Now Reich has been named to deliver UC Berkeley\u2019s 2026 commencement<\/a> speech on Saturday morning, May 16, at California Memorial Stadium \u2014 a huge live venue that is sure to be rocking. But in an interview with UC Berkeley News, the assignment had him in a reflective state of mind. He offered little partisan fire, but rather a deeply thoughtful consideration of the turbulent world that awaits this year\u2019s graduates, much as turbulence awaited his graduating class at the end of the 1960s.<\/p>\n Reich\u2019s career spans an extraordinary age of conflict and change in America. Before joining the faculty of the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy in 2006, he served as an adviser to top political leaders of both major parties, including four years as secretary of the Department of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written 18 books and won a trove of honors.\u00a0<\/p>\n And though he is often known today as a standard-bearer among American liberals and progressives, in the interview he rejected the left-right taxonomy that often molds U.S. political thought. Instead, he emphasized the importance of questioning one\u2019s own assumptions and of being open to opposing viewpoints \u2014 a message he\u2019s delivered to generations of students.<\/p>\n UC Berkeley News: What\u2019s your mindset as you prepare for the commencement address? What issues are you thinking about?<\/p>\n Robert Reich: I want to center it on the students, on the people who are graduating. They have a huge challenge in front of them. I don\u2019t remember a time when the country was more challenged, when the job market was more difficult, when uncertainty reigned as intensely.<\/p>\n I also love Berkeley students. I want them to have wonderful lives. And I want to center my remarks on a positive note. I haven\u2019t written my remarks yet, but I want to inspire them.<\/p>\n Courtesy of CoffeeKlatch Productions<\/p>\n I can\u2019t help but ask: On the political right, some commentators have already made note of your selection \u2014 a well-known progressive scholar and critic of the current administration. I imagine there may be some Berkeley students, faculty and staff who feel the same. Why is your talk going to be important to people across the spectrum, right, center and left?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t consider myself politically pigeonholed. Most of the larger questions facing this country \u2014 and indeed facing anybody who\u2019s graduating this spring \u2014 don\u2019t have to do with left or right. They have to do with the future of the country and the future of the world.<\/p>\n One of our problems is that we have bought into this left-right distinction, this notion of polarization. We are polarized, but it seems to me \u2014 and I told this to my Berkeley students for almost 20 years \u2014 that the best way of learning is to talk with somebody who disagrees with you. The best way of testing your ideas is to test them against the values and assumptions of somebody who is very different from who you are.<\/p>\n So I think criticisms in advance from people who probably have not read my work and certainly have not been in my classroom are irrelevant, quite frankly.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back in time a little bit. You graduated from Dartmouth in 1968 \u2014 what was the zeitgeist at that time? What forces were shaping the era and shaping you?<\/p>\n It was, in many ways, a terrible time<\/a>. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June that year. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in April. Our cities were in flames.<\/p>\n The country is enormously resilient. We have been through terrible times before. We always seem to learn something. <\/p>\n Robert Reich<\/p>\n I had worked on the Eugene McCarthy<\/a> presidential campaign, to no avail. Hubert Humphrey was getting the nomination. Friends of mine were getting beat up in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. Other friends of mine were being drafted and sent to Vietnam. I thought there was a chance I would be as well. Thousands and thousands of Americans were being killed there. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese were being killed.<\/p>\n In a few months, Richard Nixon would become president of the United States. Can you imagine a worse time in our nation\u2019s history? Well, some would say today is worse, but it was very, very bleak.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an interesting comparison. How were the mood and the spirit of that time different from the climate today?<\/p>\n There are very many similarities. I think some people then thought the American experiment was over, that the polarization was too extreme for us to go on.<\/p>\n I remember at my graduation, the speaker urged us graduates not to go to Vietnam, not to be drafted, but to escape America, to go to Canada. And upon saying that, I remember looking in the stands at parents who were aghast \u2014 there were fistfights among parents who were so upset with each other. The tensions were palpable.<\/p>\n I was fortunate enough to have won a Rhodes Scholarship, and I headed off a few months later for England, for the U.K. Which was a great escape in certain ways. But the anxieties, fears, worries about the country and about where we were heading hung over me and all the other Rhodes Scholars at the time. Including a young man I met on the boat heading over to England named Bill Clinton, who offered me chicken soup when I was seasick. We talked endlessly about politics.<\/p>\n I maintained my optimism, I think, in ways that I do now. I think the country is enormously resilient. We have been through terrible times before. We always seem to learn something. And I\u2019m especially optimistic because of the young people who I have taught for over 40 years, almost 20 of them at Berkeley.<\/p>\n Do you think that students in the late \u201860s, those incredibly trying times, were different in a fundamental way from students who are living through their own trying times today?<\/p>\n Not in any fundamental way. That is, in 1968, we didn\u2019t have the problem of a terrible economy, a terrible job market, and really the economic headwinds that students are facing today. But by the same token, students today don\u2019t have the Vietnam War hanging over them like a sword of Damocles.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve taught for years a very large class called Wealth and Poverty<\/a>, in Wheeler Hall. The real difference is that students today are more diverse, more interesting. I think they\u2019re smarter, if that generalization is not too bold.<\/p>\n![\"Robert](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Robert_Reich_lecture_TheLastClass_Still_09-1024x585.png\")
Robert Reich lectures students in a scene from \u201cThe Last Class,\u201d a 2025 film about his teaching career at UC Berkeley. <\/p>\n
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