Recent News

The Goldman School’s Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement (CCDE), founded by the Cal Class of 1968 on their 40th reunion, seeks to promote civility in public discourse and prepare future leaders to successfully engage people of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints in the resolution of public policy issues. CCDE Advisory Board and members of the Class of ’68 who have been gathering quarterly over the past 10 years, along with a multitude of UC Berkeley alums from various reunion years,…

Addressing the security and privacy concerns [of drones in domestic airspace], while meeting the integration deadline, will likely require federal, state, and local officials to experiment with new regulatory models.

The Labor Department reported a week ago that 236,000 jobs had been created in February. That's good news - but not nearly good enough. Even if this rate were to continue, which seems unlikely, the United States wouldn't be back to pre-recession levels of unemployment for another four years. American workers remain in a bear market. More than 12 million Americans are still without work. Another 8 million are working part time but would rather be working full time. Many have…

School board elections are usually placid affairs, but that wasn't the case in the recent Los Angeles election. Would-be kingmakers, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and media magnate Rupert Murdoch, spent nearly $4 million to defeat incumbent Steven Zimmer. Zimmer's sin was to question the untrammeled growth of charter schools and the over-reliance on test scores in evaluating teachers. Faced with a tsunami of junk ads, he exhorted the voters not to "believe the lies of March."…

As an Alaskan, I'm no stranger to guns - there was actually a shooting range in the basement of my elementary school (to be fair, it was closed during school hours). I've never had very strong feelings about the gun issue because I can see merit in both sides of the debate. That said, I think some gun rights advocates have completely lost their minds. Last week, the Alaska House of Representatives, with bipartisan support, passed what's…

Fatimah Simmons (MPP '11) helps young women from low-income communities to become civically engaged and politically involved. She is the program director for Ignite, which sponsored the Tomorrow’s Women Leaders Today conference, drawing 150 promising young women from throughout the Bay Area. Read more about the conference and Ignite's exciting work here.

by Helen Walters Kicking off the TED conference would be a daunting prospect for most, but Jennifer Granholm has tackled both nastier challenges and less friendly audiences in her time. After all, she is the former governor of Michigan, a state that, as the blurb to her book A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future puts it, was “synonymous with manufacturing during a financial crisis that threatened to put all America…

You have a science and urban planning background. How did you come into the world of public policy? I know that because of my background, it might look like I “stumbled” into public policy — but that couldn’t be further from the truth. From the very start of my time as an undergraduate, I intentionally sought out an interdisciplinary education specifically because I have always been interested in environment and development policies. I realized early on…