One of the things I treasure most about Berkeley is the sincerity of its community. As a public university, Berkeley aspires not merely to produce knowledge but to foster civic virtue. Our official statements are filled with values I share: equality, stewardship for the environment, belonging, accessibility, justice. These are noble commitments. They form part of what an institution might strive toward.
But Berkeley often adopts these commitments not as principles to be balanced but as ontologies to be inhabited: as categorical imperatives that dictate ever-expanding administrative projects. By “ontology,” I mean that a value becomes treated not as one priority among many but as a fundamental identity the university must embody in all operations. Once a value is framed this way, it becomes not a guiding star but a moral logic unto itself. And that shift has consequences.
From Normative Commitments to Activist Logics
A familiar pattern has emerged:
- Berkeley embraces a value: sustainability, wellness, accommodation, compliance, training, accessibility—at the level of normative aspiration.
- To implement these values, Berkeley increasingly hires staff whose professional identity is rooted in activist or advocacy traditions. These actors often see themselves not as administrators within an educational institution but as advocates embedded inside a university.
- Once embedded, activist-style logic becomes the functional mission. Because these frameworks rely on expansionary reasoning, “if X is good, more X is better,” they lack built-in limiting principles. Initiatives therefore grow in breadth, depth, mandatory scope, and demands on faculty time, staff labor, and institutional resources.
- The result is mission misalignment. The university bends toward the activist project rather than the teaching and research mission that justified the university in the first place.
This dynamic is not about ideology per se; it is about the absence of limiting principles and the absence of governance structures capable of enforcing them.
When Values Become Administrative Mandates
Once governance becomes ontological, with value as identity, the questions administrators ask shift from:
“What trade-offs make sense for a research university?”
to totalizing questions:
- “Are we living out the value fully enough?”
- “What more could we do to embody the value?”
- “How do we show commitment through visible activity and documentation?”
Once framed this way, the only safe answer is more:
more programming, more reporting, more compliance layers, more trainings, more staff, more certifications, more structures that scale outward rather than upward.
This dynamic now appears across domains.
Sustainability
What begins as an ethical position becomes a sprawling accounting regime—point systems, reporting rubrics, elaborate compliance checklists, and expensive symbolic projects. The value grows into its own administrative ecosystem, only loosely connected to our academic mission.
HR and “Wellness”
Initiatives are presented as unquestionably good, and thus the need to justify them—empirically, financially, or pedagogically—disappears. Sixteen hours of mandatory online training become “common sense,” even when no one can articulate the marginal benefit. (This is not well known, but our HR people proposed a 16-hour online training called “grow together” mandatory for faculty members. In the spirit of collaboration, I completed this training, which was clearly licensed from some corporate environment. It concludes with a one-hour online test! It is hard for me to understand how staff thought it a good idea to recommend this training.) Another shiner is the campus climate survey, all 500-questions of it! Little of that was actionable and it had great lacunae.
Programs such as Achieve Together use thin evidence (a small, statistically significant improvement in employee sentiment) to impose a costly, burdensome regime on campus. Here the problem is conceptual: staff conflate statistical significance with clinical significance—that is, whether an intervention’s benefits justify its costs.
Accessibility and Disability Services
Accessibility is important to Berkeley’s identity. But through a maximalist activist lens, the principle can morph into the belief that any request for accommodation is a moral imperative and that questioning implementation costs is suspect.
This logic is captured vividly by a recent statement from a campus leader:
“I don’t think of it as a downside, no matter how many students with disabilities show up […] Disabled people still are deeply underemployed in this country and too often live in poverty. The key to addressing that is in large part through institutions like Berkeley that make it part of our mission to lift people into security.”
This single quote reveals the phenomenon: a totalizing reinterpretation of Berkeley’s mission—one that, admirable as its aspirations may be, is not present anywhere in the university’s actual mission statement. It is mission substitution through activist logic.
The issue is not the value of accessibility, but the lack of guardrails around its operationalization.
Why Activist Logics Have No Stopping Point
I came from the privacy activist community. I know what totalizing logic looks like: activists who promote privacy so much that they are willing to imperil individual freedom and choice. Advocacy-oriented administrative cultures often operate according to several features:
- Unconditional moral framing: “More of this value is always better.”
- Suspicion of trade-offs: there is no vocabulary for “enough,” and no space for “let’s be reasonable.”
- Externalization: administrators gain reputational benefits for visible virtue, while costs are silently shifted onto faculty, students, and departments.
- Visibility as legitimacy: proof of commitment comes from producing activity rather than outcomes.
In a research university, however, every initiative has an opportunity cost: faculty time, staff time, dollars that could support labs, graduate education, teaching, or infrastructure.
I know these staff are sincerely committed to the values in question, and I suspect that they would themselves welcome clearer guardrails; the problem lies in the structural incentives and governance vacuum that reward escalation rather than balance.
The Externalization of Costs
Because these initiatives are morally framed, the costs are rarely borne by their proponents. Instead, they fall on:
- faculty time
- graduate student labor
- delayed research progress
- $2,000-per-square-foot construction costs
- departmental budgets
- procurement complexity
- campus inflexibility
- hiring opportunity costs
- deferred academic investments
- higher costs and fewer available resources across the board
The teaching and research mission becomes the subsidy for the activist mission.
Large capital projects pursued in the name of sustainability or social impact exemplify this pattern. Consider the $800 million power plant—an initiative that yields symbolic rewards for administrators while the student-to-faculty ratio increases. Those who champion such projects collect accolades; faculty and students inherit the liability.
The Core Problem: Administrative Misalignment
The issue is not the values Berkeley espouses.
The issue is that Berkeley has built administrative structures that pursue these values through activist logics rather than academic ones. And activist logics, by design, do not stop. They escalate.
Faculty, constrained by limited influence over operations, remain downstream of these dynamics. We feel their cumulative weight most acutely.
We are also the only constituency that reliably centers the essential question:
Does this help or hinder the university’s mission of teaching and research?
That question is almost never asked operationally—not because administrators are malicious, but because many are hired specifically to advance a value, not to weigh trade-offs.
At a higher level, the challenge of improving teaching and research is genuinely difficult. Suppose you are a dean: should you invest time in small, uncertain, hard-to-measure improvements in pedagogy and scholarship? Or is it far easier to embrace highly visible initiatives—”equitable grading,” wellness campaigns, new training modules—that create the appearance of progressive momentum?
- foreground mission alignment
- require cost–benefit analysis
- impose limiting principles
- redesign oversight structures
- evaluate administrative units on contribution to academic outcomes
- resist the tendency to equate activity with progress
Toward Rebalancing: A Mission-Centered Framework
The solution is not to repudiate our commitments. It is to translate them back from ontologies into policy goals. Here are three provocative steps:
- Require every new administrative policy or program over a certain cost/time threshold to include a publicly posted mission-alignment and opportunity-cost memo. I have proposed an approach here.
- Create a Faculty Executive Committee with veto power over new system-wide administrative mandates that impose >1 hours of faculty time. That sounds like a low threshold, but 1 hour of Berkley instructor time equals over 5,000 labor hours. Systemwide, a single hour of mandates creates colossal costs.
- Commit to making administrative positions subject to a sunset, perhaps after 5 years. We do this for academic centers. Why not for our scores of “assistant vice chancellors?”
Values require stewardship, not absolutism. They require administrators whose primary identity is service to the academic mission—not service to a separate activist project.
Berkeley will always hold strong commitments. But commitments do not absolve us of choosing wisely among competing goods. They do not relieve us of the obligation to ask whether our actions enhance or erode our purpose.
This is a moment of administrative transition at Berkeley. It is precisely the right time to reconsider how our governance structures can honor our values without allowing them to eclipse our mission. With clearer oversight, better alignment, and renewed seriousness about what a university is for, Berkeley can reclaim the balance that great institutions require to flourish.