Editorials

Ran into an old friend not long ago. He’s been teaching at UC Berkeley in a technical department for a long time, maybe 40-50 years. He’s also made very good money with his side hustle at a techy start-up that went public at the right time. He’s still teaching, presumably because he likes it, not because he needs the income. He told me he’s been delivering his lectures online, even pre-pandemic, and he plans to go on doing that, though in-person is back.

He told me that his remote class is now 1500 undergraduates, so he has approximately a hundred teaching assistants. I gathered from what he said that he never meets with students himself, and really, why should he?

Why indeed? When I was a student at Cal, way back in the dark ages before it became generically “Berkeley”, I took a couple of entertaining English classes taught in biggish lecture halls in Dwinelle and in Wheeler Hall—maybe a one or two hundred students. My classes in the French and Slavic departments never exceeded thirty or forty. The instructors in all three departments were almost all professors.

It’s funny that with all the sanctimonious chitchat we’ve seen lately in the corporate press regarding the effects of UCB’s desire to offer admission to about 5,000 additional students next year, no one says anything about the effect it might have on the students’ learning experience. Mind you, those 5000 new bodies (actually ~3000 would accept) are over and above the ~11,000 extras who have already been added to the student body since 2005 in defiance of putative limits under the university’s long range development plan.

When there are 1500 students in a small-screen class, it’s hard to imagine what they can be learning. Before the pandemic lockdown, classes were extremely overcrowded, and if thousands more students are admitted next year it could only be worse. A total of 42,000 is bruited about.

I seem to remember that Chancellor Clark Kerr (after whom the Clark Kerr Campus is named,ironically) suggested 12,500 as a good number for each UC campus, but what’s 30,000 more, give or take?

Honest figures are hard to come by, but anecdotally I can report that a guy named Jack, who said he works for UCB, called into the KQED Forum radio show on Wednesday morning, estimating that while student enrollment has increased by a third, the number of faculty and staff members has remained the same. Another caller, Janet, who sounded like a middle-aged African American woman, scoffed at UC’S veiled threat that restricting enrollment would harm disadvantaged students, particularly people of color. She pointed out that as enrollment has grown, the percentage of such students has decreased.

Can these numbers be verified?

Setting the question of available housing near campus aside for the moment, since that’s become a political football, someone needs to ask whether it’s in the best interest of young Californians to cram as many of them as possible into a single campus. The name “Berkeley” for sure has brand advantage, particularly in Asia, and the university has the best researchers money can buy, but are today’s undergraduates getting the excellent overall education my cohort got? An increasing percentage of their classes are taught by non-tenure-track lecturers or adjuncts.

A young friend, a sophomore who did her first year remotely from a bedroom in her parent’s home, told me she was being taught by only two professors out of five. Her other three classes are led by lecturers, though she did describe them as “super distinguished” (even if underpaid). Some of her classes are in person, but the rest are still online, though she’s living in Berkeley now and could attend in the flesh if it were allowed.

Because COVID? Maybe, or maybe not. No classroom on campus holds 1500 of those paying customers.

The role of all the varied learning institutions which are characterized as “highly selective” needs examination. Somewhere, sometime, there comes a limit on the number of carefully curated young persons who can be educated at once in a given venue. My observation of three generations of students over more than a half-century is that every educational opportunity which is perceived to be excellent is de facto oversubscribed. No matter where the limit is set, someone’s left out. That includes “gifted and talented” in elementary school, advanced placement classes, elite high schools like Lowell, and yes, UC Berkeley. It doesn’t make much sense to try to respond to the demand by expanding the number of students admitted to a particular class or school instead of creating more good classes or schools to meet that demand.

A major problem adding to Berkeley’s enrollment bloat is that the state of California (overwhelmingly Democratic with a budget surplus) is no longer willing to meet its obligations to educate the next generation. Just a fraction of university costs (~14%, depending whom you ask) are paid by the state. Much of the balance is raised by shilling for lucrative out-of-state and foreign students lured by the Berkeley brand, or by sucking up to very rich donors who want to see their names on buildings.

In-state fees are non-trivial, of course, as compared to the $60/semester my father paid for me to attend Cal, but less than at most other elite schools. And no, I never had campus housing, so I lived in seedy rooming houses with the bathroom down the hall.

But now state legislators choose to pretend that the only crisis for today’s students is finding housing. Housing prices everywhere in the Bay are experiencing a big bubble. Some politicians find it convenient to blame everything on the cost of requiring big projects to be reviewed for environmental impact, but there are many more factors at work, and few magic bullets. It’s hard for many people, including students, to afford housing, given the wealth disparity which the tech boom has brought.

The all-time worst simple snake oil remedy for a complex problem has just been proposed by San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener, a slippery fellow bought and paid for by the development industry and its YIMBY groupies.

Wiener claims, without a shred of evidence, that the reason that Berkeley students are having trouble finding a place to live is just because big new projects, including dormitories, must be reviewed under the California Environmental Quality Act. He proposes legislation to exempt projects described as student housing from environmental law.

He’s scooped up a bunch of gullible young people and the odd YIMBY lobbyist to make his case. Sample quote, from a Wiener press release which is full of fake facts:

“For far too long, CEQA has been misused to prevent students from having access to housing on our own campuses under the facade of protecting the environment,” said Michelle Andrews, Legislative Director for the Associated Students of UC Davis. A prize ribbon will be awarded to anyone who can prove that assertion.

The California Environmental Quality Act does not prevent anything. It simply requires full disclosure of what’s planned and what effect it will have—developers, including corporate universities, can and do override negative environmental impacts in order to build as they please. And anyone who thinks they don’t make mistakes should investigate the history of Evans Hall, 

It’s a reinforced concrete monstrosity built on the Berkeley campus the same year CEQA passed, 1970. The joke among faculty is that it’s the best place on campus to have an office, because then you don’t have to look at Evans Hall out of your window. It’s cold in winter, hot in summer. Its 10-story elevators are dicey. 

Most likely it was not reviewed under CEQA before it was built. 

Recently UCB announced that Evans is to be demolished, because it’s hazardous in an earthquake and would cost too much to retrofit. Even in 1970, enough was known about concrete construction that an EIR might have told UC administrators they were making a few mistakes. 

(Assignment for a Daily Cal reporter: Document the environmental impact of concrete, both production and deconstruction. Hint: It’s major, and bad.) 

Note to Senator Wiener: What you don’t know CAN hurt you. Dormitories full of kids are the last places we should be exempting from thorough environmental review. That’s one kind of experiment that doesn’t belong on campus. 

Berkeley (City of) provides another example of why housing for students needs more, not less, supervision. Our city’s answer to the perceived shortage of student housing since the 1960s has been to allow a substantial number of undistinguished apartment buildings to be constructed within walking distance of the UC campus. They’re cheaply constructed, but their rent is not cheap—that’s why they’re called cash register multiples. 

Tragically in 2015 a balcony on one of these buildings collapsed under the weight of too many young people, most of them students. Seven died and six more were injured. 

Shoddy materials had been used by a low-bid subcontractor. With the generous profit expected by the speculative developers of apartment buildings aimed at a student clientele, that’s no surprise. 

Student housing needs to be built to a higher standard. Enrolling more and more students and housing them in substandard buildings, on or off campus, is just wrong, legally in many cases and morally in more. 

But also, even if the campus of UCB becomes wall-to-wall luxury housing, Wiener and company ought to be working to make sure that the teaching on all of California’s campuses is generously funded, enough to offer an excellent education to any student who could benefit, no matter which school they attend. Trying to cram all of California’s good students into one campus, especially if it’s landlocked Berkeley, does no one a favor, except perhaps the speculators who are busy buying up land in the neighborhood.