Chancellor 'cautiously optimistic' about the year ahead
At back-to-school press briefing, Birgeneau says campus is 'turning a corner' on financial crisis
| 27 August 2010
BERKELEY — The setting for Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's back-to-school press briefing Thursday was similar to last year's event: the chancellor, flanked by senior campus officials, speaking across a boardroom table to an assemblage of reporters wielding notebooks, cameras and microphones.
The difference in tone, though, was striking. In contrast to fall 2009, when the campus was reeling from severe cuts in state funding, the mood was notably sunnier at California Hall. Sunnier, at least, in the Berkeley sense of the word — it's not yet time to mothball those raincoats and windbreakers.
"I'm cautiously optimistic that we're turning a corner," said Birgeneau, who expressed pride at how, "over the past year, we dealt with probably the most dire economic situation that Berkeley has faced in its modern history."
"Everyone contributed," he said, noting that "faculty, administrators and staff" took furloughs that saved the positions of more than 450 staff who would otherwise have been laid off. Birgeneau also cited higher student fees — "which we regret, but were necessary" — as a significant factor in the campus's brightening budget picture.
And he credited donors and alumni with "stepping up in a time of extreme economic hardship for everyone." The campus, he said, collected $313 million in donations during the last fiscal year, an improvement of $7 million over the
