SEASON 3: Ep. 4 Resilience, Risk, and University Leadership with Carol Christ, UC Berkeley

In this episode, former UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ reflects on her unexpected path to university leadership and the realities of guiding a major public institution through a period of intense disruption. From free speech controversies and financial pressures to the COVID-19 pandemic and shifting public perceptions of higher education, Christ shares how entrepreneurial thinking, clear communication, and strong institutional values shaped her leadership approach. Drawing on decades as a faculty member, president of Smith College, and chancellor at Berkeley, she explores the evolving role of higher education, the importance of access and affordability, and why universities must balance innovation with stability. Throughout the conversation, Christ emphasizes storytelling, transparency, and a strong moral compass as essential tools for leading institutions and preparing students for uncertain, rapidly changing careers.

This podcast is sponsored by Viv Higher Education 

About Viv Higher Education

Viv Higher Education is a Boston-based, female-owned comprehensive marketing agency specializing in higher education. With expertise in strategic planning, creative asset development, and media campaigns, we focus on enrollment-centric initiatives. Our approach is grounded in industry best practices, ensuring precision in reaching target audiences. We have extensive experience in marketing to diverse groups, including high school students, Hispanic, military, LGBTQ+, international students, and online learners. Navigating the complex landscapes of university environments is second nature to us, and we prioritize fostering collaborations that yield mutually beneficial outcomes. With a personable, nimble, and highly responsive approach, we deliver tailored solutions to empower organizations to achieve their objectives.

Website: https://vivhied.com/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/viv-higher-ed/

Transcript

 Hi, Carol, welcome to the show. How are you today? Thank you, Susan. I'm really delighted to be here. It is a deep winter here on the East coast in the Boston area. Are you still out in California? Yes, I'm in California and it's a beautiful day and the high sixties now. I am jealous.

Enjoy that. Mm-hmm. I am so excited to talk with you about your career in higher education. it's an amazing career that you've had. And, it's also interesting because you were at Berkeley and then you went to Smith and then you got back to Berkeley. So I'm excited to hear that story. So why don't we start by you just sharing a little bit about the journey you had, that ultimately culminated in your role as chancellor at Berkeley.

Well, I began as a faculty member in the 1970s at Berkeley in the Department of English. I then took the jobs that faculty members are often invited to do. I was chair of my department. I was dean of Humanities. I've finally became the provost of the university.  Then left that position, thought I would finish doing administration, and then Smith started to call.

And when I was in graduate school, I'd always thought I wanted to be in a small New England college. That didn't work out ' cause my job offer was at Berkeley. But I thought this sounded like a wonderful opportunity. I went to a women's college. The chance to lead a women's college was very attractive to me.

So I was president of Smith for 11 years. Then I came back to Berkeley to retire. how did that work out? It didn't work out. The provost resigned very suddenly because his wife was sick. And I was asked to be the interim provost. And after, period of doing that job. I was, urged to become a candidate for the chancellorship and the rest is history.

But being Chancellor Berkeley is not really a career that I anticipated. I anticipated retirement. It's a good encore career to fall into, I suppose. and you were there from, is it 2017 to 2024 in that role? That's correct. Awesome. So that was a good seven year stretch that you didn't expect to spend, at Berkeley later on.

 how was that time? What were sort of the key moments? I know that was during the pandemic and a lot of, discourse in our country happening. So would you say it was a time that made it easy for you to lead or was it very difficult? No, it was a tumultuous time. I began my chancellorship, with a free speech crisis.

 we had a financial crisis in addition to that. Then there was the pandemic, which everyone experienced, and then I ended my chancellorship with another free speech crisis, this one about Israel and Palestine. So there were tumultuous years. Yeah, I can only imagine. And the term that we're really exploring this season with higher ed leaders is entrepreneurial, leadership.

And so when I think about the time during which you were at Berkeley, the resource constraints, the political backdrop, that you were in, the discourse in the country about the value of higher education students, deep concerns about affordability and the value. How would you say was entrepreneurial leadership part of your chancellorship and how you led during those years?

Entrepreneurial leadership was enormously important to how I led during those years. though the state support is very generous, we're really grateful , to the state for its support. Berkeley to be the university it aspires to be, to achieve the level of excellence to which it aspires needs other sources of income.

In addition, our faculty and our students are eager to move the discoveries that they are making in the laboratory to the world of enterprise.  And so, entrepreneurship has been a really important focus of the curriculum. Also and the resources that we provide for faculty. Let me give you a few examples.

We had a wonderful, very visionary donor who created the Baker Fellows program. It's a highly competitive program that awards faculty grants whose discoveries are ready to make that leap from the laboratory to the marketplace. And then we have created a number of incubators on campus in which both faculty, but also that people from the community can rent space for their startups.

 We have one called the Baker Bio Ingenuity Hub. There are two others that are under construction. And there is a program that actually my successor, chancellor Rich Lions created for students. It's available for freshmen, it's called Change Makers, and what it is designed to do.

Is both encourage students and give them the resources to be change makers, whether they're going to be change makers in business or change makers politically, socially. So I see entrepreneurship. As absolutely fundamental to the financial structure of the university currently to what our faculty are looking for as they try to move their discoveries.

Into the business world and to our students who are thinking about careers that are much, more entrepreneurial. Than they were. Say when I began teaching. Right, and we think about. Where. Higher ed is headed and entrepreneurship, being increasingly needed within and outside of organizations, right? For students.

So, whether. They start their own businesses or not, they need to bring that entrepreneurial, leadership to their organizations and they have to make decisions with uncertainty, with resource constraints. And teaching them that on campus. And then. Administrators modeling that too, because we're in our own, set of uncertainties in these universities and have to figure out how to make decisions with imperfect data as well.

Do you worry about higher education as a whole, that we're not being   📍 enough to meet the demands of this time? Or do you think that generally. Speaking, the sector is moving, towards entrepreneurial, leadership at the pace that it should?  believe that, universities don't really have a choice that even if their leadership isn't going there, their students and their faculty are going there.

I remember there was a program at, Smith.  Smith had the first engineering program in a women's college, and key to that program was a senior project, which they did. In a collaboration with either a company or there were also some civic projects that they did with municipal government, and I was fascinated by what the students learned in that program because they learned teamwork.

They learned. Living with uncertainty, making decisions in the context of uncertainty, living with failure and having to find another way. So I think it was a profound learning experience and other. Parts of the, university's intellectual enterprise looked at that and they thought, oh, we could have a program like that.

And so the archives, the art museum created entrepreneurial programs that were like that. So entrepreneurship, is not, limited to engineering or the business world. I think it is a critical skill that students need. Wherever they wanna make their careers. Yes. And you have a background in the liberal arts and came through English and, lots of discussions happening right now how the liberal arts actually equip students to be more entrepreneurial and manage uncertainty and manage change throughout their careers.

Not to say that STEM majors. Don't, also have those skills, but there is sort of a moment that the liberal arts are seeing right now where the competencies that they instill actually are being emphasized so much. I'm wondering if you can give me some examples of maybe risks that you think institutions need to be willing to take right now on behalf of their students, especially when the political and the public stakes are as high as they are right now.

Well, I think many students look to their institutions for a moral compass, and it's so important, I believe, for institutions to. Be, outspoken about their core values, about, academic freedom, about freedom of speech. About integrity in science about relying upon scientific evidence for decision making about, honesty.

so I believe that there is an enormous need that you always see in students, but I think you feel that, with particular urgency. Now understanding what the moral compass of their institution is and hearing leaders articulate that moral compass and, does that include choosing a point of view that could potentially alienate some audiences or some students and their families?

Versus trying to please everybody who could potentially come to those institutions. 'cause when you say moral compass And you mentioned these examples around, the scientific methods that institutions have been teaching all along and. And helping students bring integrity and ethics. You know, I hear a point of view in that, that institutions have to sort of choose and represent.

And that's a very complicated question. I, myself believe that the leaders of colleges and universities should be, very very, careful about expressing views on, strictly political topics that don't have to do with their institutions. You wanna have a big tent. You wanna foster debate among people with opposite.

Points of view. that's part of what the mission of a university is, is to make sure that students have both the opportunities for and understand what it is to have principled arguments. And that requires, I believe, a certain amount of restraint on the part of the leader of a university.

However, there are other things that are really. Not up for debate, for. Example. I don't think you will find universities saying the universities should leave room for differences of opinion about evolution. for example there's established scientific. Fact that I think universities have to assert the value of evidence-based conclusions of reliance upon research of freedom of speech, which leads to.

Expression of diversity, of viewpoints and academic freedom, which applies specifically to faculty members and the kinds of freedom they have to represent the subject that they teach. Thank you so much for that thoughtful answer I asked because the term moral compass is very compelling.

And I do agree that especially right now, students are looking for that and I think  you introduced some really insightful nuance around, okay, so there are some things that are not up for debate and our universities are there to help students how to think, not what to think. 

  📍     I think there's a. General trend at institutions across the country right now, there is a temptation to sort of choose political points of view to. Hook students who agree with those points of views, but it seems a little shortsighted when ultimately the mission of the institution is not to do that.

Right. So thank you for that. That's right. Students are really deeply concerned about access, right? Affordability about outcomes. How do those concerns shape chancellor or presidential decision making do you think? Right now, especially at large public flagships like Berkeley.  They're absolutely central to decision making at large public flagships.

the land grant universities in the United States were created to give opportunities with the words of the moral act. , , the children of farmers and factory workers,  they were institutions that were founded on the principle of access and the principle of access remains.

Absolutely fundamental to our mission. that's really important. Affordability is essential to access. unfortunately, it used to be the University of California was incredibly cheap for everybody. Now it's not cheap for everybody, but it does meet full need for.

Students who don't have resources, and so making that clear, I find one of the problems higher education struggles with is the pricing system is so opaque many people don't understand. Yeah. I would leave the status one in five families understand that the sticker price on the website is not what you pay.

Thank you for pointing that out. That's right. Yeah, I was gonna ask you next, what's a public perception of higher education that you think is widely misunderstood or an expectation? So it's funny that you just brought up that affordability piece at the sticker price not being the sticker price.

I certainly have family members out on the West coast who still talk about how. College was basically free, you know, back in the sixties. Yeah. And everybody who wanted to work hard, could put themselves through college. It's not quite like that anymore. But there are options and there are pathways, to really get that cost down.

So that's certainly a, I think a responsibility that higher ed marketers and communicators have. but also the rest of the administration working on creating more transparent cross structures.  That's exactly right. people here.

Oh, it's a hundred thousand dollars a year to go to university. And they think that can't be for me. But very, very few students pay the full sticker price. Yeah. And that impacts not just large public flagships or land grant institutions. I think even private small colleges deal with the same issue where ultimately the sinker price isn't.

But you're right that the mission of a land grant institution like Berkeley really demands, right, that affordability states very front and center in the brand as well. Is there anything that you think, students don't understand about. What they're gonna get from an institution like Berkeley or from a higher education institution that is currently holding many people in this country back from pursuing a college degree.

And what do you think administrators can do about it? That's a really, really interesting question. I sometimes think that students are too focused on the idea that college is gonna give them a job ticket, and it is certainly true that college degree increases their lifelong earnings. It increases their employability.

But most students will have many, not only many jobs, many careers. In the course of their working life. So what you go to college to get are those capacities of mind and imagination and entrepreneurship that will make you successful at the many careers that you will have in the course of your working life.

Yeah. And there are actually, I mean, to continue speaking about the liberal arts, there are outcome statistics that graduates of the liberal arts outer on graduates in other fields 10 years later. And there's just so much that is not understood, about the value A of a college degree and b of those types of maybe majors that aren't traditionally considered high income majors.

, So that is a really good one. We just talked a lot about students and their families and sort of public perception. We talked about entrepreneurship as an outcome for students, but we also talked about it a little bit as a mindset for administrators. Wanna talk a little bit about faculty and administrators and staff, and in an institution as large and complex as Berkeley.

Right. How do you, or how did you encourage experimentation and forward momentum and that entrepreneurial leadership among the people who you worked with? Oh, at Berkeley. That isn't hard. what you do. there was a, former president of Harvard, Larry Ow, who talked about the most important attribute that a leader had to have, and this is gonna be a very odd word, was taste.

Taste in ideas, taste in issues, taste in people. You need to become very good. At being able to identify where the great energy is coming from in your institution, among faculty, among students, and try to facilitate their achieving whatever it is they're trying to achieve. research universities are very, very different from other kinds of organizations.

They are not top down for the most part. They really have a remarkable, , sense of ownership and agency. On the part of both students and faculty, and it's your job as a leader to try to as much as you can, create a great path for that ownership and agency. But all the good ideas come from the faculty and the students.

I love that you mentioned energy too, because in an institution like Berkeley, there's a lot of prestige. There's a lot of intelligence, right? There's a lot of hierarchy, I'm sure too, but just the idea that you could develop taste in. The type of person who brings positive collaborative energy and sort of that ability to navigate uncertainty, that's really compelling.

, I think a lot of people who listen to this will resonate with that and maybe me feel emboldened to really pay attention to the energy. I listened to an interview recently with a former CEO of Microsoft and they said, how do you make hiring decisions? And he said, I look for do they bring energy and do they bring clarity?

And it was just so simple. You know, that's ultimately what you need to have good collaboration and momentum. Now, I know that in any higher ed context, resources won't be limitless, and some places have more resources than others, and even within the same institution, resources are more abundant in some places than others.

So how do you decide where innovation is necessary and where that really entrepreneurial push is necessary towards a different future? And where maybe stability matters most for both students and for administrators as well, and for faculty. That's such an interesting question because I don't think innovation is always necessarily tied up with more resources.

Mm-hmm. So that it's easy to say stability means budget, stability, and innovation means More money is needed. That's a good point. A lot of times you can make innovations that even when there's an initial investment. In the long run are more efficient. So I think the first thing is to unpack that relationship between innovation, stability, and resources, and make sure you're understanding it right.

It's so easy to say, oh, we can't do anything 'cause resources are so constrained. Whereas often it's the sense of, I'm gonna say two contradictory things here. It's the sense of the new that attracts more resources. And it's also when you do something new, you are often going to create greater efficiencies and better, more, economical use of resources. 

You just identified maybe a limiting belief, right? That can exist. That you can only innovate if there are abundant resources and you know, stability maybe is equated with lack of resources and blowing all of that up to begin with and saying, no, that's not quite the relationship at play here. I really appreciate that as well.

can you think of an initiative where, you and your Teams, probably multiple teams were able to, really innovate and push boundaries on what was possible without a significant infusion of resources. Oh, I think the expansion of online learning is a good example. We did it by force. We were thrown into it with the pandemic, and faculty realized ways in which it could really.

Both enrich their teaching and expand their reach. So I don't mean that online learning is necessarily cheaper, than classroom learning, but you know, you do have to invest in it to make it good. But it also is a source of efficiency and reach. Yeah, and that's actually a great example where many institutions really let themselves fall behind on the online learning space because they assumed they needed a lot of resources and they couldn't afford it, or that it would be a distraction.

And ultimately it's about doing everything. To the extent that the learner needs it, right? Yeah. So it's not abandoning residential learning to, introduce online learning. If you look back at your chancellorship and, just your leadership journey, you know, what choices feel most consequential to you in hindsight, and what lessons would you pass on the next generation of higher education leaders who are now in this time of massive change and, and demographic shifts and threats?

From, you know, international enrollment declines to public trust shrinking, what would you tell them to, pay special attention to and any pitfalls to avoid? I think communication is critical. It's one of the things that I learned very powerfully during the pandemic is you have to create communication structures.

You can't say, oh, I already told you that, and expect that people remember it. So you have to create structures in your administration itself that makes sure that people are constantly communicating with each other that have different areas of responsibility. You also have to have a communicative strategy with your many audiences, particularly as a public university.

So I think one of the things I've learned is the centrality of I'll use an adjective, transparent communication. People want to know what's happening and they wanna be able to trust what you say. Another thing that I learned.  and this relates about, the humanities is the importance of storytelling.

People want a story about where their particular university or college came from. Where it's going. They wanna be able to put themselves in that story. And so one of the things I took with me from my scholarly expertise in English literature was the importance of storytelling for leadership.

Another thing that's important, and this is a, facet of communication, is when you have crisis, take as an example of the Israel Palestinian crisis, it's so important to reach out and be in regular contact with all of the different parties. To that crisis. sometimes they're not ready to talk to each other, but things will be much better if you reach out to them and talk to them and understand what their views are.

Thank you. All three of those examples were in some way, right, tied to communication and, marketing and storytelling. Mm-hmm. And so I guess I can imagine that everyone listening to this is thinking, yes. You know, that is extremely good advice. And to just take it a step further, who were the collaborators that you enlisted to make that successful for yourself?

If you're having to communicate with people very consistently and build that infrastructure that you mentioned and that storytelling arm. Who in a university do you think, a president or a chancellor. Would need to work very, very closely with to make that sustainable and successful. There obviously are the professionals, the communication professionals, and Berkeley certainly has wonderful communication professionals, but it's also becoming steeped in history so you can understand what the historical trajectory of your institution is.

Then, you know, as a faculty member, you are trained to think every time you speak you have to say something new. And one of the things I learned as a leader in higher education is there is a tremendous virtue. Repetition of message. So you have to free yourself from that sense of you're not really, worth your salt if you aren't saying something new every time.

And that's, you're not trying to get published in a scholarly journal every day. You're trying to make people understand where you're going and repetition's important for that. What an interesting frame on it too, because so many presidents and chancellors come up from the faculty and maybe find that very counterintuitive to, to have to repeat themselves.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And that storytelling, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, there's this whole piece around the future of higher education and where are we going and what are the trends and the competition and the demographics and all of that is valid, but being able to tie that to what did we.

Start, and where did we come from? Yeah. And who have we always been and how are we gonna carry that forward? we use the term,  in higher ed marketing, sometimes brand anthropology, right. To yeah, bring those values that were there at the very beginning into the future. And if a president or a chancellor can do that in collaboration with their communication team, that's really powerful.

 Yeah. One of the things that interested me at Berkeley, this is something I discovered is, you know, it's so natural to wanna represent your institution as we just go from victory to victory. We're so great. But in fact, I found that a kind of core value at Berkeley was resilience. And I kept reminding people of the times of hardship the university had been through before and the resilience that was important in bringing them through those times successfully.

I love that. And there are a lot of institutions right now I think, that are really discovering grit as a, at a attribute that doesn't just apply to their students. Right. If they're serving a lot of first generation students, or you said the land grant mission is to serve the kids of,  farmers, for example.

Right. That grit has always been there and translating that into the administrative context as we're weathering these different storms and headwinds that higher ed is facing. I can't thank you enough for your time and thank and insight. It's been an absolute pleasure and honor to get to have this conversation with you.

It's such a pleasure to talk with you, Susan.