News from 2015
Bucket List Wish Fulfilled
PhD student Ralph Spinelli is in the last stages of terminal cancer, but his bucket list just got a little shorter. The 74-year-old doctoral student and advocate for criminal justice reform had dreamed of meeting Jack Nicklaus to thank him for being a long-time inspiration. Ralph wrote to the golf legend and was invited, with his son, on an all-expense paid trip to Dublin, Ohio for the Memorial Tournament, which Jack Nicklaus founded. “I wanted to shake his…
Medicine, Law, Business: Which Grad Students Borrow The Most?
Perhaps not surprisingly, grad students tend to take on more debt when going into fields where the pay is higher. Students studying medicine and law typically borrow more than $100,000 to get through school, and many go on to high-paying careers. At the other end of the spectrum, many Ph.D. students wind up in academia. Most get grants and subsidies — and the majority don't have to borrow any money at all to get through grad school. One striking…
How to fix San Francisco’s Airbnb law
Brian Chesky’s business, Airbnb, is the focus of renewed attempts to regulate the short-term rental market in S.F. On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will for the second time this summer consider amendments to the Airbnb law regulating short-term rentals to fix the mess former Supervisor David Chiu’s industry-sponsored bill created last year. Unfortunately, the competing amendments and upcoming ballot measure present the public with options that are either unnecessarily restrictive or, like…
Summer Internship in Southeast Asia
This summer, over ninety Goldman School students are interning in government, nonprofit and private agencies throughout the US and the world. Cesar Manuel Zulaica is working in southeast Asia with the for-profit social enterprise agency Next Billion, which explores the connection between development and business. Cesar is piloting several data-gathering applications including a project in Indonesia that is using one such app to follow up on the sanitation conditions and community behavior around water use. He is also working…
The Choice Ahead: A Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or a Single Payer
The Supreme Court's recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation's biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths. The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us -- who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need. We have another choice, but before I get to it let me give you some background. Last week, Aetna announced it would spend $35 billion…
Leader for Marriage Equality
“We are proud of the charge San Francisco led to ensure marriage equality for all Americans," says Carmen Chu (MPP '03), San Francisco's Assessor-Recorder. "The movement was ignited in 2004 when we took the bold step to recognize same sex marriages. When California lifted the stay and resumed same sex marriages in 2013, I was proud to lead the way as the only County Recorder’s Office to remain open over the weekend so that loving couples did not have…
GSPP Welcomes 2015 Mandela Fellows
The Goldman School welcomes twenty-five leaders from Africa this summer as part of the Obama Administration’s Young African Leaders Initiative’s Mandela Fellowship Program. The highly selective US State Department program chooses 500 promising and accomplished fellows from among tens of thousands of applicants and sends them in cohorts of 25 to universities through the US. President Barack Obama launched the program at the University of Johannesburg in 2013. “We’re launching a new program that’s…
The Future of SNAP
Photos by: Jonathan Fong The federal food stamps program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) faces an uncertain political and budgetary future. Professor Hilary Hoynes, in partnership with the Berkeley Food Institute, convened a day-long, interdisciplinary workshop of policy makers, community leaders and academics to engage the critical quesitons around this important safety net program. "The objective was to have a structured conversation about SNAP with those who work most closely with it,” says Professor Hoynes, who…
Kammen and Other Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) Offer to the Vatican
Thursday, June 18, Pope Francis released his long-awaited encyclical on the environment, a groundbreaking letter declaring climate change one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Dr. Dan Kammen, a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner who also serves as a Senior Fellow to the Energy and Climate Partnership…
Semper fi, Berkeley
The recent attack on the Marine Corps as "unwelcome intruders" is just the latest example of Berkeley politicians behaving badly. Showered with ridicule, confronted with the loss of federal and state money, the City Council was obliged to withdraw its misbegotten resolution, though it wasn't prepared to apologize for its blunder. "To err is human, but to really screw up it takes theBerkeley City Council," one councilmember ruefully acknowledged. But ask Standard & Poor's, the financial services company,…