A brawl with a bear on cocaine.
That’s how one faculty member of UC Berkeley described the current political moment in front of a packed emergency town hall staged by the school’s Academic Senate on Tuesday. The bear in the analogy is the Trump administration; the cocaine is its fiendish appetite for punishing academic institutions. And the brawl? That’s what’s facing UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons, who has been on the job all of eight months and who clearly didn’t sign up for this.
At the 90-minute town hall, which was closed to the press but recounted to The Standard by several sources who attended, Lyons was persistently, if respectfully, grilled by faculty members. Many worried they were facing an existential threat to their research — and their livelihoods.
“I now find myself thinking, ‘Do we have any money?,’ or are we coming to work each day to find out if we’re out on the street?” said one researcher, who requested to remain anonymous. “I haven’t seen or heard of anything about a plan to avoid that.”
If implemented by the Trump administration — as it has already done at Columbia and Princeton — federal cuts could financially devastate UC Berkeley, which receives more than $400 million from the U.S. government, half of its operating budget. As Chancellor, Lyons has yet to publicly address any specific actions the university intends to take to ensure that it can survive such cuts. Nor has he outlined a plan to address other politically driven attacks on its operations and culture.
That left some attendees Tuesday wondering if Lyons is the kind of wartime leader Berkeley needs. Despite some faculty members saying they appreciated the chancellor’s willingness to take their questions at the town hall, not all were optimistic about his ability to win this particular bear fight.
“Lyons seems to be completely out of his depth and ill-equipped to deal with what’s about to happen,” said one longtime faculty member.
Claudia Polsky, a clinical professor of law and the founding director of UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic, left the town hall feeling reassured that administrators are “in minute-to-minute conversations with regents and the UC president to figure out how to respond, how to not to capitulate,” she said.
“The overall sentiment Lyons expressed was to the effect of, I know I haven’t been here long enough to have earned your trust, and I know it’s a big leap to put trust in me, but I need you to know that just because you’re not seeing much that looks like action, it doesn’t mean action isn’t happening,” she added.
‘We’re seeing around the country that administrators are weaker than their faculty. So it’s on us, because the option of appeasement is naive.’
UC Berkeley faculty member
Other people present said Lyons and another speaker, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin, told faculty the school should “stand tall” and has license to “poke the bear,” but it should be strategic about what battles it chooses to fight. That led to the cocaine-bear riposte, which was met with heavy applause.
Another questioner drew a sustained round of applause after urging Lyons and other administrators to push back on a separate proposed budget cut at the state level, which could reduce annual funding of the entire UC system by 8%, or almost $300 million. The state should be showing “solidarity” with its university system, the person said. Lyons said administrators are indeed having those conversations with state representatives.
Nevertheless, there was not much relief that came from the meeting. The administrators insisted that the financial situation is not as bad as the one the school endured after the 2008 Great Recession, when it was also hit with deep funding cuts. That claim “felt hard to believe,” according to one attendee.
“The feeling is: It is inevitable; everyone knows it’s coming,” James Vernon, a distinguished professor of history, said of federal funding cuts. “It’s a tsunami. Lyons is not going to be able to fill that hole.”
‘He’s ours’
When Lyons took up the role of chancellor last summer, it was to fanfare and praise. Even typically wary Berkeley faculty were open to the ascension of Lyons, who had previously run the Haas School of Business (with a prior pre-Great Recession stint at Goldman Sachs) and is the first chancellor in the school’s 157-year history to have graduated from the institution he now runs.
“I do have trust in him because he’s ours, he was an undergrad,” said Bill Drummond, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism and a faculty member for more than 40 years. Drummond said Lyons was instrumental a decade ago in getting the San Quentin News project off the ground, by pulling some of his business-school colleagues together to draft a financial plan. “My conviction is that he’s a very capable guy,” he said.
Lyons is certainly a capable fundraiser. He is credited with bringing $350 million to the Haas School of Business and was well-liked in that academic circle. In 2020, he created the Changemaker program, a certificate students can earn to develop their biggest ideas for changing the world. He’s known to perform entire sets of original music, playing guitar and singing, at school events.
“For a person who’s worked on Wall Street and then as dean of a business school, he’s probably one of the most progressive, permissive people you can find with that background,” said one faculty member.
Those characteristics, however, may not ingratiate him to a U.S. president who wants to undermine the very existence of universities like UC Berkeley. Should federal cuts come to pass, most of Berkeley’s research institutions and labs could close overnight, say faculty members.
Even before Trump returned to the White House, Lyons knew UC Berkeley needed to be on better financial footing. When he was a student in the 1980s, California funded roughly 50% of UC Berkeley’s costs. Today it covers about 10%, and the state’s latest budget proposal will lower that further. Lyons said in media interviews at the time of his appointment that he wanted to drive more revenue through a new venture capital fund; negotiate more ownership stakes in companies that use intellectual property developed at the school; and increase fundraising and philanthropic giving. He said such activity could generate $100 million for the school in 10 years.
That won’t be nearly enough to cover the state and federal cuts coming his way. Lyons and Hermalin reportedly said at the town hall that in order to help on those fronts, they are bullish on the idea of further engagement with leaders of the business community, given how much they hire from Berkeley and rely on its intellectual property.
That turned into a brief conversation about how the school may need to “reframe quintessential Berkeley values” — in other words, change the way the university talks about itself. The school’s stated principles include “excellence in diversity,” “free speech,” and “equitable access.” The administrators suggested that to appeal to business leaders, UC Berkeley should focus more on economic competitiveness, as well as national security — themes that have taken root among students at the school’s longtime rival, Stanford.
Lyons declined multiple interview requests from The Standard through press representative Dan Mogulof, who said the chancellor was “complying with guidance from the president of the university” and directed any questions to the office of UC President Michael V. Drake. Drake’s office did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Some faculty members, however, made it clear that it’s not actually up to the chancellor to decide Berkeley’s future. “It’s on us to push him to do the right thing,” one longtime member said. “We’re seeing around the country that administrators are weaker than their faculty. So it’s on us, because the option of appeasement is naive.”
“Faculty here have never been quite as radical as people may think, but they are very committed to their own individual work,” said another faculty member. “People see what’s happening now as a fundamental risk to their work.”
At least 400 faculty members and supporters gathered on campus two weeks ago for the “Rally to Defend Our University.” There is another action planned for April 17, said Polsky, who is hoping to get 5,000 people to attend.
“We’re dealing with attacks coming in days and hours, not weeks and months,” the law professor said. “Faculty is trying to design strategies quickly that put us on the offense, not waiting for the closure of labs, the abduction of students, and then reacting.”
Polsky wants UC Berkeley to “write the playbook” on how to fight and win against Trump. She even has a term for what she’s seeing: “fast fascism.” Whether Lyons and other administrators have the reflexes to contend with that blitzkrieg is the question that looms over all of campus.