My, How Dorm Life Has Changed

 Everyone who lives in the Bay Area knows that U.C. Berkeley doesn't have enough dorm space for its enrolled students.  They especially know this in Berkeley, and parts of north Oakland, where all the students are looking for someplace to live.  

August 21, 2024 was move-in day at Helen Diller Anchor House, a new dorm for transfer students.  The S.F. Chronicle wrote up the event - on that date, but good luck finding the article, sadly, it's behind a paywall.  The dorm, which cost $300 million, is 14 stories, 3 blocks from BART, across the street from campus, and will house 772 students.  The "dorm rooms" have:  full kitchens, with dishwashers and stacked washer/dryers.  Of course, they cost $2,000 a month; but the building includes an indoor/outdoor fitness center and yoga studio and a rooftop vegetable garden.  $2,000 is about what a small apartment costs today in Berkeley anyhow, and the fee includes an off-site meal plan if you'd rather not cook.

Now the voice from the past.  I attended Berkeley in the middle 60s ('63 to '68 including my master's degree) and I was a "dormie" for the first 3 years.  And boy, have dorms changed.

I lived in Peixotto Hall, which was part of the Smyth-Fernwald dorms.  These dorms were built for student housing immediately after World War II, and were recently demolished after some years as married student housing.  When I lived there, starting in fall 1963, it had 2 women's dorms (I can't recall the name of the other) and a larger men's dorm, which was either called "Smyth" or "Smyth-Fernwald."  I remember a single dorm as a long, one-story building with student rooms (2 students each) on either side of a central hallway.  The whole setup, including a central dining hall and kitchen (separate building), was about as far from campus as you could get - it was at the extreme top of Dwight Way!  I believe I recall bus service down to campus, but I also remember an awful lot of walking down hill, and then walking back up!  Google Maps says it was .9 miles one way to where Telegraph hits the campus.

What was my dorm room like?  Well, it didn't have a kitchen - in fact, it didn't have a bathroom.  It had 2 single beds, 2 student desks, and some closet space.  The bathroom, with showers, was down the hall.  This led to the occasional women's dorm call of "Man on the floor!" when a relative or a repairman had to come in for some reason.  And we ate in the central dining hall, unless we decided to go out and forage on our own.  But the dining hall was where the free food was, and we were a long way up the hill from anything resembling a restaurant, or even a fast food joint.

And nobody had a stacked washer/dryer!  If you wanted your laundry done, you either went and found a laundromat, or you took the laundry home to mama, if mama lived close enough.

It was a rather limited living arrangement.  On the other hand, it didn't cost $2,000 a month.  Frankly, I don't think I ever knew what it cost to live in the dorm; my folks paid it.  I didn't get into living costs until my senior year, when I moved into an apartment with 2 other women on North Side.  At which point I learned the joys of running into your roommate's boyfriend at 3 AM - but that's another post.

If you lived in the Smyth-Fernwald dorms in the '60s and remember stuff I've forgotten, I'm interested to hear it.

We're Going to Sue

Anyone living in California probably knows about the latest flap with the University of California, the 36 highly paid executives who claim they're going to sue the University if they have to retire on a mere $183,750 a year.  For the uninformed, here's the link to the original article.

I'm a U.C. Berkeley alumna, a life member of the alumni association, and I've been donating money to various university related causes most of my working life.  A few years ago, though, I quit donating to the University directly.  This was about the time we started hearing jointly about University executive salaries above $400K, and tuition increases.  (Are you listening, Mr. Yudof?  It was about the time you came on board, and your salary was the trigger.)

I now donate only to the University Library fund (directly) and to the Alumni Association.  A letter writer to the editor in the S.F. Chronicle the other day said she was going to quit donating to the Alumni Association over this flap, but she's got it wrong - the Alumni Association has nothing to do with what University execs get paid.  But this incident has confirmed my conviction that the University (as opposed to the university library) will not get One Dime of my money as long as it has people like these executives running it. 

I understand that there is or may be a contractual issue here, and frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.  These people have completely forgotten - as has the California Legislature - what the University of California was supposed to be about.  It was supposed to be about educating the children of California - NOT educating the children of California who can afford to pay $12,150 per year in tuition and campus fees.  Those kids were supposed to go to Stanford.

The argument for these absurd pension demands - indeed, the argument for the absurd salaries - is that "without higher pensions, U.C. could lose good people."  Baloney.  Horsepucky.  If the Regents chose to fire these prima donnas and advertise their jobs at salaries of $250K with comparable pension, they would be buried under a stampede of intelligent, competent, imaginative and capable people dying to get the jobs.  Especially if they limited the offer to people resident in California for at least 2 years.  University Regent Dick Blum described the litigants as "some of the University's most valuable employees."  More baloney.  These people are department heads - they are meeting attenders and paper pushers whose teaching duties, if any, are secondary.  The university's most valuable employees are the faculty and library staff who teach and support the students.

What really fried my bacon was this insistence that $187,750 a year is not an adequate pension.  Ladies and gentlemen, I retired  3 years ago, taking a lump-sum pension (that is, the entire present value of my pension) which didn't even approach that amount.  My husband is still working, but when he retires he'll get a pension that doesn't even approach that amount, and yet we expect to live very comfortably in retirement.  If you require $300,000 per year to live on in retirement, you need some training in money management, not to mention common sense.

This demand is pure extortion.  Pay us, and let the janitors and department secretaries starve in the gutter when they retire, or we'll sue you.  The University should fire these people and hire competent replacements at half their salaries.  I'm betting that the University would be at least as well managed as it is today.  Of course, that's a very low standard to beat. 

In Matier & Ross' column on Monday, Regent Blum was asked what the Regents would do if the Legislature failed to restore the $450 million it pulled out of U.C.'s budget in 2010.  Mr. Blum's response?  "Try to run the place more efficiently."

Mr. Blum - WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?