WHEN HE WAS IN SECOND GRADE, Robert Reich was held upside down in the bathroom by bullies who threatened to put his head in a toilet. He was a small child and was teased a lot in school.
“It was pretty bad,” said Reich to an audience of 2,000 people on Tuesday night. “I didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t want to be on the playground, and I was so ashamed of myself. When you are the object of bullying, you are the one who is ashamed. This is important for understanding where the country is, because the country right now is being bullied and many of the people who are supporting the bully-in-chief are people who have in their heart felt bullied and felt disrespected.”
Reich spoke from the stage of Zellerbach Hall on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. He was in conversation with comedian W. Kamau Bell after the screening of a new film about his career as a teacher called “The Last Class,” directed by Elliot Kirschner.
“I felt like I was just a shameful little thing,” Reich said. “I got to third grade, and I had a teacher named Alice Kim who saw something in me. Because of her, and because she saw in me what I could be, I saw in me what I could be. That is the sign of a great mentor or a teacher. You meet somebody who sees in you what you really need to see in yourself, as she did. She made me feel like I could do anything, and I did.”
And he did. Robert Reich went on to study at Dartmouth College and attend Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before earning his law degree from Yale Law School. He served in three presidential administrations, including as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, and became a nationally known public commentator, appearing regularly on broadcast TV shows like “CNN,” “Meet the Press,” “Charlie Rose” and “The O’Reilly Factor.”
He wrote eighteen books, including the bestsellers “The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It,” “The Common Good,” “Saving Capitalism” and “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into twenty-two languages. He is co-creator of the 2017 Netflix original documentary “Saving Capitalism” and of the award-winning 2013 film “Inequality for All.”
On teaching, responsibility and civic duty
In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Vaclav Havel Foundation Vision 97 Award by the former Czech president for his pioneering work in economic and social thought. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the century. As Reich reflects on his life at age 79, as he does in the film, his greatest job was being a teacher.
“Teaching is all about giving,” Reich said in one of the filmed interviews. “If you are lucky, as I have been, students will run with the class. So, you’re not letting go, you’re launching them. This is the best.”
The film follows Reich through the journey of his last semester of his 40-year teaching career, most of it spent at UC Berkeley where he was a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy. The film documents many of his last lectures in the popular course “Wealth and Poverty.”
“If you take the idea of self-government seriously, it is about taking responsibility,” he said to his students. “Taking responsibility for what you believe in, your views. Democracy is not a spectator sport. Learning is not a spectator sport. The thing that’s so important to understand is that these fights don’t end.”
His lectures blended economics and ethics, focusing on inequality, democracy and civic duty. He challenged students to analyze the post-World War II U.S. economy and trace how wealth and political power became increasingly concentrated among the top one percent. For Reich, this inequality threatens democracy itself.
Teaching is all about giving. If you are lucky, as I have been, students will run with the class. So, you’re not letting go, you’re launching them. This is the best.
Robert Reich
He reflected on generational change, noting that his recent students are among the most engaged and idealistic he’s ever taught, even as they struggle with fear about climate change, inequality and the survival of democracy.
He ended with a message to his students to resist cynicism, to use knowledge ethically and to work toward a fairer world. Education, he insists, is inseparable from democracy, both demand curiosity, courage and care for others.
His farewell semester became a love letter to teaching, a message that resonated strongly with the academic audience Tuesday night. When the six-foot-four Bell stood to exit the stage with four-foot-eleven Reich, the auditorium erupted in a standing ovation for the one who seemed taller that night — Reich.
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