Dear Campus Community,
We write to inform you that PG&E is monitoring the weather in the Bay Area for a possible shutoff in selected areas on Wednesday and Thursday. While this situation is evolving and there is considerable uncertainty, we believe it is in the campus’s best interest to be prepared for the possibility of an outage.
To this end, we encourage instructors to anticipate having to make alternative arrangements in order to minimize the disruption to their instruction. Resources to help with these arrangements can be found at https://teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/instructional-resiliency. For participants in qualifying exams, we encourage them to establish a video conferencing option in advance.
The Academic Senate, ASUC, GA, and the Administration are in the process of establishing a joint instructional resilience task force, which will investigate all the steps instructors and the campus can take to help us be able to manage through events such as these in the future with less disruption to student learning. Later this semester, this group will be sending out a survey of all instructors to gather information about alternative instruction best practices and challenges.
This has been a challenging semester with unprecedented interruptions and closures. Your patience and hard work has helped to bring the campus together to overcome these hurdles and preserve its mission. We hope that closures will not happen this week, but we must be prepared for the possibility of a PG&E power outage and reduced campus operations.
As always, we will continue to post updates on Berkeley News, and will send a WarnMe alert via e-mail and text if the decision is made to limit campus operations.
Paul Alivisatos
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Oliver O’Reilly
Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate
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