University Of California At Berkeley

Second-year water polo Coach Steve Heaston knew success, having spent eight seasons as an assistant at California, the last two with national champions. But when he replaced highly regarded Pete Cutino as head coach last season, he saw Cal blow a one-goal lead in the last quarter of the NCAA championship game and lose to UC Irvine. In the 1990 final against Stanford Sunday night at the Belmont Plaza Pool in Long Beach, Heaston said he thought history was going to repeat.

It was "the one call you never want to get as a father," John F. Grundhofer recalled Friday. "Three-thirty in the morning: 'Your daughter's been shot.' " Miraculously, Karen Grundhofer of Newport Beach survived seven bullet wounds when a deranged gunman opened fire in a Berkeley hotel bar early Thursday morning.

A former associate vice chancellor at UC Berkeley misspent almost $2,000 of university funds on personal expenses such as meals and hotel rooms, according to an audit released Thursday. George Strait, who has repaid the money, was a onetime ABC News correspondent hired by UC Berkeley in January 2003 to oversee public affairs. He was often the university's point person on news stories, including a hacker attack on university computers last summer.

Residents of one UC Berkeley dorm have a message for their fellow students who like to light up--anything. If you tune in and turn on, or even smoke cigarettes and drink beer, you have to drop out of Freeborn Hall. About 230 students--many of them exasperated with the lifestyles of their fellow students--have secluded themselves in the campus's first substance-free dormitory, which opened this fall.

Sirinda Sincharoen knocks on the door. Nobody answers for a moment, but soon she is allowed to slip inside the dormitory room. She moves stealthily, spreading streamers, balloons and flyers around the room of an unsuspecting teammate on the University of California women's gymnastics team. Sincharoen also leaves behind some written motivational phrases. One of them alludes to getting past the NCAA West Regional that begins at 6 p.m. today at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion.

It has been 30 years since Clark Kerr, the 12th president of the University of California, was abruptly fired by the UC Board of Regents, who disagreed with how he had handled student protests on campus. "I left the presidency just as I entered it: Fired with enthusiasm," he quipped at the time. Today, Kerr, 86, is widely regarded as higher education's preeminent elder statesman, and he remains as enthusiastic as ever.

The class that never had a graduation ceremony finally got one. In 1970, UC Berkeley's large-scale graduation ceremony was canceled because of the sit-ins, demonstrations and marches sweeping the campus as students protested the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. While many academic departments held small, informal ceremonies, 3,300 students left college that year without a traditional rite of passage.

It's in the record book that Northwestern, in its first and last appearance in Pasadena, defeated California in the 1949 Rose Bowl game, 20-14. But that score is not official in the minds of many Cal partisans. Dick Erickson, Cal's quarterback that day, still protests. Forty-six years later, he and his surviving teammates are still steamed over an official's call on a Northwestern touchdown in the second quarter.

A windblown wildfire fueled by dry brush whipped through the fashionable Oakland and Berkeley hills Sunday, killing 10 people, destroying more than 200 homes and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people in one of the worst brush fires in Bay Area history. Among the fatalities were an Oakland firefighter and an Oakland police officer, Mayor Elihu Harris announced late Sunday night.

A state Court of Appeal refused Tuesday to allow a female ex-student to sue the University of California over her alleged rape by four UC Berkeley football players after a co-ed dormitory party in 1986. The court rejected the former student's novel claim that the university was negligent for, among other things, housing females on the same floor as males--particularly football players, who her attorneys alleged were unusually prone to group sex crimes.