A Town Hall Meeting I Can Get Behind

Tonight I went to a town hall meeting sponsored by the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California) featuring Chancellor Birgeneau, Executive Vice Chancellor Breslauer, and Dean of Students Poullard and Vice Chancellor for Budget and Resource Planning Costantinidis.  The purpose of the meeting was to allow students to ask questions of the Chancellor and to facilitate some transparency in this crisis.  I came out of it reassured that Berkeley is in pretty good hands, given the circumstances.

Birgeneau, in contrast to Mark Yudof, President of the UC system, seems to understand and believe in the mission of the University.  Both he and the Vice Chancellor implored students to become politically active, to take their family and friends to the local offices of their elected representatives and demand that they support higher education.  He said that he hopes 100,000 students would march on Sacramento this spring and that grassroots movements were crucial to solving the crisis.  He has been advocating for a federal 'bailout' of public higher education, stating that the government could spend half of the money it spent on saving AIG and it would solve the financial woes of the top 20 public universities in the country forever.  And, when asked why the legislature has been systematically devaluing and divesting from public education over the past couple of decades, after saying that he had some theories which he didn't want to say publicly, he basically said that he thinks it is a reaction to the way California's demographics have changed.  If you read between the lines that means the politically enfranchised class, largely white and well off, doesn't want to spend money to educate the poor, largely non-white growing minority.

That's a pretty bold statement for a Chancellor to make (well, he explicitly said he didn't want to be on the record about it) but Birgeneau is committed to civil rights, access and equality.  He's got a great  resume:

• Registered voters in the deep south during the civil right movement
• While dean of science at MIT ordered a report on discrimination against women faculty which found systematic discrimination (a very important study)
  
• Chaired the National Academies committee on gender bias in the sciences
• Publicly against Prop 209, the repeal of affirmative action, saying Berkeley was worse off because of it.  (Read this Op-Ed by him, it's great: "Minority inclusion is a public good, not a private benefit")
  
• Publicly urged Berkeley community to vote against Prop 8
• Was the first in his family to finish high school (ok, not part of a liberal resume but a very interesting fact)
  

The town hall meeting was structured so that the panelists would speak first, Birgeneau for 15 or 20 minutes, and then the students could ask questions.  For the most part the audience was respectful, with some boo-ing, but mostly listening.  Once the question and answer part started, however, it was clear that there were many students, mostly undergrads, who were angry and frustrated about the budget crisis.  Their questions were generally angry and impassioned, and they didn't quite know how to react when met with sympathetic responses from the administrators.  The questions went something like this:

student: "X is a huge problem, what are YOU doing to solve it?"
Chancellor: "I agree that X is a problem and I'm doing Y and Z to try to solve it but it's a hard problem"
student, deflated: "Oh, ok."

Of course, there were some questions in which the panel and student didn't agree, but for the most part it seemed that the Berkeley administration was not working at cross purpose to the student.  I only stayed for about 30 minutes of questions since it became evident that more or less the same question was being asked each time.  I got the sense that many students were afraid for the future and wanted answers that couldn't always be given.  I understand where they are coming from; it is an unsettling time to be a member of the public education community. 

I'll end with a quote from the op-ed Birgeneau wrote that I linked to above.  I think it is an apt statement for today and I hope that he is as driven by this principle today as he was in 2005.

"Ultimately it is a fight for the soul of this institution. Inclusion is about leadership and excellence, principles that California and its leading public university have long represented and might again. "

ps: The Daily Cal live blogged it