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A new look for athletics
Two high-powered newcomers shared the podium September 15 when incoming Chancellor Robert Birgeneau told a press conference that “Berkeley has the best faculty and students, so we want the best athletic director, too,” and then introduced Anne “Sandy” Barbour--the first woman athletic director at Cal and one of only eight in Division I schools nationwide. Perhaps an even higher power also stood in the room: football coach Jeff Tedford, who has kicked the entire athletic program up a few notches with his team’s success on the field. An extraordinary 58,000 fans set an opening-day attendance record when they came to the Golden Bears’ first home game this season.
Thus an early question for Sandy Barbour: “Can you raise the money to renovate Memorial Stadium?”--a project that must happen in order to keep Tedford on the job. “That is an absolute priority,” Barbour said. “We’re committed to getting it done.” She added that fundraising is about relationships and said, “I’m very much a relationship person. I have great confidence not only in my abilities but also in the people who support Cal.”
 Barbour was hired away from Notre Dame, where she served as deputy director of athletics; before going to South Bend in 2000, she was athletic director for three years at Tulane, where her teams won 12 conference championships.
The daughter and granddaughter of career Naval officers, Barbour was born on December 2, 1959 in Annapolis, Maryland and lived in various U.S. locations as well as in Western Europe during her childhood. She graduated with honors in physical education from Wake Forest University, where she was a four-year letter winner and captain of the field hockey team; she also played two seasons of varsity women’s basketball. She earned advanced degrees at the University of Massachusetts (an M.S. in sports management in 1983) and Northwestern (an MBA in 1991).
Barbour succeeds outgoing athletic director Steve Gladstone, who will return to coaching the Cal rowing teams full time, after three years in the director’s chair. She will oversee a program that fields 27 sports with a budget of about $40 million, and says, after serving at Notre Dame, that she is well aware of both alumni pressure and alumni support. “It’s about passion,” she told the Monthly. “Clearly, Notre Dame alumni have great passion about their institution, and athletics is part of that. I’ve been at Cal for only a couple of weeks, and I can tell you that I feel an awful lot of passion about Cal and Cal athletics.”
Barbour added: “As I tell our students and our student athletes: this is your University. For alumni, this is their University too. And I want to let alumni know that we’re going to build and maintain an athletic program that they’ll be proud to call their own.”
--Russell Schoch
 Star bright: Berkeley astronmer Alex Filippenko used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to photograph this exploding star in a galazy 11 million light years away. The supernova, first seen by an amateur astronomer in Japan, is the nearest and brightest is a decade, exploding with a blaze equivalent to the light of 200 suns. “There are probably hundreds of other stars in the cluster ready to blow up, though not in our lifetime,” said Filippenko.
Thinking outside the academy
On the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, some faculty and students are again urging the campus into a more active role in contemporary social and political issues. Early in the semester, the University’s Human Rights Center--working with a Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group called Free the Slaves--issued an alarming report on modern-day slavery in the United States. There are at least 10,000 forced laborers here, it says, most of them immigrants working on farms, in restaurants, as domestic servants, or as prostitutes. Employers use threats of deportation and violence, as well as fraud, to control these unpaid workers from countries such as China, Mexico, and Vietnam. Researchers Eric Stover and Laurel Fletcher advocate vigorous government action to protect the victims.
Sociology Professor Michael Burawoy wants colleagues in his field, and other academic researchers, to engage in similarly relevant policy advocacy. He calls his program “public sociology,” and wrote recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “academics are living in a fool’s paradise if they think they can hold on to their ivory tower, fashioned for another era, another world.” Burawoy has struck a resonant chord: The recent American Sociological Association meeting in San Francisco, organized around the public sociology theme, broke previous attendance records with more than 5,500 participants.
Conference presentations addressed everything from terrorism to gay marriage, but one struck uncomfortably close to home. In a study entitled “Berkeley’s Betrayal,” a group of sociology graduate students reported that many University custodians and food-service and clerical workers make too little money to afford basic family expenses. The survey of 63 employees also reported complaints of unsafe working conditions and arrogant supervision. Sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickeled and Dimed in America and a keynote speaker at the conference, helped supervise the report and wrote its introduction while a teaching fellow here. She writes that a “movement to improve the lives and working conditions of campus employees must be part of a larger campaign to guarantee the resources for higher education in general.” University officials countered that the survey offered only a narrow view of its employees, ignored Berkeley’s benefit package, and was biased by the pro-labor slant of the researchers.
Speaking at the ASA conference in August, Burawoy suggested his own discipline could take its cue from economists, whose work is widely employed in public policy decisions. A month later, Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong, together with Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz and others, launched The Economists’ Voice, a journal devoted to economic perspectives on key policy issues. The first issue included an article by Stiglitz on the right and wrong kinds of deficits, and one by DeLong reconsidering his earlier opposition to controls on international capital. Like other academics active in political issues, DeLong says that he’s “trying to get a debate going.”
--Kerry Tremain
 | NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao ’83 began a six-month stay at the International Space Station in October. |
The World Bank appointed professor Paul J. Gertler as chief economist in its Human Development Network. |  |
 | Assistant professor of history Maria Mavroudi, who studies Byzantine-Arab cultural relations in the 10th century, received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. |
Five Berkeley researchers--Stuart D. Bale, Michael Eisen, Kara Nelson, Kimmen Sjölander, and Brian Wirth--were given the President’s Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. |  |
 | Former public health school dean Edward Penhoet is the new director of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in San Francisco. |
In September, emeritus professor Oliver Williamson was awarded Germany’s top award in economics, the H.C. Recktenwald Prize. |  |
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November 2004
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