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On Sept. 10 UC Berkeley received the largest private gift in its history, $113 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The gift will provide endowment support to help Berkeley compete with elite private schools in attracting top faculty and graduate student talent, according to UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. Specifically, the $113 million matching gift will result in $220 million in new endowments once the challenge grant is met. Altogether, these funds will create 100 endowed chairs to keep professors' salaries competitive and better recruit graduate students. "This gift is an extraordinary vote of confidence in the contribution that UC Berkeley and all great public universities make to society," said Birgeneau." ...

George Blumenthal, a UC Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysics and former chair of the UC systemwide Academic Senate, was appointed chancellor of the UC Santa Cruz campus on Sept. 19 during the board's meeting in Davis. The selection culminates a five-month, nationwide search that attracted more than 550 prospective candidates. Blumenthal has been serving as acting chancellor for the past 14 months, following the death in June 2006 of Chancellor Denice Denton. Blumenthal, 61, has been a UC Santa Cruz faculty member since 1972 whose subject of research is theoretical astrophysics. He is one of the first generation in his family to attend college, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a doctorate from UC San Diego. Blumental is the co-author of one of the most popular astronomy college textbooks, 21st Century Astronomy. ...

Those in charge at Columbia University in New York came under a lot of criticism in recent weeks for inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus. But when the moment came, Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia, introduced Ahmadinejad by saying that he "exhibited all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." Bollinger went on to say that Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust makes him either "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," and he recounted some of the lowlights of Iran's human rights record, including its execution of minors. In response, Ahmadinejad questioned the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks, defended his rejection of the Holocaust, and claimed "we have no homosexuals in Iran." ...

UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake told the Los Angeles Times that he "bungled" last week in withdrawing an offer to Duke university law professor Erwin Chemerinsky to be dean of the campus's new law school. Though he would not discuss why he rescinded the offer to Chemerinsky — citing personnel matters — Drake did express regret for how he handled it, and maintained he did not receive pressure from the UC Board of Regents or anyone else. "This is certainly something that I bungled, and I regret it completely and totally," Drake told the Times. "I am always trying to do what I can to enhance the institution and have it move forward. It's awful that all this has blown up like this. I couldn't regret it more." ...

Rory Hume, the UC's chief operating officer, gave the thumbs up last week to establish a UC-wide school on global health issues. His decision comes in the wake of a UC committee that recommended the university should develop a systemwide global health initiative, and that the best administrative structure for the initiative would be a multi-campus, semi-virtual one. The working name is the School of Global Health Sciences.

"The challenges of fitting a degree granting academic program into our multi-campus structure will be considerable," wrote Hume in an e-mail to UC chancellors, "and will call for creative thinking and flexibility, However, an effort of this kind, bringing together the unequalled expertise that exists across our campuses, has the potential to enable UC to develop scholarship, service and education in ways that we have not previously imagined." Former UC San Francisco chancellor Haile Debas will lead the effort.

— Clifton B. Parker

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