 My name is Dan Mogulov, I'm with the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs and it is my distinct honor and privilege to welcome you all to what is the second in a series of what are called campus conversations. The first was just a while back with the campus' CFO Rosemary Ray and in the future we'll also be welcoming Vice Chancellor Administration Mark Fisher and Chancellor Carol Christ. But today it is my distinct honor and privilege to welcome Paul Alavisatos, who is the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost for the Berkeley campus. I'm going to give a really brief introduction. Paul will sort of help set the table. I have a few questions that I have in my back pocket and then we'll be taking questions that come from you, the members of the audience today. Paul is a celebrated chemist, accomplished administrator and longtime member of our community. He assumed his current role in July 1st, 2017. In his capacity as EBCP he serves as the Chancellor's leading senior executive responsible for UC Berkeley's day-to-day operations and he's also Berkeley's chief academic officer responsible for the planning, development, implementation, assessment and enhancements. A lot of things you're responsible for. Of all academic programs, policies and supporting infrastructure. In addition to his role as EBCP Paul is the Samsung Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, the founding director of the Cavalry Energy Nanoscience Institute, director emeritus of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he remains a senior faculty scientist. He also holds professorships in UC Berkeley's departments of chemistry and material science. Then I have in the last section here all of his rewards. It would take me the rest of the 45 minutes. So I'm not even going to go there. Plus I'd get in trouble so I'm just going to say without further ado I just want to welcome Paul. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much. It's so great to be with you this afternoon. At first I thought just from the evidence in my eyes that it must be a lot of students here because of where you're all seated as far back as you can be. But then I look at who I know and I see, maybe not, it looks like a lot more staff than faculty. It's such a pleasure to be with you and, you know, Dan described some of my responsibilities, not all of which I can completely enumerate myself so you'd think, okay, it must be a pretty challenging and daunting situation, which it certainly is. But I'm a semester in, you know, just started in this role in July. And so it's a pleasure for me to tell you a little bit about some of my experiences so far and what I see as issues. And I really hope we can have a good discussion with you where you can ask a lot of questions and I'll do my very best to answer them. So one thing I'd like to start with is just by saying that last semester I had the opportunity to visit all the academic units. And that was really special. I am, in July I'll be a faculty member for 30 years at Berkeley. So I've been here quite a long time, I was a graduate student here as well. And so, you know, I've been on the Berkeley campus for a long time and yet it's quite remarkable to me how much I didn't know about the amazing things that go on here. And I was really struck in my visits by what I think we all know to be true, which is that really Berkeley has a positively astonishing range of programs that are innovative and very enterprising in how they approach their areas and remain really at the forefront of knowledge in every case. And often without all the resources that maybe some others enjoy, but because they're really creative. And they have a strong community spirit, they're really able to do amazing things. And so that was really a wonderful feeling, I have to say. I wish everyone at Berkeley could have it because it would certainly make you feel that sense of really mission and devotion to the community here that is really very widespread and our greatest asset as we go into a period is a difficult one and where also there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. So as a citizen, I guess I would say it was really a special experience to have that opportunity to visit all the way across the campus. This is a pretty important period of time that we're in. I think you all know this is the sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of this amazing place. And we have in this moment kind of a very interesting juxtaposition of kind of an inherent contradiction of the life that we're in right now and of the challenges that we have to meet in the next period of time together. On the one hand, we're just part way through a really hard process of bringing our financial house in order in a circumstance where many things have changed around us. And so I'll say a few words about that. On the one hand, we have that reality of a difficult budget and a big change in our whole financial arrangement. And yet at the same time, we have a situation where if you stand back and look, you feel like, well, the need of society for a truly amazing and great public institution like this one has never, ever been greater and the opportunity for us remains enormous. And we need to be thinking about how do we organize ourselves in a fresh way so that 20 or 50 years from now, this place, it remains really vital and really strong. I feel that last part very acutely, I have a responsibility in this academic world of looking at what's happening with the faculty. And as you know, the faculty turn over kind of over a long period of time. It might be 30 years over which really, if you look at me, I'm sitting here 30 years after I first joined the faculty. And so you can really see that there's this kind of long term character that's built in. In fact, one of the goals that society has in creating great universities is in fact to have a place where some thinking goes on about the real long term. And so we have that obligation and we need to be thinking very hard about where do we want to be. So I will try to just give you a little bit of a snapshot of how those two things are playing out really this semester and the important role that all of you need to play in helping us think through about where we're going to be. So on the budget front, which is our here and now, we have to make things happen this year and next year, okay? We do have a real situation to work together on. As you know, a few years ago, we entered a period where we had a budget deficit that we've been running a deficit for a while. But we entered into a period where we committed to really bringing our finances under control. And so we started just a couple years ago with a budget deficit of $149 million. We put in a commitment to bring that down over a period of a number of years, four years. And in that first period, we had a commitment to bring it down to 110. And I'm pleased to say that the campus brought it down much better than that. And when the final year settled, we were at 77. This year again, we have to go through a process of bringing that down from, if we said 110, bringing it down to 57 and then in a subsequent year to the mid-30s and then 20 and then zero. So in the 2020, 2021 academic year, we should really be dealing with no deficit if we are able to execute on that. And that's a really serious thing to contemplate doing. What I can say is that during the course of this, some of that correction is happening. For example, in this current academic year, more than half of that is happening through new sources of money. And we're going to have a discussion around what we mean by that new sources of money because we can think of it strictly as a revenue discussion, but we can also think of it very much in terms of what it means about what we're trying to grow and what we want to do in the future and how we want to interact with society. But I can say that at least in this current fiscal year, half of that deficit will be made up by new sources of money. And hopefully in the next coming years, a larger and larger fraction of that, that's how it will be. So that's incredibly important. And what I can say is that our ability to stay to that timetable, it's within sight, it's just hard, but it's a couple of years away really where we could be talking about a situation of financial stability and one where we can make a pivot towards really seriously contemplating what we want to do in a different kind of arrangement, a different kind of fiscal environment. And one thing I can say is I'm absolutely convinced that we need to stick to that timetable. We can't stretch it out further. And there are challenges. There are constantly challenges in trying to do that. For example, we did have the state not come in at the 4% increase, which it had pledged, and instead of 3%, which corresponds to $7 million. And that shows up in our budget as a new uncertainty for us. And likewise, there are questions around, well, will the legislature invest more, or will we be enabled to have, in lieu of that, if that doesn't happen, can we have some tuition support? And we're in a difficult circumstance where, for example, the tuition for next year isn't even going to be decided by the regions until May. So a student might have to decide whether to accept admission or not, not even knowing what their tuition goal would be. So we have to operate inside that environment. And I guess what I would say is I think we really have to hit our budget numbers regardless of those uncertainties. What I can say is I think we will do that, and that we have a path to doing that that is a sensible one. But we have to pay close attention to it, and we have to be successful at doing it. At the same time, as I mentioned to you, this is a year that marks our 150th, and the chancellor I think has helped us very much to think about where it is that we want to be going forward. She started a strategic planning process. I hope you've all heard about it. It's ongoing. It's a very close collaboration with the Academic Senate and with engagement with staff and students in a lot of different forums. And over the course of this semester, we really will be talking about many of our ideas of where do we want to be? And where do we want to be in 10 and 20 years? And those are very fundamental. So that discussion around strategic plan is really, if you like, it's trying to address some of the core issues like people, places, dollars, and ideas, okay? Things that this university all really has to care about. So we have working groups that are thinking on the ideas front about, what are the grand challenges? What are the ideas that really are ones that Berkeley wants to leave a mark on at a larger scale? We have a society that's struggling around issues of democracy, civil society, free speech. What does it mean to be human? We have a situation where we know there are phenomenal advances taking place in brain and mind, in artificial intelligence, in robotics, about how we will be thinking, how people will be employed, what their jobs will be like. All of those components of things. So there are many ideas around topics of grand challenge, that this community needs to have some articulated planning around in order to be successful. And when we talk about our people who are here, I really think it's vital that we think about the enormous changes taking place in education, in higher education today, that all of society needs to be thinking about. For example, what is a great undergraduate education? There are some things about that that will never change. We want our students, of course, to learn how to have a life that emerges from values. How to have certain core ways of learning that don't change. And yet, all the other changes I described to you that are happening in society mean that students want to have more experiential learning. They want to have more learning not just within one discipline, but in the context of problems that they really care about. We have to change how we organize ourselves to do that. We have more master's degree students this year, or at least an equal number, maybe a little bit more, than we do PhD students. That's a profound change. Suddenly all of these students who have completed undergraduate degrees, whether here or elsewhere, find themselves needing to know more because the complexity of human knowledge is changing, because the nature of labor markets are changing, and they need to be able to get things from us that the university maybe 25 years ago didn't organize itself around. Suddenly we have a whole population of people who are here for a year or two years, and their engagement, how they mesh with the rest of this community, how they connect with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. We need to think about them as part of our human network and how they can be supported, but also how they can be part of it and help everybody else. The graduate students profound changes. For example, it's always been that PhD program about learning how to create new knowledge, but their opportunities now, a society needs people who can create new knowledge to have a level of versatility that maybe they didn't need to have 10 or 20 years ago. So we have to structure the PhD program in a way that offers them those kinds of things. There will also be in the strategic plan a lot of thinking about dollars. How does money flow into a great public university like this? We know it's not gonna be the same way. It's not going to be that the legislature is going to send us one sum of money that then gets dispersed throughout this complex organization. In fact, we're gonna have an environment where many different actors in society, philanthropists, alumni, corporations, non-government organizations, foreign governments, all kinds of people care a lot about what happens here and they want to be involved and they will be involved supporting things that they find interesting. And so that's going to change the financial picture of the university. How do we maintain the broad range of academic work that goes on when some subjects are ones that maybe can generate a lot of financial support because they're so immediately connected to a societal need. But we're here for 30 and 50 years. We better make sure we're supporting the ideas that are required for the long-term future. So we have to rethink our whole financial structure. So I hope that you can see how complex and how interesting the set of problems that we have are. And I guess if there's one thing I would like to leave as a thought in just my early comments, it's that the two are linked with each other, the financial challenges of today and our vision for where we wanna be are very much connected. And in fact, the one way we're going to solve the problems that we might have around today's budget is around really having a serious discussion about what our best ideas are, about where we wanna be and thinking about how to grow in those directions. That's going to get us the financial picture that will give the kind of stability we need so that a great public university can remain that way for a really long time, my drill. So we're about to move into the Q&A portion. For those of you who are standing in the back, we have loads of seats up here. Neither Paul or I have ever jumped into a mosh pit, you have nothing to worry about. Come on up and join us. Have we already collected the... Okay, so if you have questions, please pass them out. No, no, we're on the cards. If we write them down in the cards and if you could pass them to the outside end of the aisles. Yeah, the outside. If you could just pass those cards down to the outside end, people are gonna come along and pick them up. So while we're doing this, I'm gonna abuse the privilege of my position here. I have some questions of my own. I actually wanna start on the budget. So recently, you and Chancellor Chris penned an op-ed in the Daily Cal and it sort of said two different things about the budget and I would ask them to see if you could resolve them. On one hand, it expressed cautious optimism for our future. You talked a little bit about this just now. On the other hand, you talked about all these uncertainties. How do you reconcile these two? Because when I think about uncertainties, I get nothing but anxious. And when I think about cautious optimism usually means there are not too many uncertainties. How do you think about it and how do you reconcile those two? Well, there's a lot of dislocation going on but we did outperform our budget target and we're very much on track to hit our target at least to hit our target this year. So we're heading in the right direction and in the face of uncertainty, we have to be prudent. In other words, we have to really stay focused on making sure that that year 2020, 2021 that we hit our target there. And we can do that but we have to also have built into our financial planning the possibility that we could have some surprises. And so that's what we've been trying to do because I mean, I have to say to my opinion if we for example said, well, we were on target but then X, Y or Z happened and now suddenly we're saying 2023, to me that would just be the most, that would be such a letdown and I think we can avoid doing that. And so that's why I say on the one hand we have to be reasonably determined, confident, do it but we have to be really careful prudent and those are kind of contradictory things and it is hard and we really have taken a lot of hard hits to our system that are difficult ones and to say anything less wouldn't be honest but on the other hand, it's not that far away and we've closed a big chunk of what we need to. So that's where we are. So how do you deal with that challenge and just have a couple of more and then we'll open it up. The challenge of the fact that here on campus we don't control all of the levers. We can't set tuition, we can't set the price and effect that students pay for attending. We can't set the number of students that we admit or where we admit them from. We can't set the level of state funding. What kind of challenges that pose and can they be circumvented? Can they be overcome? Is it just a part of our reality that we have to accept? Well, look, I mean, it is definitely true that the things that you mentioned are really, they are major challenges and it is also true that if you look at a period a little bit greater than 10 years, we've gone from a total number of students on the campus of just a little bit, around the 30,000 a little bit over to more like 40,000 total, including all kinds of students. And so that's been an enormous amount of growth during a period when the budget has been tighter and we have not been able to increase the faculty size. So we've got the same number of faculty and yet we've got a lot more students here of all different kinds. And so all of those things are just tremendously dislocating challenges. I will say that I am pleased with many of the new ideas that have come in that have brought new resources to the campus. Many of them have to do with extending educational opportunity in places where it's needed. So they really in a sense make up a lot of academic sense, but they also correspond to new programs that have been bringing in some monies. And I'll just to give you an example of that. I don't think that that need has yet reached its plateau. A lot of the pressure, for example, on enrollment comes because the state has a really growing, talented population of people from all different kind of diverse communities, a lot of whom don't come from family backgrounds where higher education has been accessible to them. So in a sense, the state's need for us has only grown greater in an environment of a lot of different fiscal constraints. And so we have to ask ourselves the question, are there ways we can serve more people? For example, have we exploited what's possible with online education? I actually think we have not done very much there compared to what might be possible. And if we could, for example, extend the benefits of some engagement with Berkeley to a lot of people who might not physically be present on the campus, maybe we can increase the capacity of the university to help people in the state. Maybe we could have more people doing year abroad. If they do that, that increases the duty factor of the capacity of the campus substantially. So I think we have to be asking ourselves, what are some levers that we can turn, which will expand the capacity of the university to help people in the state with the footprint we have. And frankly, in some cases, even with the budget that we have. And that's hard to do, but it is possible. And to the extent that we do it, it will lower the pressure on these other areas where the pressure is coming onto us just because of the needs of the state in many ways. So you say that the state needs us now more than ever, but there are those I think who believe that everybody understands that except for the state. And in that context, I have a question about the recent endorsement that you and the Chancellor provided for a moderate increase in tuition. Does that represent for you an abandonment of hope that the state's ever gonna return to the sort of financial partner it was in the past and that the days of advocacy are over or is there something else at work here? Well, it's a long game. So abandonment would be a phrase I would never use in that context. The state has an ongoing relationship with its public universities that is very long, very deep. It has its moments of strength and weakness. I will say that if you just look at, for example, the support that we get for faculty and we thought of it in terms of an endowment, it would correspond to something like 15 billion in terms of the annual amount that we get from the state that allows us to keep the faculty that we have going. And so to look at that and say, well, we don't think the state is contributing, it's complicated. I mean, they're wanting to get more out of the institution in a period when it's without necessarily meeting the incremental costs, but it would be a big mistake for us to look around us and feel like the state isn't contributing or that they're not an vital stakeholder. So I think our goal should be to restore some fiscal responsibility. I think, for example, specifically with respect to Berkeley, but you also see some of that conversation going on, particularly at the system-wide level. If they feel like the financial resources are not getting the kind of responsible stewardship they need, it's hard to get into a conversation with them about, come on, let's reinvest. So I think if we can put our fiscal house in order, we'll be in a stronger position if we can show that we are able to extend the benefits to a broader population. I think those kinds of conversations become much more possible. And I don't think we should abandon them. They will always, I think, and should always be a key player. Having said that, I also think we shouldn't have a singular focus that a public university means that the money comes from one way in which the public engages, i.e. the legislature. I mentioned all the other constituents that really care about what a great public university is like, alumni, philanthropists, foundations, companies, all of them have an important stake in what happens inside this university that belongs to them in many ways. So I think that we will have a more broad-based source of incomes that will also help us be a little bit more resilient instead of having a single major-only source. Yeah. So I'm gonna jump in now to some of the questions that came up from you in the audience. And the first one is about money, again, and the state. And it notes that public support for the UC and higher ed continues to decline. And the question is, at what point are we no longer public, and how do we stay public? And I would add to that, what does that mean to you, Paul, to be public? I mean, I will only note, former chancellor Bergenow towards the end of his tenure started to talk about Berkeley as a state-situated school as opposed to a state-funded school. I think our budget, we're now down to about what? 10, 11, 12% of the budget is state-supported. So what makes us public, and how do we stay public? Well, first of all, let me say that there is an ethos that makes us public. And it has to do with an ethos of public service and with a vision for how each of us who comes here thinks about something greater than ourselves, which is how to help society to be a better place. And that's a way of thinking that I think is embedded in the culture very, very, very deeply. So we can look for a big, there is a big transformation going on in the flow of dollars into the university and how that supports what goes on here. But I think the fundamental underlying cultural ethos is inside this place about service, about access with excellence, about comprehensive excellence, about believing in the benefit of knowledge about, and if there's one thing that I've experienced with Berkeley over all the years I've been here, there's certain cultural characteristics like relentless questioning of everything that are really wonderful Berkeley attributes that don't go away very easily. So that to me is what defines us in a sense. And certainly, we need to try to turn back that discussion with the legislature, we need to be very focused on it. You asked about the tuition issue. Look, I would love it if the state decided to really invest again in a significant way and start to increment its investment in the public university. Perhaps that will happen. But absent that, we need to all have a conversation about how everybody can contribute. And the students, in fact, in some cases can contribute in a way that protects the students with low income. In fact, they will get that monies through financial aid, but will bring resource that they can bring to the table. If we don't have these other kinds of investments, that's one of the things that may be necessary in order for people to be able to graduate on time, get through the gateway courses they need to, and so on. And that's a discussion. I mean, it's an uncomfortable one, but we have to have it. So we're gonna leave the budget just for a second and move over sort of the academic side of the house, if you will. And the question here is, besides enhanced awareness of the array of creative and innovative programs, what were some of your takeaway message, what were some of the takeaway messages from your listening tour of academic units? What did you come away with feeling, understanding, knowing, and thinking about? Well, I learned an awful lot of things about the specific areas that were going on, which I didn't know, and which were very, very helpful to me because of the, you know, I need to be able to understand what are the big issues for those different disciplines today in terms of academics. But I mean, you know, there are some larger issues there. The faculty size, having stayed constant for a long time, has put enormous stress on the system. So, you know, we are working really hard. I believe you'll start seeing already in this next academic year some of our progress in growing the size of the faculty. You know, it's gonna be done through philanthropic support and it will be modest over time, but we have set a target to grow it by 100 and there are a number of disciplines where in fact we have, we're a little bit subcritical. And part of that has happened. I'll just, you know, point out an obvious academic trend that I think we all know of. It's very exciting to see the advent of data science transforming huge numbers of academic disciplines. And suddenly we have very large numbers of students who are majoring in sociology or history or chemistry and who need these tools of data science all of a sudden. And so that's led to this kind of giant change in where people are getting instruction from and where they need it in the future and so on. And that's led to a situation, I think, frankly, where some disciplines have kind of lost some of the critical mass among the faculty that they need in order to sustain things. And so we have to redress that and I think the data science activities that we're planning and talking about will do a tremendous amount, not only to make sure that the academic disciplines more broadly are able to be having the right numbers of faculty, but also, frankly, to address issues like inequality and inequity of access to the ability to learn about things like computer science and data science, which, frankly, because College of Engineering has been so impacted in its enrollment, many people you just look and you can see the diversity out in the workplace and the commercial workplace has been so poor. Berkeley is gonna be able to play a really big role in that area by creating these new data science majors and minors that are gonna let a lot of students with different backgrounds and from different academic interest levels to interest areas to come in and get those tools and then go out into the workplace and hopefully diversify what has been a really not very well diversified sector of the economy that's growing so fast. So those things are connected and I learned how much that stress on the system has been really playing a big role and certainly also I think there's been a huge dislocation around the financial model that has played out in terms of effecting the services and how we deliver them and people are really frustrated with those things and so we have a lot of work to do to try to get those things back on track. I mean, it's a project, good project, but a real one. So that offers sort of a segue to the next question which is, what is your vision of great undergraduate education? And I'd also note, people probably read in the paper, they just announced a new president for Harvard and the new president, one of the key things he sort of put before himself was confronting this eroding support for the very value of an undergraduate education in today's economy, in today's country and a sort of deterioration of confidence among the public in what we do and what we offer. So what's your vision? Where do you think we're going in the largest sense when it comes to undergraduate education? Okay, well, thank you Ron. So grateful for getting a question like that. Look, I mean, first of all, let's remind ourselves that there are really an undergraduate education is helping a human being to learn how to learn what we know already in a broad way to really be able to access knowledge themselves and to be an active learner, not to just be a kind of passive learner. And I think if there's one thing we know about the society we live in, it's that what a student graduating today, what they're gonna be doing in 30 years is gonna look nothing like what they're doing today. So if there's anything a young person would need today, it's to learn how to learn not to have just learned a specific thing. So in that sense, yeah, there is a disconnect to their elements of society that don't seem to quite grasp that profound change and wanna convert all universities into a kind of trade school, which I think would be the last good outcome for people who need to be able to develop over the entire course of a career. But let me be very specific, as we talk about our undergraduate education, in my own thinking, and this will develop hopefully in a strategic plan with all the community input, but I can say personally, I've come to be thinking of it as really that there might be three sets of issues for our undergraduates today, which I'll call all linked together, let's say thrive, launch, discover, okay? So first of all, in my tour, another thing that I learned, which is still, I just can't wrap my head around it entirely, although so many of you live with this every day. There are a lot of students, not just undergraduates, but also graduate students and even of course also staff, whose basic needs are not met. I mean, because of the housing crisis, they're not able really to be housed properly and they have issues getting enough food. So I mean, I think if there's one thing we have to do in an undergraduate initiative, it's to try our utmost to establish conditions where there's a sufficient degree of housing and where there's, people have a baseline of needs met so that they can be in a position to learn and I think that's gotta be front and center of our campaign that's gonna start next year. On the launch front, we have to redouble our efforts to say that students in those first 18 months really get the kinds of early experiences that they need to get their gateway courses to not be blocked in areas that they need to get through and we're having a lot of trouble doing that and also to get some of the early experiences that help them take part in what might happen in the end stages of a good undergraduate degree which I would put under that rubric of discovery and say that an undergraduate today probably really needs to be having a self-driven topic that's a problem-driven kind of experience where they take what they're learning in their discipline-based major but they also have a context around it and a problem that they care about that they really come to know. That will help them then to launch onto a life themselves that is one that's purposeful. I think it's a really important time to be thinking about what happens with undergraduate education and Berkeley's gonna be able to do something really special because we have some of the very best research and discovery opportunities. So if we say that's gonna be a characteristic of the future for undergraduate education, we're gonna be in a very strong position to be really leaders in that. Thank you. So speaking of relentless questioning, this next one is a hard one I think, a challenging one. So given the cuts that academic units are absorbing, what cuts and budgetary disciplines does the campus expect from athletics? Well, look, I think we do have to have a very serious discussion around athletics. We have, as you probably know, a search going on right now for a new athletics director. We have a lot of financial challenges there. As the chancellor, I think, has made it very clear there are kind of two different kinds of challenges that are faced inside the world, the financial, in the financial world of athletics, there are two challenges that we certainly need to be thinking about. One is the ongoing programmatic needs of athletics on a year-to-year basis and the other are the capital issues around athletics. What do you mean by capital? Well, I mean so many of the issues around the infrastructure, the stadium, but also other parts of the facilities that are needed in order to actually have athletics programs. So both of those have financial challenges about them and the new athletics director is gonna certainly have to play a key role in helping shape an understanding around those. I do wanna add one more thing onto this though. Just now I'm giving my own observation here, which is that I do think our community also needs to be engaged in a discussion about what do we really aspire for student athletes? We have some amazing, amazing people here on the campus who come as student athletes. We have others to whom we have a deep commitment in terms of they've come here and we need to make sure that they're getting the kinds of education and tools and opportunities subsequently in life to be able to be successful. So I think that it is clear that we have a lot of financial challenges in athletics, but I also wanna say basically, I think we also have some significant discussion to be having around what our academic vision is around how we wanna see that develop. And I guess I'm gonna say that I do think that there's a lot of discussion going on right now about what the next stage of athletics at Berkeley is gonna look like and when the new leadership position is filled, I think that's gonna be a real key period of time to define what that looks like. So the person who wrote that last question obviously felt that pressing one hot button deserves pressing another. So the second question. Why not? As, and I know this is near and dear to the hearts and concerns of many staff members, which is as we restructure aspects of CSS campus shared services, what are the lessons being learned? Yeah, well, so I do think that we really did, we have a lot to learn there. It's a good question. First of all, let me say that our ability to deliver the services for academic units has really taken a big hit over a period of time that has really cost us a lot and it's been a very divisive set of issues and it's also been very costly. And I think that my read of it is that we really need to be in a careful partnership between the academic units and the center on how we're gonna deliver services. And that dialogue between the two really failed during that period around the centralization of the services and it failed because the two sides weren't able really to connect with each other properly. So that's a, it's a really a difficult thing. On the other hand, I want to emphasize this as strongly as I possibly can. We can think about the various assets that we have as a community. I talked with you about our history, our ethos, the possibility of the future and so on. If there's one thing that this campus has that is an off scale phenomenal resource, it is the staff who are here. And by that I mean the staff in departments but also the staff who serve the central functions of the campus. They are amazing people. They're mostly here because they really believe in the mission of the university. They feel about the university, they care about it. And so when we have a misstep like that where we organize ourselves in a way that isn't productive and then it creates a lot of kinda back and forth of not being a good discussion, a good dialogue and people getting angry, it degrades that community that's required in order for the place to be resilient. So clearly we need to be really much more careful and thoughtful about those kinds of changes and there needs to be a more careful discussion. I'm optimistic that the kind of regionalization that we're in the midst of creating will allow us to reach the balance that we need. We need a balance where the local academic needs are really discussed and understood. And they're also discussed and understood in the context of what the budget allows. There are trade-offs made within those areas to achieve the best services that we can. But whatever happens in that local area should not end up by specializing to such a degree, imposing costs on everybody else that's not in that region. And I think that the regional size entities that we're talking about will be well-sized for doing that. We have an existence proof with what's gone on in College of Engineering and having at it also environmental design in the high school. That area has provided services at a good quality level. And so we're seeking to emulate that and I think we're gonna have a partnership there between the academic units and the center in order to try to get the service level right. And we can't afford to have a lot of churning or back and forth where we're not really trying to be problem solvers and to get to where we need to go on that. So it's not a good chapter in our kind of organizational history, but we can learn from it and I tried to say what I thought are some of the lessons. Thanks. The next question is gonna slightly different territory. It has to do with faculty and I think it raises a subject that I'm not sure everybody is even aware of at the moment and that is this. Whoops, I got the wrong one, sorry. There was a growing national conversation indeed within the UC system about the benefits of defining different kinds of faculty appointments. Some focused on research and some predominantly on teaching. Do you envision exploration in this direction for Cal? Well, whether I envision it for exploration or not, it's a reality of what has happened. I mean, I mentioned to you that we've gone from sort of 30,000 students, just 40,000 students approximately and that the 1500 ladder rank faculty hasn't changed during that period but that doesn't mean that those people, that that happened without any support and in fact there's an absolutely wonderful group of people on the campus now who are in a variety of roles. In fact, I would say that if we really take that conversation or take that area apart a little bit more, what we'll find is that many of the discussions we're having are around how the way in which society interacts with the university is becoming more, they're becoming more intertwined, university isn't sort of this thing that's kind of separately walled off, people come in and then they go out. It's become a much more interactive place. People come in for different periods of time. They come in for a couple of years to get a kind of training and they go back out. They start their company here and then they come back in later on and so there are so many things now that are much more interactive than they used to be. What that means is that we actually need to also have people on the faculty or teaching here who have experiences that are not conventional academic experiences. So we might see that going on in a variety of places around the campus. It might, you know, obvious places might be things like public health or social welfare or law or, you know, any number of places, but even in other disciplines we can see that happening that there might be more, you know, ones where we didn't think of that in the past. And so, you know, I think that we should really be having a discussion around what are the kinds of experiences that people who are teaching here need to have, what are the kinds of things that they do. And to say that there's a monochromatic one that's strictly, you know, around somebody who is doing research may not completely describe the full range of what we need in order to provide the academic environment that's needed. So that's a topic I would say we have to have. And I also think that there is a range of probabilities that somebody will be really good at different things and we probably need to balance that off as well in terms of the teaching and research and other such things. So it's a fact that it's happening. It's a national phenomenon. And I think that we should be open and also thoughtful about how we make sure that people with a variety of experiences, talents are here and that we honor all of those people and treat them with the kind of respect and kind of opportunities that they deserve. So Paul, you've talked a lot today about evolving needs, evolving interests, about the need for us to get out in front of that and how it sort of impacts our vision for the future of the campus. And one of the things I've heard you talk a lot about is entrepreneurship. And I know for myself in college that was never a word I heard. It wasn't anything anybody expected out of the university. Talk to us a little bit about how you see entrepreneurship playing a role in our educational offerings in the kind of students and faculty we attract, what we provide to them and why is it so important as opposed to just leaving that to the private sector after graduation? Well, look, first of all, I think that this is part of an ongoing larger, again, kind of global conversation around universities. It's a fascinating topic. I'm personally, I have personal experiences in this area because in my own research, it turned out that things that we worked on had the potential to have practical impacts and I personally got involved in trying to see those through. And I can say as a scholar that it had a number of effects on me. First of all, when things that we did work on turned out to have practical impact, it was a kind of ultimate validation of some of the early ideas we had. So it was, in a sense, a continuation of our work. But I can also say that, for example, a couple of times when some of the things we worked on were commercialized, it became very apparent that the companies that I was involved in had far outstripped all the academic labs. And so I got an early warning call saying, hey, if you wanna keep working and be at the cutting edge, you're gonna have to shift your research direction. So my research group had to go through kind of an existential crisis of thinking, are we gonna keep doing this when there's somebody 20 miles away who's so much out ahead of us? Well, no, we probably can't do that. We could probably keep publishing papers in the academic world might be perfectly happy, but it rings hollow, it isn't true anymore. I think that just shows how deeply connected, really, in a sense, the advances in the university are with what happens in society. They have to go back and forth. But meanwhile, I guess I would say the connections between advanced scholarship and economic development, the whole nature of those have just become very different than they were decades ago. And the students are saying it themselves. It's in their interest, excitement, what they wanna do. So a lot of people who are at the cutting edge of academics feel that need to be connected with where their work goes. And the university has to evolve to allow that to occur. I'm thrilled with some of the things I see happening at Berkeley. I think we've laid a phenomenal groundwork so that in 10, that's one area. I think there's a lot of things we need to do there, a lot of things. But I believe we've got a kind of groundwork there that means in 10 and 20 years, this topic, we're gonna just be off scale great in that. And all you have to do is go to the two sides of campus, go as you're heading to the bar, take a look and see that skydeck sign up there. And that's incredibly exciting what happens inside that place. And if you go to the other side of campus where there used to be a photocopy place, it's now the house, students created incubator, just walk into that place, don't even go past the reception. Just stand there for 30 seconds and look and see what's happening. And you will feel good about our future. I mean, the Berkeley kids are inventing the future, no matter what we do. It's just phenomenal what's happening. It is just phenomenal. You can't miss it. So it's happening and we need to do a number of things to help it along. And I think it's just wonderful. Great, I think we have time for one more question before we close it up so I'm gonna bundle two together. This one actually comes from a student who says I'm graduating in May and would like to help solve challenges faced by the university in the future. What organization can I join as an alum that have a say in big decisions here on campus? And I'm also gonna bundle that with a question for somebody else who wanted to know how do we get involved with Sacramento? So people who are interested in contributing and supporting the university's cause and having a voice in sort of what our future is. What would your advice be? Wow, I'm gonna start crying now. Yay! Thank you for asking that question. You know, look, that's terrific. And you know, one thing I would urge you to do if you're willing to is I don't know what your major is while you're here, but I will say that whatever college or school you're involved in that they have a pressing need to be involved in a discussion with you about what it is you're doing and where you're going and how you're gonna be successful in the future and they would love to have a deeper ongoing engagement with you. But we do have a lot of ways through our alumni relations group from them to stay engaged with the campus while you're out there. This past weekend on Saturday, I had the wonderful opportunity to be with a group of class campaign leaders. There was the class of 1968. Imagine the class of 1968, the 100th class of Berkeley. The class that Mario Savio matriculated in. The class that's gonna celebrate their 50th anniversary on our 150th. So there was a group of amazing people they'd been involved with us for 50 years after they graduated. And they were helping make this place really have a brilliant future. So get involved in your class campaign through the university development group because even now it's not too early to be planning for your fifth anniversary, your first anniversary that class campaign that happens and helping us keep track of your classmates and being involved in helping us think that way. That group was really very deeply thoughtful about how experiences at Berkeley are changing and how excited they are at this stage in their life about helping us think about what will be next. So thank you for the question and go Bears. Yeah.