News/Research
27 Oct, 2017

Reply All in the News

Above image by Daily Cal photographer, Nikhar Arora, of Robert Reich's speech.

To mark the 53rd anniversary of the birth of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, the Berkeley Center for New Media, in partnership with The Berkeley Graduate, the Graduate Assembly, and BridgeUSA, hosted a campus-wide symposium on October 5, 2017.

The day-long event opened with an address from Chancellor Carol Christ, featured a keynote by Robert Reich, and also included panels and open discussions addressing the history, practice, and spaces of free speech within the university (schedule available here). Members of the original Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 were also present. Reply All was held in the quest to fulfill Berkeley’s best tradition as a community of inquiry, and contribute to a larger, complex conversation taking place on campus in the days to come.

Reply All was featured in both UC Berkeley official news and The Daily Californian. As Daily Cal reporter Mary Kelly Ford writes,

In an email, Christ said “Reply All” was a better representation of free speech at Berkeley than the campus’s previous efforts, as it offered open dialogue and multiple perspectives on issues. Christ referenced her new commission to further examine the campus’s community values, policies and practices on free speech as a form of engagement.

“It is what we do every day, and should be understood as free speech,” Christ said in an email. “I will continue to support free speech; I think it is fundamental to our democracy and to our university. However, I also believe the university needs to have many occasions — like today’s symposium — to deeply engage the issue.”

As social media and other forms of new media continue to shape how we engage with free speech, especially in the wake of campus visitors such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro.

Read the UC Berkeley official news article about Reply All here.

Read the Daily Californian's article about Reply All here.

And check out photos from the day below!

2017 Reply All: Free Speech in the Age of Social Media