California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Monday signed emergency legislation to allow the University of California-Berkeley to circumvent a court order that would have forced thousands of students off campus or out of school altogether.
The California Supreme Court last week refused to lift an enrollment cap at the state’s flagship public university, imposed by a lower court last year that would have required the school to conduct an examination of the impact the growing number of students moving to the area was having on homelessness and housing.
A Berkeley neighborhood group had brought a lawsuit against the school, accusing it of failing to properly take into account the environmental impacts of the growing student population. University administrators worried that the order would have forced it to cut admissions to students who would attend school in person by 2,600 slots.
The California legislature introduced bills on Friday, then passed a Senate bill on Monday to give California colleges and universities 18 months to complete environmental reviews. The law, which passed unanimously in both the state Assembly and state Senate, takes immediate effect.
The new law “sends a clear signal that California won’t let lawsuits get in the way of the education and dreams of thousands of students, our future leaders and innovators,” Newsom said in a statement.
In her own statement, Sen. Nancy Skinner (D), the bill’s chief sponsor and Berkeley’s representative in the state Senate, said the bill was meant to fix a provision in California law that allowed student enrollment to be viewed as an environmental factor that schools needed to consider.
“It was never the intent of the Legislature for students to be viewed as environmental pollutants,” Skinner said.
The dispute in Berkeley comes as California’s public universities receive a surge of applications, after two years of pandemic rules that forced students off campus and into virtual classrooms, which led to an enrollment decline. The University of California system said last month they had received more applications for the school year beginning this fall than at any other point in the system’s 154-year history.
More than 210,000 students applied to enter UC schools this fall, up 3.5 percent from last year and up almost 20 percent from the 2020 school year. Applications to the Berkeley campus rose to 128,000, an increase of about 15 percent from a year ago.