Rejecting Rausser: The History Behind UC Berkeley Students’ Movement Against Private Donations

Original graphic made by Jakob Evans

In March 2020, amid campus cries for a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for graduate students and the emergence of COVID-19, UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources (CNR) flaunted a 50 million dollar donation from former Dean Gordan Rausser that they would be accepting in exchange for the addition of his name to the College. CNR Students organized to expose Rausser’s ties to exploitative industries and tell stories of his problematic teaching history as a former CNR Dean with the goal of severing this partnership. These students are demanding the removal of his name and a return of his donation because private donations like Rausser’s privatize public education and institutionalize social injustice. 

To start off, neoliberal policymakers have been privatizing public education for the last forty years and this has created a funding problem for public universities. Advanced by US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, neoliberalism is a mode of governing that sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. Its policies champion free-trade, deregulation, and privatization of public services like education. President Reagan halved the federal government’s budget’s portion of funding for public education from 12 percent to 6 percent in 1982, and the trend of defunding higher education continues to this day; State funding for public two and four year colleges fell $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2018. UC Berkeley alone has lost 13.8% of their funding from the state over this time period. This shift was designed to increase competition in the education sector, but as the value of a college degree ever increases, it has instead led a rat race for funding. 

Universities with budget deficits have a few options to get funding—raise tuition prices, hire fewer tenured faculty-members, or accept donations from corporations and private donors. Most Universities choose all of the above and each have their own socio-economic implications. However, when universities accept private donations, they take a risk in tying their academic integrity to the reputation and actions of their donors. If these donors commit acts of racial or environmental injustice, they become associated with these acts and because they are being funded by these perpetrators, they lose the ability to speak out against them—weakening their reputation and harming marginalized students. Neoliberalism has made colleges act less like fonts of wisdom and more like businesses; And students pay the price. 

For the University of California (UC), private funding is almost equal to state funding in their annual budget. The University of California’s operating budget for 2020-2021is $39.8 billion, with ten percent of the funding coming from the State of California and seven percent from private donations. This seven percent equals $2,768,000,000 in private donations and the UC is meeting its budget goals by tying its reputation to a countless list of donor names. However, as the largest employer in the State of California, the UC could instead leverage their economic prowess to receive better funding from the state of California -- the 5th largest economy in the world. While neoliberal policy makers created this funding issue by slashing state funding, UC has political and economic power it could wield against the state. The university lacks the political will to convince the state to increase their funding and instead, they’ve opted to rely on private partnerships. This harms the integrity of the university and the quality of students’ experience and this is exactly what UC Berkeley students organizing the Reject Rausser movement are telling their administrators.

Reject Rausser (RR) began in March 2020 — at the intersection of the announcement of Rausser’s donation and the COLA Wildcat Strikes. RR’s beginnings reflected this, with their first conversations centered around how this money could be used to meet the demands of striking Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs). Satchi Thockchom, a student organizer with RR, argues that “it was incredibly poor taste for the College to flaunt this money when housing and food insecure people were striking on Sproul.”

But, as COVID-19 disrupted life as we knew it, Reject Rausser stepped out of the limelight to do some research into Gordan Rausser. They found that in his time as CNR Dean he cozied up to corporate partnerships, a $25 million partnership with Novartis Pharmaceuticals being a chief example of this. They also dived deep to get testimonials of former students’ experience with Gordon Rausser, with former students going as far to say that he “advocated for policies that ignored the reality of climate disaster in favor of protecting economic growth,” and that he “terrorized students in class making an uncomfortable and unsafe learning environment.” RR combined this two-pronged research to argue that Rausser’s name was unfit to be added to the College of Natural Resources because of the impacts this partnership would have on the functioning and reputation of the College. Wesley Tam, another organizer with RR, wrote that, “If words hold meaning, then names wield power.” Adding Rausser’s name to CNR would tie his reputation to the College, enshrining injustice.

In conservation with College administrators, Reject Rausser has been met with much resistance. Thockchom wrote that “It feels like no matter how much preparation goes into one of those meetings [with administrators], they find something new to throw us off guard.” Even when presented with a research backed case against Rausser, Administrators would not budge. CNR administrators are defending Rausser’s donation for a variety of reasons — funding issues as a primary excuse — but, by using everything at their disposal to defend the reputation of a problematic man, they are weakening their reputation.

The College of Natural Resources’ first response to Reject Rausser’s demands has been the creation of a student Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) role in CNR’s Executive Committee (EXCOM). According to a January email by CNR, This student will advocate for DEI at all levels of CNR decision making -- including the allocation of Rausser’s $50 million donation. Reject Rausser is pleased with this response, but views it as more of a starting point that anything else. Thockchom writes that “the DEI positions were the lowest hanging demand on our tree, so I’m not surprised it’s the first that’s been addressed so far,” and adds that they “feel like we’ve been given EXCOM high-chairs in exchange for a problematic white man’s paws in the knowledge we produce, and his name slapped on our degrees.”

Reject Rausser wants more from the College and they plan on sticking around until their demands are met. When asked if Reject Rausser’s fight ends with the election of the DEI student representative, Thockchom responded with, “Hellll no!” They “don’t doubt that people like [Rausser] exist all across the campus and higher education in general,” and that they “want RR to be just one of many fights against white environmentalism and private education among many other issues converging in this moment.”

Satchi is right. Across the nation, universities are cozying up with private donors in exchange for funding and are perpetuating racial, social, and environmental injustices in the process. These universities may not be responsible for their funding dilemmas, but they are complicit in taking money from problematic donors connected to problematic industries when they could instead leverage their power to demand a reversal of decades of neoliberal policy. It is much easier to accept the $50 million donation from Gordan Rausser than it is to muster the political might needed to bend the will of neoliberal policymakers, but the easy-way digs UC Berkeley deeper into a web of injustice.