Budget crunch could dissolve Berkeley’s College of Chemistry

[n2doc]

The University of California (UC), Berkeley, is considering disbanding the university’s College of Chemistry to help cope with a cash crunch at one of the country’s most prominent public universities. According to an article in today’s Daily Californian, the university’s flagship campus is $150 million in debt, and faced with flat income from tuition and rising costs. Though no decisions have been made, closing the College of Chemistry and absorbing its departments into other university colleges is just one of the many plans being considered to save money.

The College of Chemistry dates back to 1872. Today, it’s home to 101 faculty, as well as 1492 students and postdocs. Its chemistry and chemical & biomolecular engineering departments are regularly listed among the top worldwide. Thirteen of the college’s faculty and alumni have won Nobel Prizes. And since 1940, College of Chemistry scientists either led or participated in the discovery of more than a dozen humanmade elements, including berkelium, californium, and seaborgium.

Supporters of the college have started a petition asking Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks to scrap the idea of disbanding the school. As of this morning, more than 2250 people have signed the petition. Among the signees is Carolyn Bertozzi, a former Berkeley chemistry professor, who recently moved to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and posted a comment on the petition’s webpage quipping that the only beneficiaries of the move would be competing institutions.

“UC [Berkeley] College of Chemistry has impacted the chemical sciences, indeed the world, more than any counterpart at any other institution. Dismantling this paragon of excellence is only a good idea if you are at Stanford!” Bertozzi wrote.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/budget-crunch-could-dissolve-berkeley-s-college-chemistry

[drray23]

1. that is a devastating move if they go through with it

I do not know Carolyn Bertozzi but I know her father William Bertozzi who is a fellow nuclear physicist. This family is actually amazing. Bill is a very well known nuclear physicist ,carolyn is a famous chemist and his other daughter Andrea is a famed mathematician.

[Downwinder]

2. So much for STEM support.

Sort of puts the lie to the claimed shortage of STEM professionals.

[Igel]

4. Non sequitur.

UCLA in response to a budget crunch disposed of much of its applied nursing program in the '90s. (Don't know its current status.)

At the time, there was a pressing need, locally and nationally, for skilled, trained nurses and no shortage of applicants to the program. What drove the restructuring was (1) budget and (2) a desire to repurpose the dept. towards research and policy instead of patient care over the medium-to-long term.

Short-term, transient things like "we have a nursing shortage now" weren't at issue.

The same could be said--and was said--about some other program cuts at the time. Unmet needs were even more unmet in order to fulfill longer-term institutional goals. Faculty who were cut objected, student advocates objected; faculty who stood to gain were in favor of it. But all of that was short-term thinking. I don't know how things played out long term, but all long-term thinking is a gamble. Short-term thinking is even more of a gamble, one that we typically dislike even thinking exists and usually ignore because you have to stick around for a few years to see its effects.

[DetlefK]

3. Surprise. Commenter reveals that the debt comes from stadium-maintenance.

8 years ago, protesters tried to obstruct the Memorial Stadium renovation on the grounds that it would require removing old growth trees or disrupting a Native American burial site. Had they instead made the argument that the UC would dissolve its College of Chemistry after spending a king's ransom on capital expenditures for Seismic retrofit, perhaps someone would have noted that, with the Hayward Fault runs through Memorial Stadium and its underground exercise facility, it would be cheaper to buy some land elsewhere and build a stadium there.

[Igel]

5. Commenter also reveals that s/he has agenda.

I look at this as being mostly one of two things:

1. Administrator who wants to put his stamp on things, streamlining the bureaucracy in the interests of growing more bureaucracy or (more likely) shifting emphases to be in line with his Vision of what he thinks is best for society. Chemistry as a stand-alone college isn't multicultural or interdisciplinary. Moreover its college budget and overhead can't be spread around and shared as easily administratively as, say, funding in a dept. buried in the College of Arts and Sciences could. I suspect if I liked the physical sciences and chemistry I'd be proud of having that college; if I really wanted to find more funding for, e.g., history or anthropology and encourage interdisciplinary work I'd want to make those funds more easily (re)distributable.

2. Administrator playing politics, since the governor's budget proposal was released in the last couple of weeks and so the legislature will have to eventually consider said budget.
(a) There are advocates for everything and everybody--the last budget was good for K-14 education, but had a scant increase for UC while limiting UC income. UC wants to have an advocate, but UCSA tends to advocate not for UC but UC students. That's a proper role, but I'm not sure UC itself can lobby and advocate in the same way. When UC makes some issue short-term and intensely relevant to students, the UCSA suddenly lobbies for some UC things. Not just better and more stuff for students, short-term.
(b) A lot of lobbying is done in the media, where it's not "lobbying" sensu stricto. This can backfire, in that the legislature could say, "Do this and we'll punish you" or "We'll give you a very small amount, smaller than you'd get anyway, but only if you don't do this." Legislatures and populist/ideological politicians demand lock-step obedience, I don't care if they're (R) or (D), and the Calif. state legislature has more than a couple like that.


Why do I ignore the commenter and his/her agenda? Partly because that particular agenda bores me. But I suppose it has to be addressed, you can't just ignore what you don't like. (I'm a formal linguist and science teacher, both of which think any sound argument has to address known or likely counter-arguments. Formal linguists hate being lumped in with the humanities and social sciences.)

I ignore the commenter because the stadium was built with strange, not obvious funding sources. On the one hand, there were some private donations and on the other a mess of UC bonds. Those UC bonds sound ominous because general revenue debt can be required to pay off those bonds, but there's a separate stand-alone dedicated fund to pay off the UC bonds composed of private donates and stadium-generated revenue. The fund went through various revised projections and estimates, but as of less than a year ago that fund was firmly in the black and ahead of many projections. Even the nay-sayers with truly horrible projections in 2010 or thereabouts said it would only go into the red some time in the 2040s, and that's a couple of decades away. In other words, the stadium debt is handled in ways that the state legislature doesn't need to concern itself with, general revenue monies from Cal aren't funding the retrofit and payment of that bond debt, and the College of Chemistry consolidation/reassignment isn't at substantive issue. It may be at issue for public consumption, but if so that's a risky gamble on the part of Cal. More like a gambol, if you ask me.

[Orsino]

6. What have the Romans ever done for us? n/t