Judge Rules UC-Berkeley Must Freeze Its Enrollment To Assess Ecological Impact of Its Undergrads

schwit1 shares a report from Slate: Enrolling more students at one of America's best public universities might be bad for the environment. That's the conclusion of California Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman, who on Aug. 23 ordered the University of California-Berkeley to temporarily freeze the number of students it admits every year under the California Environmental Quality Act, putting crowded classrooms in the same category as heavy infrastructure like highways and airports. "Further increases in student enrollment above the current enrollment level at UC-Berkeley could result in an adverse change or alteration of the physical environment," the judge wrote (PDF). How'd we get here? Under California law, universities are periodically required to prepare a long-term development plan that includes enrollment forecasts and an environmental impact study. In 2005, UCa"Berkeley produced one projecting that its headcount would stabilize at about 33,500 students. Instead, the school ended up enrolling more than 42,000 by 2020, with plans to admit more still in the years to come. The university didn't think that welcoming more students to campus required it to perform a whole new environmental review. But a state appeals court in San Francisco disagreed in 2020, ruling (PDF) that increasing enrollment counted as a "project" that needed to be evaluated under the CEQA, just like building a stadium or dorm would be. In doing so, the judges sided with a local community group, Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods, which sued UC-Berkeley in 2019 and set the stage for last week's lower court decision officially hitting pause on the school's enrollment ambitions. California's flagship public university must now assess the ecological cost of its student body at once.

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