News

We write to inform you that PG&E is monitoring the weather in the Bay Area for a possible shutoff in selected areas on Wednesday and Thursday. While this situation is evolving and there is considerable uncertainty, we believe it is in the campus’s best interest to be prepared for the possibility of an outage.

UC Berkeley — together with UC San Francisco and the University of Washington — is launching the Weill Neurohub, thanks to a $106 million gift from the Weill Family Foundation.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has notified UC of its intent to strike. The 24-hour strike is planned for 12:00am through 11:59pm on Wednesday, November 13.

An update on Instructional Resilience Week and outlining the steps we will be taking to put the campus in a better position to weather power outages or other disruptions to instruction.

We are writing to urge our entire community to collaborate this week in creating and using a new approach for Berkeley to become much more resilient to power outages, air quality challenges, or other events that could disrupt ordinary instruction in the future. Accordingly, the Chancellor and Provost, in collaboration with the Academic Senate, are declaring the next week “Instructional Resilience Week.”

In order to be more resilient to campus-wide class disruptions, such as those occasioned by power outages, smoke from fires, or other possible events, we encourage instructors to creatively consider all options to make up for lost class time. Next week we will establish an administrative-senate joint instructional resilience working group to develop systematic plans and guidelines for this. Our goal will be to quickly learn to manage through these unpredictable situations with much improved resilience, offering students an instructional experience as close as possible to the originally-planned instructional experience, either during a crisis or just after normal operations resume.

We want to make sure that students and those staff who work with faculty and students are aware of how instructors are being guided relative to missed coursework from last week’s cancellation of classes.

This week’s PG&E Public Safety Power Shutoff was a real-time test of UC Berkeley's emergency preparedness and response capabilities. While we learned many lessons that will help us improve, overall we are encouraged by how the campus responded and proud of the way in which so many across our large and diverse community pulled together to support one another, the Berkeley campus, and its core operations.

The application deadline for the 2020 Faculty Leadership Academy has been extended from Monday October 14th to Wednesday October 16th, 5:00pm. All letters of support should also be submitted by this date.

The Global Climate Strike effort being planned by student groups on Friday September 20 includes a walkout planned for 11:00 AM. Please have a plan in place to ensure the continuity of the delivery of your course content. Faculty members are encouraged to handle missed courses and exams according to their usual instructional policies.

The application period for the fall 2020 UC Berkeley Faculty Leadership Academy is now open.

Communicating the importance of faculty not scheduling midterm and final exams, or other important academic activities on key religious holidays. Most immediately for the Fall semester, this applies to Rosh Hashana (September 30 and October 1) and Yom Kippur, which begins the evening of October 8 and lasts through October 9.

Edward Wasserman, will be stepping down as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism and rejoining the faculty full-time.

As we start the fall semester, we call your attention to the following important campus policies and guidelines concerning the academic calendar, academic integrity, and accommodations for students in their academic programs:

Jennifer Tour Chayes, Microsoft technical fellow and managing director for Microsoft Research in New England, New York, and Montreal, will be the inaugural Associate Provost for the Division of Data Science and Information and Dean of the School of Information. Her term will begin on January 1, 2020.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, celebrated architect and associate professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), will become the next dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED). He will begin his term on July 1, 2020. Professor Renee Chow, chair of Berkeley’s architecture department, has agreed to serve as acting dean beginning July 1, 2019.

The University of California has been out of contract with Elsevier since January but, so far, the publisher has continued to provide access to new articles via ScienceDirect. Although Elsevier has not yet provided us with official notification, we now have reason to believe that the publisher will shut off that direct access in the first half of July, after the July 4 holiday.

Linda Burton, current James B. Duke Professor of Sociology at Duke University and former dean of social sciences at Duke’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, has accepted our offer to become the next dean of the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She will begin her term here on September 1, 2019.

UC Provost Brown has asked the campus to submit academic calendars for the 2023-24 through 2028-29 academic years by August 15, 2019.