Celebrating 30 Years of Freshman and Sophomore Seminars at Berkeley
“The Freshman Seminars owe their existence to the combination of a good idea and a bad budgetary situation. In 1992 the University suffered deep cuts in its state budget and threats of further curtailments. The legislature resounded with the old complaints that the faculty did not teach enough. To demonstrate that we could do more […]
Liberal arts education is about truth-seeking — a call to intellectual arms
Institutions of higher education and, more specifically, liberal arts colleges, have become the butt of resentment in current culture wars based on misinformation and the attack on facts. But UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science aims to combat that by continuing to provide an education that focuses on truth-seeking and on knowledge-based discourse and […]
Berkeley Talks: Learning from nature to design better robots
In Berkeley Talks episode 148, Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology and founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research at UC Berkeley, discusses how nature and its creatures — cockroaches, crabs, centipedes, geckos — inspire innovative design in all sorts of useful things, from bomb-detecting, stair-climbing robots to prosthetics […]
An astrophysicist breaks down what NASA’s Webb telescope tells us about our universe
NPR’s Morning Edition speaks with astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley about the latest findings of the Webb Telescope. …
Oliver O’Reilly is Berkeley’s new vice provost for undergraduate education
Oliver O’Reilly, whose 30-year career at UC Berkeley is characterized by a deep passion for teaching and student success, will be the campus’s new vice provost for undergraduate education starting this Friday, July 1, officials announced today. …
Commencement Speech – UC Berkeley Cognitive Science ’22, Akash Kulgod
It began my freshman semester when I took David Presti’s Drugs and the Brain. I learned that we are amidst a tremendous resurgence of a class of compounds known as psychedelics. A couple of sessions with psilocybin, a molecule found in 200 species of mushrooms, and people heal from a Pandora’s box of ailments like […]
Learning at the Intersection of Business and the Arts: Jeena Chong, Founder of Cityface, and the Inspiration of the Big Ideas Course “Collaborative Innovation”
The UC Berkeley community spans countless disciplines and provides a unique environment for creation and innovation. “Collaborative Innovation,” one of the College of Letters & Science’s Big Idea Courses, seeks to foster that culture by bringing together the disciplines of business, theater, design, and art practice. …
“The Blank Page, the Open Mind and the Free Hand”: Forming New Perspectives Through the Art of Handwriting
To engage students in course materials, educators often turn to cutting-edge tools. As technology progresses, new methods offer an increasingly wide array of options for professors. …
A partnership with Moleskine and U.C. Berkeley: The Future of Handwriting
The evolution of handwriting has been a critical factor in preserving history and learning about the past. If it were not for the development of handwriting, some of the greatest thinkers of our time would not have been able to share their thoughts; thus, their stories never being told. …
The Future of Handwriting
In Fall of 2021, the 100 or so students in Greg Niemeyer’s “L&S 25: Creativity in Practice” course responded to a simple prompt with urgent creativity. The prompt: Write a note from the future to the present, by hand. …