By Janet Broughton
Acting Executive Dean, College of Letters & Science
I have been dismayed to read recent headlines forecasting a new California budget shortfall of 20 billion dollars. This past summer, the University of California lost 813 million dollars in state funding, a cut that already threatens the world-class system of higher education envisioned in the 1960 Master Plan. California’s leaders have hard decisions to make as they confront the state’s new budget gap, but they must understand that the state’s investment in UC isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.
Questions about investments invite economic answers, and certainly UC’s economic returns to California are impressive. In biotech alone, one-fourth of California firms have been founded by UC faculty and graduates. The broader economic argument includes the impact of increased social mobility. The Washington Monthly ranks Berkeley first in the nation for its contributions to the public good, giving weight to our high proportion of students from low-income families — students for whom a UC education will open up paths leading from poverty to greater prosperity for themselves and their families.
Yet prosperity is not an end in itself. UC has deeper value to California.
UC Berkeley offers courses in over 55 different languages each year, and undergraduates in the College of Letters & Science can choose from over 60 degree programs. Our students have access to a world-class library system, which now includes the nation’s only free-standing East Asian library. The L&S faculty ranges from a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet in the English department to a Nobel Laureate in physics, with a dozen MacArthur “genius” award-winners in between. Berkeley economist Oliver Williamson, who has just won a Nobel Prize, puts it this way: “Berkeley is a glorious place.”
Not so long ago, only the wealthy few could hope for an education at a university like this. The Master Plan says this is wrong, and that all of California’s children deserve access to a superb education regardless of their income. Fairness, not just economic benefit, is the Plan’s greater social value.
But UC’s deepest contribution to the social good is to help sustain democracy, which benefits all of us. Democracies depend on leaders and citizens who are tough-minded and open-minded, who have a deep understanding of how the world looks to people whose language, culture, politics and religion are very different from their own, and who are dedicated to public engagement and service. Without citizens like this, California cannot sustain itself as one of the world’s most open and innovative societies.
Even beyond UC’s contributions to the social good, the University has another kind of value. Over two millennia ago, Aristotle, wrote, “All men desire by nature to know,” and he is right. Even when we can see no special advantage to our inquiries, we human beings passionately seek to learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
In the search for knowledge, we must be able to start with the most challenging questions and then pursue the answers tirelessly, whether we are in the laboratory, the library, or the studio. In just the past month, Berkeley professor Tim White’s 17 years of patient research culminated in a remarkable new account of our earliest ancestors, and Berkeley Ph.D. Carol Greider won a Nobel Prize for her fundamental discoveries about chromosomes — discoveries that she credits to “curiosity-driven research.” Professor Robert Alter recently received an award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime contributions to American letters, including a new translation of the biblical psalms hailed for revealing the “essence” of their meaning.
A great university makes these quests for knowledge possible, along with economic and social goods. It’s a remarkable fact about California that it has identified itself with this wide vision of human potential. In the words of award-winning author Joan Didion (UC Berkeley '56), the University “seems to me more and more to be California’s highest, most articulate idea of itself, the most coherent — perhaps the only coherent — expression of the California possibility.”
Support for the University is not a luxury. For this California of ours, it is a necessity.
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Janet Broughton is the acting executive dean of the College of Letters & Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also the dean of arts and humanities and a professor of philosophy. She studied at Sacramento City College and received her B.A. from UC Davis.
