Looking back over 10 years: A Q&A retrospective with Jennifer Wolch

Jennifer Wolch— It is very clear that cities require interdisciplinary understanding as well as solutions that cross disciplinary boundaries. No one academic field has a lock on the answers. And in the real world teams are the norm. So one of my priorities has been to get more interaction among departments, as well as between the College and the rest of the campus.

Another priority has been to strengthen our focus on housing. The through lines of the College have always been around ecology and sustainability, economic development, and social justice issues, especially housing. Yet over time our strength in housing policy, housing design, and how housing fits into the landscape receded as faculty leaders in these areas retired.

It’s vital for the College to have an emphasis on housing, particularly given the housing crisis in California, in cities across the country, and in places around the world. So recruiting talented professors who are working on housing, and recruiting Carol Galante and supporting her launch of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, were key. We’re now rebuilding our strengths in housing design and architecture, and making sure we are mounting cross-disciplinary studios focused on housing.

JW —Because a city is a multidimensional object of study, a set of systems that shape people’s lives and opportunities, there is no one discipline that has all the insight. To solve problems, you need to have different voices and ways of collaborating. The departments in the College have always been happy to interact on an opportunistic basis, but such interaction wasn’t institutionalized. One of the reasons I wanted to create a major like sustainable environmental design was to have this kind of cross-disciplinary involvement. Similarly, the creation of introductory courses for all majors, taught by multidisciplinary teams, was a way to instill a broader intellectual scaffolding for the more focused work students do in their majors.

Many of programs that have been created in the last decade were designed to link the College with other parts of campus. We now have certificate programs and minors that involve collaborations with Engineering, Business, Arts and Humanities, Natural Resources, and Social Sciences. And the Mellon-funded Global Urban Humanities Initiative creates a strong linkage between CED and the Division of Arts and Humanities.

JW —Diversity is a priority for two reasons. First, we want the cadre of professionals going out into the world to mirror the population of California. But diversity is about more than representation. Diversity leads to new ways of approaching problems, modes of intervention, and speculating about alternative futures. Diversity is, fundamentally, about intellectual excellence.

We’ve gone a long way on the gender front, but not nearly as far as we need to in other aspects of inclusion and diversity. Diversity Platforms recognizes that diversity is not something that should be restricted to the classroom, but rather should be reflected, and indeed amplified, through co-curricular programs that create common spaces for discussion, debate, and dialogue. Diversity Platforms is one college-wide vehicle to support these types of vital programs.

I’ve also worked to increase diversity of the faculty, although that’s a slower process because the faculty stay in place for long periods of time and thus change comes incrementally. That said, we have made particular progress in recent years attracting Latinx faculty.

Our undergraduate student population is extremely diverse — 41% of our students are first generation; over 40% of our students are low income; we have higher shares of both international students and underrepresented minority students compared with the rest of campus. We clearly can do more, but we also have to ensure that we have the services students need to succeed.

At the graduate level, achieving diversity goals is much harder because our peer programs are mostly private institutions and are able to provide far more financial support to masters and doctoral students of color. But every program in the College tries its utmost to expand graduate student diversity populations.

The College now has both undergraduate and graduate diversity officers, who help guide efforts to support students of diverse backgrounds. We also created two cadres of Admissions Ambassadors – one undergraduate, one graduate. The Ambassadors are students who help recruit and communicate with prospective students about the College and what the climate is like for students from underrepresented populations.

Luckily we also have the CED Students of Color organization, partnering with us – and also pushing us – to do more!

JW —There have been three different challenges. First, protecting and enhancing academic quality is essential, and the main way to do this is to hire outstanding faculty at the cutting edges of their fields. For example, 10 years ago, our landscape architecture programs had not fully incorporated digital tools into the curriculum. However, successive Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning department chairs have been able to make curricular changes and hire new faculty in this area, and now we have students producing fabulous award-winning work with digital media. It’s my job to provide support for those kinds of broad changes.

Just having enough faculty is also part of this challenge. Last year, the architecture department lost 4.5 full-time faculty due to retirements. Also, for various reasons, City & Regional Planning’s faculty numbers fell. My focus has been to convince upper administration to allocate faculty positions to the College, help persuade prospective faculty to join us, and also support the departments as they try to adapt to shifts in numbers and resources.

The second big challenge is simply the financial situation of the College. We’ve always been a very lean organization. With repeated and often major budget cuts over the last decade, I was faced with a choice – cut expenses (mostly staff), or generate revenue. Not surprisingly, I’ve always opted to try to generate revenue. There is no one silver bullet here. So we have developed a diversified approach, including summer programs, self-supporting degree programs — like the new Master of Real Estate Development + Design (MRED+D) – executive education, and more. These initiatives have allowed us to maintain quality, recruit strong cohorts of students, and do so without compromising staff support or academic program quality.

Expanding philanthropic giving to CED has also been a big part of maintaining academic quality. During the last decade, we added four new endowed faculty chairs, matched by a challenge grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. That was a big move forward at a tough time and was especially important for a college like CED which had so few endowed chairs. Attracting future revenue for individual initiatives is crucial. But we rely on our generous and committed contributors to the CED Annual Fund to help support the College’s aspirations and wide range of needs.

The third challenge is about operations. Historically, departments managed a lot of their own functions (finance, HR, etc.), and under budgetary pressure, had made a series of successive budget and staff cuts. But in the onset of the Great Recession, in a relatively small college facing very substantial cuts, this no longer made sense. So I centralized undergraduate advising, creating one of the most innovative and admired advising units on campus.  We also centralized finance, HR, and building operations, and created an infrastructure and information technology (IIT) unit encompassing AV/IT, the Fabrication Shop and Digital Fabrication Lab, and more. As a result, the College is able to provide a broader range of support services and provide them more effectively.

Lastly, we need Wurster Hall to work! For me—especially since I’m not an architect—it was both a challenge and a lot of fun to understand how the building works and doesn’t work. It was opened in 1964 and like many mid-century buildings, it needs maintenance attention and needs to adapt as needs change. A full-on renovation of the building would take many millions, but nonetheless, we have been able to make significant improvements. Over the past decade, in partnership with many CED donors and well as our departments, we created Wurster Gallery; built the Digital Fabrication Lab and made major upgrades to the Fabrication Shop; refurbished the auditorium and installed a state-of-the-art sound system; redesigned the architecture department office and created the undergraduate student advising office; created the 2^ndfloor student hub; redesigned the 7^thfloor studio; renovated two large ground floor classrooms as well as three large 4^thfloor south studios; created the MRED+D program office; built the Ong & Ong Plaza and helped our Slanted Door partner, Charles Phan, open Rice & Bones Cafe.

JW —At the outset, I need to say that any and all of CED’s accomplishments over the past decade are the result of an academic community working together. Nothing happens without the incredible dedication of faculty and staff and students. That is the bottom line. It is a team effort. The dean can facilitate things and have some ideas, but a lot of the innovation comes from alumni and members of the college community. It’s not just one person with a baton and an orchestra following along. Thus I’m proud of what the entire CED community has accomplished.

I’m proud that the College has built a reputation on campus for being bold, innovative, and taking risks in order to maintain its quality. That approach has been essential for advancing the College, keeping up morale, and not incidentally, paying the bills!

I’m proud that CED has been able to launch a variety of successful new academic programs, from certificates to majors to graduate degree programs – often in collaboration with other units and faculty from across campus.

I’m proud that Wurster Hall has been kept in reasonably good repair and that we’ve been able to make important renovations and additions designed to improve teaching, learning, and work environments for students, faculty, and staff.

I’m proud of how CED now presents itself to the world. The College now has a dynamic, content-rich website, an updated eNews, an internal college community newsletter (Inside CED), a revamped Frameworks, and WursterLife — a whole new platform for community interaction.

Lastly, I’m proud that the College community has engaged a widening circle of alumni. Nine years ago we started the Circus. At this year’s Circus, many alumni said to me, “I feel so connected to this college, in a way that I haven’t felt for years.” That’s what community building can do — and by building a strong intergenerational community, the College will succeed over the long term.

JW —What a lot of people don’t recognize is the extent to which we punch above our weight!

JW —In the summer I’ll start a sabbatical. I’ll be doing research in India. And then there are courses I’d like to teach when I return.

JW —What I’ve found really amazing — especially when we give out distinguished alumni awards — are the incredible things that people trained here have gone on to do, and the fact that UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design gave them a start.

It speaks to the inherent value of the education that CED provides, and how the original through lines of the College and its values — issues of environment, social justice and economic vibrancy — have remained remarkably steady. On the one hand, no institution should be static, but having bedrock values is also important. I think we have these values and can be proud of that.

JW —I have to thank the Chancellor and the Provost that appointed me. In doing so, they also invested in the College in ways that allowed me as dean, and the College as an academic unit, to weather a turbulent decade and prepare for a future in which state funding does not fully support UC’s academic mission. For that, I am very grateful.