With a Sudden Vacuum at the Top, What’s Next for Berkeley?

Stephen Lam, Reuters

The University of California at Berkeley is hiring. Successful candidates for the position should be able to solve a $150-million budget crisis, crack down on sexual harassment, and spearhead fund raising at one of the most prestigious — and controversy-laden — campuses in the world.

After three years, Nicholas B. Dirks, Berkeley’s current chancellor, found this was a job he could not do anymore. On Tuesday Mr. Dirks announced he would resign after just three years, once a successor is named, and join the faculty.

“Over the summer I have come to the personal decision that the time is right for me to step aside and allow someone else to take up the financial and institutional challenges ahead of us,” Mr. Dirks wrote in a message to the campus.

Mr. Dirks’s decision also means that, for the foreseeable future, the campus will be led not only by a lame-duck chancellor but also an interim provost; Claude M. Steele, the former provost, left under a cloud of controversy four months ago.

The chancellor’s tenure at Berkeley has been marked by serious hardships and controversies on the campus. Berkeley faced a $150-million budget deficit and accusations that the university failed to seriously deal with sexual harassment of students or colleagues by star faculty members. A complaint has also accused Mr. Dirks of misuse of public funds. The university has not yet announced a resolution of that complaint.

In February, Mr. Dirks announced a sweeping cost-cutting plan designed to reassess Berkeley’s administrative and academic structures, change up academic offerings, and boost fund raising. Some of those shifts would be “painful,” he said at the time.

Professors were immediately skeptical of the plan, saying they felt they hadn’t been adequately consulted by the chancellor. Later in the spring, Mr. Dirks said 500 staff positions would be eliminated over the next two years.

Against that backdrop of uncertainty, Mr. Dirks demonstrated fund-raising prowess. Last month, he said Berkeley had received a record number and amount of donations, totaling $500 million during the past fiscal year.

Still, given the significantly reduced levels of state funding and a large amount of debt, Mr. Dirks wasn’t increasing the university’s non-state revenue sources fast enough, said Nancy E. Wallace, co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics at Berkeley.

Ms. Wallace said when the state cut funding for building renovations, Mr. Dirks began to increase the university’s debt — too much, she added. Berkeley has spent more than $2 billion on construction over the past decade, and 60 percent of the projects were necessary because the campus is built on a fault line.

Without a medical campus and a large endowment, Berkeley was left to rely on state funding and fend for itself, Ms. Wallace said. Mr. Dirks “was very ill-equipped and very unwilling to grapple with our financial problems,” she said, “and was not familiar with a very heavily science-based campus.”

Mr. Dirks, a scholar of British colonialism and India, was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University before being named Berkeley’s chancellor in 2012.

In response to requests for an interview with Mr. Dirks, a Berkeley spokesman referred to the chancellor’s message to the campus on Tuesday.

Robert Powell, chair of Berkeley’s Academic Senate and a professor of political science, said many faculty members are still processing the reasons behind the chancellor’s resignation, but want to move past the controversies that have seemed to follow Mr. Dirks.

Among them, the chancellor has faced criticism over a $700,000 fence constructed around his residence, an “escape hatch” emergency exit planned for his office, and the revelation Wednesday that Berkeley had paid consultants more than $200,000 over a year to boost his profile.

But it is concerns about sexual harassment and financial management that largely weigh on faculty members’ minds as they contemplate a way forward for Berkeley.

‘Inadequate’ Communication

The resignation wasn’t a surprise to Celeste Langan, an associate professor of English and co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association. Many faculty members had lost confidence in Mr. Dirks, Ms. Langan said.

But she isn’t pleased with the way his departure has transpired. “We would’ve preferred it to be a public faculty discussion, and yet it seems to have happened through back-door channels,” she said. There had been talk of a no-confidence vote on Mr. Dirks in the Academic Senate, which would have required such deliberation, she said.

Berkeley has lessons to learn, she said, because in her view the past two chancellors have not been successful. “Something’s not working,” she said. “The problem that this resignation leaves us with is, How do we ensure it doesn’t happen again?”

Other professors said they didn’t like Mr. Dirks’s leadership style. “He’s aloof and disconnected from faculty and students, basically drifting from crisis to crisis without much substance,” Michael B. Eisen, a professor of genetics, wrote in an email.

Michael H. O’Hare, a professor of public policy, said Mr. Dirks isn’t the kind of chancellor who strolls around campus and interacts candidly with students, faculty, and staff. That impression of being closed-off was exacerbated by the $700,000 fence, Mr. O’Hare said.

“Living in a completely isolated house, technically on campus but that in fact might as well be on the moon, instead of a nice house in Berkeley with neighbors he could meet on the street walking his dog, is a tradition he should have ended immediately,” Mr. O’Hare said.

Many of the problems that have plagued Mr. Dirks’s tenure were inherited, Mr. O’Hare acknowledged. He cited “pockets around campus where various kinds of power abuse are tolerated, including but not limited to sexual abuse” and what the professor described as a poorly designed cost-cutting plan.

But Mr. Dirks hasn’t just been a victim of old issues, Mr. O’Hare said. Last fall, he said, he brought concerns about poor communication between the administration and the faculty directly to Mr. Dirks and Mr. Steele, the former provost. “Their input channels for knowing what was actually going on, and what the faculty and staff were experiencing and thought about it, were completely inadequate,” Mr. O’Hare said.

His efforts didn’t seem to pay off. He recalled mentioning at a faculty meeting that emails from Mr. Dirks often stated “do not reply to this message” at the end. “It was an applause line,” he said.

Daniel A. Farber, a law professor, said though many faculty members were unhappy with Mr. Dirks’s leadership, plenty of their problems stem from the leadership of the University of California system. Its president, Janet Napolitano, is a former politician who has served as governor of Arizona and U.S. secretary of homeland security.

“I think there’s a sense she still doesn’t really get higher education and that in particular she doesn’t really understand the needs of a research university like Berkeley,” Mr. Farber said.

Ms. Napolitano, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment for this article.

Still, it’s clear the university needs better leadership and help from the state legislature, something Mr. Dirks couldn’t deliver, Mr. Farber said. He hopes a new leader can change that.

After Mr. Dirks’s resignation — and the ouster of Linda P.B. Katehi last week as chancellor of UC-Davis — the University of California has to not only draw the right person to lead Berkeley, but someone who is not daunted by a system ridden with other challenges.

Ms. Wallace, of the real-estate and urban-economics center, said that given Mr. Dirks’s shortcomings, she hopes Berkeley hires a leader from inside the campus who understands what the university needs.

Still, even if Berkeley hires an ideal leader, that doesn’t solve the issues the campus has with the Office of the President, Ms. Wallace said. “All of us are basically tithing to the central administration,” she said.

Despite a tumultuous year, though, Mr. Powell, the senate chair, said he doesn’t think the system will have a tough time drawing strong applicants for the job.

The Marcy Factor

Some of the sharpest criticism directed at Mr. Dirks has concerned his handling of sexual-harassment complaints involving faculty members.

In the past year, four such cases have rocked Berkeley’s campus, with the most prominent one involving Geoffrey W. Marcy, an acclaimed astronomer. Mr. Marcy stepped down from the faculty last October after the university’s handling of the case became public: Berkeley found that he had repeatedly violated the sexual-misconduct policy but, as punishment, it only threatened him with sanctions.

In March, Sujit Choudhry, then dean of the law school, resigned his leadership position after harassment-policy violations were made public. That case brought about the departure of Mr. Steele, who received a law-school appointment at the same time as the investigation into the allegations against Mr. Choudhry. Mr. Steele eventually decided on the former dean’s punishment, which many saw as light — a one-year, 10-percent pay cut and a written apology to his accuser.

Mr. Dirks has stressed on several occasions that Berkeley officials were working diligently to improve the reporting and investigation processes for harassment complaints and to offer more prevention training for faculty members. He created a new staff position in March to oversee the changes.

But for some, Mr. Dirks’s promises fell flat.

“I’m happy he’s stepping down,” Mr. Eisen, the genetics professor, said. Last fall Mr. Eisen wrote a blog post with harsh words about Berkeley’s failure to impose serious sanctions on Mr. Marcy after finding the astronomer responsible for harassing female graduate students over a decade.

Mr. Dirks’s approach of coddling professors accused of poor behavior was deeply problematic, Mr. Eisen said on Wednesday. “He’s shown no real leadership on this issue or, frankly, on anything else.”

Kathleen Gutierrez, a graduate student at Berkeley who brought a harassment case against an assistant professor this year, said she saw Mr. Dirks’s failure to take faculty misconduct complaints seriously as part of a broader trend of administrative shortcomings at the university.

Still, she wrote in an email, his departure “does not mean a clean slate for the University of California and its gross mishandling of sexual-harassment complaints against tenured and tenure-track faculty members.”

“The campus has the opportunity to set the new norm” on how colleges handle professors who harass, she said. “I only hope that it is the new chancellor’s prerogative to see that this happens.”

Clarification (8/23/2016, 11:45 a.m.): A previous version of this article stated that Mr. Steele was seeking an appointment to the law school. He has denied that he ever sought the appointment, which he received but later resigned. The appointment was Mr. Dirks’s idea, the chancellor has said.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.