UC Berkeley’s music program is booming, with the fastest-growing major on campus. Thanks to a newly retooled curriculum, students' modern interests are reflected in new songwriting classes, expanded performance ensembles, more digital music creation, and an...
Across the country, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are being scaled back or eliminated altogether. From federal agencies, to Corporate America, to higher education, DEI programs are disappearing, creating uncertainty about what values and priorities will take their place.
Organized by Sophia Perez, Indigenous Technologies Coordinator for the Berkeley Center for New Media, a weeklong series of public workshops beginning March 9 will feature master navigators teaching everything from traditional canoe technology to ancient star-mapping.
Sophia Perez thought her 2018 visit to Saipan, in the Pacific Ocean’s Northern Mariana Islands, would only last a few weeks.
She’d graduated from UC Berkeley with a double-major in rhetoric and ethnic studies in 2014, and went on to work in commercial film and media production in Los Angeles and...
The mural in the new Undergraduate Academic Building in the heart of campus pays tribute to 41 women and the ways their contributions have echoed through time.
As a postdoctoral physics researcher, Elizabeth Dresselhaus had found many excellent networking groups for young women scientists — but she longed for a structured environment to learn professional skills and strategies. So, when she received an email about joining UC Berkeley’s Shining Lights Program’s first cohort, she thought it was the perfect opportunity. The semester-long leadership development fellowship aims to help more...
Standing on Asilomar State Beach just west of Monterey, Marius Castro talked with dozens of his fellow UC Berkeley students for hours under the moonlight. The moment felt special to Castro, like he was in a movie. In actuality, he was attending the first annual MPS Scholars retreat.
“Everybody I met had such good vibes,” said Castro, a third-year student double majoring in applied mathematics and computer science. “I...
As tensions have flared over events ranging from the 2020 murder of George Floyd to the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, our nation’s divisions seem to grow more and more stark. Against that backdrop, Berkeley’s new course “Openness to Opposing Views” aims to foster dialogue across ideological divides.
The asynchronous, self-paced course launched in the summer with just 50 enrollees. Since then, it has grown to roughly 700 students, with thousands more Cal faculty, staff, and alumni taking advantage of the free, non-...
UC Berkeley is launching a new course this spring to engage students in the work of famed sociologist and civil rights icon Harry Edwards. For 30 years, Edwards captivated students at UC Berkeley, where he developed the sociology of sport as a field. After retiring from campus,...
Tristan Lombard’s first interaction with what was then known as the Cal Independent Scholars Network was to call the Better Business Bureau and report a scam.
It was 2006, and Lombard’s pre-college years had looked different than most of his peers: He’d attended four different high schools, sold drugs, had brushes with law enforcement and experienced periods of homelessness. So, as what he terms a “very bitter 17-year-old,” he saw an invitation to create a wish list for move-in day dorm products and assumed it was a con.
It wasn’t. Rather, it was part of a fledgling program...
Collections at UC Berkeley's California Language Archive help keep Indigenous languages alive. This is the story of one of them.
November 6, 2025
This story is part of a two-part UC Berkeley News series about the California Language Archive. An episode of the Berkeley Voices podcast features one student’s story of working with the archive and learning about his own culture.
Throughout her long career as a linguist, Sally McLendon...
