In Berkeley Talks episode 196, Ruth Simmons, a longtime professor and academic administrator, discusses how the journey to equal access and fairness in education has reached a critical inflection point — and why educators are essential to the progress we need to see.

“History has shown: The failure to resolve satisfactorily the issue of whether and how the state should address the causes and effects of discrimination will continue to impair progress, sow seeds of hatred and despair, and make even more distant the goals and ideals enshrined in the United States Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution,” Simmons said during the Clark Kerr Lecture at UC Berkeley in April.

“Yet, as we know,” Simmons continued, “considerable efforts have been undertaken by various branches of government, non-profit institutions, for-profit institutions, educational institutions and activists to reconcile the immense differences over what constitutes appropriate remedies for past and present discrimination. That we have failed to resolve this question adequately almost 250 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights proves the intractability of the dilemma.”

Simmons, currently the president's distinguished fellow at Rice University, served as the eighth president of Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU, from 2017 until 2023. And from 2001 to 2012, she served as the 18th president of Brown University, where she was the first Black president of an Ivy League institution.

In closing, Simmons said: “Education makes possible the smoothing out of the unequal circumstances into which many are born. Educators are therefore on the front lines in ensuring that this democracy endures because we are optimistic enough, brave enough and wise enough to create and manage a process in which the public as a whole feels well-served by our work.

“And so our efforts to make plain where we stand in regard to evening out unequal circumstances are, in this moment, all-important. So, let's get about the work of making plain where we stand.”

This April 18 event was sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 195, UC Berkeley professors discuss how and why psychedelic substances first evolved, the effects they have in the human brain and mind, and the mechanism behind their potential therapeutic role.

"If it's true that the therapeutic effects are in part because we're returning to this state of susceptibility, and vulnerability, and ability to learn from our environment similar to childhood," says psychology Professor Gül Dölen, "then if we just focus on the day of the trip and don't instead also focus our therapeutic efforts on those weeks after, where the critical period is presumably still open, then we're missing the opportunity to really integrate those insights that happen during the trip into the rest of the network of memories that are supporting those learned behaviors.

"And then the caution is that we don't want to be opening up these critical periods and then, for example, returning people to a traumatic environment or exposing them to potentially bad actors … So we want to be very careful about the way that we take care of patients after they've been in this open state of the critical period."

Panelists of this March 27, 2024 event included:

• Imran Khan (moderator): Executive director of the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP).
• Gül Dölen: Renee & U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Bob Parsons Endowed Chair in psychology, psychedelics, and neuroscience; professor in the Department of Psychology.
• Daniela Kaufer: Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; associate dean of biological sciences.
• Noah Whiteman: Professor of integrative biology and of molecular and cell biology; faculty director of the Essig Museum of Entomology.
• Michael Silver: Professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science and in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; faculty director of BCSP.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo of Daniela Kaufer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 194, Harry Edwards, a renowned sports activist and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of sociology, discusses the intersections of race and sport, the history of predatory inclusion, athletes’ struggle for definitional authority and the power of sport to change society.

“You can change society by changing people’s perceptions and understandings of the games they play,” Edwards said at a March 2022 campus event sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) and Cal Athletics.

“I’m saying whether it’s race relations in America, whether it’s relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, whether it’s what’s going on in South Africa with apartheid, you can leverage sport to change people’s perceptions and understandings of those relationships. Change society by changing people’s perceptions and understandings of the games they play.”

This episode is from our archive. It first ran on Berkeley Talks in April 2022.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Harry Edwards.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.