News Archive

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.

The grand disagreement between Gov. Jerry Brown and University of California President Janet Napolitano has never been resolved. There have been some cease-fires, one showdown and a couple of deals struck. But the deeper argument remains: What sort of institution should the University of California be in the years ahead?

Full article: What's next for Berkeley and UC?

UC Berkeley announces major strategic planning initiative to address long-term budgetary concerns. Is it a canary in the coal mine or will it emerge as a model for other institutions seeking similar solutions?

Full article: Can Berkeley stay Berkeley?

Public universities must establish new sources of funding if they are to avoid having to choose between access and excellence, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley has claimed.

Full article: Nicholas Dirks: public universities need not choose between access and excellence

With Chancellor Nicholas Dirks entering his third year in the position, the Daily Californian’s Senior Editorial Board sat down with Dirks and campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof to discuss recently released college rankings and the importance of a public university.

Full Article: Chancellor Nicholas Dirks discusses college rankings, importance of public university

"We need to provide a coherent defense of the liberal arts, for their role in the larger university and for the broader society. For me, the defense is both deeply personal and based on intellectual and institutional arguments."

Full article: Why I Miss the Culture Wars

"Chancellor Nicholas Dirks has proposed that the Berkeley Global Campus at Richmond Bay will be 'a new form of international hub' in which a group of leading foreign universities and technology companies will establish satellite locations on a 130-acre parcel of Berkeley-owned land located a mere 10 miles from the main campus."

Full article: A Global Hub, Close to Home

"The campus’s main goal, Dirks said, is to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to global problems like climate change, income inequality, epidemic diseases, and the need for new forms of sustainable energy."

Full article: Berkeley Plans to Build a Global Campus, Ten Miles from Home

"Chancellor Dirks will introduce, and in some cases interview, the performers, writers and other notables appearing at Berkeley Talks, a new series he created with Cal Performances Director Matías Tarnopolsky. It’s the first move in the chancellor’s initiative to engage people across campus and in the wider community with the arts."

Full article: Nicholas Dirks: Intimate Chats in the Public Spotlight

"My first response on seeing the film, as an academic (now administrator) who has spent an entire career in college settings, was to welcome the depiction of the dilemmas and challenges confronting a range of institutions. Yet the film made me increasingly uneasy, despite its illustrations of the power of undergraduate education."

Chancellor Nicholas Dirks drew comparisons between Columbia, Stanford, and the institution he runs.  In an Aspen Ideas Festival* panel on the state of the humanities, he summed up the difference between Ivy Leaguers in New York City and graduates of the institution he now runs. "You know, the tradition at Columbia is that you read Aristotle and then you go to Goldman Sachs," he said. "And the dream at Berkeley is to do social work and then go work for Google or Facebook."

Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and Scott Biddy, vice-chancellor for university relations at the same institution, discuss California’s public university system, the forthcoming presidential election, and an incident near the University of California at Santa Barbara last month that left six students dead - three of them from gunshot wounds.

Full article: The Podcast: University of California