BY HANK REICHMAN
The late UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr once famously quipped that “the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” Only the last of these, he suggested, presented a problem. Another related saying attributed to him was his description of the Berkeley faculty as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over car parking.”
Today Berkeley is embroiled in a controversy centered around a university plan to replace a garage containing 350 spaces with an expansion of its Goldman School of Public Policy and a housing complex for faculty that would include 150 apartments and 170 parking spaces, presumably dedicated to residents. The proposal has run into problems with the faculty — on May 1 the campus Academic Senate voted 174-69 to ask campus Chancellor Carol Christ to “immediately suspend” the project — with Berkeley’s City Council, and now with San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King. The UC Board of Regents is scheduled to vote on a design approval tomorrow. [Disclosure: I occasionally have parked in the garage when attending concerts at the university’s nearby Greek Theater.]
A cynic might observe that the controversy over the Upper Hearst Development Project validates Kerr’s sentiments, but that would be wrong. The issue isn’t parking. The controversy is about priorities, shared governance, town-gown relations, and privatization.
Prior to the Senate meeting Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA) co-chair Michael Burawoy, a distinguished professor of sociology, wrote this about the proposal:
Here we go again! Over and over again, the campus has made poor judgments in capital investment – the Memorial Stadium project, the Legends Aquatic Center, and the ASUC Building, to mention just three egregious cases. And now the two most important Senate Committees (CAPRA and DIVCO) are calling into question the latest capital project: the already infamous Upper Hearst Development Project that will demolish the parking lot to allow a 37,000 square feet expansion of the Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) and the construction of a residential building with about 150 market-rate rental units, intended primarily for faculty, postdocs, and graduate students.
Because of the heavy debt incurred by previous projects, the campus proposes to build the housing facility through a Public Private Partnership (PPP) — but the financial details of this partnership have not been made public. The Goldman School expansion was at first to be subsidized by projected revenues from the housing complex, but now (as far as we know) it will be funded separately, the building costs only partly covered by previous Goldman School fundraising efforts. Borrowed money will pay the rest, and the campus will again be responsible for incurred debt should the Goldman School fall short of its projected revenues.
Nor has the campus offered an explanation as to why GSPP, as opposed to other units, should be the beneficiary of more space. While the Budget Committee is talking of floors to the number of FTEs in a given unit, there is no talk of ceilings – can any unit that raises funds make claims on campus property?
Goldman School Dean Henry Brady responded that his school “deserves a ‘shout-out’ for its innovation, industry, pluck, and willingness to serve campus.” Indeed, he wrote, the effort should be seen as “a model for how even a very small campus unit can help solve some of the problems we face.” He argued that “GSPP is paying for the new building itself, and there is a very robust financial model to ensure that it will do so.” Rather than asking the university for more space, Brady continued, “GSPP decided that it should move ahead to provide space on its own. . . without state funds so that others on campus can benefit from state subventions.”
In response BFA board member Celeste Langan wrote,
Educational policy theorists have described the 21st century “university of excellence” as “a new romance in which the enterprising academic is the central figure.” Scholars are encouraged to transform themselves into “intrapreneurs,” advancing the institution’s interests through individual initiative and innovation. No wonder, then, that you think GSPP deserves a “shout-out”; “innovation,” “industry,” and “pluck” belong to the discourse of the entrepreneur. . . . [Y]ou suggest that faculty criticism of the Chancellor’s failure to evaluate the GSPP expansion proposal against other possibilities in order to determine the “best use” of the Upper Hearst site ought to be heard merely as the whining of those who imagine a university’s resources should be shared (“Instead of asking others on campus to provide GSPP with the space it needs, GSPP embarked on an effort to self-fund a new building”). . . .
The question–a question that has not been addressed or answered–is whether the Goldman School’s desire to expand should take precedence; whether one of the few spaces left for redevelopment should be given to the Goldman School, especially when the administration failed to follow its own procedures . . .
One important consideration, we believe, is whether the desire to expand “self-supporting” (and revenue-generating) programs should take priority over the basic mission of the university, which is not to generate revenue, but to foster the growth, transmission, and conservation of human knowledge. . . .
In other words, the concerns raised were hardly focused on the loss of parking, but on why this project, as opposed to others; why mandated shared governance procedures were not followed; and why details about financing are so sketchy.
“We saw what happened with the stadium,” electrical engineering Professor Eli Yablonovitch told the packed Senate meeting, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. He was referring to the $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium and the $153 million student athletic center that opened in 2012 and for which the university will owe annual payments of $26 million to $82 million beginning in 2032. Yablonovitch won applause when he called for the administration to drop the project and “involve the faculty in creating a new plan.”
The city of Berkeley’s objection is about the university’s student population explosion and its impact on the city. As the Chronicle reported,
That’s because the campus discussed its growing enrollment within the environmental impact report it submitted for the Upper Hearst project. (Years earlier, the campus projected that it would have a student population of 33,450 by 2020. But the campus has already reached about 41,000 students.) The fact that the critical issue of rising student population was embedded in the report bothered Berkeley council members so much that on Tuesday [April 30] they voted to take the university to court.
“Why would they try to bury such a massive population growth into a project that is ostensibly about two buildings?” asked Matthai Chakko, a city spokesman. “Our belief is they are trying to distract people from the issue, which is the massive population growth.”
In today’s Chronicle architecture critic John King joined the chorus of objectors. I won’t address his devastating critique of the building’s design, but focus instead on the political rather than the aesthetic points made in his piece. “A university can expand, yet show a far-sighted respect for its neighbors,” King writes. However, he continues, “The Upper Hearst development, by contrast, is all about the needs of the moment, including the need to make the project turn a profit for a private developer,” American Campus Communities, which builds housing at campuses nationwide and has already built a residence hall at Berkeley.
Here, King explains,
the developer agrees to design, build and maintain the Upper Hearst complex. It also would lease and manage the 150 apartments that would be reserved for new faculty hires who might otherwise be forced to live far from campus. The building would be handed over to Cal in 31 years. Until then, rents are used to pay debt service and operating costs. . . .
American Campus Communities and SCB [its architect] are churning out product. They have a model for cost-efficient university housing and they apply it across the country. Add all of Upper Hearst’s complexities — parking, a public policy school, a constrained hillside — and the strain shows.
Which brings us to the privatization issue. Here King hits the nail on the head:
This isn’t a tale of shady developers or scheming bureaucrats. If you want an easy villain, blame the state of California, which hasn’t issued a bond for new UC construction projects since 2006. Individual campuses are left on their own when they want to create needed housing or add space for growing academic departments.
Enter what are billed as “public-private partnerships,” where government hands off responsibility to private developers. We do it for prisons. We do it for infrastructure. Why not do it for student housing?
But handing off responsibility means that the public is no longer the client. Developers get to call the shots, which forces an institution such as UC Berkeley to do damage control.
Ironically, today, shortly after reading King’s piece, I received an email from the Chronicle of Higher Education inviting me to purchase its new issue brief, “The Outsourced University: How Public-Private Partnerships Can Benefit Your Campus.” It’s a compact 32 pages and a steal at just $79!
