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For reasons that are unclear to me, the US seems to be the only country where the top universities are mostly private and funded by gigantic private endowments. The closest are probably Oxford/Cambridge, which have both moved to build up endowments to go with state funding.
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<p>Actually, I would say that the reason is quite clear. It's because the US has been more free-market-oriented than most other countries have been, and so the philosophy is that numerous private entities should be allowed to compete for dominance, as opposed to running higher education through dirigiste diktat (i.e. much of continental Europe). The fact that European professors are usually civil servants and the top European universities are government-run makes them unusually susceptible to the vagaries of bad government policy, like when the Nazi government decided to fire all German Jewish professors, many of which ended up in US universities. The government has comparatively little control over what happens in US private universities, and especially not over what happens with private university profs who are tenured, which means that they are basically unfireable without cause. The policies of one bad university administration might bring down that one university, but won't bring them all down the way that one bad government can cause the quality of all public schools in the whole country to decline (again, consider the example of the the Nazis vis-a-vis Jewish professors). </p>
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And he is just one in a line of prestigious researchers who have abandoned the university in recent years — or are threatening to today — in part because UC Berkeley simply cannot afford to build enough labs, upgrade technology or even keep the floors shiny."</p>
<p>"The campus has nearly $600 million in deferred maintenance costs and struggles to keep roofs patched, pipes sound and heating and ventilation systems working. It no longer washes windows, waxes floors, replaces worn carpets or paints interior walls."</p>
<p>"Plastic sheeting is tacked above equipment in some Birge Hall physics labs as protection from dripping pipes. The chairwoman of the music department raided research funds two years ago to paint dingy hallways so picky donors wouldn't turn away. Only 30% of the university's classrooms are wired for updated teaching technology."</p>
<p>If this is happening at Berkeley, the flagship UC campus, is this representative of what is happening (or will happen) at other UCs? Thoughts, CC?
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It is indeed about the money.
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<p>Actually, I think it's not just about the money. Money is only part of the explanation. The other explanation has to do with the culture of the administration that is in charge.</p>
<p>The article complains about the lack of maintenance, grime, and general decrepitude of the Berkeley campus. Well, let's do a comparative analysis. The truth is, the campus of, say, MIT is pretty darn grimy and broken-down too. The Infinite Corridor is not exactly ritzy, and is downright filthy in certain places, especially some of the bathrooms. The Sloan School, which is supposed to be flush with cash on a per-student basis, nevertheless has a lot of broken classroom chairs and grungy hallways (especially in the original Sloan Building). And then you have ridiculously ugly buildings like E33 (the Rinaldi Tile Buildings). I mean, seriously, look at that thing. That things looks more at home in a condemned burnt-out urban ghetto. But, no, it is an actual MIT campus building. </p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/campus-map/objimgs/object-E33.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://web.mit.edu/campus-map/objimgs/object-E33.jpg</a></p>
<p>MIT has a lot of money. Money is not the real issue. The real issue is that MIT doesn't want to spend the money to spruce itself up. In fact, MIT tour guides once even touted the campus's ugliness as a strength - that since they're clearly not spending much money on campus maintenance, they must be spending it on the education. I am convinced that even if MIT were to obtain the largest endowment in the country, they still wouldn't spend it on beautifying the campus. </p>
<p>Nor is MIT alone. You can look at Harvard. While parts of Harvard are gorgeous (for example, the campus of Harvard Business School looks like a country-club from heaven), others are shoddily maintained. The innards of the Science Center, for example, is quite grungy, and that bathrooms are sometimes scarily filthy. Some of the buildings around the Yard are not exactly well maintained - i.e. the classrooms in Harvard Hall ain't exactly examples of splendor. Harvard has more money than God, and even Harvard's campus is not exactly pristine.</p>
<p>The point is, I think what matters far more is the culture of the administration, and specifically what the administration chooses to prioritize. I believe that even if Berkeley were to get a boatload of money, they still wouldn't spend it on maintenance. They still wouldn't spend it on teaching facilities. Harvard Business School is beautiful because the HBS administrations WANTS it to be beautiful, and so the administration makes it a priority. I personally think they make it to be TOO much of a priority, as it is extremely annoying to be woken up by a leafblower at 7AM on a Saturday morning. But anyway, the point is, it comes down to a matter of what the administration wants to do. If the administration doesn't care about having a clean campus, all the money in the world isn't going to change anything.</p>
