Congratulations on your appointment as Chancellor.  You have been selected by a process that affords little role to faculty, or any other group of employees on campus.  The people hiring you have little experience of the campus you will lead. Here is what you need to know before you accept or begin the job.

Faculty have never been more demoralized. For the past 25 years, your predecessors have tried to make up for dwindling state support by soliciting philanthropic gifts, pursuing commercial income, raising tuition fees, and cutting costs. It is a strategy that has demonstrably failed. Private funds cannot begin to replace the scale of lost public investment. You will inherit a campus that is close to breaking point. That has created a huge burden on faculty to maintain Berkeley’s reputation as the best public university in the world with ever-diminishing resources and ever-deteriorating working conditions.

Faculty have not received a pay raise in line with inflation for many years, and our salaries continue to lag behind UC’s own comparator institutions, let alone the elite private universities we compete with for faculty and graduate students.  Worse still, our salaries have had to cover the dramatically increasing costs of health benefits and the erosion of our pensions.  Compounding all this, a large number of merit and promotion cases for faculty have been seriously delayed without any communication to those affected, let alone an apology or understanding of the difficulties and stress created.

The situation has become almost impossible for many faculty, but especially early career faculty and those households with more dependents, to afford housing in the Bay Area, let alone to become homeowners.  New faculty are provided a housing allowance that is at best little more than half the cost of the deposit for a modest two-bedroom property, while interest rates for the mortgage program have just been raised a full percentage point, making repayments even harder.  There is virtually no support for faculty struggling with childcare.

Working conditions are no better.  Despite many new buildings named after donors, the campus infrastructure is collapsing. The majority of buildings on campus were built before 1980, and the cost of seismic retrofitting and repairing them stands at $8.5 billion.  Most classrooms, labs and offices faculty work in are dirty, cramped, poorly ventilated, poorly heated and inadequately equipped. Many of the makeshift ways of ventilating rooms in the early period of the pandemic remain unchanged.  Faculty are expected to subsidize the campus by using their own phones, providing their own equipment, moving furniture, and even cleaning their own offices. As no fewer than 400 staff positions have been cut since 2015, the administrative work they once performed has been pushed down to faculty through a proliferating number of online platforms.  And, of course, we are now teaching more students than ever before. Between 1990 and 2020, the student-to-faculty ratio rose from 18-1 to 30-1.  In 2012/3, UC Berkeley had 35,346 students; last year there were 43,932 students, and the plan is to enroll 51,201 students by 2029/30.  Faculty workloads have become intolerable for many.

The process by which you were selected as Chancellor – which limited faculty and staff consultation – demonstrates the way in which the long, strong tradition of shared governance at Berkeley has been devalued. The last several Chancellors have regarded the Academic Senate as little more than a useful rubber stamp. On the few occasions when the Academic Senate has passed resolutions opposing administrative plans, these have been ignored, even when they are backed by the recommendations of joint Senate-Administration Task Forces, as most recently on library funding.

There is no longer any transparency around or accountability for decisions which are made by a senior administrative group whose size and salaries continue to grow. The campus budget remains shrouded in mystery.  The rhetoric of austerity is used to justify cuts in routine maintenance operations and even foundational resources like the library, while giant sums are magically found for new pet projects like the new data science building. There is no transparency in how indirect costs are charged or how those monies are used. While donors increasingly shape where faculty are hired, faculty have little knowledge of, let alone oversight of how, the campus uses its ‘secret’ $100m endowment funds for retention and recruitment.

Finally, the campus is struggling to maintain its reputation as a bastion of free speech and academic freedom. Across the country, the alt-right has sought to neutralize universities as spaces of critical thought. They have found allies on our own campus who are worried that potential donors may be alienated from the Berkeley “brand.” Sometimes, they protect platforms for provocateurs who do not value all human lives equally. Meanwhile senior administrators constantly remind faculty and students that they cannot introduce politics to the classroom. They warn that protests threaten public safety, and that encouraging protest is against the mission of the public university. This has created a chilling environment in which many faculty and students feel intimidated and silenced. Berkeley must remain a campus where the right to critique and protest is not restrained by turning the rhetoric of freedom, inclusion, civility and community against the very thing that Berkeley has excelled at: the defense of the public good.

If you wish Berkeley to remain the best public university in the world, you must improve the working conditions of faculty, restore faculty governance and protect academic freedom. We wish you good luck, and we are here to support you in the achievement of those goals.

Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association