UC Regents Vote to Submit Bid to Continue Running Lab in Berkeley

SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California Board of Regents on Thursday voted to submit a bid to continue managing the Lawrence Berkeley national lab that it has run for decades.

Still to come are decisions on whether UC will seek the management contracts of the two nuclear weapons labs that it also manages -- the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore lab in Northern California.

Regents Chairman Gerald Parsky said the vote Thursday was “an important first step” in the process but added that it did not necessarily indicate how the other decisions would be made.

The Lawrence Berkeley facility, which conducts unclassified research, is on the UC Berkeley campus and has been part of the university since the lab was founded by pioneering physicist Ernest O. Lawrence.

UC also has run the Livermore and Los Alamos weapons labs for the government since their formation decades ago. But UC’s role as national nuclear steward came under attack after a series of management and security lapses at Los Alamos. The U.S. Department of Energy had announced that it would call for bids when the management contract expired this year.

The Livermore contract also expires this year, but the Energy Department has indicated that it would extend the deadline for two years.

The Lawrence Berkeley contract expires at the end of this month, but it also is expected to be extended. The deadline for bids on the Lawrence Berkeley facility is Feb. 9.

However, the Los Alamos contract is expected to be awarded this year. So far, UC regents have instructed staff to proceed as though they will bid for the weapons labs, but they have yet to decide whether to pursue the contracts.

In other university matters, an employee union criticized the hiring of the partner of the new UC Santa Cruz chancellor for a new $192,000-a-year job. Union officials representing staff at the 10-campus system said the move was a mistake at a time when the university was cutting budgets and raising fees.

UC officials defended the hiring of Gretchen Kalonji, the longtime partner of incoming Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Dee Denton. They described Kalonji as a highly qualified professor who would be an asset as director of international strategy development.

Kalonji, a professor of materials science at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in international education, also is receiving a tenured professorship.

Mary Higgins, president of the Coalition of University Employees, which represents 16,000 clerical employees, said she was concerned that UC would make such a hire at a time of cutbacks.

“If you’re sitting there at the regents’ meeting and you’re hearing the students talk about how difficult it is to make ends meet and then they turn around and do something like this, it’s just so arrogant. It’s so unethical,” Higgins said.

UC Provost M.R.C. Greenwood said UC officials had been talking about creating a strategy position when Kalonji became available. Regents approved her hiring in closed session.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that if I had done the search for this position, she would have been one of the top candidates,” Greenwood said.

UC has found work for the spouses of top hires in the past. When Marye Anne Fox was hired last April to head UC San Diego, her husband, a chemistry professor, also got a job there.