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To Julie Sinai, a “policy junkie” who recently ended a nine-year stint as Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates’ chief of staff, the time was right for a return to education, which she believes “is under siege right now.”
Politics & public policy archive
Weekend Occupy Cal activities end peacefully
February 21, 2012:
Two tents were put up on an International House lawn near campus and about 100 protestors marched across campus over the weekend, but all events ended peacefully.
Be vigilant global ‘netizens,’ not passive ‘users,’ Internet scholar-activist urges
February 15, 2012: How do we protect civil liberties, privacy and even the character of democracy in a networked world where private interests control much of the digital real estate? Scholar-activist Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked, covers fertile ground in a talk at the School of Information.
Guess which West Coast campus tops ‘politically active’ list
February 15, 2012: UC Berkeley is one of the three most politically active college campuses in the nation, according to the “next-generation news and politics” website Policymic. From its “iconic protest of the Vietnam War in the 1960s” to today’s Occupy Cal
movement, Berkeley is a place where “political fervor reaches far beyond the norm,” it says.
most politically rkeleyis one of the three most poitically active campuses in the “next generation news and politics” website “Policymic”
Granholm hosts nightly political show, ‘The War Room’
February 13, 2012: Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, a faculty member at Berkeley in law and public policy, now hosts a prime-time political show. “The War Room with Jennifer Granholm” airs Monday through Friday on Current TV.
Professor of Greek history worries about his homeland’s future
February 10, 2012: As Sunday’s vote on austerity measures approaches, Nikolaos Papazarkadas, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of classics and a native of Greece, is apprehensive about conditions in his native land improving anytime soon.
Biometric ID cards for workers would cost $40 billion, study says
February 9, 2012: The first-ever in-depth analysis of the costs of establishing a biometric employment identity card, just released by Berkeley Law’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, finds that cards for all workers would cost $40 billion, and would infringe on civil liberties and fail to stop the employment of undocumented immigrants.
Berlusconi lecture delves into the cult of personality 
February 8, 2012: With the 2012 US presidential race heating up, IGS visiting scholar Sergio Fabbrini unpacked the Italian media tycoon’s rise to power in the age of “tele-democracy.”
J-School students’ ‘Food of Politics’ featured by USA Today
January 26, 2012: A video produced by Berkeley journalism students appeared recently on USA Today‘s website. “The Food of Politics,” spotlighting an Iowa diner where presidential hopefuls eat, was created for the summer 2011 Berkeley News21 project on food and health reporting.
NAS honors Robert Powell’s work on nuclear deterrence
January 19, 2012: UC Berkeley political scientist Robert Powell has been awarded the National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Occupy Cal returns
January 19, 2012: About 40 students and others staged what they called the “Spring Into Action” rally Thursday at Sproul Plaza, relaunching the Occupy Cal movement’s protest against a wide range of issues, including rising tuition and state disinvestment in public higher education.
UCTC receives funding for new transportation research
January 19, 2012: The University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) on the UC Berkeley campus is overseeing a new research consortium of five other UC and four Cal State University campuses that just received a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and a matching amount from California’s Department of Transportation.
‘Income inequality didn’t just happen, it was engineered’
January 18, 2012: Political scientists Paul Pierson of UC Berkeley and Jacob Hacker of Yale say the vast and growing gap between America’s haves and have-nots didn’t just happen, but was deliberately and politically “engineered.” Co-authors of the recent book “Winner-Take-All Politics,” the two appeared on the Jan. 13 episode of “Moyers & Company.”
City redistricting deferred, charter amendment planned
January 18, 2012: Redistricting in the City of Berkeley will be deferred to 2013, following a 7-2 City Council vote on Jan. 17. The council also agreed to draft an amendment to the City Charter, for consideration by the voters in November, to allow new district boundaries to deviate from those set in 1986. A group of UC Berkeley students have been agitating for at least one student-majority district. Berkeleyside reports.
Diesel-truck emissions in Oakland fall sharply, study finds
January 17, 2012: Strict new emission standards for diesel trucks have reduced their emissions of unhealthy pollutants by half at the bustling Port of Oakland, says a team of researchers led by Rob Harley, professor of civil and environmental engineering. Writing in Environmental Science & Technology, Harley details improvements made as a result of aggressive new state regulations.
Media Advisory: North Korean crossroads
January 17, 2012:
Experts will assemble on campus Friday to assess North Korea
Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen: Don’t hinder access to publicly funded research
January 11, 2012: Michael Eisen, professor of molecular and cell biology, argues in a New York Times op-ed that the government should require free access to all published scientific results that were obtained with funds from taxpayers. A bill before Congress would prevent the National Institutes of Health from requiring that all publications be freely available through the National Library of Medicine Web site.
Biofuels, land and ethics
January 10, 2012: Growing dedicated energy crops on lands that won’t support food crops is one of the promises of emerging cellulosic fuels. The latest issue of the Energy Biosciences Institute magazine, Bioenergy Connection, looks at how much land is available, its energy-producing potential and which plants are the most promising alternatives. It also explores ethical questions involved in moving toward greater use of bioenergy.
Internet-privacy complaint center launched
January 5, 2012: Scholars at Berkeley helped lay the groundwork for a new service that allows people to report online-privacy problems, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
Law prof’s book probes ‘whys’ behind Big Apple crime decline
January 2, 2012: Between 1990 and 2009, New York City saw its crime rate drop by more than 80 percent. In his latest book, The City That Became Safe, Professor Frank Zimring explores how NYC’s experience, focusing on harm-reduction strategies, challenges assumptions driving U.S. policies on crime and drugs.
Michael Nacht on North Korea after Kim Jong Il
December 19, 2011: What’s in store for North Korea now that longtime dictator Kim Jong Il has died? In a Q&A, Michael Nacht, a UC Berkeley professor of public policy, gives his take on the future and stability of this isolated nation-state.
Lower classes quicker to show compassion in the face of suffering
December 19, 2011: Emotional differences between the rich and poor, as depicted in such Charles Dickens classics as “A Christmas Carol” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” may have a scientific basis. Researchers at UC Berkeley have found that people in the lower socio-economic classes are more physiologically attuned to suffering, and quicker to express compassion than their more affluent counterparts.
Income inequality writ large — on the wall across the street
December 14, 2011: In a move inspired by Occupy Wall Street and noted by the Maddow Blog and others, the UC Berkeley Labor Center took its research findings to the streets, literally, with some Bat-Signal infographics.
A campus perspective: ‘Occupy’ and the crisis in higher education
December 13, 2011: Berkeley students and staff share their opinions on the state of public education and the recent campus protests.
Proposed regs limit working families’ access to affordable healthcare, study finds
December 13, 2011: Tens of thousands of working Californians’ family members could be denied access to affordable health insurance under proposed regulations to the federal healthcare law, says a new report released by researchers at UC Berkeley and UCLA.
I School prof’s word of the year for NPR: occupy 
December 8, 2011: Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg picks “occupy” as the word of the year for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air show with Terry Gross, because it “has actually shaped the perception of important events.”
State should change tax code, invest more in education, professors tell Assembly
December 8, 2011: The widening gap between the rich and poor is largely the result of government policies, and the state should institute a more progressive tax code and invest more in education to help reverse the trend, UC Berkeley professors told lawmakers in Sacramento on Wednesday. Read the San Francisco Chronicle story.
SAGE summit tackles graduate-student issues
December 6, 2011: The Berkeley Graduate Assembly hosted panel discussions on higher education with top UC administrators, leading faculty and state lawmakers.
Does raising the retirement age increase inequality?
December 2, 2011: Raising the retirement age may seem sensible, given rising life expectancy. But many working-class families and African Americans may not live to retirement age, “making these proposals profoundly unfair,” Ken Jacobs and Nari Rhee, of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, write in the Sacramento Bee.
Chilean student-protest leader speaks at Berkeley
December 1, 2011: A leader of the massive student-protest movement, ongoing in Chile, shared insights on the 2011 “Chilean Winter” in a Nov. 30 talk at Berkeley. Giorgio Jackson said university students in his country seek an overhaul of the system for financing public education.
