UC Berkeley in 2017: The year in photos
From Carol Christ becoming the first female chancellor in Berkeley's 149-year history to the campus as a champion of free speech, it was a year of speaking up and leading the way. Take a look
December 22, 2017
For UC Berkeley, 2017 was a year of speaking up and leading the way — with Chancellor Carol Christ becoming the first woman to lead the campus in July, and dedicating the year to free speech after a protest over alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos that made national headlines.
When the campus wasn’t debating the First Amendment, it was helping those who needed it most. Student veterans showed up to a Santa Rosa evacuation center, scrubbing toilets for the hundreds of Sonoma County residents displaced by deadly wildfires. Students in “la diaspora” raised $7,000 for Puerto Ricans struggling to live after a massive hurricane ravaged the island. And when the Republican tax plan was unveiled, graduate students created an online calculator help their peers estimate its cost.
Here’s a look back, in photos.
In January, hundreds of students flooded Sproul Plaza to protest the inauguration of newly elected President Donald Trump. (UC Berkeley photo by Hulda Nelson)
Following the presidential inauguration in January, Arturo Fernandez, one of UC Berkeley's 470 undocumented students, voiced his concern that President Trump would end the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals program, an act that would threaten benefits for more than 700,000 young immigrants in the U.S. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
Alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos arrived to speak on campus in February but was driven out when a protest turned violent. The attack was instigated by some 150 masked agitators, now known to be part of the group Antifa. Yiannopoulos, then a Breitbart News editor, had been invited to speak by the Berkeley College Republicans. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
Also in February, The Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center, named after the civil rights activist who was involved with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, opened on campus. It's a space where Berkeley's black students can come together, something that is very important to this student population, which makes up just 3 percent of the student body. (UC Berkeley photo by Ken Li)
Carol Christ joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1970 as an assistant professor of Victorian literature. This year, a balanced budget is allowing her to begin increasing the size of the faculty. She's also creating five clusters of new faculty members who are experts on topics related to populations that have been historically underrepresented in scholarship at American universities.(UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
Also in March, the European Patent Office announced its intention to grant a broad patent for the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to the University of California, the University of Vienna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. The tool, developed by UC Berkeley's Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, and Charpentier, is already being used to edit the genomes of animals to study diseases that affect humans, insects to fight disease and crops to improve disease resistance.a A legal battle over U.S. patent rights for CRISPR-Cas9 continued throughout 2017.
Tens of thousands of prospective and current students, alumni, families and friends flooded the campus in April for Cal Day, the campus's annual all-day open house. Visitors chose from 400 events, performances, tours, faculty talks and hands-on activities designed to show off every side of the Berkeley campus. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
In May, more than 5,500 graduating seniors, decked out in black caps, gowns and colorful variations thereof, celebrated their hard-earned right of passage. "This is a beautiful mix of people," the keynote speaker, Iranian American stand-up comic and actor Maz Jobrani, told the audience. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)
In June, the campus discovered the first-ever peregrine falcon family living on the campus's Campanile. Experts banded the two chicks, named Fiat and Lux by the campus community in a Facebook survey, and volunteers worked around the clock to make sure the baby peregrines had a successful first flight off the 307-foot bell tower. (Photo by Mary Malec)
In June, the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, along with Amnesty International, hosted first-ever summit for the growing workforce of college students, including 16 students from Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab, being trained worldwide to review and verify digital content — typically videos shot by citizens who witnessed atrocities — that could help human rights lawyers prosecute war criminals. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
Marian Diamond, one of the founders of modern neuroscience who was the first to show that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment, and who discovered evidence of this in the brain of Albert Einstein, died in July at the age of 90 at her home in Oakland. (UC Berkeley photo by Elena Zhukova)
In August, UC Berkeley was again named the No. 1 U.S. public university in the Academic Rankings of World Universities, an assessment of 500 top institutions around the globe by ShanghaiRanking. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)
"This is going to be a free speech year," announced new Chancellor Carol Christ at the campus's back-to-school press conference in August. This is a time of beginnings, she said — new students embarking on their college or graduate school years, new faculty beginning their Berkeley careers. She also described her vision of the campus and laid out her goals for the year, her first as Berkeley’s top leader. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)
Also in August, the campus broke a world record when 7,196 students formed a "C," the largest human letter as judged by Guinness Book of World Records. The last recorded human letter was made by 4,223 University of Tennessee students, who formed a T in March 2016. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)
Malachi Jackson is one of the hundreds of students who attended a speech in September by conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at the campus's Zellerbach Hall. The event, which the campus spent an estimated $600,000 on for security, has been one of many events that has affirmed the campus's dedication to promoting free speech. (UC Berkeley photo by Anne Brice)
UC Berkeley photo courtesy of Bancroft Library
In October, Berkeley News premiered a series of short, TED-like talks highlighting the work of 17 UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab researchers who are tackling the global challenges of climate change. Climate modeler William Collins (pictured), a professor of earth and planetary sciences and a Berkeley Lab researcher, kicked off the series with a 5-minute video exploring "pathways for getting down off the up escalator of climate change." (UC Berkeley photo by Elena Zhukova)
Also in October, a small team of students, led by Berkeley student and Iraq veteran Matthew Smith, mobilized to help victims of the Sonoma County wildfires. For a week, they cleaned, sanitized, mopped and scrubbed a Santa Rosa shelter for fire evacuees. (UC Berkeley photo by Jeremy Snowden)
In November, Berkeley students Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte, launched a Google Chrome browser extension that puts a button onto every Twitter profile and tweet. With a click on the Botcheck.me button, users can see if the account is run by a person or automated program, based on the pair’s own machine-learning model. (Wired photo by James Tensuan)
Students in Puerto Rico's "la diaspora" took relief efforts into their own hands in November, raising money and delivering supplies to the island's residents, struggling to live after Hurricane Maria struck in September. Members of the student group Boricuas in Berkeley (pictured) raised more than $7,000, which they donated to nonprofits helping farmers restore their destroyed crops and aiding in the humanitarian crisis. (UC Berkeley photo by Anne Brice)
As 2017 drew to a close, Chancellor Carol Christ was formally inaugurated in December as UC Berkeley’s 11th chancellor, in front of 600 new graduates and their families at the winter commencement ceremony. "You are completing your college education and beginning that period I always imagine in capital letters — LIFE AFTER COLLEGE,” Christ told the crowd. “And I too am beginning a momentous task.” (UC Berkeley photos by Brittany Hosea-Small)