From Conservapedia

University of California - Berkeley City: Berkeley, California Type: Public Sports: baseball, basketball, crew, cross country, football, curling, field hockey, gold, gymnastics, lacrosse, rugby, soccer, swimming, softball, track and field, volleyball, water polo, tennis Colors: Yale Blue and Golden Yellow Mascot: Golden Bears Degrees: Bachelor's, Master's, Doctoral[1] Website: http://www.berkeley.edu/

The University of California, Berkeley (also referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, or simply Cal), is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, on the hills above the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. Berkeley was established in 1868 through the merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland, and Berkeley is the oldest institution in the UC system. UC Berkeley is the head campus of the University of California system. This UC educational system has been criticized as liberally biased and as such resembling "a sanctuary for a narrow ideological segment of the spectrum of social and political ideas" that does not help students learn how to think, but rather teaches them what to think.[2]

Berkeley has 1,580 full-time and 597 part-time faculty members dispersed among more than 350 degree programs. The student-to-faculty ratio is 17 to 1.[3]

History

The roots of the University of California go back to the gold rush days of 1849, when the drafters of the State Constitution, a group of vigorous and farsighted people, required the legislature to "encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral and agricultural improvement" of the people of California. These early planners dreamed of a university which eventually, "if properly organized and conducted, would contribute even more than California's gold to the glory and happiness of advancing generations."

In the 1930s research on campus burgeoned in nuclear physics, chemistry, and biology, leading to the development of the first cyclotron by Ernest O. Lawrence, the isolation of the human polio virus, and the discovery of a string of elements heavier than uranium. Twenty members of the Berkeley faculty have been awarded Nobel Prizes for these and subsequent discoveries, as well as in literature and economics, for liberal arts kept pace with physical sciences. In 1966 Berkeley was recognized by the American Council on Education as "the best balanced distinguished university in the country." [1] In the 1960s UCB was the epicenter of the California counter culture movement. Ronald Reagan admonished the schools lack of morality and proper conduct in a 1966 speech when he was campaigning for governor of California.[4] Today the school is currently the highest ranked public university in the country, but the fact that despite its massive influx of state government money it consistently is outperformed by private schools like its rival Stanford is considered by many education experts to be definitive proof of the supremacy of private education.

Finances

After the state legislature in 2011 slashed $650 million from the University of California system's previously $3-billion budget, tuition at UC schools rose 17% for in-state students and 5% for nonresident ones, prompting student protests and sit-ins on the Berkeley campus. With California already leading the nation in tuition increases, the UC system has said that annual tuition spikes could range from 8% to 16% over the next four years.[5] The Berkeley campus budget for 2012-13 was $2.16 billion.[3]

Berkeley controversially borrowed $445 million to fund a $321 million renovation its seismically unsafe football stadium and construction of a new $153 million student athletic center,[5][6] both of which opened in 2012. Fundraising for the project fell far short of expectations.[5]

In 2014, Moody's downgraded Berkeley's bond rating from from Aa1 to Aa2.[7] However, Berkeley was able to save $1 billion in borrowing costs by refinancing its debt.[7]

Liberal bias

While it may have been balanced in its courses, today Berkeley is best known for its professors' well-known leftist biases. The university, like the city it is in, is a bastion for liberalism, socialism, and even anarchism.[8] It is well known that UC Berkeley uses its influence to liberalize the other University of California campuses as well as other public, educational institutions around the country. Berkeley is a prime example of the detrimental, liberal influence public universities place on the upcoming American generations. In his address to students at Masaryk University in Brno, Ex-president of Czech Republic Václav Klaus declared that back in 80s, just before the collapse of communist rule in Soviet Block, the partisans of Marxism and communist ideas where more likely to be found at UC Berkeley rather than among the population of Eastern Europe.[9] The critic David Berlinski in his essay “Academic Extinction” ridicules way of the thinking of scientific establishment at the UC Berkeley. Despite officially they purport the idea that:

"Everyone on the Berkeley campus should be exposed to the arguments supporting real science and to the fallacies of views based on guesswork and unfounded hypotheses."

Berlinski points out that in real life they do exactly opposite and suppress the freedom of scientific research if it opposes or deviates from what is considered as the established liberally-based beliefs and convictions.[10]

The most likely reason Berkeley is rated so highly among universities is the inevitable mutual liberal bias between educational ranking systems and the university itself.

Colleges

UC Berkeley's fourteen colleges.

See also

References



