Out to dinner with friends the other night, the conversation turned to shared college memories. Three of the four of us at the table had been at UC Berkeley at the same time in the 1970s, though none of us knew each other at the time.

Happens a lot to Cal people. It’s a big place. Some 30,000 students then — up to almost 45,000 now. My wife took two degrees there, and then was on the faculty. I didn’t know her until the mid-’80s.

Our friend had been one year behind me, and we have many interests in common. We figure we were at the same free Talking Heads concert on Lower Sproul. Didn’t know him until recently. (His poor wife. All this Go Bears talk through the meal. Must drive the non-Cal types bonkers. Deal with it, infidels!)

But as we talked about all things Berkeley, a source of endless fascination to me — as if I were still in college after all these years, and in fact I am still quite involved on campus — our friend made a very cogent point.

We had discussed the successful lawsuit, now put on hold, by city of Berkeley neighborhood groups aimed at limiting enrollment at the university until it somehow manages to build more student housing.

Students are packed into apartments like tinned fish. Dormitories are over-subscribed. Some, at the No. 1 public university in the nation or the world or the universe, depending on which magazine you read, are indeed living out of their cars.

It’s way worse than it used to be, but it was also kind of always thus. I knew a guy who, very much against the rules and probably the law, lived in the attic of the student publications’ Pelican Building in the middle of campus. You got into his digs by standing on the toilet and pulling yourself up through a hole in the ceiling into a weird little Hobbity space.

It’s not as if the school isn’t trying. But it must deal with the wee problem of existing in the state of California. Ever try to build anything here? Carol Christ, the estimable chancellor, is even braving the third wheel of Berkeley politics: Building student housing, along with other low-income housing, at People’s Park on Telegraph Avenue, where in 1969 one person was shot dead by police and 128 injured badly enough to be admitted to hospital when the university tried to develop it.

My friend said: “When we were young, and more people wanted to get into the university, UC built more campuses. Why doesn’t it build more campuses now?”

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Great question. I’m old enough to remember when UC Santa Cruz was built, for instance, and it’s full up, as are all UC campuses. But UC Merced was the last such effort, and it opened 17 years ago. There is an enormous international demand to come to college here. Most of the UCs are crazy hard for even the best California students to gain admittance to. There’s a huge demand, and very little supply. And yet we do nothing. Because California has lost the ability to think big.

Which has created an opening for Arizona State University to simply eat our lunch. With brilliant audacity, it recently bought the gorgeous Julia Morgan-designed Herald Examiner Building in downtown Los Angeles and repurposed it as a satellite campus. ASU touts the fact that 18,000 Californians are already degree-seeking students at its Tempe campus or online. Since UC is so incapable of expanding, why not just move in and take up the slack? “Here, ASU will feature some of its top-ranked and accredited undergraduate and graduate degree programs and innovative transdisciplinary opportunities will give California students … new opportunities,” the school says. While we do nothing at all, incapable anymore of even giving it the old college try.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].