Mar 14
Pyrrhus of Berkeley
Taking a break from the bad news elsewhere . . .
Berkeley’s making national headlines again. The state courts have ordered the University of California, whose campus occupies 600 acres in the heart of town and another 600 in the hills, to reduce next fall’s incoming class by nearly three thousand students pending completion of an environmental impact report required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which became law in 1970 under the auspices of then-governor Ronald Reagan.
(Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency. Reagan signed CEQA. The half-century-long transmogrification of the Republican Party from responsible legislative partner to fact-phobic Putin metastasis will likely prove the immediate, if not the underlying, cause of America’s demise.)
I have a couple of first-person observations about this matter. The first is that the Berkeley campus does not set its own enrollment. That prerogative lies with the Regents of the University of California, who set enrollment for all ten UC campuses. The Regents work in tandem with the governor and legislature, because enrollment and budget decisions are intertwined. I once attended a talk by the university’s CFO in which he explained that his office’s goal was to secure enough money to fund access, excellence, and affordability. Usually there’s only enough for two and a half of those. A lot of people at Berkeley feel excellence is indispensable, but in the early 2010s, Governor Jerry Brown and the legislature prioritized access and affordability. So here we are.
The second observation is about the plaintiff in this case. Years ago someone thought it important that I meet Phil Bokovoy, head of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, so he and I met for an hour in my office. He made a good first impression, talking for the first twenty minutes about his recent six-month bicycle trip across the US, which I found interesting because I’ve long harbored an idle fantasy of doing the same thing. For the next twenty minutes he bragged about all the top campus executives he knows, which is when I became wary; why was he bothering with a supporting actor like me? (In fairness, he too was probably responding to a third party’s suggestion that we meet.) And then he spent the last twenty minutes threatening to sue, by which time his charm had vanished.
He didn’t speak of this specific lawsuit, for the simple reason that the events giving rise to it hadn’t occurred yet. But his message was clear: everyone on campus connected to his concerns was incompetent, he had tons of money to finance litigation, and unless the campus did what he wanted he’d eventually win. Which he has.
Except he probably hasn’t.
The governor and state legislature are the elected representatives of the people of California. For years they have deemed — with little public opposition — that educating ever more students at UC is in the state’s best interest. So when even a persistent critic of the university like State Senator Phil Ting pushes for legislation (which the governor will almost certainly sign) effectively nullifying the court’s decision, it’s apparent that while Bokovoy won the battle, he overplayed his hand, and in doing so has likely lost the war to stop UC’s enrollment growth.
In the 1980s The Fabulous Wife and I lived on the south side of UC Berkeley, where most students live. We were closer to the clamor (including People’s Park) than Bokovoy. By our mid-thirties we felt ourselves outgrowing the neighborhood and moved to the north side, about as far from campus as possible within city limits. Bokovoy has way more money than we do. He can afford to live anywhere in Berkeley. (Cookbook author Mollie Katzen’s house is for sale. Check it out!) After reading recent features about him, this one perhaps the most insightful, I still can’t fathom why he insists this college town adapt to him rather than the other way around.
