UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ to retire in 2024

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ announced she will retire June 2024 — more than seven years after she became the first woman in Cal’s history to serve in the role.

In a letter sent to the university community Thursday, Christ noted she had intended to end her tenure sooner, but once the pandemic hit campus in 2020, she “simply could not imagine parting ways with so much left to do.”

In her final year, the 78-year-old plans to focus on key financial and housing projects still in the works, including UC Berkeley’s ongoing $6.5 billion “Light the Way” fundraising campaign and development of “The Gateway” academic building, which will house the recently formed College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.

“I originally expected to serve as Chancellor for no more than three to five years. What I, or anyone else, never expected was a global pandemic that descended quickly upon the world and had the effect of slowing everything down, including our university’s most important efforts and endeavors,” Christ wrote. “My time in office has been meaningful and rewarding beyond compare, and I will sorely miss the challenges, the opportunities, and the daily interactions with the members of Cal’s amazing extended family … There is no place I would ever rather be.”

Christ, who is the school’s 11th chancellor, said the University of California’s Office of the President will conduct a national search to secure her successor.

Christ had long ties to UC Berkeley before the UC Board of Regents approved her nomination to the school’s top post.

She rose the ranks within Berkeley’s English faculty from 1970 to 2002, when she left campus to serve as president of Smith College in Massachusetts for 11 years.

In 2015, she returned to the East Bay to direct the Center for Studies in Higher Education and later was named interim executive vice chancellor and provost — a role she had previously undertaken before moving to Smith College — with the responsibility for the campus’s day-to-day operations and finances as well as leading academic programs for the university’s undergraduate and graduate students.

Christ replaced former chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks in 2017, after he announced he would step down amid a series of sexual harassment scandals that roiled the university community.

During her seven-year tenure, Christ was applauded for a range of initiatives, from supporting UC Berkeley’s commitment to eliminate all non-essential, single-use plastic by 2030 — becoming the first university to do so — to inviting both conservative and liberal speakers to campus, in an effort to live up to its distinction as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.

More recently, community members criticized Christ for helping lead a controversial push to develop People’s Park — three blocks south of the university — into student housing. In Dec. 2022, roughly 150 academic workers protested outside her office, hoping to compel her to publicly support their union demands for better wages and benefits.

Gov. Gavin Newsom thanked Christ on Thursday for her service to academia in California.

“As she retires from a formidable career in higher education,” Newsom said in a statement, “we all have one more opportunity to learn from Chancellor Christ by following in her footsteps to make higher education more accessible and reflective of our values and diverse communities.”