These opportunities represent areas where Berkeley can lead, where our distinctive strengths, values and scale position us to tackle challenges that matter most.
Submit your ideas or sign up for a focus group to help shape Berkeley’s next chapter.
Investing in Faculty Success
Berkeley has the opportunity to pioneer support systems for best-in-class faculty work so they can focus on what they do best.
Some “First Things First” initiatives already underway:
- Cases: Improving timeliness of senate faculty cases
- Facilities: Improving research-supporting facilities
- Accessibility: Website accessibility and disability services to support faculty, staff and students
- Admin: Improving research administration to propel research
Equitable Success for All Students
Berkeley can show how a public university delivers world-class, personalized education to students from vastly different starting points.
Some initiative ideas we’ve heard so far:
- Mobility: Doubling down on and scaling up social and economic mobility
- Pathways: Scale up L&S’s First-Year Pathways program to support students with a curriculum that prepares them to live a life of meaning and consequence
- Readiness: Enhance student readiness for life and careers in a rapidly changing world
- Alumni: Extend our support for students to five years beyond graduation
Enabling Staff to Do Their Best Work
We have an opportunity to reimagine how we support, develop and recognize the people who make Berkeley run.
Some initiative ideas we’ve heard so far:
- Frictions: Reducing frictions that prevent staff from doing their best work
- Prep: Proactively preparing staff for AI and other technology transitions
- Pathways: Creating more visibility and pathways for growth and recognition that honor staff contributions as central to Berkeley’s mission
Research for Global Challenges
Berkeley can establish new models for research sustainability — streamlining administration, diversifying funding sources, modernizing facilities and creating infrastructure that makes ambitious, interdisciplinary work not just easier but easier than anywhere else.
We can fund problem-focused interdisciplinary research with incubator-style support for tackling areas of key societal importance such as:
- Climate
- Quantum
- Human Health
- Societal Fracturing
Building Financial Sustainability
Berkeley has an opportunity to pioneer new models of public university funding so that funding our core is less dependent on federal and state funds.
Some initiative ideas we’ve heard so far:
- Flywheel: Create a “Research Flywheel” that captures equity upside in small companies that leverage our research
- Subscription: UC Berkeley Masterclasses using a global subscription model (think Masterclasses meets Netflix) generating revenue through wider credentialing in non-degree/international programs
- Funds: Develop more fully a set of outside university-supporting investment funds
Growing Trust with the Communities We Serve
As one of society’s greatest assets, Berkeley can rebuild public trust and more effectively serve its public mission by demonstrating tangible impact.
Some initiative ideas we’ve heard so far:
- Corps: Establish a Berkeley Community Corps that engages and assists local communities
- Showcase: Highlight further our social and economic mobility at scale
- Influencers: Engage influencers in telling Berkeley’s story as one of society’s greatest assets
- Stories: Coordinate storytelling across campus about our societal impact
Leading the AI Transformation
Berkeley is uniquely positioned to define how research universities harness AI’s potential and navigate AI’s disruption.
Some initiative ideas we’ve heard so far:
- Platforms: Create intentional and productive collisions between AI researchers and instructional faculty across disciplines to spark both innovation and regulation grounded in our shared values
- Pedagogy: Create an AI system for pedagogical innovation available to all faculty
- Framework: Design ethical AI frameworks that other institutions will follow