News Archive

A message from Chancellor Carol Christ

http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/27/a-budget-update-from-chancellor-desi...

We can still be the institution that represents the genuine democratization of knowledge and opportunity. Even in this new and sometimes daunting world, we can still be utopians, “together, here, now,” as I said when I first arrived here four years ago.

The University of California, Berkeley, and the community around it have been symbols of free speech for more than 50 years. We still celebrate the legacy of Mario Savio and others who fought in the 1960s to ensure that the First Amendment be honored on campus.

But today Berkeley is facing extraordinary challenges to living up to this legacy. The campus has become a magnet for groups who seek to use the site of the birth of the Free Speech Movement as a staging ground for violence and disruption.

UC Berkeley has joined a coalition of the country’s top colleges and universities in the American Talent Initiative, a Bloomberg Philanthropies and Aspen Institute-led effort that met for the first time last week. Our collective goal is to educate 50,000 more low- to moderate-income students by 2025.

Lessons from a shameful chapter of our nation’s past take on renewed relevance in our current political moment as fear, racism, xenophobia and jingoism again endanger the civil rights of friends and neighbors, while simultaneously betraying our country’s bedrock values.

As a campus community, it befits us to debate issues about which we feel strongly, and to do so with respect for evidence, truth and for the power of argument. Recent op-ed submissions to this newspaper have, however, shifted the debate from one about freedom of speech and the First Amendment to naked endorsements of violent suppression of free speech in the name of supposedly higher values. 

In an interview Friday, Peter Sittler, a sophomore at Berkeley and vice president of the organization that sponsored Yiannopoulos’s visit, the Berkeley College Republicans, told me the school’s administration, from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks on down, “worked tirelessly to plan [the event] and make sure it went through.”

Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent the following message to the campus community on January 26th.

This message was sent to campus faculty and staff on April 11, 2016.

This message was sent to campus faculty on April 1, 2016

This message was sent to campus faculty, staff and students on March 30, 2016:

This message was distributed to UC Berkeley staff on March 28, 2016. 

Campus leaders, including Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Claude Steele, participated in a Leadership Roundtable staff event, March 9. The event, co-sponsored by Berkeley Staff Assembly (BSA) and the Chancellor’s Staff Advisory Committee (CSAC), provided an opportunity for staff to engage with campus leadership regarding the campus’ strategic planning and analysis process that are underway. The event was attended by approximately 150 staff, while many others watched online via a live stream video.