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Concept:
Sather Road is refurbished in materials equal to its role as the primary route through campus. A new creekside glade at the Sather Gate bridge creates a green, peaceful complement to sunny, active Dwinelle Plaza. |
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Strategic Academic Plan
It is a fundamental principle of the New Century Plan that our capital investment strategy should align with and promote the academic goals of the campus. Toward this end, the Chancellor formed a new campus committee in fall 2000 and charged it with preparing a Strategic Academic Plan, which has now been completed and presented to the Chancellor.
The Academic Plan has, in turn, shaped the physical vision of the campus described in the New Century Plan. The Academic Plan is comprised of ten key principles, four of which address the physical campus and, together, define the parameters of future campus development:
- Limit Future Growth
- Maintain Contiguity
- Design for Interaction
- Invest in Housing
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Limit Future Growth. As the demands generated by both education and research continue to intensify over the next decade and beyond, the Berkeley campus must become even more rigorous in managing the nature and magnitude of further growth.
First, UC Berkeley is a small, intensively developed urban campus. While a few building sites remain on the core campus, and a few existing buildings can be enlarged or replaced, the cumulative potential to increase core campus space is on the order of 10%-15%, as described in strategic goal 1. This is barely adequate to accommodate the growth required by 'tidal wave 2': it provides no capacity for further growth or for new academic initiatives. The university-owned sites on the blocks adjacent to the core campus could, if redeveloped, contribute as much as another 10%: however, these sites are also ideal for new student housing, for which UC Berkeley has a critical need.
Second, the ability of the city to absorb further campus growth is also limited. The city infrastructure is aging, and housing near campus, due in large part to the demand generated by the university, is both scarce and expensive: these conditions would only be exacerbated by further growth. Third, there is no assurance capital would be available to fund investments in new academic space: while we should continue to pursue such funds, the state capital program for at least the near future at UC Berkeley is composed primarily of seismic retrofits to existing buildings.
Berkeley is also the oldest campus of the university, and half the built space on our core campus is over forty years old. Both instruction and research have undergone dramatic change during this period, in terms of both the workstyles we employ and the infrastructure we require. Many instructors and researchers struggle with spaces and systems compromised not only by age, but also by decades of underinvestment. The renewal of our facility inventory is crucial to our ability to recruit and retain exceptional individuals, and to pursue new paths of inquiry and discovery.
To the extent land and capital are consumed by further campus growth, they become unavailable for campus renewal. Because capital is scarce, and land is both scarce and finite, we must impose a limit on future growth in order to focus our resources on the critical task of renewal. The Academic Plan recommends the campus:
- limit enrollment at UC Berkeley to no more than 33,000 students, our projected size if the entire 'tidal wave 2' increment of growth proposed for UC Berkeley is absorbed.
Maintain Contiguity. The breadth and quality of our academic programs are the equal of any university in the world, but UC Berkeley is more than the sum of its parts. A great research university also requires a dynamic intellectual community, one that provides exposure to a wide range of cultures and perspectives, and generates the interactions that lead to new insight and discovery. For such a community to thrive requires a campus organized and designed to foster those interactions.
Although the academic structure of the campus reflects the traditional disciplines defined over a century ago, they are no longer insular and self-contained. On the contrary, the potential for creative interaction is everywhere. The health sciences initiative, for example, brings together researchers from physics, biology and chemistry, while our academic programs focused on culture, gender and ethnicity draw upon both social sciences and the humanities.
Because the potential for interaction is everywhere, and because we cannot predict where productive synergies may emerge in the future, our first principle of physical organization must be to retain and reinforce the contiguity of the academic enterprise on and around the core campus. The Academic Plan recommends the campus:
- accommodate future academic growth on the core campus and adjacent blocks.
- reserve core campus space for functions that serve and/or involve students.
- reserve adjacent blocks for research, cultural, and service units that require core campus proximity.
Design for Interaction. While the compact size of the campus encourages an interactive community, its physical design does not. Buildings on the Berkeley campus provide few interior spaces conducive to informal, unstructured interaction, although the thriving cafe in Moffitt Library shows how productive such places can be. This is a longstanding problem: Clark Kerr writes of the 'tragedy' visited upon the campus when, during the great expansion of the 1960s, the state refused to fund requested space for student and faculty lounges in each new building.
The same is true for exterior spaces: while the campus landscape is beautiful, few places are designed and furnished to be conducive to social interaction, and even fewer have any sort of visual link to the activity within the buildings around them. This is a special dilemma for the growing numbers of students, faculty and staff who use the campus at night: after dark, exterior spaces unlit and unobserved by active interior spaces are perceived as unsafe.
Because research and instruction today are increasingly team-based and multidisciplinary, the campus must be re-envisioned to foster the interaction and information-sharing this new community demands. Leading edge companies in biotechnology, information technology, and creative services understand the value of places of interaction, and design for them as a matter of course: they are just as crucial to the work of the university. The Academic Plan recommends the campus:
- make spaces conducive to creative interaction a priority in new capital investment.
- create 'places of interaction' at key nodes of campus activity.
- enhance the role of the library as an intellectual commons.
- site and design interior and exterior common spaces to create a true 24-hour campus.
Invest in Housing. Even more fundamental to intellectual community than the physical design of the campus is the ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty and students. The adequacy and quality of our facility inventory is one cause for serious concern, as described above: another is the cost and quality of housing.
Our best student and faculty candidates increasingly cite the scarcity of good, reasonably priced housing as a primary factor in their decisions whether or not to come to Berkeley. Of those who do, many find themselves living miles from campus, where the length of the commute itself becomes a disincentive to spending time on campus, at the expense of both formal and informal interaction with their colleagues.
While the problem of housing affects everyone, it is particularly acute for students. University operated student housing, and its extensive on-site support programs, presently accommodates only 20% of our students, primarily first-year undergraduates. Expanding the supply of university housing, in close proximity to campus, is necessary not only to ensure our students are adequately housed, but also to enable them to focus on their academic pursuits and immerse themselves in the rich intellectual life of the university. The Academic Plan recommends the campus:
- provide two years of university housing to entering freshmen who desire it, and one year to entering transfers who desire it.
- provide one year of university housing to entering graduate students who desire it.
- provide up to 3 years of university housing to new untenured ladder faculty who desire it.
- partner with private and not for profit developers to continue to expand and improve the rental housing stock available to the campus community.
The goal for entering freshmen includes these admitted as fall extension students.
Links to the New Century Plan. The four aforementioned principles, along with other Academic Plan initiatives with implications for capital investment, inform the entire New Century Plan, but are reflected most directly in the Campus Vision, Strategic Growth, the Interactive Campus, and the Housing Initiatives.
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Note:
The term 'tidal wave 2' refers to the projected growth in the numbers of college-age Californians over the next decade, which includes the children of the huge postwar generation: the original 'tidal wave'. In order to meet its obligation to the state, the University of California as a whole must increase enrollment by 60,000 students during the period 1998-2012. The Berkeley campus has been requested to accommodate 4,000 of these students, an increase of roughly 13% in enrollment over this period. |
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Long Range Development Plan 
Together, the Strategic Academic Plan and the New Century Plan define the policy framework for the Long Range Development Plan. The LRDP outlines the campus investment program for a specific period of time (through 2020) and entitles this program under the California Environmental Quality Act through a comprehensive program-based environmental impact report.
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