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Why This Berkeley Professor Is Sleeping in His Office Julia Steinberg
BERKELEY, CA — Ron Hassner’s UC Berkeley office, on the seventh floor of the Social Sciences Building on the south side of campus, is slightly bigger than a one-car garage. It’s generous by administrative standards—Hassner has been a political science professor at Berkeley for twenty years—but it’s not a domicile.
When I got there at three p.m. on Monday, Hassner, who is six feet, four inches, had been living there for the past 93 hours. It’s not because he was evicted. He is there because he is staging a sit-in protest to bring attention to a rising tide of Jew-hatred on campus—and the administration’s inaction in the face of it.
When I texted Ron to ask if I could come visit him, he texted back: “bring Febreze.”
“I’m a scholar. I don’t believe in activism,” Hassner tells me when I get there, pacing alongside the twin-size mattress leaning against his bookshelf. (I met Ron—in typical California college fashion, he corrects students who call him “professor”—a year ago, when he led a trip to Israel to study military history.) At 53, Hassner marched in his first protest only earlier this month—something of a miracle by Berkeley standards—when he joined a San Francisco march against antisemitism. “I don’t know how to do any of this,” he says. “I don’t have a rulebook that I’m following.”
All he knew, when he announced on March 7 that he would be shacking up in his office, was that something had to be done.
His Jewish students were scared. They were telling him so. The word Zionist had become a slur on campus. The middle section of Sather Gate, a central fixture on campus, had been blocked by pro-Palestinian protesters for the last month with yellow tape, chains, and posters. Student organizers blared sounds of drones and bombs with megaphones throughout the day. Jewish students say they have been filmed and harassed by the anti-Israel activists camped out there.
Then, on February 26, things got violent.
That night a handful of pro-Israel groups on campus attempted to host an event with an Israeli lawyer, Ran Bar-Yoshafat. A handful of the school’s pro-Palestine groups swarmed Berkeley’s Zellerbach Playhouse where it was taking place. “It was a riot,” Sharon Knafelman, 20, a political science major, tells me at an off-campus café, a gold Jewish star dangling from her neck.
“I saw my friend get spat at and called a dirty Jew,” she says. “They shouted at us that we were pigs. They were violent with some of us: two girls got assaulted, they ended up shattering the windows.” One student’s wrist was injured, requiring her to go to urgent care, while another says she was choked trying to keep other students out of the hall where the event was taking place.
The day after the riot, Chancellor Carol Christ and Provost Benjamin Hermalin issued a statement condemning the riot as “transgressive.” On March 4, they announced that the University of California Police Department, Berkeley was launching investigations for hate crimes and physical battery. One suspect has so far been identified for trespassing. But Knafelman told me that tracking down the students would be difficult as the protesters “wore surgical masks, or they wore their keffiyehs over their faces to cover their identity.” The event with Ran Bar-Yoshafat went on at an off-campus Chabad house; the students were escorted through tunnels with police escorts to safety.
Knafelman told me that since October 7 the environment on campus has been “uncomfortable, ostracizing, and isolating to the point where I think that we really only feel safe in spaces like Chabad.” She expressed frustration with the administration, which she believes hasn’t taken sufficient action to stop discrimination and harassment against Jews on campus. “We shouldn’t have to go through so much bureaucracy and so much back and forth to try to simply get them to do their job of ensuring our safety.”
Hassner, the professor living next to his desk, agrees. And he has a few demands—he calls them “requests”—of the administration.
“My first request at university: please find a permanent way to keep Sather Gate open. My second request to the university is that if a speaker is shouted out, and has to leave campus without giving their talk, no matter if they’re Palestinian or Israeli, no matter if they are right wing or left wing, that they receive an apology from the university and that they be invited back. And my third request was that the university provide Islamophobia and antisemitism training to staff. These are my requests, and they strike me as reasonable.”
Until then, he will sleep on the mattress on the floor and teach his 100-person “War in the Middle East” class over Zoom. (His five-person graduate seminar will meet in his office.) Ron uses the bathroom down the hall and does not shower; he showed me his wet wipes in his makeshift bedside cabinet—another, smaller bookshelf. His dress shirts are hung on his door handle. His son and daughter, both teenagers, bring him food from time to time.
He keeps a lamp on his window, facing Berkeley thoroughfare Bancroft Way, at all times. He wants students to see that at least one professor is “sleeping as badly at night as they are.”
In the office, students—both Jewish and not—trickled in and out, nibbling at cookies and assorted pastries brought or sent to Ron. Fruit baskets and the remains of Shabbat dinners sent from supporters around the country crowded his small coffee table. He offered everyone who came in coffee or tea. I counted four teaching awards on his office walls. There are also maps of Vienna, his birthplace, and Jerusalem, and a long bookshelf lined with plants and stuffed with political philosophy and Agatha Christie, on top of which he keeps his pillows.
When I asked Ron about his Israeli background—he moved there as a child and served in an intelligence unit in the IDF—he cut me off. “It’s not relevant.”
“I know that in a world of identity politics, it really matters who you are. Isn’t it a terrible shame that the only people who are willing to stand up to antisemitism are Jews?”
I talked with a Jewish student who’d come to visit Ron and who told me that lately, she’s been eating by herself in her sorority house. “ ‘Oh, that’s the girl who supports genocide,’ ” others would say of her, she told me. “All of my friends in sororities complain about the same thing.” She’s lost most of her friends who aren’t pro-Israel Jews. Another student chimed in that she overheard a girl say “I support Hamas.” Ron cuts in: “Why didn’t you ask for details?” Later, a law student came in to bring Medjool dates from the kibbutz he worked at in Southern Israel.
Ron expected his sit-in to be “monastic”—he compared the project to sitting Shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, in which the family of the deceased receives guests at home. But it’s more like a party—or at least a place for students to finally relax. He shows me a guest book where he’s encouraging visitors to sign their names. Yesterday’s page had around 90 signatures. “And yesterday was not a busy day,” he told me.
Ron Hassner doesn’t have a view of Sather Gate from his office, but that iconic site, where the Free Speech Movement began, has for weeks been a no-go zone for Jews and Israel supporters thanks to a barrier set up by Bears for Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine.
On the day I visited campus, hundreds of Jewish Berkeley students and community members marched to “Liberate the Gate.” They wore all white and demanded that the university fulfill its most basic obligations: to keep students safe and to enforce its free speech policies, which prohibit blocking the gate.
“This is a campus known for its protest,” Hassner says. “Put up propaganda! Hang it everywhere! But don’t physically block students from walking. Don’t harass them. Please don’t strangle them. I think it’s possible to advocate for the Palestinian cause without strangling people.”
Later, at Sather Gate, I met Allison, a third-year economics major, who wouldn’t give me her last name. “I think people should continue protesting because it is a genocide,” she says.
A senior with heavy black eye makeup who is majoring in interdisciplinary studies and who, citing privacy, declined to give me her name, told me that she thought Zionist students “have balls for just sitting there,” referring to pro-Israel groups who had set up tables in the center of campus. When I asked her about pro-Israel groups on campus, she said: “I don’t personally think there should be Zionists, period.” I bring up the fact that there are Zionists on campus, and that they say they feel unsafe. “I don’t necessarily say that’s particularly undeserved.”
In this, the students at Berkeley reflect the broader atmosphere of Jew-hate that’s swept the Bay Area since Hamas’s October 7 attack. San Francisco, a city 7,500 miles from Gaza, passed a cease-fire resolution in early January. On February 28, the Anti-Defamation League filed a federal complaint against Berkeley Unified School District for ignoring pervasive antisemitism. At least 30 families have pulled their children from Oakland Unified for the same reason.
Then, on March 5, UC Berkeley received a letter from the Department of Education announcing that it was investigating antisemitism on campus.
“We’re committed to full cooperation with the investigation,” university spokesman Dan Mogulof said. Of Ron Hassner, Mogulof has written, “The administration is committed to confronting antisemitism and holds Professor Hassner in great esteem and it is in conversation with him about his concerns.” Hassner told me that administrators had even stopped by his office. But UC Berkeley did not respond to The Free Press’s request for comment.
At around 5:30 p.m, Hassner’s wife, a Berkeley faculty member in the business school, brought him updates on Sather Gate, a homemade salad in Tupperware, and a Dyson vacuum cleaner.
At six p.m., Ron approached the door and added a fifth tally mark, for day five of the sit-in. “I’m in my pajamas on a mattress in my office smelling bad,” he reflects, when I ask him what he thinks about all the press interviews and the hundreds of emails pouring in every hour. “It’s a bit of a nebbish protest, right? I’m not out there giving big speeches. I’m not dressed in a beautiful suit standing in front of an audience of 7,000.”
After I left, he had a call with doctors in San Francisco whose patients were dealing with antisemitism in hospitals. Then, another interview. At around eleven p.m., he would place his mattress on the floor and go to bed. He doesn’t sleep well on the floor of his office, he tells me. He’d likely be woken up by a student knocking.
For more on the riot at UC Berkeley, read Greg Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo: “If Berkeley Wants to Protect Free Speech, It Will Expel Its Rioters.”
Julia Steinberg is an intern at The Free Press. Read her last piece on the college dropout who unlocked the secrets of ancient Rome using AI. And follow her on X @Juliaonatroika.
And if you appreciate our coverage of campuses, antisemitism, and higher education, consider becoming a Free Press subscriber:
On Sunday, A-listers from Kim Kardashian to Ben Affleck brutally mocked former NFL quarterback Tom Brady (and each other) for three hours, live on Netflix.
The Roast of Tom Brady was scorched earth. Tony Hinchcliffe joked about cotton picking and said Brady “looks like a Confederate fag.” He said the football player’s ex-wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, took after him—because she was out “draining balls right now.” He also threw this barb at comedian Jeff Ross: “Jeff is so Jewish he only watches football for the coin toss.” UFC’s Dana White ragged on Netflix for giving him so little time on the mic: “You guys gave me 60 seconds? My name is Dana! Is that not trans enough for you liberal fucks?” Former New England Patriot wide receiver Julian Edelman even managed to make fun of Aaron Hernandez’s suicide in the middle of a dick joke.
You know what happened. The Washington Post called it “misogynistic” and “cruel.” Gisele Bündchen is said to be “deeply disappointed” by the show—and wanted the world to know that she is currently focused on her charity work.
But guess what? No one cared.
Because the roast—raunchy and crude and totally politically incorrect—was fun.
It felt like a throwback to a simpler time, before Hannah Gadsby made us feel sorta bad about comedy, and SNL fired Shane Gillis for saying a rude word before his first day on the job.
And it’s not the only thing that feels old-school and alive in the best way.
The rap beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar is vicious and, in the parlance of the decade, homophobic, misogynistic, and ableist. There’s wordplay about Parkinson’s; talk of “ho shit”; and gay-tinged put-downs. (Kendrick called Drake’s crew “dick riders.”) It’s not quite family-friendly, but it’s very, very entertaining.
Streams don’t lie, nor do laughs: The Roast of Tom Brady is in Netflix’s Top Ten and the song in which Lamar called Drake a pedophile broke streaming records. Woke scolds and Keffiyeh Karens are still screaming their heads off, but normal people are just tuning them out.
There are other clouds of fun rising up like vapor through the grates. The wellness regime of daily workouts and endless supplements and dietary restrictions—which always felt puritanical and smug—has been vanquished by Ozempic, a cheat that allows you to eat whatever you like, just less of it. Even the fact that Sweetgreen announced it’s now serving steak—cue the Times’ ceremonial hand-wringing over red meat’s carbon footprint—feels like an unbuckling. Pop music, and there is so much of it, is a Technicolor dreamscape tinged with Americana. Taylor Swift is dating a cool jock who dressed like Al Capone for the Kentucky Derby. JoJo Siwa is letting her freak flag fly. The Kings of Leon’s new album, set to release in two days, is called Can We Please Have Fun. Yes!
The band’s last album, from 2021, was called When You See Yourself. It came at a time when we were all meant to reflect, check ourselves, dig deep, do the work, and most importantly, do better. Now? It’s the Morning After the Revolution. It’s time to let loose.
Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow her on X @SnoozyWeiss.
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Tesla, as a publicly traded company, does not exist to serve the interests of Elon Musk, its CEO. Rather, it must act in the interests of all its shareholders.
The electric car company ran into some trouble in this regard when it agreed to a massive compensation package for Musk in 2018. The deal resulted in Musk being awarded more than $50 billion in stock options, which, combined with his existing shares of Tesla and other assets, made him the richest person in the world.
Musk’s pay was approved by the board of directors and a vote of shareholders. It also required Musk to meet ambitious growth and profitability targets. But in January, Delaware Chancery Court Chief Judge Kathaleen McCormick invalidated the whole thing. In a 201-page decision, McCormick sided with Tesla shareholders challenging Musk’s pay. She found that the company’s board of directors breached their fiduciary duty by granting Musk excessive compensation and failing to be transparent with shareholders.
McCormick noted that the scope of Musk’s pay package was unprecedented — “250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation plan and over 33 times larger than the plan’s closest comparison, which was Musk’s prior compensation plan.” Further, Musk enjoyed “thick ties with the directors tasked with negotiating on behalf of Tesla, and dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan.”
Ira Ehrenpreis, who chaired the compensation committee, is a longtime friend of Musk who has invested tens of millions in Musk’s companies and bought the first Tesla Model 3. Another committee member was Antonio Gracias, a friend and business associate who regularly vacations with Musk. The shareholders who sued to void Musk’s pay package noted that these board members were described to shareholders as “independent” prior to the vote on Musk’s pay. (Another Tesla board member is Musk’s brother, Kimball.)
Tesla General Counsel Todd Maron, “Musk’s former divorce attorney… whose admiration for Musk moved him to tears during his deposition,” also played a key role in the process. But the reality was that there wasn’t much of a process at all. Musk proposed the amount and structure of his pay, and the board approved it. During the legal proceedings, Gracias admitted there was no “positional negotiation.”
How has Tesla’s “independent” board responded to a mortifying legal defeat? Has it proposed changing its governance structure to create genuine independence from Musk? Has it proposed a more reasonable level of compensation for its CEO? Nope. Instead, the board voted to award Musk the exact same pay package a court just decided was unfair, retroactively. And now, they are asking Tesla’s shareholders to approve the plan on June 13 — or early by proxy vote.
The Tesla board has created a dedicated website, SupportTeslaValue.com, to encourage shareholders to give Musk $50 billion. Originally, the pay package was supposed to incentivize Musk to work hard for the company. This never made much sense since Musk, at the time, already owned more than 20% of the company and was incentivized for Tesla to succeed. Before the 2018 compensation package, every time Tesla’s value increased by $50 billion, Musk earned $10 billion.
Now, this argument makes even less sense because the company is compensating him for work that has already been done. So, the board chair Robyn Denholm asks shareholders to approve Musk’s pay package reactively as “a matter of fundamental fairness and respect to our CEO.”
Denholm, who became board chair in 2018, is incentivized not to rock the boat. In 2021 and 2022, Denholm cashed out over $280 million in Tesla stock options. She described the wealth she has achieved at Tesla as “life-changing.” Meanwhile, the “average total compensation for board members in the largest 200 U.S. companies was $329,351 in 2023.”
It’s a team effort. On X, Musk is rallying his supporters to approve his massive pay package.
2024 is not 2021
In the company’s proxy statement, Tesla urges current shareholders to retroactively award Musk $50 billion to recognize the “stockholder value” that Musk delivered as CEO. But not all current Tesla shareholders have benefited from Musk’s leadership. On November 5, 2021, the price of one share of Tesla stock was $407.36. Current shareholders who bought their stock that day have lost nearly 60% of their investment. Since the beginning of the year, Tesla stock has lost almost 30% of its value. Musk himself has unloaded about $39 billion in shares.
Musk would not be entitled to his full compensation package based on the company’s current valuation. He was awarded about 1% of Tesla’s outstanding stock each time the company’s value increased by $50 billion, up to $650 billion. Tesla’s current market value is less than $550 billion. The Tesla board voted to compensate Musk as if the company was still worth $650 billion.
Tesla’s future prospects are also much less rosy than three years ago. Global demand for electric vehicles is slowing, and Tesla faces increased competition from nearly every global automaker. Tesla’s core vehicle lineup is dated. And its one new entrant, the CyberTruck, has been a bust. Plans to build a less expensive model, seen as a key to future growth, were scraped. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla reported “its first year-over-year decline in quarterly deliveries since 2020.”
Musk’s embrace of far-right politics and bigoted conspiracy theories appears to have damaged Tesla’s brand. Today, just 31% of people in the United States would consider buying a Tesla, down from 70% in November 2021.
Increasingly, Musk is staking the company’s future on his plan to make Tesla’s fully autonomous. The “Full Self Driving” product currently “requires drivers to pay attention at all times and doesn’t make cars autonomous.” Musk first claimed that Teslas would be fully self-driving in 2016. Since then, he’s repeatedly announced that his vision was just around the corner but failed to deliver. In 2019, for example, he said that Tesla robotaxis would begin operating in 2020.
Tesla “forecasted the robo-taxis would last 11 years, drive 1 million miles and make $30,000 gross profit per car annually.” At the time, Musk said it was “financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla.”
Now, Musk is promising a robo-taxi by August 8.
But robo-taxis already exist — they just aren’t operated by Tesla.
Musk is also hyping Tesla’s Optimus robot, claiming it “will be able to perform useful tasks in the factory by the end of the year and could reach the market by the end of 2025.” Musk says the Optimus is “more valuable than everything else [at Tesla] combined.” One analyst called Musk’s claims about Optimus “utter nonsense and borderline investor fraud.”
$50 billion is not enough
Denholm says Tesla stockholders should give Musk $50 billion so Musk “will continue to be driven to innovate and drive growth at Tesla.” Today, running Tesla is not Musk’s full-time job. He is also CEO at SpaceX (his privately held aerospace company) and CTO at X. Musk also helps run xAI (his artificial intelligence company), Neurolink (which recently implanted a microchip into someone’s brain), and the Boring Company (which makes tunnels for transportation).
And Musk has already made clear that restoring his $50 billion pay package isn’t enough to keep him interested in Tesla. Musk said he is “uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control.”
To achieve that, the Tesla board and shareholders, after giving Musk $50 billion, would need to provide Musk with another massive stock grant. And, unlike in 2018 when the compensation package was tied to future growth targets, Musk appears to be demanding an immediate increase in his ownership without conditions. Musk would own more stock currently but sold a significant portion of his holdings to finance his acquisition of Twitter.
Almost all shareholder resolutions proposed by the company are approved. But whether or not Delaware courts will allow the reinstatement of Musk’s 2018 package — or an even larger future compensation package — is far from certain. So, in addition to a $50 billion payment to Musk, the Tesla board is also proposing to move Tesla’s state of incorporation to Texas. In her message to shareholders, Denholm says “the board and I are increasingly troubled by the growing uncertainty of Delaware corporate law.” But “we believe that the Texas legal system is strong and fair.”
Denholm does not mention that she and other board members were sued in Delaware for awarding themselves excessive compensation and agreed to a settlement where they “collectively agreed to return more than $735 million to the electric car maker’s coffers in combined options, cash and stocks.” Denholm and the other board members did not admit to any wrongdoing.
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