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The Underground Scholars took a different path to Cal. JAMES CARLIN WATCHED A SMALL AIRPLANE snake over the field beyond the barbed wire fence at Deuel Vocational Institution, a state prison in Tracy, about 60 miles east of Berkeley. He’d seen the plane before. It came at daybreak, flying low and trailing behind it a […]
IN NOVEMBER OF 2015, A FEW DAYS BEFORE the Big Game between UC Berkeley and Stanford, California State Sen. Nancy Skinner attended an Oakland Rotary Club meeting. That day, as it often does, the club was discussing athletics, and it had invited antitrust economist Andy Schwarz, a longtime critic of the National Collegiate Athletic Association […]
Not everyone is on board. There’s money in college sports. Lots of it. March Madness, the national basketball tournament, alone brings in more than $900 million annually for the NCAA, the nonprofit that oversees college athletics in America. And big-time college football generates even more revenue than basketball. The athletes who play these sports, however, […]
Berkeley unveils a new fundraising campaign. Last month, we formally launched a comprehensive fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $6 billion for Berkeley—a historic target for any public university and one of the most ambitious in all of higher education. The goals and aspirations for the campaign connect directly to the challenges and opportunities […]
Meet Kristine Sanders, the alum who “majored in Disney.” My earliest memory of Disneyland was going on Splash Mountain when I was 3. It was upsetting and wonderful all at the same time Disney was a major feature of my childhood; sometimes my mom would take me four or five times a week—and she wasn’t […]
Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg talks pronouns and our changing language. “Letter-for-letter, no part of speech gets people more worked up than pronouns do,” Geoffrey Nunberg wrote last year in an op-ed for NPR. But this “pronoun rage,” which speaks to the growing agitation around gender and identity politics, isn’t all that new, he says. And he […]
Some of our favorite books, films, and performances, for your entertainment Our editors have curated a list of the arts to indulge in this spring season. Here are their top picks of forthcoming dance, films, novels, and more to check out now through May This is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice […]
Famed law school is now housed in “The Law Building” ON THE MORNING OF THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, UC carpenter Joe Poppi chiseled away the name “Boalt Hall” from the façade of the UC Berkeley law school. It was the culmination of a long debate after revelations surfaced about the building’s namesake’s racism. “There is no […]
Welcome to the United Nations of Berkeley. FOR INTERNATIONAL HOUSE ALUMNA BERNICE TAJIMA, the days after February 19, 1942, were a race against the clock. President Roosevelt had just signed an executive order forcibly relocating people of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes to internment camps across the country. In this climate of extreme […]
Everything you never knew about Berkeley zoology Campus is teeming with more than just students; a wide variety of wildlife can also be found in Berkeley’s backyard. From the mountain lions that roam around the Lawrence Hall of Science to the three-spined sticklebacks in Strawberry Creek, here are a few of the critters who call […]
Berkeley’s William Drummond talks reporting from San Quentin In 2012, William Drummond had begun to lose faith in journalism. A changing media landscape in the age of the Internet had led to what he saw as an abandonment of the fundamentals. So when the Berkeley journalism professor was invited to teach a class at the […]
What’s changed since California voters passed Prop. 64? NOT FAR FROM THE OREGON BORDER, in the serendipitously named city of Weed, the Hi-Lo Café boasts a display of cannabis-themed souvenirs. Among the buttons and baseball caps are Bic lighters that urge smokers to “Enjoy Weed,” “Got Weed?” coffee mugs, and refrigerator magnets bearing the legend […]
In the early 1970s even athletes were swept up by the revolutionary spirit.
