 Greetings, and welcome to this, the first campus conversation of the new academic year. I'm Dan Mogulah from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Today, I'm honored to welcome Ben Hermelin, our Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. Ben took office in July, 2022, with just over a year under his belt. It's really great to have this opportunity to talk with him about his plans and priorities for the campus. Ben holds professorships, both in the Economics Department and at the Berkeley Haas Business School. He received his PhD from MIT in 1988. The same year, as a matter of fact, he joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. From 1999 to 2002, Ben served as the Berkeley Haas Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Chair of the Faculty. He was the Economics Department Chair from 2005 to 2008, the Chair of our Academic Senate from the fall of 2015 until spring 2016, and then Vice Provost for the Faculty from 2016 to 2022. His areas of research include corporate governance, the study of organizations, especially leadership and the I'm sure, industrial organization and law and economics. We already have a number of really good questions that you guys have sent in before we started today, but please, as always, feel free to post additional queries you may have for Ben on our Facebook live streaming site, and we'll do our very best to proceed to respond. So let's get started. So Ben, start off just a little bit about what exactly is a provost and what's the full scope of your job and responsibilities on campus? Well, thanks, Dan, and thanks for having me participate in this conversation. So the provost is the Chief Academic Officer for the university overseeing everything that has to do with academics. The deans report to me consequently, as do a number of other people like the University Librarian and working with them and the Council of Deans, as well as of course, consulting with the Academic Senate as part of shared governance. We set the course for all things academic, the teaching and the research. In addition, as Executive Vice Chancellor, I am the number two person after Carol Christ, our Chancellor, and I serve with her to help run all the other parts of the university. And the way that Carol has organized the organization is that many things, many people report to what's called the box, which is the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor. So I'm wondering, obviously, you were a vice provost and none of this was entirely new to you, but what surprised you? Share some impressions from your first year or so in office of what it's like to sit in that corner office that you occupy. Well, it's a different view in both a literal sense and a figurative sense. When you're the vice provost of faculty, you're principally concerned about faculty welfare, faculty advancement and so forth. And now the scope of things I need to attend to is far greater. Some things I knew a little bit about, some things I've learned a lot more about, such as our finances, particularly how we do our finances and how we can improve our finances. I've got a better sense of some of the challenges across the campus and other in areas outside of the academic part of the university. Learned strange things I didn't think I'd ever need to know about seismic safety and things like that. So it's a lot of different things. It's a very interesting job. Are you having fun? It depends on what day you ask me. Today I'm having fun because I'm getting to be with you, Dan. Oh, don't spend the spinner. Okay. Yeah, this is, look, look, this is a very rewarding job. This is, I think this university is one of the greatest institutions out there. And feeling to have any job where you're helping to advance the mission of this university and supporting all the people who worked in it is really satisfying. It gives meaning to my life. I mean, I know that might sound trite or contrived, but truly it does and that, it's very rewarding. I think everyone to really be content in life has to feel that their life has purpose and doing this job creates a lot of purpose for me. You know, I noticed I was reviewing before we sat down today, the speech or the remarks you recently shared with the deans and chairs. And you talked about gratitude. I mean, quoting a past guest of Campus Conversations, our very own, Dr. Keltner, why was it important for you to bring that up to the deans and chairs? Well, I think Dr. Keltner could answer the question better than I could. So, I'm really channeling him to some extent. I think that when we lose sight of gratitude and we don't recognize gratitude in our day-to-day lives, we are certainly less content, less happy, less compassionate, we are less collegial. And so, it's something that we want to feel and something that we need to pay attention to. I also think that it's very easy sometimes for people to lose sight of just what an amazing institution Berkeley is, how great it is, how much in demand it is, right? Over 100,000 students every year apply to come here. You know, you travel around the country and everyone is in awe of Berkeley. Faculty around the globe would like to be here. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that, how well we do and how important our job is. And I think having some gratitude for that as well as perspective is very important. Otherwise, I don't think we can be as effective to our jobs as well and maintain good mental health. Yeah, that's great. I'm gonna go on and ask about plans and priorities before I do for those of you who may have joined us late. Welcome to the first campus conversation of the academic year. We're with executive vice chancellor and provost Ben Hermelin. We already have a number of questions that we received before we started. But if you have any queries, post them to our Facebook Live site and we're gonna do our very best to respond. Ben, let's talk a little bit about your priorities. What occupies sort of the top three or four items on your list this year? So the top three are working on financial sustainability. This has many dimensions, principally has to do with thinking about how we do our budgeting. Our budgeting model is not one that reflects our strategic needs. And so changing that to ensure that resources are going to where they're needed to maintain our excellence is important. We face some challenges due to the fact that over the last few years, our costs have risen at a far faster rate than our revenues. And so part because of that, our central ledger that is the central reserves of the university are fairly depleted in that rebuilding those central reserves and figuring out how to function with some of the pleaded central reserves is critically important if we're able to continue to be able to fulfill our mission. Second priority is trying to continue to reduce the bureaucratic burden. We had a lot of success this past year. There was a task force report we find on the EVCP website, summarizes a lot of what has been achieved and a lot of what we hope to achieve. And we wanna continue to work on reducing the bureaucratic burden in large part by changing the culture around bureaucracy here to really make everyone feel that they're a problem solver, not a gatekeeper and that they're recognized that everyone is a vital member of our team who plays a vital role through their own initiative and thought. And then the third priority is to continue to improve inclusion and belonging that applies in so many ways across our campus. One way I particularly wanna focus is in the classroom and making sure that we have inclusive classrooms. I feel that every student who comes to Berkeley comes with a contract from us that we are going to do everything we can to make sure that they have, get the education that they deserve and are able to go as far as they wish. And that means that we have to think about that when we think about how we design our classes so that they lift up every student. We can't teach to a particular point in the distribution. We must teach the entire distribution. And we must also recognize that we live in a society that is very unequal. And so we have bright students who come from high schools where they can take BC calculus and beyond and others who come from high schools where the highest math they can take is algebra two. And if you've only had algebra two no matter how bright you are, that's gonna put you at a disadvantage competing with students who've taken BC calculus. We have to figure out how to make Cal work for everyone. So inclusive belonging, inclusion and belonging particularly in the classroom is a priority. But let's unpack those a little bit and start off with the finances. I mean, I've been on campus for 19 years and boy, the budget seems like a perennial evergreen issue. Is there a fundamental problem at the core? Is there a systemic issue? It seems, it just seems to be a recurring issue that we can't get past. Is there hopes that we're gonna ever put financial challenges in our rear view mirror? Well, yes and no Dan. One of the amazing things about Berkeley is there's so many wonderful things we can do. And you think of all the wonderful things you could do we'll never have enough resources. No university would ever have enough resources do all the wonderful things Berkeley do. Even Harvard with all its riches would feel resource constrained in some sense to try to do all the wonderful things that we can do. So in that sense, no, the answer is no we're always going to have to make decisions, trade-offs and so forth. That's inevitable. On the other hand, I think what you're getting at is where we're always gonna feel this incredible austerity that we've felt off and on. And here I'm hopeful, but we also have to recognize the challenge that we face for quite a long time ever since the Great Recession and even somewhat before that state funding has really fallen off. And although California state funding has started to come back from that deep trough following the Great Recession in California in many ways has been a better state than other states in that. And we were very fortunate that the governor and the legislature has put in place this five year compact with 5% increases every year. Nonetheless, our revenues for a very long time have fall our operating revenues for a very long time fallen shorter operating expenses. Now, that's not the end of the world because we've had non-operating revenues as well as reserves we could draw upon to cover that difference. But as I said earlier, our reserves are now fairly depleted and our costs are rising much more rapidly than our revenues. So we're going to have to think about how can we raise our revenues and how can we have our revenues grow more quickly? There are a number of things philanthropy is one. We've been incredibly successful. We've hit $6.7 billion in the campaign. Our goal remember was just 6 billion. We've hit 6.7. We hope to get to 7 billion before the end of the campaign. We now rank number seventh in the country in terms of philanthropy. And we're the highest ranked school that doesn't have a medical school but highest ranked university that's known medical school. We are an entrepreneurial powerhouse and we're increasingly figuring out ways to profit from innovation and intellectual property. And that continues to be a growing source of revenues. We have a number of programs, academic programs that bring in revenue. So I have to continue to work on all those things as well as the state continuing to increase its share of funding for us. And then we're just gonna have to think about how can we ensure that we're using our funds wisely into the best purpose and that's the financial sustainability analysis initiative is about and we're doing a deep dive analysis and a number of different units to make sure that we're doing that. And we'll have to have some thoughts about where are there places where greater discipline in terms of increased expenditures can be implemented so that we can slow the growth in our expenditures? So it was interesting. You talked also with the deans and chairs and I was looking at remarks, you shared a very similar message but you also talked at length and it was interesting and impactful I thought about Berkeley's resilience and this idea and your impression that we always rise to meet the challenges. There was a good deal of confidence between the lines. Where does that come from for you? Well, I've been at Berkeley 35 years Dan as you mentioned that the outset and in that 35 years, I've only seen Berkeley get better. I mean, the university of today is a better university than the one I joined. The one I joined was obviously a wonderful university but I think we're a far better university on any dimension that you want to think about. And yeah, the whole 35 years I've been here people have also been very anxious about various financial things. I had no sooner arrived and there was a state budget problem and we had the voluntary early retirement programs and many cuts. We suffered with the dot com bust. We've suffered with the great recession but we are amazing in our resilience and part of that resilience comes about because we're very innovative. We're not wedded to the status quo or always asking the question, how can we improve? What can we do differently? Where are things going and how do we stay ahead of that curve? And I don't know of any university that's been as successful as we've been in that regard. Wow. Let's move to the second one. The bureaucratic burden. And in fact, we got a question and directed exactly at that issue. If you don't mind, I'll read it. Sure. For many reasons, the UC Berkeley is a wonderful place to teach and conduct research. At the same time, the excessive bureaucratic burden associated with hiring staff and non-latter rang faculty, financial management and establishing public and private partnerships severely dampens the growth trajectory for many of our individual and collective research endeavors. We are, quote, significantly out of step with the flexibility enjoyed by our colleagues for these routine processes at peer UC and non-UC institutions, which ultimately has the potential to threaten retention of the brightest minds at Berkeley and limit educational and research opportunities. How is the institution trying to make it easier to be successful as a faculty member at UC Berkeley? And if you could go from there, maybe and talk more generally, but let's just focus on that. So it's an excellent question. It is an excellent question. I think just to give just a little bit of caution. So one always has to remember higher education is one of the most highly regulated industries in America. We are a state institution and many of the policies and practices or procedures that we have to operate under are not set on this campus, but set at 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland. And that would be the address of? Office of the President. Got it. Okay. And now, you know, different UC campuses are perhaps a little bit freer in how they interpret some of the dictates from the Office of the President's policy. So there I would agree with the question that some of our sister UCs seem to have less of a bureaucratic burden than we do. And one of the things we're doing as part of the Financial Sustainability Initiative, but it does spill over to reducing bureaucratic burden is examining our processes as benchmark against other large public R1 universities such as UCLA. So we hope to learn from what they do and to make changes accordingly. We are looking into a lot of the hiring practices and other things that have caused people a lot of concern and we're trying to improve those. Some of what we've accomplished already is listed in, as I said, on the EVCP webpage. And the other thing is people should make sure that we know about what those pain points are. And no one should sort of suffer in silence. We're committed to working on that. And so please, you know, bring to my attention or bring to someone's attention the specific issues and we will look into them and we will try to resolve them to the best of our ability recognizing some of the constraints I mentioned earlier. Got it. Let's move on to the third leg of your priorities stool as it was, as it is. And that was diversity and inclusion. And so obviously this is something important for the campus, equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging, number of people who are working on that every day. But why did you feel it necessary to elevate it to one of your three priorities this year? Well, this was a priority I started last year, but it remains a priority this year. And in fact, I hope to accelerate our work on it. I think that one of the things that has struck me is that we have worked very hard to improve diversity on this campus. And I read the first to say that the pace has not been as fast as we would like, but we have made a lot of improvements. That's only part of what we need to do though. I really feel strongly that everyone who comes here should feel a strong sense of belonging and a sense of belonging, not only that they feel they belong, but they're confident that others see them as belonging and being a vital part of this campus and its community. And so I think, you know, I don't wanna take my foot off the diversity pedal or some of the other pedals, but I think trying to work on inclusion and belonging is important because I want everyone who comes here to thrive and to really benefit as much as possible from their time at Berkeley, whether it's a student, faculty member or staff. And so that's, and I think we have not always done work on that. And we've not always been as conscious about making sure that everyone feels that sense of, feels included and feels that sense of belonging. So that's why I raised it, because I think it's vital. And I think, you know, when we think about our mission, it has many parts, but really key part of our mission is education. And I don't think we can do a excellent job in educating people if we are not conscious about inclusion and belonging. There are all kinds of studies that show that when people feel that they're not included, that they don't belong, they don't do as well as they can or they don't take advantage of all the resources that are available to them. So I think part of being excellent in our educational mission is improving inclusion and belonging, as well as I think it positively infects everything else we do as well. You know, I noticed you also talked again, referring to that same set of remarks to the deans and chairs recently. You talked about community and it always struck about how community is front and center in so many speeches and messages delivered by Chancellor Christ as being an inherent and essential element of a high quality education. How do you see it? You see the importance of community. Well, I totally agree with what Chancellor Christ has said about community and she's absolutely right. I also, you know, being a social scientist and someone, as you mentioned earlier, Dan studied leadership. Yeah. You know, one of the things that social scientists have pointed out all the way back to the 14th century in Ibn Khaldun is that what makes an organization successful or a key to an organization's success is it's social cohesion. It's a sense of community that people have and organizations where people have a sense of community do well. And that's how we outperform those where that is lacking. I sometimes say that, you know, part of Berkeley's secret sauce is that in so many departments, we have such a strong sense of community and that's lacking in a lot of our competitor departments and that's in part what allows us to attract and retain the world's best faculty if people enjoy the community that they have here. And as I said earlier, community and a sense of community is vital for people to thrive. They need that and they can't be successful in the classroom and their research in their day to day job without that. So that's why it's so important. Ben, I'm gonna go on in just a second to a question we received in particular about our Latinx community, but I also wanna note we've received a very large number of questions about some named and specific employees. And I just wanna note that we are strictly forbidden by California law from talking about personnel issues and we are completely committed to protecting the privacy and confidentiality. So we just can't answer in any specificity about any specific employee past or present. So just to note that, but I can read this part of the question. Dear Provost Hermelin, what is your plan for retaining Latinx faculty from other underrepresented groups? It's a great question. So we've been doing a lot of things to work on that. It encompasses many things. First, we've worked very hard to improve our recruitment faculty from underrepresented groups. We've had over the last few years a sharp increase. Again, it's not as fast a pace as we would like, but it is an improvement in the recruitment of people from underrepresented communities. We've had a number of initiatives like the Latinx and Democracy Initiative that's a cluster hire that's very exciting. We've not only hired faculty interested in this area, but provided a lot of funding for research for them. We are working on making sure that a number of other initiatives, such as those in the African-American Studies Department continue to thrive. There was a wonderful program going on in the Collaboratory that the grant is running out. We're gonna make sure that the funding stays so that can continue to be successful. We know that a big challenge for many faculty is the housing market, which is very tough. And so we also know that, again, because we live in an unequal society, often people from underrepresented groups are also people who don't come with a lot of inherited or family wealth. So we're trying to do everything we can to improve access to housing. That's a challenge, but we've put in place a number of programs to facilitate that, whether it's the zero interest forgivable loans, whether it's raising the minimum off-scale component in faculty salaries, so a number of things there. We've worked very hard on retentions. We have a very high success rate in retaining faculty from underrepresented groups. In fact, I think I'm pretty sure our success rate with that group is higher than with other groups. So we're working very hard. And I also note that the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, Don Yamatos, has a number of thriving initiatives, one of all of which together are going to help a lot. And there is one specifically around Latinx issues as well. So continue to work on it. Moving on to a somewhat different subject, question that's come in from the audience. I hope you'll update the audience on the status of PAC-12 negotiations. And for those who may not know, even though the amount of coverage has been absolutely mind-boggling, there's major realignments going on in the conferences which formed the foundation of intercollegiate athletics, a lot of speculation about where Cal and Stanford are going to land. What can you tell us, Ben? Well, I can't tell you very much in part because I really don't know very much. I said earlier that Carol has a model, two in the box for many things, but there's some things that don't report to the box. They report only to Carol and athletics as one of them. So I do know that the chancellors work remarkably hard along with Jim Nolton, the athletic director, to try to resolve the conference realignment issues and negotiating with other conferences and trying to come up with the best possible outcome for Cal. What little bit I've heard, and I think everything I've heard has probably been in the press too, is promising that we'll land or remain in a top five, power five conference, thank you. But things are still ongoing, so we'll have to wait and see. And should any future agreement create budgetary challenges, what happens after that? What's the process that the campus uses in that regard? Well, we'll have to see what it really entails and how we can best tackle any problems that arise. I don't, you know, not knowing even what the scope of that may be, it's a little bit early to begin to say what we would do. There are many different possibilities. Also keep in mind that we also get, we're supposed to get some money from UCLA to make up for their abandoning the PAC-12 and precipitating all of this. So we'll have to see what happens. You know, we remain right now committed to, you know, continuing to field the teams that we're fielding in our collegiate athletics. The chancellor has made clear that she sees intercollegiate athletics as playing a vital role for this campus. So we're gonna have to figure it out, but until we know exactly what's what, it's a little bit early. Makes sense, thanks for that. Gonna bounce into another subject, picking up a question that just came in. Thank you for addressing the faculty and also for answering our questions. My question is, this person wrote, would you consider helping to improve the situation for faculty who do research internationally? Though our research is often more costly, the university provides us with the same amount of funds as faculty whose research allows them to remain inside the United States. Might there be some way to enhance the university support for faculty doing international research? Yes, the short answer is that there might well be. We haven't looked into it. As many people know, although we provide funding for faculty research, it's principally in terms of startup for faculty when they join or sometimes in retention cases to help induce them to remain here. We have some other limited funds that we provide through, for example, the Bears Grant program and so forth. We can certainly look into whether there are other ways that we can support faculty who are working internationally. We've tended, I would say, with our programs to be somewhat egalitarian in our funding and perhaps we can also think about whether we wanna have programs that are a little bit more tailored to specific needs of the faculty requesting funding and if you have thoughts or send them to my office. Great, thanks. Another question from the faculty. I'm an assistant professor under review for promotion to tenure. My case has been stalled. I've heard from others that their cases are also delayed. Can you please share what has caused the delay and when we can expect to hear about our decisions? Sure, so first of all, obviously, it's very hard to have one's tenure case delayed. It's a very anxious period, so I wanna recognize that. I do also wanna mention that having your case delayed is not a signal of anything. So people shouldn't try to read into it, some hidden message. Unfortunately, this year was somewhat of a perfect storm in terms of academic personnel matters. We have a wonderful new vice provost for the faculty, but everyone has a learning curve, and so that is a factor. We also, and a much bigger factor is we had a lot more retention cases this year than we ordinarily have. Retention cases always jump to the top of the queue. We've also had a lot of late appointment cases and faculty appointment cases also jump to the head of the queue. And if they come in late, they come in right around the time that we're trying to wrap up all our tenure cases. I know that the vice provost is working very hard on the tenure cases. I know the academic personnel office is working very hard on them. I've received a number of them recently for my review. So for those who don't know, once the case gets through the budget committee and the vice provost, it comes to the provost and then to the chancellor. So I've tried to expedite every case that's come to me turning around in a day or two because I know people are eager to hear. Right, so it sounds like help is on the way to some degree? Yeah, and that's a good point, Dan. I should have mentioned that. We have added staff in the academic personnel office to try to deal with that. One of the economies that we made and maybe a false economy is that we have a very lean academic personnel office. Our academic personnel office, I think is roughly half the size of UCLA's. It's one of the smallest in the system. People having worked with them for many years of people in the academic personnel office are fantastic. They're so fortunate to have them. But they're only human. They're only 24 hours in any day, only seven days in any week. So when we have too few people, things sometimes take longer than would be ideal. Thanks, before I go on to the next one, I'm gonna read another question that came in from the audience, just reminding people. We do have a number of questions we're working through that came in before. But if you have a query that you'd like to see if we can answer, that you'd like to have answered today, please post it to our Facebook live site and we'll do our best to respond in the time that's remaining. Ben, this next question. What is your opinion on remote work? Working from home, they explain, especially in the context of maintaining and building our community. Okay, well, since you're working from home, Dan, I gotta be really careful here. There are trade-offs, I think, you know, for a lot of jobs and a lot of people's situations, people, particularly people who face long commutes or family issues, having the flexibility of working remotely is a real godsend. And we wouldn't wanna take that away. On the other hand, as I said earlier, I think community is really important. And Zoom technology, at least in my humble opinion hasn't replaced in-person communications. There's something to be said for conversations around the proverbial water cooler in the hallway and so forth. And so I think we need to figure out a way to balance these things. I really think we want people to have a sense of community. I think they'll feel better if they have a sense of community. And so we need to promote, you know, that sense of community in what's clearly going to be some kind of hybrid environment going forward. You know, Ben, speaking of community, I've talked to a number of people who've expressed some trepidation about the fact that we have obviously a presidential election coming up, those have been times of where a lot of passions are expressed on the campus, issues about free speech come up and some of the inherent tensions that might exist between free speech and some of our communitarian aspirations. Talk to us a little bit about how you view that issue, the importance of free speech and diversity of perspective on a campus like Berkeley and how we can hold the community together in the face of passionately held views that can be highly divergent. Yeah, I think this is obviously a huge challenge, been a challenge for society forever in a day. So, you know, I'm not gonna be great and brilliant to say about it. I think a few things. One, I think each and every one of us has an obligation to give some thought to how what we say will be perceived by others. This isn't to say we should censor ourselves or we shouldn't speak about things we feel passionately about, but we should think a little bit about how we convey that message. Second, I think everyone should, I believe as a society, and my personal view is not the view of the university or anybody but my own view, I think we as a society have lost a considerable amount of goodwill for others, tolerance, and instead of assuming that someone has said something out of malice or because they're a bad person or they're a jerk or whatever to try to give them the benefit of the doubt, try to hear what they have to say. You don't have to agree with it, but going to anger or getting, striking back at someone isn't probably not the right response. And so I think we as a people just need to rediscover our abilities to be tolerant and so forth. This doesn't mean we should put up with people who are behaving poorly. We shouldn't put up with hate speech in the sense of saying it's fine. It certainly is not fine, but just simply saying that we have to figure out ways to be a little bit more calm. Because as you say, Dan, I imagine there'll be a lot of people who'll be trying to incite a lot of anger and emotion over the course of the next year plus. And we're a target for it because Berkeley is a name and getting your protest on TV is gonna be easier if you do it at Berkeley than if you do it at Wichita State or Texas El Paso or something. Uh-oh, now we're gonna get all kinds of letters from alumni from Texas El Paso who won't be pleased with that one bit. But yes- I apologize in advance. Yes, but I've long thought that they should adapt that song to say, for Berkeley, for certain activists and people who love attention. If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. Anyway, I'm gonna bounce around, go back to a question we've received from the audience. Can we expect to see enterprise systems related to graduate student fellowships slash private awards and fund management? Currently, units use Excel spreadsheets, CADs and ledgers to figure out balances and other items this person lists. And as we create more and more funds, the administration management and stewardship of those funds has become increasingly difficult. So it sounds like a call for help here. Yeah, so I don't know all the issues that this questioner is raising in terms of the specifics. Obviously, we wanna make things better. I believe that UDAR is looking into improving its systems. We're looking into improving all our systems. I think if you have specific concerns or questions, again, if you can direct them to my office, we can try to think about what we might need to do. Maybe we're already working on it. Maybe it's something we're not aware of. Sometimes it can be, we have too many people involved in things, where can we streamline and so forth. So happy to look into that. Great, another issue that you and I talked about last week before this conversation was the issue of digital accessibility that you raised as something of importance, a particular area of attention. Can you unpack that a little bit for us? And what exactly that means and what we're doing in that regard? Yeah, I mean, there are a number of things. So one, we have to make sure that whatever we present in a digital format, particularly online, is accessible to everyone who wishes to access it, particularly our people in our community. So that means that materials have to be accessible by those who have vision impairments or have hearing loss or hearing issues. So we have to think about that. We're under a consent decree with the Department of Justice in part to improve accessibility. And we should be doing that anyway, but we're even more obliged to do it than we would otherwise be, perhaps. So that's really important. And I think people should also think, people teaching classes or other things, make sure they think about, are they doing things in ways that everyone can access them in ways that work for them? That's obviously important, as well as not relying on people necessarily having access to certain technology, which in our unequal society may not be true. You know, Ben, one of the things that caught a lot of attention over the summer was the Chancellor's message that she'll be stepping down next July. Can you just really broad brush strokes? How does the search process? Is the campus run the search process? Does the office of the president, how involved are we? Where do things stand? How is this gonna unfold over the next few months? Sure. So the office of the president runs the search for any Chancellor, any of the campuses. They do so under a very scripted set of procedures. There's a regents order that describes what they do, and then there's a 19 page detailed thing that specifies exactly what that means and how that's implemented. We have no say or very little say in who serves on the search committee. Different groups are allowed to make nominations of slates from which the office of the president may choose. So I know the Berkeley staff association will be able to submit a slate. The students will be able to submit a slate. Let me just interrupt you for a sec. What do you mean by slate? Like a list of names? Yeah, list of names. So for people, the one I know best is the office of president asked the academic Senate's committee on committees to submit the names of nine to 12 faculty, then the system-wide committee on committees will narrow that down to that list of nine to 12 down to six, and then the president will choose three to serve on the search committee. The committee is made up of the president of the system and under regents, some people from our community, the chair, vice chair of the system-wide academic Senate, faculty member from another UC campus. So we're not the drivers of this. There is opportunities to give input to the search committee. So on October 10th, there'll be what's called campus day when the search committee comes to talk to invited guests to provide input, there'll be other forums for people to provide input as well on the search process. Got it. Last question before we wrap up. Can you give us sort of a summary about construction on campus, about where things stand? Any major projects that we stand on the cusp of beginning right now? Well, certainly people who've been on campus notice that we're doing a fair amount of construction. The most notable new construction is Anchor House on Oxford, which would be a dorm for transfer students. I think it has 760 beds. It seems like it's almost completed, although I know they have a lot more to do. Yeah, it's like another, I think it's like another year or something, which, yeah. So right now it's a little bit of a Potemkin building in the sense that the outside looks all done inside. I guess that needs to be taken care of. I think the next major thing that people will notice is the building of a new classroom building and also a home for LNS advising that will be built on what is now the Rinell parking lot. So between Valley Life Sciences and the Twin L fall. I believe that's slated to begin sometime this fall, but I got off the top of my head. I don't remember when. The Bechtel construction is underway. This is to improve Bechtel for students. You mean an engineering center there? Yeah, yeah. So there are a number of things that are underway and a number of things are planned as well. So we continue to build and change. And of course everyone's seeing the gateway building, which will be the home of CDSS and the School of Information. I noticed the legislature just passed a new bill, a statute that addresses some of the issues in the People's Park lawsuit. My understanding is that we still need, we're waiting to hear from the Supreme Court. The administration, does the commitment remain the same as it's always been for that particular project? It does. So as you say, the legislative action that just passed and obviously needs to be signed by the governor, but assuming his signature, then that doesn't immediately give us a green light. We still have to continue with the process in the state Supreme Court as you mentioned in and all legal technicalities are not something I know or understand, so I can't talk to them. But the chancellors has remained clear that, she wants to move ahead, that the need for student housing is incredible. We house the smallest number of our students of any of the UCs. And particularly if we all want to maintain access and ensure that everyone who wants to come to UC Berkeley and gets in can afford to be here, we are gonna have to address the housing issue for our students and People's Park, along with construction on Channing Ellsworth, along with construction in your former home on Fulton and Bancroft, and so forth, all gonna be part of the solution to this problem of ensuring adequate housing for our students. So we've reached that point for the hardest question, which is, wanna share some closing thoughts, just as we embark on another academic year here and face the challenges and opportunities, many of which you've addressed today. Sure. I would like people to try to channel the enthusiasm that I see in our new students and our new faculty. I really, I had a wonderful opportunity before the semester started to meet with both new faculty and new students. And their excitement about being here is just amazing. I mean, they are just grateful to be here, excited to be here, enthusiastic. And they remind you, again, to go back to what we talked about with gratitude, what an amazing place this is, how wonderful it is to be at Berkeley. And yes, we have many challenges. And I'm not trying to sugarcoat anything. I'm not trying to deflect from those challenges or to say we should ignore them, we can't ignore them. Yet at the same time, we have to remain aware of just what a great place this is and how fortunate we are to be here. So those will be my closing remarks today. Not bad. Ben, I wanna thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I wanna thank everybody for tuning in to this, the first campus conversation of the academic year. We have all kinds of great conversations lined up in the future. We hope we'll see you down the road. Have a great day.