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UC Berkeley 2013 — the year in pictures
December 19, 2013
Even by the standards of UC Berkeley, 2013 was a banner year. The campus installed its 10th chancellor, historian and anthropologist Nicholas Dirks, and celebrated its 22nd Nobel Prize winner, Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology. And the Berkeley campus, in turn, was celebrated at film festivals and theaters around the world, as famed director Frederick Wiseman released his long-awaited four-hour, four-minute documentary At Berkeley, set to air on PBS stations on Jan. 13, 2014. It was also, notably, a year that saw the campus emerging from a period of state cutbacks — a slice of which figures vividly in At Berkeley — with its reputation for world-changing research and academic excellence unscathed.
As Wiseman has said, even a four-hour film can only scratch the surface of the richness of life at UC Berkeley. With that in mind, here’s a modest pictorial glance back at the campus in 2013, month by month.
“A lot of people think that the real function of documentary film is to show bad people doing evil things,” Wiseman said after a screening at the Pacific Film Archive Theater. “I think it’s equally important to show people of goodwill and intelligence doing good things.” And while he shot the film in 2010, his return to campus provided a unique — and aptly reflective — window on Berkeley 2013.
Finally, after three years of waiting, the campus got a look at At Berkeley,
four hours and four minutes in the life of UC Berkeley, as seen by legendary director Fred Wiseman (here, at left, with Berkeley professor and documentarian Jon Else).
It was standing-room-only at December’s launch of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, part of an ambitious, three-university project to support faculty, researchers and students in their efforts to mine information in areas as diverse as astronomy and economics, genetics and demography.
Here, Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, meets Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Kathryn Huff.
... followed by the formal investiture, a grand show brimming with pomp, ceremony and speechmaking, in Zellerbach Auditorium.
On Inauguration Day, Friday, Nov. 8, Chancellor Dirks made an informal appearance at a rally of hundreds of well-wishers on Sproul Plaza...
Also in October, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer — pictured here, at right, with Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman — announced a new Center for Jewish Studies. The center, he said, “builds upon UC Berkeley’s long tradition of leadership in the study of Jewish literature, history and rabbinics.”
During a visit that was equal parts inspiration and information, students at Richmond High learned — from a campus contingent led by Chancellor Dirks — that higher education is within their reach."It's not a dream that you have to think of as unrealizable,” Dirks told some 150 enthusiastic junior and seniors. “You can get there. You can do this. And we know you will.”
Schekman got the news around 1:30 the morning of Oct. 7, after his wife, Nancy Walls, took the call from Stockholm. Hours later, the brand new Nobelist received a very public call from UC President Janet Napolitano, as the chancellor (and others) looked on.
In yet another Berkeley tradition that never gets old, Randy Schekman, professor of molecular and cell biology, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in revealing the machinery that regulates the transport and secretion of proteins in our cells. He's Berkeley’s 22nd Nobel Laureate, and the first to receive the prize in the area of physiology or medicine.
Berkeley’s “On the Same Page” program this year featured Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by one-time Berkeley undergrad George Dyson. The author made several appearances on campus, the highlight of which was his keynote in Wheeler Auditorium — where he was briefly backdropped by a 32-by-32 array of charged spots, the digital universe as it existed in 1953.
Dirks, looking ahead to his first semester as Berkeley's chancellor, stressed his commitment to preserving the public nature of the campus's mission, and to enhancing the undergraduate student experience. He's seen here, with Vice Provost Catherine Koshland, listening to a reporter's question.
September brought both the first full week of classes and a more recent tradition, the chancellor's back-to-school briefing.
How do you lead the life of a "normal" 18-year-old student when you're one of the most renowned swimmers in the world? Freshman Missy Franklin — who'd moved into her Berkeley residential hall just days before — appeared at a news conference with coach Teri McKeever to ask for some time and space to find out.
August means Move-In Weekend, a longstanding Berkeley tradition and another first for the new chancellor.
The former site of Eshleman, as seen from Bancroft Way. (That's the MLK Jr. Student Union in the background.)
Summer 2013 was a time of construction, renovation and — in the case of Lower Sproul Plaza's Eshleman Hall — demolition.
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two landmark decisions supporting same-sex marriage the morning of June 26. By lunchtime, members of LavenderCal — UC Berkeley LGBT employees and allies — had gathered on the Sproul steps to celebrate.
UC Berkeley's 10th chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, officially took office on June 1, a day that included an informal meeting with staff in California Hall. In truth, Dirks, confirmed by the UC regents in November 2012, had been working on the transition ever since.
Robert Birgeneau, who stepped down as chancellor after more than eight years in California Hall, told the Class of 2013 their ceremony was "my graduation as well as yours." Just the same, he and his wife, Mary Catherine, got their own farewell celebration in May on the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Plaza, just outside the stadium.
On a joyful day, a joyful noise.
Delivering the keynote at May's Commencement Convocation was Steve Wozniak, who dropped out of Berkeley in 1971, co-founded Apple Computer in '76, and returned for his bachelor's a decade later. His values were shaped at Berkeley, "the Woz" told a crowd of 21,000 at Memorial Stadium, where "a lot of intellectuals on this campus stood up for human values and human rights."
... and you didn't even have to be a Bear, as the campus's lecture halls and research labs, museums and libraries, galleries and gardens were open to all.
On Cal Day 2013, some 40,000 members of the general public renewed their identification with UC Berkeley...
These Bears fans, gearing up for a possible future as part of the Class of '32, were among the hundreds who turned out at Haas Pavilion for the team's sendoff to New Orleans.
In a year when all the Cal sporting news wasn't great — the football Bears, for instance, would finish the season with work to do both on and off the gridiron — the women's basketball team, led by head coach Lindsay Gottlieb, made its first appearance in the NCAA Final Four.
Terrence Park, a Berkeley senior and president of the campus's math club, showed the depth of his support for a federal Dream Act in March, when he came out via an online video as an undocumented student. Then-Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, a staunch advocate for so-called Dreamers, hailed the South Korean-born Park's move as "courageous."
Demonstrating again why having a great public university is good for the state's health, a yearlong collaboration of policy experts — including several from UC Berkeley — unveiled a detailed roadmap to improving care and outcomes for California's residents. The plan would also save the state an estimated $110 billion — about $800 per household annually — over the next decade.
For anyone wondering if Berkeley's reputation for excellence had survived years of belt-tightening, the answer arrived in January, when UC released freshman and transfer application numbers for the 2013-14 academic year. A record 67,000 students applied for enrollment to Berkeley, an increase of nearly 10 percent over the previous application period.