Heralding a new era in public-private partnerships with far-reaching benefits, UC Berkeley announced a $113 million gift in September from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Setting the gift apart — in addition to its size, which makes it the largest private donation in Berkeley’s history — is its significance as a watershed moment in building the University’s endowment for faculty excellence.
Paul Alivisatos
Larry and Diane Bock Endowed Chair
in Nanotechnology
A world-renowned pioneer in nanotechnology, Paul Alivisatos is a case study in the productive bonds that can occur between the donor of a chair and a chair holder. He holds the Larry and Diane Bock Endowed Chair in Nanotechnology, named after generous donors who are active in the life sciences.
Although neither Larry nor Diane Bock attended Berkeley, their experience with Berkeley faculty and alumni in the more than four dozen companies Bock founded or financed inspired them to establish Berkeley’s first endowed chair in nanotechnology.
While Berkeley in itself is the draw, Alivisatos acknowledges that endowed chairs can provide the difference in whether Berkeley can sustain and enhance faculty excellence over the long run.
“Berkeley is the kind of place to go to when you’re looking to change the world,” says Alivisatos, explaining why world-class faculty prefer to stay here in the face of bountiful offers from the top private universities. “You don’t want to leave because of that feeling.”
Rosemary Joyce
Professor and Chair of Anthropology
As chair of the Department of Anthropology, Rosemary Joyce has seen firsthand the difference additional support can make
in keeping outstanding professors - and in attracting graduate students of all backgrounds.
Ranking among the top in the nation, Cal’s anthropology department has faced five retention cases recently. No one left, although the offers were “extremely big.”
“Other institutions want to bring in people who can give weight and seriousness to their programs,” Joyce says. “These are extremely big recruitments and put faculty in the position of having to think seriously about the long-term effects of saying no to a place that offers them the chance to take risks they couldn’t take with their research otherwise.”
Joyce, who specializes in the study of sex and gender in ancient societies of Central America, should know. She is among those highly sought Cal faculty who have been the object of affection among Berkeley’s elite private peers. Thankfully she chose to stay at Berkeley — in spite of the offer of a 40 percent raise from one institution.
“Endowed chairs give people a chance to go beyond, to take that extra step and establish new fields,” she says.
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A conversation with Walter HewlettThe gift is in the form of a challenge grant that will result in $220 million for 100 new endowed chairs once the challenge is met. An additional $3 million will be used to support an enhanced infrastructure for managing those endowed funds. Together with the matching funds, the Hewlett Challenge will increase Berkeley’s funding for endowed chairs by nearly 50 percent.
The Hewlett Challenge will match 80 gifts of $1 million dollar-for-dollar, creating 80 new endowed chairs in each of the campus’s 14 schools and colleges. It will also match 20 gifts of $1.5 million dollar-for-dollar to endow 20 new $3 million distinguished chairs in multiple academic areas.
The Hewlett Challenge represents a new model for financing faculty excellence by emphasizing a greater role for private philanthropy in building and managing the campus endowment base. The long-term result is a stable and growing funding source to retain and recruit faculty and support graduate students. In the case of the Hewlett gift, measures will also be taken to enhance the investment of these endowed funds.
“I believe that this gift is an affirmation of our unique role in higher education as the only university that combines comprehensive academic excellence with access for exceptional students from all socioeconomic backgrounds,” said Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau in announcing the gift, which has garnered extensive media coverage. “The Hewlett Challenge will decisively bolster Berkeley’s efforts to retain and recruit top faculty — the heart of the University’s excellence.”
Berkeley competes for faculty with the elite private universities, which have enormous and growing endowments. For example, the payout from Stanford University’s endowment of $14 billion last year yielded more than Berkeley received for its operating budget from the State of California. Endowments of this scale, and the revenue they are able to generate, have changed the landscape of faculty compensation.
The ever-widening gap in average salaries for faculty at Berkeley compared to those offered by its elite private peers is up to 20 percent in some cases. In addition, competition for top professors is growing. Since 2000, Harvard University has tried to recruit more of Berkeley’s professors than any other private institution, and has been the most successful in luring them away.
Despite the salary gap, the campus has had a 72 percent success rate in recruiting new faculty in the past decade, and in the past five years it has retained almost 70 percent of faculty whom other institutions have tried to recruit. This success, however, has been achieved only through extraordinary and costly measures.
Said George Breslauer, UC Berkeley’s executive vice chancellor and provost, “Some universities are phenomenal in three or four fields, but we have 35 departments that are ranked in the top 10 nationally. So we have to invest broadly in order to maintain that breadth and depth of excellence.”
Although Berkeley is succeeding today in preserving the preeminence of the faculty, building the University endowment is increasingly seen as the only way to sustain the long-term excellence of Berkeley’s faculty and, to a larger extent, the vitality of public higher education.
“The intellectual environment here is so rich — nobody wants to leave it,” said neurobiology professor Geoff Owen, dean of the biological sciences in the College of Letters & Science. “People here are that good, and when you are surrounded by people who are that good, the exchange of ideas and the excitement of learning is tremendous.”
To find out more about the Hewlett Challenge, visit hewlettchallenge.berkeley.edu.
