President Milliken shared the following recap on his Substack, The Gold and the Blue, Volume 22.

I recently sat down with UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons for the latest in my series of conversations with UC campus leaders. You can watch our full conversation here.

Rich is a Cal Bear through and through. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Berkeley in 1982 and returned as a faculty member in 1993 before going on to serve as Dean of Haas Business School and now Chancellor. Few people know the campus more deeply.

Rich grew up in Los Altos, and neither of his parents had a four-year college degree. He said when he arrived at Berkeley, he could not imagine a career in academia, let alone leading a university. Fortunately, several faculty members saw something in him, encouraged him, and helped open doors. He made an important distinction between mentoring and sponsorship. Mentors advise you; sponsors stake their credibility behind you. I suspect many of us can name the people who did that for us.

We also spoke about “pride without arrogance” — an idea that reflects the culture Rich helped establish at Haas and that he has worked to cultivate across Berkeley’s campus. Universities have every reason to be proud of their accomplishments, but they also have an obligation to remain open, curious, and willing to adapt.

I was especially interested in Chancellor Lyons’ thoughts about entrepreneurship. He has worked for years to broaden the concept beyond founding startups. His goal is to help students across all disciplines learn to think entrepreneurially and recognize opportunities, act on ideas, and believe they can have an impact on the world regardless of what field they end up in. Berkeley’s Changemaker program is one example of putting that idea into practice.

We spent considerable time on AI, which we both see as the defining challenge and opportunity facing universities today. Chancellor Lyons sees enormous possibilities for research, including accelerating work in biomedical science and creating AI resources that are broadly accessible. But he also believes the educational question is deeper. Berkeley should be asking how to produce the strongest generation of critical thinkers it has ever educated and how AI can help expose students to ideas and arguments and engage them in more demanding forms of intellectual inquiry.

That is one reason I found his discussion of Berkeley’s courses on thinking, science, and opposing views so compelling. Chancellor Lyons shared an excellent quote from Clark Kerr: “The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.” This speaks to an enduring purpose of higher education to prepare students to encounter new and challenging viewpoints with curiosity and intellectual confidence, to weigh evidence carefully, and to reach conclusions of their own.

Berkeley helped Chancellor Lyons imagine possibilities for his own life that he had never considered. Today, under his leadership, the campus is helping a new generation do the same amid profound technological and social change.

We concluded with a glimpse of how Chancellor Lyons unwinds. After sharing that playing music helps him decompress, Rich picked up his guitar and treated us to a rendition of Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” He has now set quite a high bar for these leadership conversations.

Check out our Oakland event photos

For questions about the President’s Leadership Conversations series, contact Kate Moser.

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