The 220 distinct first languages that undergraduates at UC Berkeley speak embed campus with a student body that is constantly rearticulating and redeveloping the ways we approach problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is how universities work intrascholastically, but this cross-pollinated communication is doubly essential in their relationships with other universities. From the nation to the world, the solubility of our most exciting challenges in the lab and university depends on the ability of vastly different institutions to collaborate and incorporate one another\u2019s ideas.<\/p>\n
Step outside and listen to those 220 languages: The blurring chitchat on Sproul Plaza is a microcosm of what campus itself is a part of. The whir of research between the world\u2019s top universities depends on these differences. It depends on the ability of a common intellectual good to either transcend or work within the framework of political divide.<\/p>\n
However, the mounting pressure that President Donald Trump\u2019s administration is placing on numerous US institutions, including<\/a> UC Berkeley, for their involvement with other universities suggests an interest in throttling the common good in an isolationist direction. This is a shortsighted play, and promises to lead to long-term loss.\u00a0<\/p>\n In early August, the Department of Education dealt a blow to the United States and China\u2019s collaborative research relationship, one that has already been strained since the COVID-19 pandemic. The Education Department alleged that UC Berkeley received<\/a> $224 million in gifts and contracts from Chinese sources over the past 25 years, a claim that campus is currently disputing. This anxiety surrounding international funding disincentivizes research collaboration, threatening to slow its pace to a crawl.\u00a0<\/p>\n The fruits of these labors are self-evident: A study originating at UC Berkeley included breakthrough insights into Huntington\u2019s disease<\/a>, a fatal neurodegenerative illness with no known cure; an electric \u201cnose\u201d<\/a> proposed to detect allergens and spoiled food with new accuracy was developed by campus researchers; the largest-ever 2D color model<\/a> of the universe was mapped by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers; and statistical evidence that political mismatches<\/a> impact our romantic lives was posited here. Through collaboration, we can stand on the shoulders of giants and shake their hands across fields and disciplines.<\/p>\n But in August, the Pentagon ordered<\/a> a research security audit of UC Berkeley and 29 other academic institutions, threatening revocation of federal funding for failure to conduct a timely audit. When the UC Berkeley School of Law isn\u2019t once again being squeezed<\/a> for alleged DEI practices, swaths of campus\u2019s most important research centers are being relentlessly pressured by the federal government. This leads us to the present moment, which feels so tense it might shatter.<\/p>\n But all of this for what?<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that UC Berkeley is a titan of world research, so much so that it almost seems as though developments emerge, exist and are shared exclusively within that titanic body; but this is nowhere near the truth.<\/p>\n CRISPR, one of campus\u2019s most prestigious objects of claimed discovery, was partially developed, before the UC Berkeley patent, through research conducted and published by Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Lithuanian, South Korean and Japanese institutions. The primary applications of this technology, including human genome editing, are now spearheaded primarily by Chinese institutions. Nonetheless, the intellectual leverage of CRISPR \u2014 because the home of its primary patent and codifying research is here \u2014 resides at UC Berkeley and in the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n The status of campus \u2014 and the nation in general \u2014 as a research behemoth can never exist in the kind of closed-door environment Washington seems interested in establishing. Our greatest accomplishments depend on collaboration from universities and researchers across the world, and our own research institutions in the United States ought to be able to freely pursue projects such as these \u2014 projects that are distinctly human rather than political, projects that indisputably stand to improve the quality and duration of our lives across geopolitical borders.<\/p>\n Furthermore, while this ideal depends on an evaluation of knowledge and public good in precedence over its political connotations, the political effects of actions like these stand only to harm the country\u2019s long-term political interests, making them fundamentally shortsighted.<\/p>\n We are a public institution and, because of that, we are an arm of the government, a reality there is little use trying to circumvent or theorize away. There is nothing novel in that. What is new, and is increasingly a source of friction between universities and Washington, is this kind of politicization of research as an instrument of geopolitical strategy on the world stage. It is a misguided, shortsighted strategy to burn foreign adversaries in a short-term play. This will eventually cost world-renowned universities, such as UC Berkeley, their leverage, as the rest of the world collaborates and advances without us.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not only does this manner of policymaking from our government dim what would otherwise be our campus\u2019s world-illuminating light, it snuffs out the already-dying flame of the United States\u2019 political capital.<\/p>\n Washington is clumsily handling the carrot and the stick. Open research relationships, which could be leveraged for other political gains, are severed in order to assert pressure over the world, and a weak one at that. By this, the government gives up one of our best political assets \u2014 a political asset that depends on open lines of communication to preserve and effectively expand.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whatever political interests such isolationist policies are meant to serve, they risk creating a political and academic environment that we won\u2019t be spearheading, because we\u2019ll be missing the rest of the spear. While the rest of the world works together to stake the next life-altering development of the 21st century, we\u2019ll be playing catch-up with a collection of nice, shiny rocks without any grip or hold.\u00a0<\/p>\n We depend on the rest of the world.<\/p>\n For every language that touches a concept, every bank or shore on which an idea washes up, a piece is added that benefits our whole species. Removing ourselves from this process, alienating our intellectual and scientific lives from the rest of the world as Washington pressures universities to do, would not empower us but only impoverish us. It is, in fact, the most direct translation of our power into weakness, and it harms the species writ large just as it does our campus and our country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 220 distinct first languages that undergraduates at UC Berkeley speak embed campus with a student body that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[3573,1085,107616,182511,18154,19442,536,182512,182515,174003,50367,182513,143,145,144,5407,182514,6610,26656,1695,149,83502,558],"class_list":["post-463439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-china","tag-covid","tag-crispr","tag-danish","tag-dei","tag-department-of-education","tag-donald-trump","tag-dutch","tag-electric-nose","tag-huntingtons-disease","tag-japanese","tag-lithuanian","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-pentagon","tag-south-korean","tag-spanish","tag-sproul-plaza","tag-trump-administration","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-uc-berkeley-school-of-law","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}