March 2012

Welcome...

from John Wilton, Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance

This has been a year of significant campus wide reforms designed to increase efficiency and raise revenue. The ultimate goal is simple: free up more of our limited resources to spend on teaching and research, and place Berkeley on a sustainable long term financial footing.

I have spent much of my first year listening and learning about Berkeley's culture and about how things are really done. But it has also been a year where we have begun to implement a number of important initiatives. With Operational Excellence, we moved ahead with several large-scale projects (including BearBuy, CalPlanning, Energy Management, and Shared Services) that touch every corner of campus. We also made great strides in fundamentally changing the way we think about budgets and financial planning. We are moving away from an incremental approach based on permanent/temporary budgets towards a more comprehensive approach that allows us to measure ourselves on a quarterly basis relative to an all-funds budget within a multi-year framework. We also began to shift our strategic thinking away from an exclusive focus on cost cutting and towards an equal emphasis on growing revenue. I believe that investing in Berkeley to enable it to grow is key if we are to maintain access and excellence. In this regard, we have identified several opportunities that we will pursue in close collaboration with other campus leaders. More on that as we develop strong and specific business cases.

Outreach has also been a priority for me. The need to do this originates from the simple observation that there is a lot of misinformation out there and we have traditionally been in reactive mode. I have spoken at conferences and to alumni, students, parents, faculty, staff, etc. My intention is to provide a candid assessment of where we are and outline where we are heading. I hope that I have managed to reach many of you; either personally or through the videos we made for the new Sproul Plaza app on Berkeley's Facebook page. Both the original Budget Primer video and the consequent response videos can be seen on the UC Berkeley NewsCenter. This was an experiment that we undertook as a response to suggestions that came from my newly formed Student Advisory Group. If you haven't already, please take a look and post your comments or questions. I want to hear from everyone.

Lastly, while we have had some early successes, the one thing I am sure about is that we will make mistakes and encounter some failures. This is inevitable, given the change agenda we have set ourselves. But we have to be able to acknowledge these mistakes, learn from them and adapt. The bigger failure would be not trying – we should not rest on our Laureates.

— John Wilton