 Welcome. Welcome to the transfer students, the class of 2021. Welcome to the freshmen, the class of 2023. My name is Carol Christ, and as Chancellor, it's my great pleasure to welcome you all to the University of California at Berkeley and to the next chapter of your lives. Each of you has a different story about how you came to this place at this moment in time and your lives and experiences add so much to this rich mosaic. So I'd like to begin today by telling you a little bit about yourselves. First, there are roughly 9,000 of you joining our campus this fall, 6,400 freshmen and 2,600 transfer students. The youngest of you is 15 and the oldest is 72. Making it clear that it's never too late to invest in your education. Members of your classes come from nearly every county in California, 50 US states and territories, and 70 countries from around the world. 80% of the new undergraduates in your class join us from public high schools. 94% of new transfer students come from California's exceptional community colleges. 119 of you come here from having served your nation in the armed forces. Probably a third of you are the first in your families to attend college. Among those sitting in this room today are a student who has won a host of engineering awards for inventing a device that helps people perform CPR more effectively. A person who co-founded a non-profit organization dedicated to providing more enriching science education for young people. A student who has traveled to Turkey annually over the last few years to help give Syrian refugees medical and dental treatment. A rock climbing national championship. A person who founded a software startup that helps those with learning disabilities build their social circles. A person who was homeless for the first 12 years of life. But who went on to intern in a public defender's office and then went a fellowship to work in state senator Nancy Skinner's office before being admitted to Cal. A student from Oakland who created a popular app that educates users about the amount of sugar in various drinks as well as the effects of excessive sugar consumption. And a student who led his national team at last year's Rubik's Cube World Championship. In sum, you are an extraordinary as well as an extraordinarily diverse group and we're so thankful to have you with us. As you settle into your lives here, I'm sure your new friends, resident assistants, GBO coordinators and others will have many pieces of advice for you and I hope you'll hear them out. I too have a few pieces of advice that I'd like to share with you today. First, I want to offer some thoughts on navigating Berkeley. I don't mean literally getting around campus, although when you start spending time in the labyrinth of Dwinell Hall, you might look back and wish I did. No, I mean considering how to get the most out of a research university like this one, I sometimes compare different colleges and universities to different kinds of communities. Some colleges, for example, are like small towns in which everyone knows everyone else. Berkeley, on the other hand, is a big city. More than 40,000 students are enrolled here and we have scholars studying every subject under the sun from gentrification to genetic engineering to the works of Graham Greene. In this way, Berkeley responds to city skills. It rewards those who can survey the vast resources in front of them, ask themselves what they want to get out of their time here, and then chase those goals. No matter what you're interested in or care about, we have someone, perhaps a whole academic department, sharing that interest. But you must be proactive in finding your intellectual neighborhood within this big city. You must knock on doors and make your interests and hopes known. People are eager to help and we have services to support you, but you must have a degree of personal agency to make the most out of Berkeley. Tied to this with such a cornucopia in front of you, my second piece of advice is to make time to explore. There are incredible people to meet and resources for you to take advantage of here. And I hope you'll use them to expand your interests, to broaden your horizons, and grow your understanding of the world. Heed the words of Eleanor Roosevelt who once said, the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste it to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. Berkeley is a place where even if you know for sure that you want to be a doctor, you can still take a place with a former secretary of labor or a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer or the world's foremost authority on earthquakes. You won't truly be able to uncover your full range of talents without exploration, and you never know when an activity you take up on a whim might change your life. Steve Jobs often told the story of how he took simply to fulfill a course requirement and entered a class in calligraphy while he attended college in Oregon. He later said that it was the most important learning experience of his life because it made him see the value of clarity, elegance, and simplicity in design. That course in calligraphy was foundational to what he accomplished with his company, Apple. I might add, of course, that Berkeley graduate Steve Wozniak, who designed the first Apple computers alongside Jobs, helped out more than a little bit. Beyond classes, you can explore the richness of Berkeley in so many ways by participating in undergraduate research, joining one of the country's top ranked debate teams, becoming a member of the largest student housing cooperative in the nation, founding a company at one of our startup incubators, forming in one of our music or theater or dance groups, and much more. Maybe your experience here will take you far past the edges of our campus itself to Greece for a study abroad program, to Washington D.C. for an internship on Capitol Hill, maybe to Puerto Rico for a service learning alternative spring break trip. Don't miss the opportunity for such powerful and eye-opening experiences. Outside of Berkeley's academic and co-curricular ecosystem, your thirst for discovery should extend to the kinds of people you surround yourself, engage, and interact with. For many of you, this place will be the most diverse community you've ever experienced, and I mean diverse in every sense of the word. The people you meet and the perspectives you'll be exposed to will stretch you intellectually and at times emotionally, but I urge you to be open, to listen actively, to allow the validity of your beliefs to be tested and challenged while building connections with people who are far removed from those you know now. Allow yourself to be surprised by discarding stereotypes, by developing your capacity for empathy, by learning to see with different eyes and to put yourself in others' shoes. This need is connected to an issue that's been in the news the last few years and that is our campus' commitment to free speech. I'd like to close with a few comments about that. Free speech, the constitutionally protected right to believe what we wish and to express ourselves as we wish is fundamental, both to our democracy and to our mission as a learning institution. It has a special meaning at Berkeley, home of the free speech movement in which students of the 1960s united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. A commitment to free speech involves not just spending your right to speak and those whose views align with your own, but also defending the right to speak by those you disagree with, even if only to learn to effectively counter ideas and ideologies that you do not support. This is not easy. You may feel that some speech attacks your very identity. However, rather than seeking to shut down or shut out those we disagree with, the right response is to question, contest, debate. Universities exist in search of truth. We must embody and model a community that responds to hate speech with more speech, with rebuttal and counterpoint. Still, I understand that our lived experiences are not the same, that some forms of speech and expression can be immensely difficult and feel personally damaging. I understand that there can be an inherent tension between our absolute commitment to diversity and our unwavering commitment to freedom of expression. A diverse community means we see diverse and often widely divergent reactions to, for example, expression in support of a particular political ideology. Yet if that community is strong, respectful, inclusive and supportive, we together have created the necessary conditions to engage ideas of every sort. You do have the right to expect our university to keep you physically safe, but we would be providing you less of an education, preparing you less well for the world after you graduate if we tried to protect you from ideas that you may find dangerous or frightening. We have classes on the rise of Nazism in World War II so that we understand what allowed such a regime to gain power. Next week we're hosting a symposium on the 400th anniversary of the first Africans in this country to be sold into slavery in 1619 at Jamestown, because it's a painful but important chapter in our history, one whose effects have rippled out into the modern era. That inherent tension is what makes community and a true sense of belonging for all so extraordinarily important. When strong ties bind us together, wheels feel supported, and it becomes easier to take risks, to move past stereotypes, to open ourselves to learning and exploration. Nothing, therefore, is more important than our shared responsibility to ensure everyone, everyone in our community feels safe, respected, and welcome at all times. Now let me end my remarks by simply offering you my warmest welcome to Berkeley, a place where we readily take on and examine thorny issues like free speech in the modern era, just as we extend the boundaries of science, seek a more profound understanding of history, create a new critique art, rethink social norms, develop new ideas, found new companies, and cultivate our own best selves so that we can go out and change the world. After a long and competitive admissions process, you may feel that you're lucky to be here. We feel as a university that we are lucky to have you. You are bringing to the Berkeley community remarkable intelligence, energy, ambition, resilience, creativity, curiosity, and eagerness to challenge the status quo and reimagine the future. You will stimulate and energize our entire university and we're thrilled to have you shape Berkeley even as it shapes you. Thank you, and thank you as well to all of the Golden Bear Orientation Advisors and Orientation Leaders, new students, services, team members, GBOs, steering committee, everyone who's been hard at work to make sure you get a good start on campus. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. We couldn't be more excited to be part of the great journey of personal and intellectual discovery that awaits you. Fiat Lux and Go Bears!