Good morning, and welcome to Monday, April 15. Laura Krantz wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
An investment in trust
Higher education needs to get better at showing people how it creates a positive societal impact if it wants a shot at improving public trust in the sector, the incoming chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Richard K. Lyons, said in an interview on Friday with the Daily Briefing.
Lyons, a former Berkeley business-school dean who is now the campus’s associate vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship, was tapped last week as the university’s next leader and is set to take over on July 1, when Carol Christ, who has led since 2017, steps down.
In a conversation about the existential issues facing the sector and his priorities for Berkeley, Lyons said chief among them will be helping people connect the dots between teaching, research, and positive outcomes like disease cures and courses that set students on a new life trajectory.
“I’m not saying that this is going to take us from low trust to high trust, but I think it’s one of the elements of how we can make the case across the [political] aisle,” he said.
Recently the university received a $1-million gift from someone (Lyons wouldn’t reveal the donor) who required the money be used to more powerfully tell the university’s story in innovation and research externally. Lyons is excited — he thinks this should be a new category of donations.
“It’s like an investment in trust,” he said.
In this time of strained finances, colleges need more creative ways to share in the economic value they create, said Lyons, who’s also an economist. Over the past six years Berkeley has developed partnerships with eight external venture-capital funds that now have contracts to share their return with the university. “That creates a pipe that recycles resources back into the university to fund the fundamental mission,” he said.
- Or, create a company: Berkeley recently created a platform that allows outside companies to rent unused research equipment. The university funded the capital and recruited the founding team from its alums, and now it retains 16 percent of the equity in the company.
On free speech, institutions haven’t found the perfect balance, he said, between freedom of expression and student safety. He said he’s committed to upholding Berkeley’s reputation as a “marketplace for ideas” where professors are equipped to teach students how to have difficult discussions and disagree respectfully.
- A headline in his own backyard: Just last week, an incident took place at the home of the dean of Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, when the professor’s wife, who is also a Berkeley law professor, tried to grab a microphone out of the hands of a Palestinian student who had begun protesting at the invitation-only dinner for law students. Lyons pointed out the incident took place at a private residence and was a social event. He called Chemerinsky “arguably the world leader in First Amendment rights,” but declined to comment further. Our Len Gutkin spoke with Chemerinsky about the incident for The Review.
Students’ struggle to afford the cost of living is a priority, Lyons said. The biggest gift in the recent capital campaign, he said, was a dorm to house transfer students, who make up a quarter to a third of all students and often struggle with how to afford a degree. “If we are going to be the social-mobility engine that we are,” he said, “then we have to affect those transitions from community college.”
To keep himself sane in these demanding roles, Lyons plays the acoustic guitar and sings every morning. Several months ago I had a chance to ask Christ, the departing chancellor, about her own self-care, and she shared her daily habit of playing the viola. Turns out these Berkeley chancellors are a musical bunch. Lyons has had the same Martin Shenandoah guitar for 30 years, and his favorite song to play is “Sympathy for the Devil,” by the Rolling Stones. The best part of singing, he said, is “finding a voice that is interesting and true. Your voice does get stronger when you sing a lot.’’
