U.C. Berkeley’s Leader, a Free Speech Champion, Has Advice for Today’s Students: Tone It Down

Waves of boos, angry chants and the steady rhythm of feet pounding on metal seats were upending the graduation ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Viva, viva Palestina!” students sang out. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Israel’s apartheid has got to go!”

It was the soundtrack of this year’s antiwar protest, voiced on the morning of May 11 by hundreds of cap-and-gowned graduates, loud enough to nearly drown out the ceremony’s official speakers — and force the event to halt.

One minute passed.

Two minutes.

Five.

It looked like Berkeley’s 2024 commencement was about to be canceled midstream.

Then, suddenly, surprisingly, the ceremony resumed.

Once it was over and most had left the school’s low-slung football stadium, Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, sat near the podium in a folding chair. She is silver-haired and soft-spoken, a soon-to-retire 80-year-old former English professor with an unusual background for the modern college president: Her views on free speech first crystallized during her years as a student protester in the turbulent 1960s.

When the demonstrators forced the pause, had she considered ending the event?

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Christ said. This is Berkeley, she said. “We were always going to power through. Protest is part of our core.”

Dr. Christ (her name rhymes with “wrist”) plans to retire at the end of June. The first woman appointed to the job, she leaves as the oldest chancellor in Berkeley history, and one of the oldest leaders of an elite college campus in America.