UC Berkeley administrators have denied a recent Los Angeles Times report suggesting that the dean of its Boalt Hall School of Law had plans to take the school private.
“Boalt Hall law school’s goals are not a ‘privatization plan,’” UC Office of the President spokeswoman Ravi Poorsina said.
Such a move would strip Berkeley of all public funding, she said.
“What the dean is suggesting for Boalt Hall is increased private support,” Poorsina said. “All graduate programs in the UC system seek to do that. It connotes a more encompassing idea, raising private funds.”
Poorsina said the University of California has increased its efforts to attract private donors.
“We have also stepped up [the university’s] efforts in soliciting private donations,” she said. “The need has been increasing the past few years.”
The word “privatization” and its implications can be easily misconstrued, Poorsina said.
“First and foremost, Boalt Hall is part of University of California, and at the end of the day, we all want the same thing — for the university system to be successful,” she said.
Boalt Hall’s Director of Communications Molly Colin said the state’s financial role, which has generally always been supportive, would continue under the plan.
“State funding historically provides the bare bones, the very basic costs, such as faculty salaries,” Colin said. “Private donations provide ‘above and beyond’ support, such as graduate student research, buildings and financial aid grants [and] fellowships.”
Graduate schools are much more selective and expensive than their corresponding undergraduate programs. They have to look elsewhere for additional funding, according to Colin.
Boalt Hall only seeks to solicit funding from private donors to supplement the funds Berkeley currently receives from the state rather than switching to a model that relies solely on private funds. The Jan. 3 article did not explain whether the law school would completely reject public funds in lieu of private donations under a fund-raising scheme outlined by Boalt Hall Dean Christopher Edley Jr.
The school’s plan to seek increased private support has come several months after the University of Virginia, the oldest university in the country and founded by Thomas Jefferson, announced that it would go private.
Neither Berkeley’s nor the University of Virginia’s plans mark a growing national trend in higher education privatization, according to Aims McGuinness, an analyst with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.
“The word ‘privatize’ really is inappropriate because of the public invested in the core assets of the school. … The state of California, through the regents, will still be the owner,” McGuinness said. “I would not see this as a trend leading to ‘privatization’ of [the University of California] — only as a necessity for institutions to generate alternative sources of revenue while still maintaining their commitments to the public purposes for which they were established.”
The demand and costs of higher education are going up rapidly — more rapidly than state funding — and public institutions must seek “alternative revenue sources,” he said.
The idea of top public universities turning to private funds is not a new one. The University of Virginia, for example, is proposing legislation that would extricate it from the state’s cumbersome bureaucracy — such as state provisions requiring all revenue, including tuition, to be deposited in the state treasury — and from further budget cuts, according to McGuinness.
Edley said he plans to uphold Boalt Hall’s reputation as one of the nation’s top law schools. Doing so will prove to be much more difficult, however, amid state budget cuts and economic instability, he said in an interview on KQED public radio.
“If the [state] is unwilling or unable to pay the bill, we need a strategy that does not depend on a miraculous turnaround,” Edley said in the interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Edley said he plans on raising a $300 million endowment so Boalt Hall can have greater control over its own management and finances. The move would also allow the school, with continued state support, to have enough per-student funds and student financial aid to make it competitive with rivals such as Yale, Stanford and New York University. Edley also wants potential donors to feel confident that the money donated to Boalt Hall will stay at the school, rather than be siphoned off to other departments in Berkeley, or other parts of the UC system, he said in the interview with the paper.
The University of Michigan’s and the University of Virginia’s law schools are the only public law schools ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News and World Report. Boalt Hall, ranked 13th this year, is down from seventh a year ago.
