Editorials

The citizens of Berkeley have shown, yet again, that they can’t be fooled by the army of lawyers and planners (including the local firm DCE) that the University of California has arrayed against them to support yet another grandiose expansion plan. Both City Hall and numerous individuals with sharp pencils and good educations (often courtesy of UC Berkeley) have dissected the environmental impact report supplied for the university’s long range development plan, and lambasted it both for what it contains and for what it doesn’t contain. What the report discloses is horrendous enough: many more square feet of building mass in undisclosed locations, accommodations for many more cars, and other manifestations of uncontrolled growth. But even worse is what it doesn’t disclose, for example the University’s plans for development of its toxic site at the former Richmond Field Station, rechristened Campus Bay for marketing purposes, and the future of Lawrence Berkeley Lab, dependent of course on whether the federal government decides to re-invest in UC management skills.  

The current struggle is over the adequacy of the EIR itself. No one except the University has suggested that it’s a true and fair representation of all future plans. 

The California Environmental Quality Act provides that project proponents must disclose potentially harmful environmental impacts and mitigate them if possible. For impacts that can’t be mitigated, a statement of overriding considerations (saying why the project is really really important) has to be adopted by the regulatory body responsible for the project, in this case the UC Board of Regents. The City of Berkeley and citizen watchdogs have pointed out in detail what the EIR lacks, and it’s theoretically possible that the Regents could direct that it be fixed up. If not, again theoretically, someone could sue to force them to fix it up: the City of Berkeley, individuals or groups like the Sierra Club. In an ideal world, a decent EIR might materialize at some point in time.  

But while the EIR discussion is going on, it’s even more important to talk about the substance of UC Berkeley’s future program plans, both revealed and concealed. Overbuilding in Berkeley is a symptom of the problem, but it’s not the problem itself. Just because the University of California at Berkeley has been a good school in the past, as many of us who went there would agree, doesn’t mean that putting it on steroids will make it better. It’s already too big and too impersonal, and too many of its students are managing to graduate without getting what used to be called a broad liberal arts education. The factory-like atmosphere, with no quality control department, is producing some graduates who can’t express themselves adequately in writing, don’t know any foreign language, don’t have a grasp of simple statistics or a rudimentary acquaintance with science or the arts.  

Huge classes make it easier for students to disguise what they haven’t learned. If the Regents were to adopt a Statement of Overriding Considerations which pledged that the new buildings would be used to improve the education of undergraduates, or would make it possible to admit more students from low-income families and under-represented minorities, many in Berkeley would cheer them on. That’s not what’s happening. 

As several of our correspondents have noted, there’s every reason to believe that UC’s Berkeley expansion is slated to accommodate the needs of for-profit industry, the biotechnology industry in particular. Many of us voted for the big stem-cell ballot measure in November because we sincerely believed that it would aid scientific progress, and it probably will. But we didn’t understand what an immense cash cow for drug companies it would turn out to be—news of how the money from the Stem Cell Initiative will be allocated is just now getting out, and the details haven’t been completed. There’s good reason to think that the biotech industry is supposed to be the anchor tenant for the 23 buildings, each with square footage equal to the six-story Civic Center building, that UC proposes to add to already-crowded Berkeley over the next 15 years.  

While the watchdogs are watching the EIR for the Long Range Development Plan, they might just add the task of following the stem cell money to their list. 

—Becky O’Malley