College and Campus News
University updates- May 2004
Berdahl
stepping down
Berkeley’s outgoing chancellor, Robert Berdahl, and his wife, Peg,
were each honored with the Berkeley Citation at the recent Charter Day
celebration in April. Berdahl, who will return to the history department
after a sabbatical, has been chancellor since 1997.
His legacy includes the creation of new interdisciplinary research centers,
including CITRIS and QB3, and the raising of $1.5 billion dollars, including
110 new endowed chairs and $200 million in student scholarships.
He has overseen the renovations and upgrades of numerous buildings, and
the groundbreaking and work on more than a dozen new buildings, including
the replacement for Stanley Hall. He has also overseen the opening of
a virtually new athletic facility—Haas Pavilion. Many of these facilities
were built with the help of private support. Mrs. Berdahl founded the
Clark Kerr Infant Care Center on campus and championed many causes, especially
breast-cancer awareness programs.
Peering into Berkeley’s future
In mid-April, Berkeley released its draft Long Range Development Plan
and environmental impact report, vital documents that could direct the
development of the campus for the next 15 years. Building space for academic
and support programs could grow by up to 18 percent, student housing by
up to 30 percent, and parking by as much as 32 percent. The new plan will
guide decisions on land use, enrollment growth, housing, parking, academic
and research facilities, architectural and landscape design, and more.
The plan is designed to meet the campus’s needs while preserving its beauty
and architectural heritage. http://lrdp.berkeley.edu/
Kerr remembered
Clark Kerr was remembered in a February campus event as “the father
of the modern University of California.” Kerr, who died in December 2003,
was enormously important in shaping higher education and UC. Kerr was
Berkeley’s first chancellor and the University of California’s 12th president.
As UC president, Kerr spearheaded the negotiation of California’s Master
Plan for Higher Education, which, noted Chancellor Robert Berdahl, was
one of Kerr’s two greatest achievements, along with expanding UC to a
nine-campus system. Kerr was posthumously awarded the Berkeley medal.
Six million years old and counting
Paleoanthropologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and
the Cleveland Museum of Natural History have found more fossils of a nearly
six-million-year-old human ancestor first reported three years ago, cementing
its importance as the earliest hominid to appear after the human line
diverged from that leading to modern chimpanzees. This hominid may represent
the first species on the human branch of the family tree just after the
evolutionary split between lines leading to modern chimpanzees and humans.
Downtown hotel and conference center
studied
Carpenter & Company Inc. and UC Berkeley have entered into an exclusive
negotiating agreement, and the firm will conduct a six-month feasibility
study of constructing a hotel and conference center at the corner of Center
Street and Shattuck Avenue.
The company, based in San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass., will work with
UC Berkeley, the city of Berkeley, and the Berkeley community on ways
to design the hotel project so it would complement the possible development
of new space for the campus’s world-class but seismically-challenged Berkeley
Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
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