Waves of boos, angry chants and the steady rhythm of feet hitting metal seats overturned the graduation ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Viva, viva Palestine!” the students sang. “Hey, heh, ho, ho, apartheid Israel must go!”
It was the soundtrack to this year’s anti-war protest, voiced on the morning of May 11 by hundreds of hat-wearing graduates, loud enough to nearly drown out the ceremony’s official speakers — and force the event to a halt.
A minute passed.
Two cents.
Five.
It looked like Berkeley’s 2024 commencement was going to be canceled in the middle.
Then, suddenly, surprisingly, the ceremony continued.
Once it was over and most had left the school’s low-slung football field, Berkeley Chancellor Carol Crist sat near the podium in a folding chair. She is silver-tongued and soft-spoken, a soon-to-retire 80-year-old former English professor with an unusual background for a modern college president: Her views on free speech first crystallized during her years as a student protester in the tumultuous 1960s.
When protesters forced a halt, had he considered ending the event?
“Absolutely not,” said Dr. Christos. This is Berkeley, he said. “We always went to power through Protest is part of our core.”
Dr. Christ (her name rhymes with fruit) 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.
She first arrived at Berkeley as a professor in 1970, when only 3 percent of the faculty were women, the campus was almost entirely white, and the protest movement that swept through 1964 had not yet reached its peak.
Now that her career is winding down, Dr. Christos has had more time to think about the tone and style of protest on campus and worries about where it is headed.
Dr. Christos became chancellor in 2017, a year in which conservative firebrands Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro caused a frenzy by announcing campus lectures. After Mr. Yiannopoulos’s appearance was interrupted by what the chancellor called a “riot,” he instituted a year of free speech on campus, with extra teaching on the First Amendment and a committee on dialogue formed by faculty members.
For Mr. Shapiro’s lecture, the price for security was about $600,000. But Dr. Christos said protecting a view that many on her liberal campus found repugnant was worth the cost.
“I started this job during a free speech crisis,” said Dr. Christos, “and I’m leaving this job during a free speech crisis.”
This school year, Berkeley has struggled with how to handle civil disobedience over the Israel-Hamas war. At universities across the country, police crackdowns led to the arrest of more than 3,000 protesters this spring.
Berkeley weathered its protests with little police involvement. But the university still saw enough turmoil and ugliness to spark an anti-Semitism probe by House Republicans and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education.
Dr. Christ says she has always believed that college campuses should reflect the philosophy of John Stuart Mill: “The idea,” she said, “that you need a kind of free market of ideas for truth to prevail.”
She remains wedded to First Amendment speech protection. But after seven years leading Berkeley, her views have an extra layer of spice: Mill’s ideals no longer hold. Not in this age of resentment and division.
Consider what unfolded on the Berkeley campus following the October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel.
There was the daily Israeli protest at Sather Gate, one of the main entrances to the campus. There was the clash at a lecture hall when dozens of pro-Palestinian activists smashed windows and slammed doors to protest a speech by a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, forcing attendees to leave under police protection.
Activists at times taunted Dr. Christos, saying she had tolerated Islamophobia on campus. The law students disrupted an alumni dinner at the home of Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school who is Jewish and a Zionist.
Activists had already published caricatures of him with blood on his lips and a fork and knife — echoing an anti-Semitic trope, according to Mr. Chemerinsky, Dr. Christ and many others.
One student leader, Malak Afaneh, denied this claim, telling the New York Times: “If our dean had been a Muslim woman in a hijabi who supported genocide, I would have made the exact same poster with the exact same blood.”
Pro-Israel politicians, students, donors and faculty members pressured Dr. Christos to harshly condemn the activists, accusing them of anti-Semitism. A professor organized a sit-in.
Activists set up nearly 180 tents outside Sproul Hall, famous for free speech and anti-war rallies in the 1960s. It looked like the university might be torn apart by the kind of clashes that would later emerge at Columbia University, at Dartmouth College and the University of California, Los Angeles, where school presidents brought in the police to break up encampments.
Dr. Christos, whose office features a framed 1960s photo of Berkeley free speech icon Mario Savio, decided to take the protests gently, choosing negotiation over violence. Shortly after the graduation ceremony was almost over, Dr. Christ brokered an agreement that helped bring the camp to a peaceful shutdown.
Among the students’ longstanding demands: recognition of Palestinian suffering and divestment from companies linked to Israel.
The chancellor offered a compromise.
He told activists that Berkeley could not delegate independently. Such decisions rest with the trustees who oversee California’s public university system, and those trustees oppose such a requirement.
But he pledged to issue a statement calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. And he pledged to support a review of Berkeley’s investments to ensure they align with its values, which include, he said, “respect for equality, human rights, a commitment to enhancing the conditions for human growth and development and the aversion to war. .”
The reaction was quick. Dozens of faculty members signed a letter repudiating the deal and chastising the chancellor for “appeasement.” A splinter group of protesters ignored the compromise and stormed a closed, fire-damaged university building near the main campus, culminating in at least a dozen arrests.
Even the leaders of the student camp scoffed at the chancellor’s compromise. “Too little, too late,” said a protest spokesman, Matt Kovacs, who promised civil disobedience would continue into the fall.
Asked if the Berkeley chief felt like he was being held in a vise, Dr. Krist nodded and smiled a tight smile.
But she said calling in police in riot gear to break up the Sather Gate encampment and protest would not just be a disaster, it would go against her school’s cherished identity. And she recalled her own days in the 1960s as a student at Yale protesting the Vietnam War.
“If there was a big demonstration, I was there,” he said, adding, “I wanted to do everything I could to oppose the war.”
“Students today feel the same moral passion,” he said. “It’s the nature of students at this age. For these students, this feels like the biggest existential crisis of their existence.”
“I was once that person.”
At the same time, things are different now, Dr. Christos said, enough to change the very nature of what it means to protest and change her own thoughts about free expression.
Social media has damaged tone and empathy, he noted. Too many are hushed up in briefing rooms, walled off from opposing views and want dissent to be silenced. There is no consensus on truth.
In past decades, the most significant protests on her campus united students, she noted. “Now it’s student vs. student,” he said. “Faculty member vs. faculty member. Staff member vs. staff member.” And each faction leans hard into talking about each other.
Then there is the ethos and sensibility of the current generation, brought up with an extra awareness of young and old.
The students, he said, “feel sticks and stones can break my bones and names can always hurt me.”
For her, the market for John Stuart Mill’s ideas seems “less strong” than ever.
“I’ve come to understand that while freedom of speech is absolute, just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to say,” he said. “We all use censorship in our speech in relation to the situation in which we find ourselves. If you value your community, you need to find ways to share your opinions that aren’t vehement, that don’t needlessly hurt other people.”
Right now, he said, “we’re not there.”
Unlimited expression comes with serious responsibility. This is why Dr. Christ has spent the last several months asking students to consider how the speech and protest affected the entire campus community.
Berkeley, he said, should aspire to teach students how to engage in dialogue and debate with citizens. Without that ability, he said, “we are lost.”
Dr. Christos remembered Mario Savio, known for leading Berkeley’s free speech movement in the mid-1960s.
During a student rally, a police patrol car was surrounded by student activists near Sather Gate. Savio, the chancellor noted, got into the car to give a speech but first took off his shoes to avoid damaging its roof.
Dr Christos wondered aloud if a modern-day activist would do the same before climbing on top of a police car. Probably not.
In fact, he quipped, they just “might kick in the windows.”
