BERKELEY — A law professor specializing in ethics, criminal law, and legal and political philosophy, Chris Kutz has served since August 2009 as chair, and before that as vice chair, of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate. Faced with an alarming budget crisis, the Senate has become a hub for faculty deliberation and activity on an array of important decisions — "some of them reversible," he says, "some not" — concerning the character and structure of the campus and the UC system. He sat down recently with NewsCenter writer Cathy Cockrell to share his perspective on the challenges of shared governance in a time of unprecedented change.
Q. What was your initial agenda as Senate chair? Have you had to switch course as the campus's financial situation has deteriorated?
Academic Senate Chair Chris Kutz teaches in the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program and directs the Kadish Center for Law, Morality & Public Affairs, both at Berkeley Law. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Berkeley and his law degree at Yale. (Peg Skorpinski photo)A. When I agreed to take the job two years ago, I thought we would be dealing with very different issues. I had been co-chair of a task force on large-scale industrial partnerships like the BP/Energy Biosciences Institute. I thought the Senate would be thinking a lot about private funding in relation to our public mission. We have, in fact, but in a very different context. Not "How do we maintain our autonomy in a shower of private dollars?" but "How do we get some of those dollars to replace the public ones that are disappearing?"
I was also eager to try to make the Senate a more efficient governing body, by taking greater care in how we ask for and use the extraordinarily limited resource of faculty time and deliberation. We have made a little headway here, in trimming back on standing committees so that we can ask more faculty to serve on specific "task forces," for example those dealing with athletics or the budget.
It became clear last year that the funding of intercollegiate athletics was going to be a big issue. Athletics would have been an issue even without the budget crisis, but the huge budget shortfall has given it steam, even though it accounts for a fairly small fraction of the campus's budget. Athletics — while it's significant and needs attention — has more symbolic than financial impact.
One thing I was not ready for is the degree of anger in the community. You cut people's salaries, hike their tuitions, or threaten layoffs, and they get angry.
Q. How has that anger manifested?
A. It has manifested, for example, in the Nov. 5 faculty meeting about the funding of athletics, in which tempers were very short. I'm greatly concerned about the poor state of our labor relations, which I think is hindering UC politically. We need to mount a unified front politically in support of higher education — represented workers, non-represented workers, and faculty, together. We have a common institution and a common future.
Q. What is the Academic Senate's central challenge at this time, in your view?