Chancellor Carol Christ told a group of UC Berkeley staff members on Friday that the school needs to do a better job of making them feel part of a community on campus.
Speaking to members of the Berkeley Staff Association during its annual “Chancellor’s Chat” forum, Christ laid out her plans to raise revenue, address a continued budget deficit, improve morale and better connect with the school’s 10,000 staff members.
“We couldn’t do what we do, we couldn’t serve our students, we couldn’t serve our faculty were it not for the extraordinary work you do,” Christ told the group of 50 staffers. “You are so smart, you are so imaginative, you are so inventive; I want to find better ways of harnessing all that extraordinary intelligence, loyalty and imagination.”
Christ compared Berkeley, with its 50,000 students, faculty and staff, to a small city. Everyone at Berkeley is connected to university, she said, but that isn’t always enough to make staff feel at home.
“In the cities, you tend you feel community more by your sense of connection to identity and mission rather than things that involve the whole city,” she said. “You think of New York as that ‘Big Apple,’ but you find your community in your neighborhood, and so I think we all need to get good at creating communities in our neighborhoods here, and finding that community of ‘we.’”
To that end, Christ said, the campus has hired an administrator whose sole job is improving staff morale, expanded employee appreciation week and begun investing in staff organizations. She also said the campus would focus on improving new-employee orientations and being transparent with staff about budget changes.
Christ also faced questions about budget cuts and low wages.
“When the ‘do more with less’ model expires, might the administration consider making doing ‘less with less’ our model?” asked David Kim, the director of administration in the Department of Anthropology.
“I believe very much in doing less with less,” Christ responded. “I don’t think that you can continually stress people with doing more with less.”