It is easy, Chancellor Carol Christ told a crowd of UC Berkeley staff, faculty and students on Tuesday, to have a “triumphalist narrative” of UC Berkeley, the world’s best public university.
But taking repeated victory laps can lead to disappointment when the inevitable realities of tuition hikes, housing costs, budget deficits and funding shortfalls consume so much time and energy.
“I think triumphalist narratives get you into trouble because there is no place to go but down,” Christ told the crowd during the spring semester’s final Campus Conversation event, where key administrators take questions from the campus community. “I think it is much more important to have a ‘resilience narrative’ of Berkeley, because there, of course, have been a lot of challenges in our 150-year history.”