(From left) State Sen. Jackie Speier, UC Nobel Laureates Paul Boyer and Sherwood Rowland, State Sen. Jack Scott, Nobelist George Akerlof, UC Regent Fred Ruiz, and Nobelist Steve Chu.

Chu on UC: 'Intellectual Magnet' for Best and Brightest Minds

Berkeley Lab Director Steve Chu went to bat Wednesday for the University of California as clean-up hitter of a five-Nobelist team that traveled to Sacramento for one reason - to deliver a message of caution to the state's leadership. Noting the treasures and contributions that the UC system makes to the state and its economy, they warned that to continue the downward trend of state funding for UC will jeopardize everything that makes the university system - and California - great.

"We're sounding a visionary alarm for what's at stake for the state in the future," said State Sen. Jackie Speier, who organized this hearing of the Subcommittee for Higher Education under the state's Senate Education Committee. We are not making the same investments today (that we have in the past). We have trouble at hand."  

She gave statistical evidence. The portion of UC's budget that is state-funded has dropped from 49 percent in 1970 to about 27 percent today. Speier also noted that in 1970, prison costs accounted for 2.1 percent ofthe state's General Fund allocation, and UC received 7 percent. Today, those numbers are reversed. The correctional system now gets 7 percent of the Fund, and UC gets 3.5 percent. There are as many undergraduates in UC as there are prisoners in the system, and it costs roughly three times as much to sustain a prisoner as it does to educate a student.

UC President Robert Dynes and five Nobel Prize winners, including Chu, followed Speier's sobering assessment with their own examples of how the university impacts California, and why the state's support must be enhanced. Dynes described it as a "call to arms" for the future of California. "Our investments over the next 10 years will determine California's future for the next 50 years," he told the subcommittee members.

"We are creators: we create new knowledge, we create the next generation of creators, and we take our creations to benefit the public."

He characterized UC's negative state funding trends as "devastating" in terms of the impact on higher student fees, program cuts, and faculty and staff salary stagnation. "Staff morale has been the lowest I have seen it at the University," he said.

Chu, the final of five distinguished scientists to address the panel, focused on what the institution invests in the state. He called it "intellectual capital."

"The University of California has been an intellectual magnet for the best students," he said. This lure of UC is really a "brain drain," in reverse, he said, with the best and brightest graduate students and faculty being drawn to UC, staying here, and stimulating the state economy.

What's beginning to happen now, however, could reverse that trend. He and his colleagues noted that the best private colleges like Harvard are offering rich packages to rising stars, and UC's fiscal constraints are impacting its ability to compete. Chu recalled a post-doc who took a Harvard set-up package worth about $2.5 million. As part of a 2003 review of the UC Berkeley physics department, he found that of 15 hires made at Berkeley, 10 had been lured away to other institutions.

"The State is in a very fragile situation," Chu warned. "We must do our best to staunch this flow. I didn't come here to oversee a decline. I came to see (UC) the way it was when I was a student here, and that's Number One."

One example Chu shared was that of Physical Biosciences Division Director Jay Keasling and his seminal work in synthetic biology. Originally seeded with a small grant from UC's directed research fund (UCDRD), Keasling has grown his program to the point where it has attracted a $43 million research grant from the Gates Foundation to find a low-cost way to synthesize a new anti-malarial drug.

And he pointed out that the campus and Berkeley Lab are inextricably tied and mutually benefited. The Lab, he said, has helped to attract world-class scientists - 10 of Berkeley's 14 Nobelists worked at the Lab - and over one-sixth of the membership of the National Academy of Sciences are Lab employees. About 75 percent of the UC Berkeley Chemistry Department scientific staff, and more than half of its funding, comes via the Lab.

Nobel colleagues J. Michael Bishop, Chancellor at UC San Francisco; economist George Akerlof of UC Berkeley, atmospheric chemist Sherwood Roland of UC Irvine, and biochemist Paul Boyer of UCLA offered similarly compelling testimony about how UC research drives and feeds the state's economic engine.

President Dynes summed up the issue with this statement: "If the University of California is allowed to be just another university, then California will become just another state."