BLUE’s position on UC’s 2020 LRDP

Letter to the Berkeley City Council

by Sharon Hudson

24 January 2005

Dear Mayor Bates and City Council:

In case there is any confusion about BLUE’s position on the LRDP, as we stated in our Position Paper, it is that the City should sue. Only much later, when some kind of negotiations take place in a less hurried environment, with meaningful alternatives and mitigations on the table mandated by a new EIR, can useful negotiations occur, at which point the citizens should be represented in an open process.

Besides the important goal of causing the University to change its way of thinking by being forced to look at alternatives, one strategic benefit of the lawsuit is that it provides time. While perhaps in football it is good to delay when you’re in the lead, those of us who come from the development wars know that generally delays benefit the weaker, less prepared side. In this case, it would provide time to get our PR machine into gear (UC’s has been running for a hundred years), publicize the issue and gain more public support, take political action at the state level, and accumulate more information ammunition (every day people find out more about how other cities handle similar problems). What often happens when a large institution is forced (and they must be forced) to look at new ways of doing business, they come to realize with surprise that other options benefit themselves as well as their “opponents.”

Besides Churchill, another example of a leader going up against overwhelming odds without many tangible resources, but only intangibles, was, of course, Martin Luther King. His intangibles were the same as Churchill’s and almost all great leaders’—a moral vision advocated with courage. Through this consciousness raising (accompanied by some forceful action) he inspired and educated the public and eventually created significant change. MLK said: “I have a dream.” He didn’t say: “I have a compromise.” He didn’t say: “Let’s make a deal.” Those are not words that inspire nations—or cities Or universities. And one thing MLK knew was that the change he sought on a moral basis would in the end benefit not only people of color, but everyone, and nobody can doubt that it has. In the same way, the change that BLUE advocates will in the end benefit UC as well as the City.

Finally, for those of you who want to make decisions not based on courage and a moral vision, but on a cost-benefit analysis, consider the following. The short-term cost of resistance is easy to see and to measure. A lawsuit will cost a tiny fraction of one year’s City budget, and a small fraction of what UC costs the city every year. The long-term cost of capitulation is difficult to see and impossible to measure, and it will be without apparent limit. But we know it will cost millions in unrecovered UC expenses in the first year alone. Even if we had a very small chance of winning anything, a suit would be a rational financial and strategic investment.

Back to Churchill, one reason the analogy is apt is because Britain was massively outmanned and outgunned, and he knew the short-term cost of his “no surrender” policy—namely, several years of horrific war. And he knew he faced an uphill battle, with as much likelihood of losing as winning, though with time he knew he could enlist allies and build resources and skills to match those of his opponent. But the long-term cost of capitulation he perceived as much worse. Just as Berkeley’s capitulation in 1990 leaves us so much worse off today, and our capitulation today will leave our city even further diminished tomorrow.

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