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I got my first personal impression of UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau last Tuesday, when he and Mayor Bates were the featured speakers at the City Lunch sponsored by the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. Up to then, I’d only encountered Robert Birgeneau in print—through quotes in many newspaper articles, and through the admirable speech he delivered when he was inaugurated as the campus’s ninth chancellor last April. I was curious to see how he and the mayor would address their announced theme, “The City and the University Partnership for Berkeley’s Future.” 

I left the Doubletree Hotel thinking that the newly arrived head of UC Berkeley, a Canadian no less, grasps this city’s distinctive character better than the mayor who’s lived here for over half a century.  

Up on the dais with Bates, Birgeneau told how on Nov. 12, the day of the Cal-USC football game, he and his party had showed up at Downtown Restaurant around supper time without a reservation. They couldn’t get a table, even though, he said, “I think they knew that I was the chancellor at UC.” He sounded bemused, not resentful. I liked him better for that.  

But what I liked even more was the behavior of the Downtown Restaurant staff. In honoring their commitments to those who’d called ahead, they said, in effect: We have our democratic principles and procedures, and we’re going to hold to them, even if it means disappointing a powerful individual. To cite Mayor Bates’ campaign slogan, that’s Berkeley at its best.  

Unfortunately, in his three years in office, the mayor has mainly honored Berkeley’s democratic principles and procedures in the breach. He truckles to power like a moth drawn to flame. The most egregious result of this toadying is the Bates-brokered May 2005 agreement that settled the city’s lawsuit over the university’s latest Long-Range Development Plan. As a friend remarked after reading the document, if you didn’t know otherwise, you’d think that the university had sued the city, because the city made all the concessions.  

“As far as I know,” Tom Bates told the 80-odd Chamber lunchers, “there’s not one city in the United States that has planned together for the expansion of their university, and I’ve talked to a lot of mayors. But we’re doing it.”  

He needs to talk to some more mayors. As documented in the 2005 book The University as Urban Developer, numerous cities have worked with the expanding institutions of higher education in their midst. On the other hand, no other city I know of has agreed to terms like the ones in the 2020 LRDP settlement, and for good reason: Municipal officials who took their oaths of office seriously would never surrender their town’s legal authority to regulate development, including private development, within its boundaries—which is the gist of the May 2005 agreement.  

To be sure, Chancellor Birgeneau also signed the settlement agreement. But his primary obligation is to the UC regents, not the public. Unlike the city, the university gave up none of its own legal prerogatives. Indeed, the agreement explicitly states: “The Regents will reserve their autonomy from local land use regulation.”  

Yet to hear Tom Bates at the lunch, the agreement was all gain for the city. It couldn’t be otherwise, given the mayor’s perspective, from which poor little Berkeley appears as a supplicant to UC. “What’s made Berkeley great and will continue to make Berkeley great,” Bates told his listeners, “is the innovation and creativity in our community. A lot of that innovation and creativity are due to the university.” True enough, and it befits the city’s mayor to say so. 

But a mayor who saw Berkeley as more than an appendage to the eminent local university would also pay tribute to the community’s indigenous (if you will) achievements and institutions, manifest in its vibrant political life, numerous environmental and human services organizations, rich artisanal and artistic sector, numerous one-of-a-kind shops and diverse light industrial enterprises, which produce “world-class” (the mayor’s favorite adjective) products ranging from chocolate to harpsichords to pharmaceuticals. None of these got even a nod from Tom Bates. Nor did the mayor allude to Berkeley’s extraordinary physical charms—its superb location, fine residential neighborhoods, lovely gardens and distinguished architecture.  

Instead, it was Chancellor Birgeneau who lauded Berkeley’s “beautiful setting” and “livability.” “The quality of life in the city of Berkeley,” he said, “matters to the university as much as it does to the citizens of Berkeley.” That’s because the campus’s ability to attract top-notch personnel depends in part on the city’s appeal. “If we don’t have Berkeley as a flourishing urban community,” the chancellor explained, prospective faculty members who are being offered 25 percent higher salaries at private schools such as Stanford and Harvard will “go elsewhere.”  

The irony, of course, is that the greatest threat to the city’s quality of life is the massive expansion—the 2.2. million new square feet, more than in the entire Empire State Building, with 1.1 million of those feet slated for somewhere in downtown—contemplated in UC’s 2020 Long-Range Development Plan and its environmental impact report.  

Mayor Bates put it well at the Feb. 23 press conference announcing the city’s lawsuit against UC. “The university,” he said, “asked us to sign the equivalent of blank check that would allow it to build wherever, whenever, and however it would like. The lawsuit firmly states that we are not signing anything until we know what we are buying.”  

But when the mayor and five councilmembers voted to settle the lawsuit, they agreed to sign the same blank check they’d spurned three months earlier. The LRDP and its environmental impact report read in May exactly as they did in February. Nevertheless, in mind-boggling fashion, the Bates-led council reversed course and effectively endorsed the university’s plans. At the same time, they abandoned their demand that the tax-exempt university fairly compensate the city for police, fire and sewer services, thereby further burdening those of us who do pay taxes.  

I don’t have room to detail the ways in which the settlement agreement compromises Berkeley’s welfare and independence. (For a succinct and comprehensive critique, see Anne Wagley’s essay, “Mayor Bates Drops the Ball,” in the June 24, 2005 issue of the Daily Planet. ) But in the context of the Chamber lunch, one item that has major implications for Berkeley businesses deserves immediate attention: local procurement.  

The new town and gown partnership, Bates said, will lead to “more local purchasing.” Maybe so. But the relevant language of the settlement agreement is not reassuring. Section V.C. states that the campus will “[d]evelop and implement within a reasonable time a local-purchasing program for prioritizing the purchase of goods and services in Berkeley, to the extent feasible.” As you might guess, the operative words are “to the extent feasible.” Like the other “Additional Joint Initiatives” in the agreement, this one ties campus participation to “existing law and UC practices.” In other words, the Bates council underwrote the university’s right to do as it pleases.  

To get an idea of how existing UC practices are already affecting the purchase of goods and services in Berkeley, consider the Sept. 28, 2005 letter sent to Associate Vice Chancellor Ron Coley by Gary Shows, the longtime owner of ALKO Office Supply. Shows wonders why UC Berkeley has been “actively encouraging, and in some case insisting that UCB Departments (our customers) buy supplies from Office Max instead of us” [emphasis in original]. The university, Shows writes, is ALKO’s “most important customer. We maintain a special low price list that we tailor to UC[,] and constantly work on how we can remain competitive and do a better job for this customer.” UC has been buying from ALKO for decades. Last week Shows told me that “some departments at UC have begged to be able to buy” from ALKO, citing the store’s special services to them. “There’s all this talk about supporting small business” he said, “but it’s all talk, even in a liberal town.”  

City officials should walk the talk. But it looks as if the settlement agreement requires them to acquiesce in UC’s practices, and not just with respect to the purchase of office supplies. This is the reality of the “new era” of town and gown relations that Tom Bates has been puffing since last May. Anyone who prizes Berkeley’s integrity should demand that the city withdraw from the May agreement and seek a relationship that benefits both UC and the larger community.  

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