Dr. Carol Christ is a Board Member of the Council on Higher Education of RIDGE-LANE LP.

Dr. Christ serves as Chancellor of the University of California – Berkeley, where she leads 350 degree programs across 14 colleges and schools with 45,000 students, ~$800 million on research and development, as well as affiliations with three national laboratories: Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos.

She was President of Smith College, one of the country’s most distinguished liberal arts colleges, where she led the development of the nation’s only accredited engineering program at a women’s college, oversaw a significant rise in student diversity, expanded Smith’s global activities and reach, managed a major campus capital planning program, and shepherded the college through strategic planning exercises designed to improve its academic and financial models within the context of changing trends in higher education.

Previously, she spent more than three decades as a professor and administrator at UC Berkeley, including Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. As the campus’s top academic officer, she sharpened Berkeley’s intellectual focus, strengthening many of the institution’s top-rated departments in the humanities and sciences, advanced major initiatives in areas including neuroscience and bioengineering, and developed a ten-year strategic plan for the university.

Dr. Christ received her B.A. from Douglass College, a M.Ph. and Ph.D. from Yale University. She authored two books, The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics, and has edited or co-edited several others, including The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Dr. Christ is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.