ever raised before in a campaign so we thought it was going to be a challenge and then we met the goal 14 months early the the other huge surprise is I thought when the pandemic struck we had the public kickoff of the campaign 10 days before we went remote with the pandemic and when that happened I thought oh this is going to be the end of the campaign people are going to be so reluctant to give what really surprised me is the the pandemic seemed to increase people's philanthropy and there are lots of reasons for that I'm giving a lot of thought I mean in part there was an enormous wealth created for certain segments of society during the campaign but I think people also felt their mortality more than they may have felt at another time and a lot of we had a lot of conversations about legacy gifts and I was so surprised at how easily fundraising could adapt to a digital medium so I had lots of gift conversations about large gifts with donors on zoom I would never have thought that would have been possible so I think it's a combination of really three things the wealth that was created particularly in some very rich segments of society this is secondly people's increased generosity at a time when they were conscious of their own mortality and conscious of the suffering of others and then I think that there was an increased sense of the importance of universities universities were so important in doing the research in kind of record record warp speed in developing vaccines for the pandemic developing cures for COVID-19 so the epidemiological research so all of that I think contributed to the increase in philanthropy that we saw in our hitting our goal early it's so interesting so the six billion dollars it is a lot of money what how to get our arms around what that will mean for the university but what difference will that make what what becomes possible as a result of pretty stunning success well one of the the thing a kind of common misconception is that here the chancellor is just sitting up here in her office with six billion dollars kind of talked in her desk people give to specific purposes there are almost no gifts that are general discretionary money for the university things that have really moved donors during this campaign have been scholarships for undergraduate students we had a 400 million dollar goal we hit it early so that was really exciting the basic needs center was very successful in its fundraising we saw a huge increase in gifts to diversity equity and inclusion so that that area did extremely well we've had more challenges raising money for our building projects I sometimes wonder if you know was that a consequence also of people being mostly remote and you can't build half a building so if you if you don't meet your goal for undergraduate scholarships you still use all the money that you've raised but if you don't hit your goal for a building you're kind of stuck so buildings have been more challenging we've also been raising money for graduate fellowships that we knew was be a challenging area but we're doing very well with graduate fellowships and we're trying to raise money for faculty positions again we've set a very ambitious goal we're about a third of the way there so in these last 14 months we're not doing a victory lap what we're doing is doubling down on the areas that we have been you know we still have ways to go and reaching our goals so this year we we've been particularly emphasizing graduate fellowships because those are so important yeah how interesting we're going to talk about buildings and infrastructure in just a bit I should also let people know that you're suffering from a bad cold today so I'm glad to see you're hydrating and I'm glad you made it all the same to join us today regarding the strike what can you say am I correct in thinking that there are some limits that you have you're limited in terms of what you're allowed to publicly say by law given that we're in the middle of negotiations that's absolutely right um the negotiations are conducted by a bargaining team that's at the office of the president I cannot opine on the strike so I I can say very little about this wreck yeah um can you talk at all about what your sense is about where things stand right now or are we fairly stalemated are you optimistic pessimistic or just wait and see I think it's just wait and see I feel thrilled that we've settled two of the contracts and they're now being voted on for gratification the postdocs and the professional researchers the uh negotiators have been doing just incredible marathon sessions but um they're still haven't reached agreement yeah um and what's your level of confidence or satisfaction with whatever mitigation steps we're taking in terms of the impact end of semester finals and all the rest of that well the faculty are working as hard as they can talked with a number of faculty about what they've been doing in their classes um I for example Alex Filippenko does a you know huge astronomy very popular astronomy class and he's changed his final to a multiple choice final that can be machine graded he's changed the requirements for his last assignments I talked to another faculty member in economics where the sections do very different work from the lectures the sections work on problem sets and so what he does is does one section obviously remotely for all his 11 sections where the undergraduates can see him work through the problems in a way that his GSIs would so there's lots of different adaptations that faculty have made it's still not the same graduate students are our essential partners in the pedagogical enterprise for our undergraduates and so yes their their their education in this last part of the semester has been has been harmed but we're doing the best that we can we're trying to create more latitude and deadlines for grade submission and that most of this the stuff about grading is in the control of the senate and I know they're working very hard on that got it and thanks for just filling in that that gap about you know the limitations that are imposed upon you in terms of not being able to opine which I'm sure is frustrating but understandable given the negotiations that are ongoing you know something else that made news this week was the fact that we have a new police chief coming oh yes February 1st Yogananda Pittman who had been the interim chief of the capital police another force that has attracted a certain degree of attention I'm just wondering you know I know we had a lot of highly qualified candidates what about her stood out for you oh well first of all her record she is the first black woman to have held any number of different positions and and her record very specifically in in heading the capital police at a point she took over shortly after the January 6th riots and she just she she was so impressive in fact I she was just I believe today offered a given a congressional medal of her work in during in the aftermath of the January 6th riots but what also impressed me is just talking with her she was she's just an amazing person and I thought she would have the ability to really connect with our community in a way that will bring us even further down the road of better public safety for the campus yeah fantastic and so I guess she's starting February 1st and that'll be something to look forward to I want to go now back to something we touched on you touched on briefly we were talking about the campaign that was buildings and just the infrastructure issue how why is that the center of so many I have so many conversations that I've been aware of lately that are happening on campus among leadership and among staff and faculty around infrastructure what's going on why is it becoming an ascendant issue for the campus recently well it used to be the case that every two years the voters would pass or almost always pass a general obligation bond which was applied both to capital construction but also to deferred maintenance that stopped in 2006 Jerry Brown had a different philosophy about how capital construction should be financed and what that's meant is that all the campuses have been just just you know very very short of deferred maintenance funding and that means a huge amount on the Berkeley campus where the oldest campus and we also live in a seismically active zone there are lots of our buildings that need seismic retrofitting so we have an 8.6 billion dollar combination of need for seismic retrofit and deferred maintenance and this has gotten to be just a critical issue there isn't any retention case for faculty that I've worked on in the last six to nine months that didn't have at its center the condition of our physical facilities that we had a review committee come in for the department of chemistry and I was told I wasn't at the you know final summary meeting but I was told their faces were action when they talked about the the state of some of the labs and chemistry I sometimes used to joke with Doug Clark the dean of chemistry about he gives a tour of chemistry labs the ones in the worst condition I call it the Dr Frankenstein's tour of our chemistry but it's really a problem we got a report from the chancellor's advisory committee in the life sciences which spends two-thirds of its length detailing the problems with deferred maintenance that are interfering with research so I decided we absolutely have to I mean it's it's one thing we could do is wail about how the state is in funding deferred maintenance and I couldn't do that I could wail for you if you wanted me to but um but I thought what we had to do is look at the income streams that we control and try to figure out how we can create a dedicated income stream for deferred maintenance it's not going to be equal to the need the need is huge but at least we can start chipping away at the problem excuse me yeah please you okay uh-huh take a break while we're breaking here just just remind everybody we're joined by chancellor carol chris for our end of semester conversation um talking about a wide range of campus issues and your questions as always are welcome they can be posted to our facebook live site uh streaming site um let's stick with the infrastructure for a bit but there is a lot of work going on I mean can you run down we've got gateway anchor house grad student housing gig give us a little run down of of what's happening in infrastructure well I'm thrilled with anchor house that's our new um residence hall for transfer students uh if you drive down oxford it's between um it's between Berkeley way and university avenue and between oxford and shattuck it goes up every day I'm thrilled to see its progress and this is the largest philanthropic gift that the campus has ever received and the excuse me the donor um it is a gift that's giving twice because the donor is insisting that the money that we save by there not being any uh long-term debt on the building be used for financial aid for our needing students so that's excuse me for a minute yeah take a break if we hesitate to let me know if we need to cut this short today okay I will um so the um and then the gateway of course is our new home for uh the new what will be a new college the college of computing data science and society on the former um site of pulmon hall and uh that's um a big hole in the ground right now but it gets to be a bigger and bigger hole every day which is and um and we are about to a break ground in the spring on a set of new graduate student apartments that are um that'll be down at university village in albany that'll be about 770 apartments I think so that's really a project that's exciting not yet in construction but soon then there are other projects that are moving toward um detailed drawings which is the step right before construction uh um hethcock hall which will be an addition to lewis hall in chemistry and then the center for connected learning in moffett library we're adding two more floors so that they'll become more like the two floors that have already been redone in that library so lots of construction going on then there's kind of facelift construction I'm sure that people have noticed that Stevens um until recently has been covered in cheating and we're we're we're we're doing some um work on that so we're trying to do you know projects and get things started um as we have the resources to do them yeah so let me ask you about another the status of another infrastructure project that stalled we began to try to begin construction in people's park in august and we're now operating under an injunction imposed by the appeals court um there have been some hopes that there would be a decision um earlier in the fall in october november that hasn't happened and we're unable to proceed so do we remain committed to that project what's your current thinking and where do you where do you think stand as far as you're concerned I am deeply committed to that project we have a desperate need for housing and just to remind everyone of the components of that project there will be a residence hall that'll have about a thousand apartments in it and then there will be permanent supportive housing for the people of low income and formerly homeless people that is 125 apartments I think about 185 beds and then about almost half the site will be a park the park will have memorial elements in it that we can co-design with the community to commemorate an important history that happened there although I think currently the park isn't very much of an asset to anyone it's a lot of crime takes place you know in and around the park and it it just doesn't to me offer the kinds of things the campus needs most urgently and I would say the homeless population needs most urgently which is housing incidentally we in June before we tried to begin construction on the site we offered housing there were about 60 people at that point camping in the park we offered housing to them all in a collaborative project we had with the city in which we've rented the roadway in for 18 months all but three of the people in the park took that offer of housing and we've been working to to move them from the roadway into permanent housing and I understand that's going fairly well yeah speaking of which how are things with the city I mean it used to be something that seemed like you opened up Berkeley side or one of the local papers in the Wisconsin something friction in the town gown relationship and it doesn't seem to happen anymore how would you assess our relationship with the city of Berkeley right now I think our relationship with the city at this point is very good I work very collaboratively with the mayor who by the way supports the people's park project as does the the city council we work on public safety issues we work on planning issues the the foundation of our improved relationship with the city is a an agreement with the city consequent to our long-range development plan which involves our contributing a little bit over four million a year to the city on a set of projects that we agree upon and that mutually benefit us and these projects the ones we're discussing go all the way from fire prevention in the culling of trees up in what's called the hill campus in other words up in the hills where the campus owned owns land to safety improvements on Berkeley streets traffic lights traffic slowing creation of bike lanes things like that I'm going to we're going to shift to a broader national topic and that has to do with diversity and affirmative action I know just in recent weeks you've done a couple of interviews with national media outlets that were connected to the supreme court hearing a case that could put an end to affirmative action in in universities and there were questions here for you about you know how we've managed or the efforts we've been making to enhance the diversity of our particularly of our student population what are your what are your current thoughts how concerned are you on a sort of a national scale about the impact of a supreme court decision ending affirmative action and how are things going on our own campus in terms of enhancing the diversity of all aspects of the campus community well thanks very much for that question there's no question in my mind that affirmative action is a really powerful tool in creating diversity in student populations on campus when the regents passed first sp1 and sp2 the regents resolution eliminating attention to race ethnicity or gender in admissions in contracting and in hiring our diversity in our student body dropped by a half and it's been a very long path to some recovery we're still not at the levels that we were at in the early 90s however we've been making a lot of progress recently we have wonderful leadership in the in Olafemi Ogendale who has really come and looked at our admissions process from you know at every element of it trying to figure out whether there are any things in it procedures that have implicit bias in them and he's changed a number of things that we do for example I'll just use one example this is before the regents eliminated the SAT and the ACT as a requirement for application what he found when he came here is the very first page that a reader saw was the student's SAT or ACT scores and then obviously creates a kind of framing effect for the whole file and so he moved that page to the back that's just one small example the elimination of the ACT and the SAT is a requirement is another example and he's changed the way in which readers are assigned areas we've changed our outreach programs so we've been making a lot of progress each year we've admitted a more diverse class but we're still not nearly where we want to be I worry a lot about what the Supreme Court may rule because one of the things we can depend on in California is knowing California high schools very well but if you have a national market like many of our most competitive privates do it's much harder to know the high schools and so it's going to be very interesting to see what happens if the Supreme Court eliminates that tool in its ruling but I think Berkeley has a lot to teach in the things that we've discovered help us yeah interesting but sort of depressing I think in some ways at the same time I want to go to a question that came in from the audience because it also speaks to the diversity of our community and it has to do it's a question about how the camp is going forward can and will and is thinking about supporting the LGBTQ plus community and this is in the wake of you know the horrible incident in Colorado the mass murder in Colorado rising tide of violence and also you know I think some just some discussion is a result of a speaker who was on campus who has a very profound anti-LGBTQ plus position I just want to correct one thing that was it's a common misconception it was in the question that the campus hosted the speaker the campus did not hosted by student groups student groups or autonomous and independent and have a legally protected ability to invite speakers or their choice and the campus by law can't interfere with that but all the same that speaker's presence had a profound and damaging impact on members of the campus community and so I guess you're being asked here what's your own thinking about how we can better support those members of that community within the campus community well I think it's being very very public about how we value all sexual and gender identities and being very you know creating a good climate on campus I was actually though the speaker's views are important to me who came to speak on campus I was also glad that there basically was no you know no incident you know that he didn't I mean of course it was during the strike but he didn't garner as much response as one might have feared so I think that was good but I just just making sure that we and everything we say and do present our support to the LGBTQ community got it thank you and we've had a couple of other questions come in I think it looks like it could be from graduate students and if I can synthesize them and I'm hoping I'm doing justice to the two questions they focus and please obviously if we're going to territory you can't speak of because of the prohibition on talking about or opining about the strike but these are questions about cost of living and about how much it costs to rent the rent burden on graduate students and the question is are there any plans to help alleviate that burden when it comes to graduate students in particular cost of housing the accessibility of housing that's obviously an essential part of having a positive experience on campus yeah I think every member of the campus population undergraduates graduate students faculty staff has you know suffers an impact from the high cost of housing in the bay area what we're trying to do is increase the amount of campus built and managed housing for actually every element of the community but for graduate students I already mentioned the the project that we're beginning down near albany village we recently brought into our housing stock in about a year ago it was opened in in january of 2022 the the intersection which is again a project for graduate students in emoryville that was a gift to the campus and all of the money again that we saved through there not being any debt long-term debt on that building goes to financial aid for graduate students got it um let's go from one complicated subject to another and that is the issue of the pack 12 athletic conference I know here too there's some limitations on what you can say given that the region still haven't decided but for those who haven't been following it and I know it's taken up a lot of time in your attention but for those who haven't been following it what's a synopsis of what the issue is and what are the current thoughts you can share with us and I think the regions are planning to decide on the 14th just around the corner that's right just around the corner next week so ucl uc and ucla decided this was at the the the end of june to leave the pack 12 conference and join the big 10 conference uh one of the major sources of financing for athletic departments in division one schools are um meteorites and the uh the big 10 uh was just signing a very lucrative media deal that would um enable the the members to get about 62 million dollars a year in this media deal um so currently the pack 12 gets around 30 um and their media contracts are currently up for negotiation they're all expiring in 2024 so the departure of usc and ucla diminishes the value of those meteorites because la is obviously a major media market and um and there won't be you know la teams in the in the pack 12 anymore because they'll be in the big 10 unless the regions decide to do something about it so that is a a financial hit to cal not at the current moment but anticipated in the worth of the media contracts that it's currently negotiating uh so um the the the kind of concern that many people have including me is that um that you know the the big 10 i i think the farthest west um uh school is university of nebraska and it extends all the way to rutgers university in new jersey so obviously these are huge travel distances for student athletes for student athletes for ucla and usc that would involve their missing more class time i i could just take my views um i think that that well i step back for a minute there are a huge number of changes right now in intercollegiate athletics there is the um right that many state legislators have given athletes to make money from their name image and likeness there is there are several lawsuits that um are what is at stake is whether athletes should be considered employees rather than students and then there is all of this conference realignment that's been happening and all of these have budgetary consequences for athletic departments and their sources of revenue um that um i believe that it's better to have more strong conferences than fewer strong conferences some people see a huge consolidation coming in division one athletics that would result in you know just um a few mega conferences like the sec and the big 10 i believe we're better off with more strong conferences that involve less travel for student athletes carol do you have some overarching concerns about where intercollegiate athletics is heading i mean is that is this bound up in some broader concerns that you have oh absolutely i mean i i really believe in the amateur tradition in intercollegiate athletics and what we're what we're moving toward is a professionalization not of all intercollegiate athletics but of the revenue producing uh division one intercollegiate athletics namely football and men's basketball with uh media rights kind of of piping the tune um for all the other sports and i think this has a bad impact on olympic sports on women's sports so yes i very much regret the direction in which things are moving thanks so i want to move in and talk a little bit about rankings and other sort of a hut button issue but if you don't mind i'm going to answer one of the another question came in following up about the speaker who was on campus last week and we were asked if the security provided by the campus was paid for by the student group or the university and just to say it was paid for the university that too is a legal obligation of ours that too is not discretionary all of that is laid out in our major events policy we would do the same thing for any any student group regardless of the perspectives of the speaker they invited and again it's not a discretionary decision it's something we have to do as a matter of law right um let's talk about rankings um it was interesting i saw that um Dean Chemerinsky has pulled the law school out of the rankings that created a whole flurry people of the national news sky was falling for some the deliverance that arrived for others are is this the beginning of the end of rankings oh who knows i don't have crystal ball i have to say that i'm highly critical of the u.s news and world report rankings for a number of reasons first of all i think it's just a fiction that you can create a one to whatever many one to one hundred ordinal list ordinal rank list of institutions as if they were sports teams with win-loss records you you just can't do it it's a completely false intellectual exercise um what of course the various ranking organizations do is they create an algorithm giving so much weight to x so much weight to y so much weight to z and what they do is they change that algorithm year to year they always say it's oh it's to make the algorithm better i actually think the motivation is to create artificial volatility in the rankings because anybody who's led ecology university knows they're not that easy to change and the idea that a university goes from number one to number eight in one year is ridiculous it what it it what it is created by is changes in the algorithm and the algorithm weights wealth factors and selectivity factors and those are not berkeley's values i mean um that uh we're a state institution we operate on a considerable you know considerable tighter budgetary environment than our private competitors do and we pride ourselves on our our um our access but that's not what the rankings weight so um and i think the rankings have a destructive effect on students choices i've heard some students say oh my parents will only let me go to a university that's in the top 10 us news and world report top 10 and that's silly there are many good choices for every um prospective student and where a school ranks in us news has very little to do with what kind of choice that institution is for a particular student and did you approve of dean chimerinsky's decision to absolutely yeah and i know our executive vice chancellor and provost ben hermelin was was asked there was a reporter who was interested in you know ben just noted that we hadn't really yet had that community wide conversation about the rankings and we weren't close to any sort of decision but is that something that you see in the often anytime soon an institutional conversation about where we stand with the rankings whether we want to continue to participate well it's a very complicated subject um there are some institutions that have tried to become independent of the rankings and what us news does is just makes up the data then and continues to rank them so i think one of the powers of the law school action is that was a lot of law schools who did it not so i think this would have to be not an action that a single university takes but a more general um but a more general action got it um i'm going to change subjects once again another complicated one that's cal versus berkeley i know i know folks in our office are in the middle of doing market research and leading campus conversations on campus and with stakeholders about the differentiation and when to use which what's going on because the last time we brought this up which was about 15 years ago um a lot of people sort of freaked out at the idea that we might be getting rid of cal or we may be doing this or that what's going on well what's going on is that we have currently a very strict set of guidelines about who can use cal and who can use berkeley so i'll give you a funny example there's a wonderful woman retired staff member from the school of public health who wrote a terrific book about the peregrine falcons on the and on the top of the campanile and she wanted to call her book the cal falcon still nope she couldn't call it that um so it it there was the effort some years ago to study cal and berkeley um tried to do something that i think any linguist would tell you was an impossible project which is to say you use cal in these circumstances and you use berkeley in those circumstances and you really can't do it and language is a living thing and i think most of us code switch very easily between cal and berkeley and we know what circumstances we use berkeley and we know what circumstances we use cal in there is confusion out there in the wider world um i've certainly had a number of conversations with people mostly not in california about you know people who don't understand that cal and berkeley are the same institution um and um and there's some very interesting research that i saw connected to this branding study um shows that in audiences that are more distant from california berkeley is seen as extremely prestigious but cal is seen as not prestigious so it's just um it's just i find it fascinating as someone who studies words the purpose of this is not to decide on cal or decide on berkeley but rather to have a more reasonable and linguistically realistic idea of how you have these two identities interact and coalesce in a way that it isn't quite as confusing or has a policy that frankly um it just doesn't surface very well wow where do you when do you think there'll be a decision or when to change how it will be sometime in the spring but it won't be a decision i don't think uh-huh just sort of i think it'll be a loosening of the currently rather rigid guidelines understood um application numbers do we have them we're we're i don't yet so um i don't yet so i don't know where we are yeah we're and we're last year we were over 100 000 again 128 000 for the freshman class alone and then i think there were about 20 000 for transfer admission yeah it is it's sort of remarkable that berkeley remains the magnet that it is right and i'm just wondering what is is that because we've evolved with times or because we've remained a steady source of kind of academic excellence what's your sense about that's an incredible number of applications well i've a rather complicated sense of this first of all um the state of california is number 49 out of the 50 states in the proportion of places in four-year undergraduate institutions in relationship to the size of its population so it means that i'm part this is because the community college system but california has under invested in four-year institutions and you can see it's not just berkeley that's seeing these application numbers it's almost all of the ucs that admit undergraduates are seeing these very big application numbers i think in part it's the prestige of these campuses um it's i think unique in the united states that you have in fact it is unique in the united states that of the nine undergraduate campuses of the university of california seven of them are in the american association of universities i that's just extraordinary so they're very high prestige campuses that offer excellent education that are accessible and that are when you compare it to private institutions relatively efficient economically so that explains i think the the the large application numbers quality of institution but also the fact that it probably strikes many california families as a more affordable alternative in addition students are applying to so many more schools you know you talk to students they apply to like 20 schools when i was when i was applying to college back many many many decades ago you apply to three schools that's not the case anymore so of course that swells everybody's application numbers i'm going to go back to uh before we close to and it's interesting and it's i think a commentary on not just the university but california as a whole and has to do with cost of housing we've had a few more questions coming in asking whether the university has a plan or can even do anything about the cost and somebody brought up an example of you know at intersection it's 1425 a month and i'm just reading the questionnaire you can almost feel the the challenge this person is facing and is there anything we can do is there any discussion about that what's your thinking we really can't have an impact on the housing market as such i think the thing that we can do is to build more housing which i'm trying to do right so just a matter of supply and right yeah yeah it's a tough one and it's i mean it seems like everything that the samples go chronicles filled every single day with more and more stories about the cost of housing throughout the bay area not just the university so with that closing thoughts is we're all about to head off and have a little break looking forward to the spring semester well i want to thank all of the staff we're listening in today for your extraordinary work through this semester thanks the faculty for your work thank the students if there are any students listening in and to you know to take the time over the break to relax to recharge to be with family and friends and to have a wonderful holiday season and thank you for everything that you do for Cal and on behalf of the campus community and Berkeley and on behalf of the campus community uh Chancellor chris i want to thank you for all that you do and for your time today and thank everybody for joining us we'll see you on the next edition of campus conversations