The sound of buzzing surveillance drones over Gaza played from a loudspeaker on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, on the very spot where Mario Savio rallied for free speech in the 1960s. A student encampment of about 40 tents at the campus on Tuesday, up from 12 the night before, spanned the landing and sprawled onto the grass.

“Many of the students here have a sense that something is wrong, but they don’t know all the history,” said Ussama Makdisi, a UC Berkeley professor of history with a specialty in the Middle East and a chancellor’s chair, which is a high rank given to professors who have demonstrated unusual academic merit.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.