BREAKING: Rich Lyons named the next Chancellor at UC Berkeley

Lyons will replace Carol Christ as the leader of our campus this summer.

For the first time in a long time, UC Berkeley will have a leader who knows what Cal stands for on day one.

The UC Board of Regents officially announced Rich Lyons as the next Chancellor of the University of California. Lyons, who currently serves as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley, will succeed Carol Christ, who will retire at the end of this calendar year.

One of Lyons’s core memories growing up was going to California Memorial Stadium to watch his beloved Golden Bears.

Lyons has two older brothers and remembers traveling to the East Bay to attend Cal football games when he was in his early teens. Those trips sparked his lifelong love of Berkeley.

Lyons is the first chancellor in UC Berkeley history to be a Cal undergrad. The last leader of the university was UC Berkeley’s last president, Robert Sproul, in 1930.

In his opening remarks in accepting the Cal Chancellor position (while wearing a Cal pin and a tie dispersed with Golden Bears, he closed by talking about his memories of being at The Play just before graduating.

“I finished as an undergrad in December of 1982. The Play was weeks before I graduated. I was in that stadium in that Cal-Stanford game in 1982. This place has literally transformed my life. That’s why we’re all here.

And he signed off with a “Go Bears”. I have dreamed of these days.

Obviously, there are pressing priorities besides athletics, particularly regarding revenue for central campus, housing projects to attend to a rising student body, increasing diversity and inclusion efforts, and free speech/political concerns. Lyons mentioned many of these things in his opening remarks.

On funding:

“We need to fund the whole university. We need to fund the hard-to-fund parts. We need to fund the deferred maintenance in our research facilities and our doctoral students and research in the humanities and the arts,” Lyons said.

To increase funding, Lyons said he wanted to see UC Berkeley participating “more fully in the economic value we create,” beginning with intellectual property licensing and philanthropy and building out more funding streams.

On inclusion:

"A commitment to equity and fairness in society is as fundamental as it gets," he said. "Every student has a need and a right to feel they belong at Berkeley and that they are respected at Berkeley."

As UC Berkeley continues to rely more and more on gifts and fundraising and less on the state of California, Lyons has proven to be a very successful dean in that regard. As Dean of the Haas Business School, Lyons was an excellent salesperson, landing huge fundraising wins.

As a fundraiser, he helped land eight of the top 10 gifts to the Haas business school and nearly doubled the overall donations during his tenure as dean from 2008 to 2018, compared with the previous decade, the business school reported. One $25-million donation seeded the $65-million development of a six-story, 80,000-square-feet building with classrooms, study rooms, an event space and cafe.

His work as Chief Innovation Officer on campus has encouraged a culture of entrepreneurship. As a Cal undergrad alum, Lyons understands UC Berkeley culture so well, and wants to emphasize the student. He launched the Berkeley Changemaker program to help tell the story of what Berkeley is, which includes courses on entrepreneurship and sports management that have become very popular among Cal students and student-athletes, garnering nearly 20% enrollment.

"Over 500 students showed up," he said. "Why? Because it's a narrative. It's not just a name. It's not just a curriculum. It's not just a course. It's a way of living, and it's a way of living that Berkeley has occupied forever. This idea that there's got to be a better way to do this, question the status quo."

There are many challenges ahead, but this is a great day to be a California Golden Bear. Welcome Chancellor Lyons!