Saturday morning marked UC Berkeley’s 2026 campuswide commencement ceremony, where more than 7,000 graduating students gathered to hug, laugh, snap selfies and reflect on their academic achievements.Throughout the ceremony, one theme stood out: the importance of connection and community as a foundation for graduates to go out and change the world. Robert Reich, this year’s commencement speaker, emphasized the unique power Berkeley grads hold to make positive change despite enormous headwinds. He ...

University Of California, Berkeley

For his honors thesis, Charles Long wanted to know about power and prisons: "What happens when people are placed in supportive roles instead of positions of power and domination?" Drawing on both his own and others' experiences, he concluded that empathy is a skill that must be practiced. "Like any other muscle, if you don't use it, it atrophies."Long, 43, has overcome many obstacles that “could have soured him,” as one of his professors explained.He graduated from Milpitas High School, but an a ...

University Of California, Berkeley

“You know how you can get a mental picture of someone on the phone without seeing them at all? I study how people do that.”Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, studies the social information carried in speech: the subtle cues of region, age, race and gender that listeners decode automatically, often without knowing they're doing it. “My linguistic research has always come back to one question: ‘When we hear speech, what properties do we attune to that enable ...

University Of California, Berkeley