UC Berkeley press release

NEWS RELEASE, 9/19/96

UC Berkeley aims to raise $1.1 billion by 2001 in historic New Century Campaign

by Jesus Mena

Berkeley -- Determined to maintain academic excellence, to extend access to education and to keep California at the forefront of technological innovation, University of California at Berkeley officials formally launched a campaign Thursday (Sept. 19) to raise an historic $1.1 billion by the year 2001.

The New Century Campaign was formally presented today to the UC Board of Regents for their approval. It sets the most ambitious fund raising goal in history at a public university.

So far, the New Century Campaign has raised more than $480 million in a little more than three years, during the so-called "quiet phase" of the campaign. That amount already exceeds the total raised by a previous five-year UC Berkeley campaign.

Campus administrators said that this campaign emphasizes student, faculty and program support, as well as campus outreach.

"This campaign is not just about money," said Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. "It's about people. It is a bold effort on our part to redefine our relationship with the public we serve. With this campaign, we are positioning Berkeley to continue its historic role as innovator into the next century."

Tien said public universities have hit an historic crossroads as government funding declines, while the costs of teaching and conducting research rise. This critical juncture comes at a time when the fast pace of technological innovation escalates the need for universities as both educational and research institutions.

C.D. (Dan) Mote, Jr., Vice Chancellor for University Relations who is overseeing the campaign, said the success the campus has had to date makes him extremely optimistic about reaching the ambitious goal.

"We have been overwhelmed at the tremendous enthusiasm and generosity among our alumni and the friends of Cal," said Mote. "We want to go even further. We must develop broad-based public support for the campus and for higher education. Our efforts will ensure that Berkeley will continue to help keep California at the forefront of the nation."

Tien and Mote credit the leadership of key alumni volunteers for the success so far, particularly Peter E. Haas, Class of '40, chairman of the executive committee and director of Levi Strauss & Co. During the quiet phase, Haas chaired the Chancellor's Campaign Cabinet, a panel of influential alumni and friends. The quiet phase of a campaign is designed to test the viability of the overall goals before the campaign is announced publicly.

The campaign's enhanced focus on outreach to K-12 and on public service is reflective of the New Century Campaign's effort to redefine how the public views public universities.

"Traditionally 'public' has referred only to institutions supported by state taxes," Tien said. "We think the state definitely has a continuing responsibility to provide that core support for higher education. But through this campaign, we are challenging the private sector, the Cal alumni and the tens of thousands of friends of Cal to invest in Berkeley for the public good. We are encouraging them to become an enthusiastic part of the new public support network that we need to continue as a world center of scholarship and opportunity."

The campus has received major gifts from business leaders from the Silicon Valley to Asia, including a $15-million gift from Intel's Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty; and $15 million from alumni and friends in Taiwan. Also raised in the quiet phase of the campaign was a $15 million gift from Peter and Mimi Haas as well as the largest gift ever to the campus -- a $25 million anonymous contribution.

The six main objectives of the New Century Campaign and the target sums are:

o Maintaining Academic Excellence -- $130 million goal

o Preeminence in the Sciences and Engineering -- $129 million goal

o Preeminence in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences -- $100 million goal

o Ensuring Educational Opportunity -- $85 million goal

o Improving Student Life at Cal -- $60 million goal

o The Chancellor's Millennium Fund -- $50 million goal

Funds already raised have had an impact on students and faculty.

Patricia and F. Warren Hellman, for example, established the Hellman Family Fund for Faculty Research to support research by promising assistant professors. Professor Pedro Noguera last year received a research grant from that fund to study violence in economically distressed urban schools.

Noguera's research fostered the creation of special partnerships between schools and community organizations to provide services needed by disadvantaged students as an innovative way to address violence in the schools. Such pro-active partnerships could evolve as models for other urban schools.

"The grant from this campaign allowed me to work on the research and address the problems plaguing schools and the youth who are our future," he said.

In addition to the goal set for faculty research funds, the New Century Campaign will create graduate fellowships and distinguished professorships that will reward exceptional professors and support the retention and recruitment of top faculty.

"This campaign is vital for the renewal of the faculty and our continuing pursuit for excellence," said John M. Quigley, professor of public policy and economics, and chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate. "It will increase the resources on the campus for both research and pedagogy. The future of the next generation of faculty depends on the success of this fund raising campaign."

The New Century Campaign is seeking funding to improve the quality of student life, aiming to raise over $100 million for undergraduate scholarships and initiatives, graduate fellowships and programs such as the Incentive Awards Program.

Typical of the youth who have been helped by the Incentive Awards Program is Abel Guillen from San Francisco. Guillen could easily have ended up on the streets. During his years at McAteer High School, two cousins died in gang-related incidents. But Guillen rejected the gangs and instead turned his energies to student government, football, and volunteering in his community.

His perseverance paid off. Thanks to a scholarship from the Incentive Awards Program, Guillen attends UC Berkeley and is working to achieve the American dream his immigrant parents have found so elusive. He excels academically, serves in many organizations, and is a student senator. This past summer, he received a highly competitive Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Public Policy.

"The Incentive Awards Program has helped me get a first-class education and helped me to motivate other high school students, including my younger brother, to pursue higher education," he said. "In that sense, it's turned me into a role model for my community."

UC Berkeley also hopes to improve the lives of youth through its K-12 outreach programs such as the Berkeley Pledge and the many hands-on science enrichment programs offered by the Lawrence Hall of Science.

And though the emphasis of the campaign is on people rather than buildings, the creation of state-of-the-art facilities has a human side.

When Cambridge University tried to woo physicist John Clarke away from UC Berkeley by offering him its most prestigious chair in science, Chancellor Tien asked Clarke what it would take to keep Clarke at Berkeley. Clarke asked for support -- not just for his own research -- but to upgrade Birge and LeConte Halls for the good of the department. Money raised for the Chancellor's Millennium Fund made these improvements possible.

In this modernized space, Clarke and his students are perfecting superconducting quantum interference devices. These miniature devices are the world's most sensitive detectors of magnetism and are being used to study living cells and bacteria and to evaluate steel subjected to thermal and mechanical stress.

The campus libraries also will benefit from the New Century Campaign. With the largest collection of volumes in the University of California system, the UC Berkeley Library provides backup for every college campus in the state and is the most complete library in California. Still ranked as the second greatest research library in the country despite recent fiscal setbacks, the library is seeking funding for its collections, to build a new East Asian Library and Studies Center and to construct a new music library.

The New Century Campaign will appeal to UC Berkeley's extensive base of 321,000 alumni and friends worldwide. About 10 percent of all alumni give to the campus -- a low level of participation compared to other top universities.

Already, however, there has been a marked increase in the rate of giving during the campaign. Key donors have been giving to UC Berkeley at three to five times the level they did in the university's last campaign. Since 1993, UC Berkeley has received 167,600 separate gifts from alumni and friends.

In the public phase of the campaign, a new group of alumni leaders and a vast network of volunteers from every corner of the state and world will now take the reins from Peter E. Haas, the Chancellor's Campaign Cabinet chair.

The new campaign co-chairs are alumni F. Warren Hellman, Class of '55, John F. Hotchkis, ('54), Carl J. Stoney, Jr. ('67, JD '70, MBA '71), and Nadine M. Tang (MSW '75). Hellman is senior partner of the San Francisco investment firm Hellman & Friedman; Hotchkis is managing director of Hotchkis & Wiley, a Los Angeles investment service; Stoney is a senior partner in the San Francisco-San Jose law firm Jackson Tufts Cole & Black; and Tang practices psychotherapy in Berkeley and teaches part-time at UC Berkeley.

Tien said he was elated with the progress of the campaign to date.

"We are laying the groundwork needed to ensure that our campus will remain a leader in the nation into the next century," he said.


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