In Berkeley Talks episode 188, a panel of scholars discusses free speech on university campuses — where things stand today, what obligation campus leaders have to respond to conflicts involving speech and the need for students to feel safe when expressing their own views.

"Issues of free speech on campus have been there as long as there have been universities," began Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky at a UC Berkeley event on Jan. 10. "There's no doubt that since Oct. 7, universities across the country, including here at Berkeley, face enormously difficult issues with regard to freedom of speech."

"Especially in these times where, and especially with this (Israel-Hamas) war, where people are feeling so hurt by words, and arguing that words or phrases mean you're anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, it's really challenging," said Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand. "The temptation when people are so hurt and in so much pain is to run from it.

"But in fact, I think we should do the exact opposite. … At times, those are the moments where people will actually want to learn, and need to learn, and listen.

"So I think we should charge toward the conversations in these hard times, precisely because there are opportunities to learn so much. Because … when people make this demand or that demand, they're often expressing a need to be heard and a need to have a voice in what's happening."

Panelists in this discussion included:

• Geeta Anand, dean of Berkeley Journalism
• Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney, ACLU; adjunct professor, NYU School of Law
• Howard Gillman, chancellor and professor of law, UC Irvine
• Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law (moderator)

This discussion is part of the Berkeley Law Conversations series. Watch a video of the conversation and learn more about the speakers on Berkeley Law’s website.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Photo by Kefr4000 via Wikimedia Commons.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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In Berkeley Talks episode 187, Bernice Yeung, managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program; public health journalist Isabella Gomes; and gender-based violence expert Holly Joshi discuss how sex trafficking can appear invisible if we don’t know where to look, and how doctors, nurses, police officers, hotel operators — all of us — can do more to protect victims and survivors. 

“If we're just looking at sex trafficking as the issue, then it's a bipartisan issue,” said Joshi, director of the GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice in San Francisco, and a nationally recognized expert on gender-based violence prevention and intervention. “But if we're really looking at the causes and the historical oppression and the ongoing systemic oppression of women and girls and immigrants and failure to create safe cities for immigrants and anti-Blackness, all of those things equal a failure to protect survivors of sex trafficking.

“So … yes, it's a bipartisan issue if we're just talking about sex trafficking legislation, specifically. But we're not. We're really talking about American politics and the historic lockout of entire groups of people that is continuing to go on and is creating vulnerable victims in this country.” 

This Nov. 8 discussion, co-presented by the Pulitzer Center and Berkeley Journalism, was part of a forum focused on gender. It also included a keynote by New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg on democracy and authoritarianism in the context of gender, race and identity in the U.S.

Learn more about the speakers and watch a video of the conversation on Berkeley Journalism’s website.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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In Berkeley Talks episode 186, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars from the College of Letters and Science discusses the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in academia — and the questions and challenges it requires universities and other social institutions to confront. 

"When it comes to human-specific problems, we often want fair, equitable, unbiased answers," said Keanan Joyner, an assistant professor of psychology. "But the data that we feed into the training set often is not that. And so, we are asking AI to produce something that it was never trained on, and that can be very problematic. We have to think very carefully about how we're training our AI models and whether they'll be useful or not. I think there's so many awesome uses of AI, and I'm going to use it in my own work, and it's going to definitely infuse psychological science and social sciences more broadly." 

Panelists of the October 2023 Berkeley event included:

• Alex Saum-Pascual, associate professor of contemporary Spanish literature
• Keanan Joyner, assistant professor of psychology
• Josh Bloom, professor of astronomy
• Moderated by Marion Fourcade, professor of sociology and director of the Social Science Matrix

This discussion is part of the L&S Salon Series, which showcases the diversity and range of academic disciplines embedded across the five divisions in the College of Letters and Science.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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In Berkeley Talks episode 185, New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn discusses how polling works, the challenges facing pollsters today and where polling stands as we head into the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that we have a crisis of polling at the same time we have a crisis of democracy," said Cohn, who gave UC Berkeley’s Citrin Award Lecture on Oct. 19.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that Trump mobilized a so-called silent majority of voters who felt that they were unrepresented in our political system, and who turned out to be underrepresented in polls by an order of magnitude for decades.

"Just think about all of the choices that politicians made from the '80s onward. That in each one of those decisions, they were doing it, in part, based on data that underrepresented the number of white working class Americans by tens of millions. I think it added up, and I think I'll start by proving that to you, and I think it offers a nice launching point for where polling is today. Because although it's tempting to think the problems in polling are recent to Trump, I think it's probably fair to say that Trump exposed issues in polling that had existed for a very long time before that."

The Citrin Award Lecture is an annual event of Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research. Watch a video of Cohn’s lecture on YouTube.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

AP Photo by Steve Helber.

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In Berkeley Talks episode 184, Richard Rothstein, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, and housing policy expert Leah Rothstein discuss their 2023 book, Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. The conversation was moderated by Tamika Moss, founder and CEO of the Bay Area organization, All Home. 

In the book, the father-daughter co-authors describe how unconstitutional government policy on the part of federal, state and local governments created the segregation that we know in this country today, where every metropolitan area has clearly defined areas that either are all white or mostly white, and clearly defined areas that are all Black or mostly Black.

"We had a myth term that what we had in this country was 'defacto segregation,' something that just happened because of private bigotry or discriminatory actions on the part of private businesses or people just liking to live with each other of the same race ... something that just happened by accident," said Richard Rothstein, author of the 2017 book, The Color of Law, and a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow emeritus of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  

"And the reason that that distinction is so important is because if it just happened by accident, then we might not like it, but it's easy to think that the only way it's going to unhappen is by accident. But when we understand that this is the creation of racially explicit written public policy on the part of federal, state and local governments ... (and) if we take our responsibilities as citizens of this country seriously, then we know we have an obligation to fix it, to undo this unconstitutional system."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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In Berkeley Talks episode 183, Poulomi Saha, an associate professor in the Department of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, discusses how cult culture, once a fringe phenomenon, has moved into the mainstream — and what that tells us about what we long for, what we fear and who we hope to be.

"In this crisis moment, we have a return to desire for overarching meaning, radical acceptance, transformative experience, transcendence," says Saha. "But unlike in the 1960s, we're not dropping out, we're tuning in ... to a highly regularized representation of cults. If in the 1960s we had the sense that fringe groups and communes might offer us a way out of conformity and regularity, in this current incarnation, when cults appear in our everyday lives, they do so highly regularized."

Saha is currently working on a book about America’s long obsession with its own invented visions of Indian spirituality, and why so often those groups and communities come to be called cults.

(Editing note: Because of an audio issue, we left out the Q&A portion of this talk.)

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Jen Siska.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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In Berkeley Talks episode 182, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties Democratic governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world. 

"To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things that we need," began Klein, who joined in conversation on Oct. 5 with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab.

"It's so stupidly simple, so obvious, that it seems weird there could be any need to write articles or podcasts or truly, God forbid, a book about it. 

"And yet, the story of America in the 21st century, more than that, the story of liberalism, and particularly California liberalism, is a story of chosen scarcity. Why did we choose to build so few homes in the places people most need to live, including here? Why do we choose to build so little clean energy, and make it so hard to build clean energy, that red states are getting far more of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act than blue states?"

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Lucas Foglia.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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In Berkeley Talks episode 181, renowned artist and human rights activist Ai WeiWei discusses art, exile and politics in a conversation with noted theater director and UCLA professor Peter Sellars and Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Ai, who grew up in northwest China under harsh conditions because of his poet father's exile, is openly critical of the Chinese government's stance on democracy and human rights. He is well-known for his provocative works, including his 2014-15 installation on San Francisco Bay's Alcatraz Island, @Large, that the LA Times called, "an always-poignant, often-powerful meditation on soul-deadening repressions of human thought and feeling."

"Normally, people call me an artist or activist, and I am often forced into one condition," he says. "It's not that I intentionally try to create something or to crystallize something, but rather I've been put in extreme conditions, and I have to focus on dealing with those situations. Normally, I don't accept the easy answer. 

"So I think I have to find a language to illustrate my expression, and it comes out in certain ideas or materials. We can call it art. I don't think my art really looks like art, but still, it's hard to categorize it. I'm a bit ashamed about it because everything in real life, it has a purpose. It has clear problems and solutions. But the art is not really about that. It rather creates problems after problems. So yeah, that's what I do."

This Sept. 24 event was co-presented by Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Read about 10 of Ai WeiWei's adventurous works on Cal Performances' blog Beyond the Stage.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu)

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Ai WeiWei.

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In Berkeley Talks episode 180, Dania Matos and Fabrizio Mejia, vice chancellor and associate vice chancellor, respectively, for UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, join Berkeley student Angelica Garcia to discuss the campus’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives (LTI) and how these efforts are supporting Berkeley’s goal of not only becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), but also of transforming Berkeley into a Latinx Thriving Institution.

“There's a practical standpoint of this that's about becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution,” begins Matos. “That's why you'll hear HSIs a lot, and it's important in that naming and framing. Dr. Gina Garcia is a sort of national expert who talks about this, but for us, it's really taking it beyond that. Because becoming an HSI is about 25% enrollment of undergraduate students, which, by the way, the federal government does not count graduate students, and we care about graduate students here, too.

“For us, we're thinking about (how to) build this ecosystem where we are honoring, bringing in more Latinx communities, but also honoring the different ways of knowing and being, which are so counter to the way U.S. higher educational system is done.

“Latinx Thriving Initiatives is a multifaceted campuswide effort, but not just campus. It's really thinking and honoring our mission as a public institution, and (asking), ‘How do we center community in that?’ We're not just a community center that people come to or get admitted to and leave from in four years, but a place where they're having an impact and creating that.”

“It’s collecting all the work that is happening,” added Mejia, “honoring that historical effort, that ongoing effort, but also asking ourselves, ‘What else? What does it look like to have a Latinx student body, Latinx staff, Latinx faculty that are all thriving from the moment they conceptualize “Is Berkeley a place for me?” to the moment they land on the campus and say, “Where do I see myself in this environment? How do I meet my aspirations? Am I getting the support all the way through?"’

Listen to the full conversation in Berkeley Talks episode 180, “What are Berkeley’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives?”

This conversation was recorded in March 2023 as the first episode of Berkeley’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives podcast, which explores what it means for Berkeley to become a Latinx Thriving Institution, and the direct impact it’ll have on its Latinx-identifying campus community. It was created in partnership with Ethnic Studies Changemaker, a campus group of students plus a faculty adviser that aims to “amplify the voices and diverse experiences of marginalized communities.”

Learn more about Berkeley’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives and watch a video of what these efforts have accomplished over the past year on the Latinx Thriving Initiatives website.

Photo by H.G. Villaseñor and I. Torres.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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In Berkeley Talks episode 179, Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson reads several poems, including "The Mud Sermon," "The Bicycle Eclogue" and "After the Hurricane." His April reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event Lunch Poems.

"I take this voyage into poetry very seriously," begins Hutchinson, "and take none of it for granted, because of the weight of history, both growing up in Jamaica and knowing the violent history that comes with that. But also the violence, too, of canon, and seeing that my work as a poet, in part, is to figure out what sort of emancipatory forces I should summon. Luckily, I stand in great shoulders within the Caribbean tradition of many poets and writers that I admire, and envy, and wish they hadn't been born. Don't tell them that. This isn't recorded, of course."

Here’s “A Mud Sermon,” one of the poems Hutchinson read during the event:

They shovelled the long trenches day and night.

Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.

Venereal mud. Malaria mud. Hun bait mud. Mating mud.

1655 mud: white flashes of sharks. Golgotha mud. Chilblain mud.

Caliban mud. Cannibal mud. Ha ha ha mud. Amnesia mud.

Drapetomania mud. Lice mud. Pyrexia mud. Exposure mud. Aphasia mud.

No-man’s-land’s-Everyman’s mud. And the smoking flax mud.

Dysentery mud. Septic sore mud. Hog pen mud. Nephritis mud.

Constipated mud. Faith mud. Sandfly fever mud. Rat mud.

Sheol mud. Ir-ha-cheres mud. Ague mud. Asquith mud. Parade mud.

Scabies mud. Mumps mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud.

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin mud. Civil war mud.

And darkness and worms will be their dwelling-place mud.

Yaws mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud.

Canaan the unseen, as promised, saw mud.

They resurrected new counter-kingdoms,

by the arbitrament of the sword mud.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

Lunch Poems is an ongoing poetry reading series at Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 p.m. to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month. A new season of Lunch Poems will begin on Oct. 5 with Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik in the Morrison Library.

Find upcoming talks on the Lunch Poems website and watch videos of past readings on the Lunch Poems YouTube channel. 

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Neil-Anthony Watson.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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