There have been a lot of recent news items about trouble in the chemistry department at UC-Berkeley. (This article at the campus’s Daily Californian a week ago seems to be have kicked off the story, and good for them if it did). The situation is not good, but it doesn’t seem to be as catastrophic (yet) as some of the follow-on headlines have it. I hope.
From what I can see, the university is in the middle of figuring out how to close its (substantial) operating deficit, and they’re floating all sorts of ideas about how to do that. One of them is closing the College of Chemistry as it exists today, but that doesn’t mean that Berkeley is getting rid of chemistry or firing the professors. The idea seems to be that some of the faculty would end up in the College of Engineering and some of them in the College of Letters and Sciences.
Now, this still seems like a really bad idea. The first objection is how financially useful it would be. (I know that’s not most people’s first objection, but I’m trying to look at it from the same viewpoint that got this idea considered in the first place). From the outside, it seems as if the university would mostly be saving some administrative costs through this scheme, and I’m not sure how much they’d realize there, since adding a pile of professors to each of those other areas would surely mean some extra administrative staffing as well. No one’s showing any real figures about how much less expensive it might be if the College of Chemistry were, in fact, dissolved – and if anyone ever does, you can bet that there will be room to dispute them.
Until such figures emerge, my guess is that this proposal isn’t that far along. This may have been someone’s idea of a trial balloon – “Just putting this idea out there, folks” – and in that case, the university has gotten a preview of what they can expect if they get serious. But a serious proposal requires real financial details, and my suspicion is that if those were out there, someone would have found a way to leak them. So with any luck, this isn’t quite as real a threat as it might seem.
If it is, though, it really does look like a mistake. Berkeley’s chemistry department is basically legendary, one of a select group of chemistry departments in the country that can legitimately lay claim to that adjective. Fundamental discoveries, great professors, Nobel Prizes, influential graduates – they’re all in evidence, and how. Breaking up the department would seem to have no chance at all of improving it, and runs (you’d have to think) a very real risk of doing the opposite. It’s true that the Cal administration doesn’t seem to be talking about that end of things at all – just the financials – but whatever cost savings might be realized will have to be weighed against the damage that will be done.
My knowledge of the university’s finances is minimal, so I have no suggestions to offer. But if they’re seriously proposing measures like this, then you do have to wonder how a great university ended up in such a situation. The state of California has financial problems running through it from top to bottom, though, and no doubt Berkeley’s situation is part of that larger one. Maybe the question is how a state like California ended up where it is today.