EVCP Remarks Given at Deans and Chairs Retreat Fall 2026

In the Bible, Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden for eating of the tree of knowledge. Now that Bible verse has long puzzled me: what is so bad about knowledge? After all, like everyone in this room, I’ve devoted my entire life to acquiring knowledge. But if you’ll indulge me in a bit of amateur biblical exegesis, let me suggest an answer: Remember that after eating the forbidden fruit, the Bible says that Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened. Open to what? Open to possibilities. Open to the recognition that what is might not need be; that is, to the amazing power that comes from being able to ask, “what if?”

The power of what if lies behind all our advances. There is no fiction or art without what if. No scientific or technological breakthroughs. No improving society. Yet, having one’s eyes open to what if also casts you from Eden: there are no regrets without what if. No disappointments. No worries.

Our challenge: how do we utilize the power of what if to bring about necessary change without falling victim to its darker side? How, as leaders, do we reimagine and reinvent our university so it can thrive in a rapidly changing environment without being paralyzed by regret and wishful thinking? Never forget that the serpent managed to hide himself in what if: the serpent hisses seductive calls to do nothing, seeking to lull us into a false complacency by whispering, what if the state funded us as we think it should? What if the federal government was more proponent than opponent of higher education? What if the public had a better opinion of higher education and we weren’t a battlefield in the culture wars? What if AI didn’t exist? In short, what if it could be as it once was?

And I get the seductive power of what-if day-dreaming. For instance, what if I could play the guitar like the Chancellor? What if I could carry a tune like he can? What if I could lead us in singing the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” with its chorus of “Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same • as • it• ever • was”?

But higher education won’t be the same as it ever was. The entire sector is at an inflection point: It won’t be just Berkeley that won’t be the same as it ever was. It won’t be just the UC that won’t be the same as it ever was. It won’t be just public universities that won’t be the same as they ever were. No university can expect to be the same as it ever was. Change is coming for all of us; indeed, in many ways, it is already here. The question for us is how do we reinvent ourselves thoughtfully and deliberately—in a way that upholds our values, our unwavering commitment to excellence, academic freedom, and belonging—rather than in a panic? How do we ensure we are the masters of our future rather than having change imposed on us?

No two ways about it, this is daunting, so the serpent’s siren song is seductive. But we must rise to the moment. Here, I would note, as I did last spring, that Berkeley is actually better off than nearly every other university: through hard work, foresight, and admittedly some serious sacrifice we are not in a panic or crisis, we can be deliberate and thoughtful. We aren’t staring down the drastic cuts that so many universities are. In fact, as I will discuss later, we’re still able to make strategic investments. The risk, though, is that we listen to the serpent, and fail to act before the storm really hits. Make no mistake, while Berkeley may enjoy better metaphorical meteorological conditions than our peers, the winds and rain they face are blowing our way. Unlike them, we still have a window of time to prepare. That window, though, is quickly closing—we cannot afford to be idle.

Now any mention of clouds on the horizon risks making this sound like a message of doom and gloom. That’s not my intent. I continue to be optimistic. Optimistic because, throughout its history, Berkeley has been unparalleled in asking what if, so that it may reinvent, reimagine, and remain one of the world’s greatest universities. And optimistic because I have faith in you — your creativity, your imagination, and your incredible capacity to do the hard work necessary to keep the number one public university number one.

The university of the future will, I imagine, resemble the university of the past in the same way motion pictures resemble stage plays. There will be similarities: our core values, such as prizing brilliant scholarship, research, and teaching, will endure; just as, movies and plays both prize brilliant acting. But there will be differences. Early movies were simply filmed plays, but people quickly realized that film offered wonderful possibilities beyond what the stage allowed. At the same time, movies are not inherently better or worse than plays—the two are simply different. The university of the future will be different, too: not uniformly better, not uniformly worse — simply not the same as it ever was.

That future is driven, in many ways, by changes in the constraints we face. Some constraints, perhaps due to technology, will become less binding. Others, like the brutal mathematics of keeping expenditure growth in line with revenue growth, are getting tighter. When the constraints change, the solution to the optimization program changes too. And, here, let us remember a hopeful lesson of history: constraints drive innovation. Or, as Orson Welles is supposed to have said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

A key component of our strategic planning is dealing with what we’re referring to as “under the hood” issues. These are core to our reimagining of the university, to navigating our rapidly changing landscape. Part of under the hood is working to remove unnecessary obstacles and restraints, to improve how we do our business. The initiatives that the Chancellor and I introduced last spring speak to that. I’m pleased to report that we’ve made considerable progress over the past six months: For example, in terms of speeding up academic personnel cases, we exceeded our goals for handling cases with on-time tags: 82% of 2026 cases with on-time tags were completed by July 1st; that is an over nine-percentage-point improvement from a year ago, one achieved despite there being 16% more on-time cases this cycle than last. I want to thank Vice Provost Plaut and APO for this tremendous progress. In a month or so, we’ll roll out a plan for improving human resources and research administration. A greater portion of our campus renewal dollars are now spent on facilities central to our research and teaching mission—and we’re spending more on this critical under-the-hood issue. Additionally, we have innovative financing ideas that will permit us to soon spend considerably more on campus renewal. The Expenditure Growth Methodology or EGM, while challenging, has led units to better focus on what is key to our excellence.

As you know, there are four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. As we work under the hood, we will need to employ the first three and guard against the fourth.

Addition means continuing to develop new sources of revenue through better monetizing the intellectual property we create, developing new sources of research funding, and by increasing our philanthropy. On that last point, I want to celebrate that this past year we again raised over $1 billion in philanthropy. We must also add through strategic investments, such as continuing to grow our Senate faculty. From last year to this, we have added 21 Senate faculty, bringing our head count to 1648 Senate faculty, very nearly a hundred more Senate faculty than we had just five years ago. Our Senate faculty now grow faster than our student population. And we have 75 new searches for this academic year. We are investing in making our new faculty successful by, for example, committing over $31 million of campus funds last academic year to their startup packages. And we continue to do exceptionally well in retention battles: Over the last five years we have won 87%—nearly nine of ten—of our retention fights and over the last three years our win rate against the top-ten privates is 86%, again nearly nine of ten. We will continue to invest in our educational mission, as exemplified by our continuing to increase EVCP TAS: Ignoring R&C, which is financed in a unique way, EVCP TAS will increase this year versus last by 6%. This continues a trend that has seen the EVCP contribution to TAS for the colleges increase by 235% over the past decade, far more than the 61% growth in costs over that decade, so that the EVCP now covers 53% of all TAS spend in our colleges as opposed to just 25% a decade ago.

We also must subtract: We have no choice but to stop doing certain things. We are already in phase one of a cessation program that should reduce our expenses by at least $6.1 million this fiscal year and by as much as $28 million annually long term. Future phases will identify even more savings: by stopping things that, in many instances, we should have stopped long ago because they are unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. Indeed related efforts connected to the EGM have identified $5 million in efficiency savings for this year and an additional $5 million projected for next. I would note here that I’ve been successful in lobbying UCOP to start addressing the unnecessary bureaucratic burdens it imposes. Now I’d love to tell you we’ll only be subtracting things we didn’t want in the first place. But I can’t. And here I’d like to put in a plug for our hard-working and dedicated staff: you, me, our faculty colleagues and others need to accept reduced service levels or that we no longer do certain things—badgering our staff to continue to do what we’ve stopped or reduced is simply unfair to them and inconsistent with our principles of community. I’d also love to tell you that no subtraction will occur in our academic units. I can’t say that either. No unit, academic or otherwise, is exempt from examining how it deploys its resources.

Here, I want to focus a moment on Senate faculty teaching. As I just noted, we’ve grown our Senate faculty considerably over the last five years. That investment was made with a quid pro quo in mind: More Senate faculty should mean more of our students benefit from being taught by the world’s leading experts. That, however, is not what we’ve seen. Indeed, we’ve seen the very opposite. Over the past five years, we’ve seen a decrease—a decrease—in the total number of student credit hours taught by Senate faculty of almost 3%. During these same five years, the on-duty—that’s on-duty—Senate FTE has been increasing. I must be frank: This is a serious problem and it’s unsustainable financially. I have asked the deans to take steps to address this and I’m pleased to say progress has been made in some corners of campus—but data indicate that we need to do more. So, as a heads up, the administration will use at least three incentives to ensure our continued investments in Senate faculty deliver their full promise to our educational mission:

1. Changes to the EVCP TAS allocation model to encourage Senate Faculty teaching;
2. More attention than ever on Senate faculty teaching when it comes to FTE allocations; and
3. Funding and approval for course relief that is more limited and more strategic than it is today.

I realize that my raising such a third-rail issue risks pushing my favorability numbers through the floor. But it’s better to address these matters honestly and thoughtfully now than in the midst of a financial crisis. And it’s better that we do so ourselves than have others do it for us. Living in a blue state is no guarantee against legislative efforts to regulate higher education, to, for example, mandate teaching loads in the name of affordability. A house that appears disordered risks having others come to clean it. In this, I am reminded of when I went, around the turn of the century, to give a short course at a university that had been in East Germany. Near five o’clock each evening, a cleaner would come into my office, furiously straighten my papers, yell at me about the empty coffee cups on my desk, and otherwise scold me for my messiness. After a few days of this, I mentioned it to the professor who had invited me.

“Ah,” the professor replied, “You need to understand: The cleaner’s a holdover from when the Communists ran the university. She was taught that we academics are social parasites and that she, as a member of the proletariat, is superior to us; hence, she feels entitled to boss and reprimand you.” Moral of the story: don’t rely on deference being paid if we can’t clean up our own messes.

I’ve mentioned addition and subtraction. Multiplication arises because we need increasingly to be more than the sum of our parts. To do so, we need to find “force multipliers,” ways in which our efforts better complement those of others.

To round out the arithmetic operators, a quick word on division. This is what we need to avoid. Debate, questioning, and engaging with opposing views are all part of what makes for a great university. At the same time, we cannot afford to tear ourselves apart. To navigate the rough seas ahead, we must row together. Here, too, we can benefit from the power of what if. What if I give the person who disagrees with me the benefit of the doubt? What if I focus more on what we hold in common than on what separates us? What if I look for a compromise rather than see an all-or nothing battle? What if I keep in mind that one cannot demonstrate one’s intellectual superiority through anger, that anger can only demonstrate the opposite?

Our success in the under-the-hood work we need to do—indeed for all of our strategic planning—will follow from a number of cultural enablers, among them our ability to engage in yes-if thinking. The essence of yes-if is that if we decide something is worth doing—the first if condition—then our focus should be on how we overcome the obstacles that stand between us and our goal—not on the obstacles themselves. We should not default to no-because. We should focus our genius on surmounting what stands in our way. Yes, some obstacles will prove insurmountable—some if conditions cannot be met. But our default must be to envision victory, not assume defeat. Yes-if and what-if are thus two sides of the same coin: hope, imagination, and a determination to find a way forward.

We have, as I also remarked last spring, been cast from Eden and it is pointless to look back. But we bring with us the power of what if. So, let me conclude with a few final what-ifs. What if we can utilize our collective genius to grow our revenues faster than our expenses? What if we can harness technology to provide a Berkeley education more efficiently? What if we enhance the productivity of our administrative operations so as to free up resources to advance our mission of research and teaching? What if, despite certain political pressures, we can make Berkeley even more equitable, inclusive, and a place inviting to all and where all can thrive? What if we can be open to reimagining and reinventing our university to meet the rapidly changing higher-education landscape? I see none of these what ifs as wishful thinking. We are Berkeley damn it—and Berkeley is where, day in and day out, we make possible what others can only dream. There is no better place than Berkeley. And there is no better place than Berkeley to lead through the changing, uncharted landscape of higher education in the 21st century. I know this because I know you: your genius, commitment, and leadership fill me with confidence. Together we will accomplish what no other university can. Fiat lux and go Bears!