Language
Sample Messaging
Some sample messaging can be found below; download the full media kit from this website’s “Press” section for more context and historical background.
Key Public Messages
- “Light the Way: The Campaign for Berkeley challenges the philanthropic community to partner with the university to help illuminate new possibilities for a better tomorrow. Together we will empower the next generation of leaders, push boundaries of knowledge, challenge convention, and fuel innovative solutions for society’s greatest challenges.”
- “The best public university in the world, UC Berkeley projects a brilliant light. Both parts of its identity — its comprehensive excellence and its public mission — set it apart from its elite private peers. Berkeley is committed to serving the public good, and this is reflected in the campaign priorities and vision.”
- “Driven by the motto Fiat Lux, Berkeley embraces both tradition and the future, resilience and excellence. Light the Way: The Campaign for Berkeley encompasses a way forward for Berkeley that is visionary and path-breaking, building on Berkeley’s distinctiveness in transforming lives, fueling social mobility, and changing the world.”
- “The campaign will touch every part of the campus, including students and faculty, and every school, college, and program. Every gift made during this period, no matter what size or what it supports, will count toward the campaign’s success.”
- “In this campaign, Berkeley is focused not just on funding new initiatives, but primarily on raising support for the university’s core strengths.”
- “Light the Way: The Campaign for Berkeley mobilizes the entire Cal community to stand together, demonstrating its collective power, to illuminate knowledge and realize a common vision for our future.”
Campaign Priorities
FACULTY AND FELLOWSHIPS: One teacher can embolden thousands
- Add 100 tenure-track faculty positions and provide sufficient resources for leading-edge research
- Create 300 graduate fellowships and graduate scholarships
OPPORTUNITY AND EXCELLENCE: Students are more than their majors
- Increase scholarships to provide experiential education for a diverse student body, regardless of financial background
- Ensure every student’s basic needs are met, including housing, food, and financial security
- Create research hubs for undergraduate discovery using emerging technologies to facilitate connection and innovation
RESEARCH FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD: Illuminate solutions to society’s greatest challenges
Drawing from foundational research and a deep desire to serve, we have identified five complex challenges that Berkeley is ideally suited to address through interdisciplinary engagement. Philanthropic support of these key priorities is critical to enabling faculty and students to create new knowledge and solutions for a brighter future.
- Data Science and Artificial Intelligence — Ensure that the uses of artificial intelligence are safe, fair, ethical, and compatible with human intelligence. Give students from all backgrounds the skills to analyze and compute data in a rapidly evolving digital world, and then apply them to any field.
- Democracy and Equality — Study the institutions and practices of democracy and how to make them better, such as closing the income gap and making access to education, work, and well-being more inclusive, just, and equitable.
- Energy, Climate, and Environment — Understand the depths of environmental change, speed up strategies for mitigating and adapting to it, and ensure that vulnerable populations can participate in transitioning to clean energy and other needs.
- Health and Basic Discovery — Uncover the molecular mechanisms of disease and build new tools, therapeutics, and treatments for human health, particularly for neurodegenerative and genetic diseases.
- Innovation and Entrepreneurship — Help all undergraduates build their capacity to turn imagination into innovations that have the potential to change the world.
PLACES OF POSSIBILITY: Inspired buildings will inspire discovery
- Invest in new spaces and transform existing structures — The physical places in which we learn, live, and innovate must meet our rapidly changing needs.