When Carol Christ first joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, more than fifty years ago, she remembers a new colleague giving her a half-joking piece of advice: don’t bother preparing the last three weeks of your class, because you’ll never get to teach them—the students will all be out on strike. Protest has been part of her experience at Berkeley throughout her career there, first as an English professor (she specializes in Victorian literature) and later as an administrator; apart from an eleven-year stint as the president of Smith College, in the early two-thousands, the university has been her professional home. She assumed its top leadership role—chancellor—in 2017, and announced last summer that she would retire in 2024.
The job of heading a college or university has rarely come under greater public scrutiny than in the past two months. Since the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel and the beginning of the Israeli assault on Gaza, campuses across the country have seen a wave of protests—and accompanying accusations of both Islamophobia and antisemitism. There have been demonstrations, open letters, official statements, follow-up official statements, confrontations, threats, anger, and fear. At Cornell, campus police placed the Center for Jewish Living under guard; at Columbia, the administration disbanded pro-Palestinian student groups. At Berkeley, students organized a mass walkout on behalf of Palestine. During the walkout, a student carrying an Israeli flag was allegedly hit with a water bottle, an incident that’s now among the campus conditions cited in a lawsuit alleging antisemitism at the law school. Earlier this month, the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress in a hearing titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Trump-aligned Republican, went viral with her questioning, in which she pushed the presidents to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their institutions’ rules. Their responses, which parsed definitions of protected speech, inspired widespread outrage. Liz Magill resigned as president of Penn a few days later. Claudine Gay faced calls to step down as president of Harvard, but maintained the governing board’s support.
Christ spoke to me over Zoom from her office. After a turbulent semester, the campus seemed quiet, she said—it was finals week, and students were focussed on their work. The question on the horizon: “What do we do when the spring semester starts?” She’d been thinking about the Vietnam War, and the teach-ins she attended in her own student days. “You went to learn; they weren’t shouting matches,” she told me. “I wonder if we can use something like that.” In our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, she discussed her hope that through free speech, the Berkeley community can find a way to navigate “almost existential differences of opinion.”
To start out, maybe you could break down what you’ve seen as your role, as the leader of a university like Berkeley, during this time of intense conflict.
What I think a president or chancellor needs to do is make space for all students. In other words, in these days of increasing diversity of all sorts on college campuses, what the president or chancellor, I believe, needs to do is to create a sense of belonging, of membership in the campus community, for all students. And that means, in relation to a very divisive issue like the current conflict, you of course want to express sympathy, compassion, and empathy for the extraordinary suffering that has gone on in the Middle East; the loss of life; the way in which students are deeply, deeply affected, feel unsafe, feel harassed, and are just deeply caught up in this conflict. At the same time, I think it’s wrong for someone in this position—although this is controversial, and many people, particularly outside universities, don’t have sympathy with this point of view—to take sides or to pass judgment on one party or the other.
One of the really interesting things about universities in general is that they have an enormous range of both individuals and groups who feel that they have an ownership stake. So it’s not as hierarchical a structure as you would think. Whether it’s alumni or donors or students, staff, faculty—all of them feel with passion that they have an ownership stake, and should be able to have a major voice in positions that the institution takes.
I have not been in a crisis in which presidents’—or, in my case, chancellors’—words have seemed so important. And not just Do you make a statement, do you not make a statement? but, rather, very particular words. You must use this word; you must not use this word. Sometimes I’ve felt like I’m in a situation in which there are at least two, sometimes I think more, speech codes that people are using to represent their sense of the situation. There’s a speech code if you’re representing the situation of Israel, in anger and with a sense of its violation, and there’s a speech code if you’re speaking about the Palestinian history in Gaza and the West Bank, and often the words are the same. But they mean something different and they apply to different things.
This situation is so different from other situations of controversy in that it has really split the student body. If you go way back to the Free Speech Movement, for example, that was the students versus the administration—not a lot of controversy among students.The shape of this particular situation is really different because there is a deep, deep division on the campus.
It’s striking that there’s this expectation that campus leaders will weigh in—I saw that the president of Williams had to make a statement saying that it was her policy not to make statements about geopolitical events. Is it your sense that that’s novel, or has that been the case for some time?
I think it’s very different now. There’s hardly an event in the world that happens where I don’t get pressure to make a statement. I think in part it reflects the time rhythms and the digital media of our news world right now. Before there was the Internet, if you made a statement, you would spend a lot of time writing it. It was a long process.
I’ve very rarely had not only “Make a statement” but also “Let me read the statement first and revise it before you make it.”
Coming from other groups?
From campus groups—they want to read the statement, want to revise the statement, want sometimes to write the statement. It’s a very interesting way of claiming “I am seen”—by writing the words that represent the situation, whatever the situation is.
Is there a turning point that comes to mind?
I think it’s a relatively recent development. I don’t remember it ever happening when I was president of Smith, even though that was post-Internet. I’m not sure I can claim there’s one event. Certainly the murder of George Floyd was an event in which I think most presidents spoke up.
I’m curious to hear what you thought about the congressional hearing with the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T.
I didn’t watch the testimony, so all I’ve read are news accounts. It’s striking to me that all three presidents are new presidents, and that all three presidents are women—so there’s a kind of symmetry that I think wasn’t intended in their appearance. I also think one of the things that has happened is that there’s a narrative about higher education, generally, that’s politically useful to some groups in this country, and this very difficult situation with Israel and with Palestine is getting absorbed into that narrative. I also think that there is a tension between Title VI protections and First Amendment protections, and that hasn’t really been tried in court. I think it may be a very interesting product of this moment.
My understanding is that what the presidents were saying was legally accurate—it was a fair representation of what the codes at their schools permit—but it was clearly profoundly unsatisfying to a lot of people. Do you think there’s a way to make a positive case for free speech on campus that people actually want to rally around?
One of the ways in which I’ve tried to frame my comments about the current situation is our Principles of Community. I say often, to lots of different audiences, “Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean that it’s right to say.” The protections in our society, I think quite rightfully, are extraordinarily broad for free speech. When I talk about them, I often talk about John Stuart Mill and what he says about the marketplace of ideas, and how it’s only by having bad ideas colliding with good ideas that the truth comes out in our age of disinformation. I’m not sure how much Mill’s arguments about free speech really hold up. But, nonetheless, that’s certainly the idea for free speech. And the question about censorship of speech is always “Who’s the censor? Who has the power to determine what can’t be said?” And is that a step down a slippery slope that leads to restrictions that many people would not want on free speech? And is therefore the consequence of people sometimes saying abhorrent things with the legal license to do so—is that the price that we pay for not having that censoring authority?
One of the things that’s exciting about universities is you have this community that’s constantly changing. You can’t say, “Oh, I said that already.” Because it’s a new audience that’s there. Universities are places where students are for a time while they get their degree. But that means that you always have new people who may not understand how to act in a community. I myself believe that the pandemic has really reduced, generally, people’s social skills. So you have students coming here, also adults coming here, who have real gaps in their usual social experience because of the pandemic.
The very nature of students—it’s why I love them, I love being with them—is that it’s these years between eighteen and your early twenties when you’re forming your identity, and young people of that age sometimes believe things and say things with a kind of absolutism that will be foreign to them later in their life. And that’s in part what gives university communities their character—the stage of life of a very big part of their population.
You mentioned that you noticed that the three presidents who were testifying before Congress were all new in their jobs. You’ve been an administrative leader—at Berkeley and also at Smith—for some time. If you were in a position to give advice to those presidents, what would you say?
Oh, gosh, it’s always hard to say what kind of advice you would give somebody you don’t know. But I think in part what has happened is when you’re in one of these jobs for a while, you have relationships. I certainly have alumni who have felt that my statements haven’t gone far enough, who have been very, very distressed by what’s happening on campus—but they tend to call me up. When you have relationships, it becomes in some ways easier to have the conversation, because you have some credibility with people. What I always say is “Listen—you’ll learn from what you hear.” I certainly have learned from listening to our Jewish students, from listening to our Palestinian and Muslim students. And what I hear, paradoxically, both groups saying is “See my pain. See where I am.” Both groups to a certain extent feel unseen, either on the particular campus or, more generally, in the world. I think the task for us all is to try to figure out how we can bring together people of sharply differing views, and have them talk to each other with civility and respect. We had two faculty members here, Ron Hassner and Hatem Bazian, and they wrote a letter together to their students, saying, We disagree about everything; we vehemently disagree, but we have always treated each other with civility and respect, and this is what we are asking of you.
It seems like part of the challenge is within the campus community, and part is the way the wider world responds.
One of the things that really struck me when I got to Smith is that something inappropriate, mean, prejudiced that one student might say to another in the dining hall could become a campus crisis like that. There was very little separation between the private world and the institutional world. Here, if a student said something awful to another student in the dining hall—I’m sure it goes on, but you’d never know about it. At Berkeley, what there is is public space. People come here to protest because it gets in the newspaper. Places like Berkeley and Harvard, they make news. And they can serve as shorthand for an idea of an institution that people may want to use, for negative purposes or for positive purposes. So there’s a difference between public space and private space. I always thought, when I was at Smith, that I didn’t have enough public space, and at Berkeley, the public space overwhelms. It predominates. It’s the picture on Sproul Plaza. It’s the banner that’s hanging off the Campanile, rather than the conversation that should be happening between people who have different ideas about things.
A Berkeley law professor wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed with the headline “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students.” There have been various efforts to discourage employers from hiring students based on their political stances and activities. What do you think of that?
I think it’s wrong. We owe all of our students support both in getting through their education and then also finding a place of employment after their education. So I don’t think that that’s a very good pressure point. Obviously, when an employer hires somebody, they make lots of judgments. I do it all the time when I hire people. But to say in a blanket way you shouldn’t ever hire a student who holds this political belief—I don’t know. It rubs me the wrong way.
In the past few months, a number of campuses have had so-called doxing trucks driving around campus—Berkeley dealt with that last year, right?
It’s terrible. We don’t have a lot of control over those trucks; if they’re driving around the city streets, we can’t stop them. What I do is I’ve offered to write a letter of recommendation for any student who has been doxed in that way, if they are a student in good standing, to say they’re a student in good standing and say what I can about them.
The doxing trucks arrived at Berkeley targeting student groups at the law school, whose policies excluded speakers with Zionist views. At the time, it seemed like many on campus reacted to the trucks with solidarity for the affected students—even some Zionist students, who disagreed with the policies. Now those policies are cited in a new discrimination suit against the law school, alleging antisemitism. What’s changed?
I can’t really speak for the people who have developed the suit, but I think the current terrible, tragic, violent situation has reactivated their opposition to student organizations that express preference about point of view in their speakers.
Toward the beginning of your time as chancellor, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos announced plans to stage a so-called Free Speech Week on campus, which prompted new clashes over free speech at Berkeley. Looking back, what were the lessons of that experience?
I knew how critical it was to do whatever we had to to allow very conservative speakers to be able to speak on campus without being shouted down, without their event being cancelled, without riots happening. And so we took extraordinary measures.
The first thing that I learned was how important it was to defend the rights of free speech, even when the person’s point of view—like Milo Yiannopoulos’s to me—was just abhorrent. Another thing that I learned was how important it was for the community to have the conversation about free speech. The community was highly critical of the way in which I brought in enough police presence to enable the next conservative speaker who was invited to campus to be able to speak—and so we had a free-speech commission, we had lots of hearings. One of the things that you learn as a leader of an institution like this is, what you have to do is in some way embed the conversation in the community by having the opportunity for a lot of people to have it and to have it with different views.
You said it was important to you to have very conservative speakers on campus. Why was that?
I thought it was a real reputational damage. “Berkeley is a place where conservative speakers can’t speak.” It was not only damage in the eyes of a larger public but some of our alums said, “What is this? Why can’t a conservative speaker speak at Berkeley?” And then it just answers to my own principles for the university. The university is a place where you debate ideas. It’s not just a place where you hear the ideas that make you comfortable. You should hear the ideas that make you not so comfortable, or you should hear people argue them back and forth. If not us, where? And so making the conditions for that seems, to me, very important.
In recent years, there have been—among many different groups—conversations about what it means for students to feel safe on campus. How do you define safety at a place like Berkeley?
Absolutely, students have to be safe—end sentence, full stop. And that means physically safe, and it also means safe from targeted harassment. Doxing. We have pretty robust complaint procedures for people who believe that they have been harassed or doxed. And we’re actually hiring lots of extra help to try to go through what has been a huge increase in the number of complaints we’ve been getting. We’ve also increased our investment in security, as well as using observers more who can intervene if something seems to be getting out of control. One of the things that is very troubling to me, although I guess it’s understandable, is the sense of intense fragility—that physical fragility and vulnerability that students feel. And what I want to say is, “The campus is a pretty safe place”—which it is, but then you have terrible incidents like the young man who was hit by a car on the Stanford campus, or these three young men who were shot in Vermont. And so there are incidents that I think reinforce the sense that students keep sharing with me that they don’t feel physically safe.
How have you seen expectations around safety evolve in the course of your career?
When I was a student, we wanted to be independent! We didn’t want anything to do with the restrictions of an older generation. Now students want to be both psychologically and physically assured of their safety. I don’t know whether this has to do with maybe changes in parenting styles or what. However, I went to white-majority schools. Now our campuses are a lot more diverse, and I think that creates more fragility around the idea of belonging, which can bleed over into a sense of lack of safety. Also, this is a generation of students that grew up, through grammar school, with anti-bullying instruction. And so I think there is more sensitivity. But there’s also the permission that an online world gives to irresponsible speech—saying things that you would never say in person. I think there’s also been a huge shift since the pandemic. The kind of fragility that I’ve seen is much more pronounced since the pandemic.
Berkeley had a reputation as a place of protest since before you arrived. How do you compare the current wave of student activism with movements of the past?
During Vietnam, there was this real sense of agency. Students discovered that young people could have a role in history—that was the overwhelming sense of the sixties, whether it was the civil-rights movement, or the protests against the Vietnam War, or the Third World college strike at Berkeley. When I compare what’s happening now, there seems to be almost a sense of helplessness. There’s this situation in the Middle East that it is so grievous in so many ways—so horrible to think about, so horrible to look at when you watch the news or read the newspaper. And people are angry; they feel angst. And they also feel a sense of real impotence about it. So it seems quite different in that regard than the protests of the sixties.
Often student protests are against the college administration—last winter, striking academic workers occupied your office and marched on your house. What’s that experience like from your perspective?
It’s not enjoyable. But I understand the impulse of it. It’s a form of American activism. And so long as students pay attention to the time, place, and manner rules, it’s a legitimate form of the expression of group social opinion.
You’ve spoken a bit in the past about how your background as a literary scholar informs your perspective as an administrator. What are you drawing from your academic work right now?
First of all, literature teaches you empathy. You can’t read novels without having to shift your empathy, your sympathy, your understanding of people coming from very, very different places. The book that I’m reading right now is by Viet Thanh Nguyen—the title is “A Man of Two Faces,” and it’s about his difficulty in being a Vietnamese immigrant, from a family that had seen a lot of suffering in Vietnam, in the United States. And of course there are parts of this book that make me uncomfortable, and there are parts that are deeply illuminating about that experience. And, being a professor of literature, you’re used to paying a lot of attention to words, and words have been so fundamental to this current crisis.
You mentioned before Steven Davidoff Solomon’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Just in the past two or three days, there’s been an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by another one of our faculty, Ron Hassner, and it’s about “from the river to the sea.” And it’s really interesting. One of the points he makes is that some students—and I’ve learned this from talking with students—don’t understand it the way some Jews understand it.
One of the things I certainly have learned from this crisis is that there are certainly moral absolutes—there is nothing you can say that in any way rationalizes the barbarity of the Hamas attack on Israel. But people don’t always use words with the understanding of how they sound to someone else. And you see that all the time in an incredibly painful way in the current situation. I’m not at all calling for a moral relativism; I’m just saying that people aren’t hearing their words with the ears of another. And they’re often ignorant of the history that leaves those words to resonate in a certain way.
Christ and I spoke prior to Magill’s resignation and the Harvard governing board’s announcement of support for Gay. After those developments, I e-mailed her for her thoughts. She wrote:
While I will refrain from criticizing or second-guessing the presidents who appeared before Congress, the aftermath offers ample evidence of the perils and challenges higher education is facing at that intersection of free speech, diversity of perspective, and the essential import of civil discourse for strong campus communities. At Berkeley we have been grappling with some of these issues for years if only because as a public university we have far less discretion than private institutions when it comes to First Amendment compliance.
At Berkeley we would strongly condemn any advocacy for genocide against the Jewish people. And our response to that hate speech would not stop with condemnation. This campus can and will discipline hate speech not protected by the First Amendment. Any speech not protected by the First Amendment would, by definition, violate the Student and Faculty Codes of Conduct. And, even if that hate speech was protected, it would not stop Berkeley from strongly condemning it and marshalling the university’s educational resources to address the evil and the ignorance at the heart of any call for genocide against the Jewish people. Yet, I am certain that even this commitment—which is as far as we can go under the law—will sound far from sufficient to some, and an unwarranted over-reaction to others. ♦
