Until December 2015, the University of California maintained $25 million of indirect investments in three major private prison corporations and almost no one knew. The UC is now the first U.S. public university system to sell its shares in private prisons, however it was activism that propelled the victory. Black students from the Afrikan Black Coalition, a statewide Black youth organization, used research from Enlace and strategic planning to demand private prison divestment. This personal reflection on the path toward prison abolition examines some of the strengths and resurgence of Black student organizing in the era of #BlackLivesMatter.

This article reveals new thinking about the meaning of shari’a (roughly translated as Islamic law) in the everyday lives of Muslims. Proposals to ban shari’a , adopted across the United States and overseas, beg the question, “what is shari’a ?” Varied individual Mulsim responses to that question appear in this article. Research is based on two years of fieldwork and more than 100 semi-structured interviews conducted by a University of California-based research team. Themes of daily guidance, family, social justice, equality and inequality, Islamic living, excessively legalistic codes, and more emerge from the narratives of identity and of learning religious values and unlearning media-driven stereotypes.

In this extended interview, Peter Kareiva, the former chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and new head of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, talks about the connections between conservation science and cities. Among other topics, Kareiva discusses the importance of communications and creating shared values to help the public understand the urgency and potential of conservation and science.

Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron in Berkeley more than eighty years ago did more than introduce a uniquely efficient and effective atom-smasher to the world of high-energy physics; it launched the paradigm of capital-intensive, large-team research known as “Big Science.” The paradigm’s offspring include the Manhattan Project, the moon landings, the Human Genome Project, and research into climate change. But it raises questions about the influence of money on basic research and how society should weigh competing demands for resources among practical social needs and the quest for fundamental knowledge of our natural world.

How students and their supporters should respond to the collapse of state funding for public higher education in California, especially at the University of California.