Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a new job: Head of a “nonpartisan” institute to “save democracy” at UC Berkley, where Republicans have been effectively banned for decades.
UC Berkeley announced Monday that it is partnering with the retiring House Democrat to create the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy, a research and teaching center set to open in January 2027.
The university has already secured more than $35 million in donor cash, already more than halfway to their $50 million fundraising goal.
Surely half of that money for the “nonpartisan institute” is coming from conservatives, right?
“UC Berkeley has a long, proud history of challenging the status quo and producing leaders who run toward the greatest challenges of our time,” Pelosi said in a statement. “I am honored to partner with this exceptional community of scholars and students so we can equip the next generation with the tools they need to strengthen our democratic institutions and forge a future that serves the public good.”
“I viewed this as a liberation for me from the political, not politics, but partisanship,” she told CNN. “Because you’re going to an academic institution. It’s about what our founders had in mind with our Constitution.”
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons said they would “do more than simply study democracy; we are building this institute to strengthen it.”
Among UC Berkeley faculty, voter registration data found a 10-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans, among the most lopsided of any major university ever studied.
A Campus Reform analysis of a decade of UC Berkeley commencement speeches, from 2009 to 2019, could not identify a single speaker invited to the college with a history of conservative donations or politics.
Berkeley College Republicans have spent years fighting the university just to bring right-leaning speakers to campus. A planned 2017 appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled amid violent riots. Events planned with Ann Coulter and David Horowitz have been canceled entirely. When the club manged to bring Ben Shapiro onto campus that same year, the university demanded $600,000 on security to make the event possible — a cost conservative students complained effectively priced out their speech rights.
Pelosi said simply that the idea of a “bipartisan” academic center at “the epitome of public education” was what convinced her to collect the donor money for UC Berkley in the first place — money she bragged she secured “quite easily.”