THE STATE - Berkeley gets big gift for faculty - The $113 million from the Hewlett Foundation will go toward keeping professors wooed by better-paying rivals.

The university and the foundation hope that the huge gift will help Berkeley retain faculty members who are sometimes wooed by private universities with offers of $100,000 pay hikes and millions of dollars in research money.

Attracting and keeping the best faculty members, they say, is the key to maintaining the campus' excellence.

"This Hewlett gift will be transformational," UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said. "We are moving toward a model that has been developed successfully at private universities."

The effort is not a move toward privatizing the university, the chancellor said.

"We are in the ironic position of needing private support for our public character," he said.

Traditionally in higher education, large donations often help erect buildings or create programs. But the Hewlett gift, the largest in UC Berkeley's history, is unusual because it is devoted to supporting the campus' basic activities.

UC Berkeley has endowments totaling $2.5 billion, but nearly all of those funds are restricted to specific purposes.

The Hewlett donation will be used to attract matching gifts from other private donors and create a $220-million endowment that the university can build on. It also includes $3 million to improve management of the campus' endowments and maximize their return.

The gift, to be paid over seven years, is designed to help compensate for cutbacks in state funding that threaten to erode the quality of the university. UC officials have assured the foundation that the gift will be a supplement to state funding, not a substitute.

"Our goal is to take a great state institution and help it maintain its greatness," Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest said. "It's a different model for a public university, one that has worked very well for the privates."

The endowments of many private universities have soared in recent years. Harvard University has an endowment of nearly $30 billion; Stanford University's is about $15 billion.

"Private universities figured out long before we did the importance of building up an endowment," Birgeneau said. "If you look at income from Stanford's endowment, their payout is $200 million more than what we get from the state."