The University of California, Berkeley, will open an institute named for former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who rose to become the first woman to lead the House and one of President Trump’s most ferocious adversaries.
Campus officials are billing the institute as a nonpartisan, academically rigorous operation focused on the tending of American democracy. But the announcement comes as the university faces extraordinary pressure from the Trump administration, which has spent months pelting the campus with investigations.
Ms. Pelosi’s new role at U.C. Berkeley, which will include teaching and fund-raising, may not tamp down the animosity. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Trump have been frequent antagonists; she has described him as a “vile creature,” and he has called her an “evil woman.”
But the professors who approached Ms. Pelosi, who will leave office in January, said they were inspired, in part, by the former speaker’s stature and by organizations like Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a decades-old haven for debates about campaigns and public policy.
“We really want to emphasize leadership in public service for students to be able to be better advocates for the causes they believe in, whatever those are,” said Scott Straus, the chair of Berkeley’s political science department.
The institute’s emergence comes as dozens of schools have started civics programs. Many are in Republican-controlled states and are often perceived as having a conservative bent. Centers in places like North Carolina and Ohio regularly focus on Western civilization and civil discourse, with supporters hoping that they will act as counterweights to academic cultures many conservatives view as ideologically intolerant.
Ms. Pelosi, on the other hand, is a titan of Democratic politics, who will have represented San Francisco in the House for nearly 40 years.
In an interview in her office in Washington — blocks from where the Republican National Committee used to display an enormous “Fire Pelosi” sign — Ms. Pelosi insisted that she viewed her role in the institute as “almost an emancipation from partisanship.”
“This is about civics, it’s about the vision of our founders, it’s about democracy,” she said, a flag bearing the speaker’s seal still behind her desk.
“You can’t be partisan in the academic world,” Ms. Pelosi added, describing the institute’s vision as “more sacred.” (“Not to degrade what I do every day,” she said.)
Although some details are still being discussed, Berkeley officials said they expect the institute to offer undergraduate students a public leadership track that will begin as a certificate program and could someday evolve into a major or a minor. The institute, also slated to include a visiting fellows program and research opportunities, will feature a course taught by Ms. Pelosi and Eric Schickler, a U.C. Berkeley professor who has written extensively about Congress and who said he was eager to test political science theory against Ms. Pelosi’s in-the-room recollections.
Berkeley said it had already raised $35 million for the institute. The university declined to identify the donors, but Ms. Pelosi, among the wealthiest members of Congress, said she would be contributing and helping with fund-raising.
U.C. Berkeley’s chancellor, Richard K. Lyons, said the center could inspire young people who would not otherwise consider public service, or be prepared to pursue it. He added that the institute could have outsize effects on a public campus like his, which has about 33,000 undergraduates and 13,000 graduate students.
But he bristled at the notion that Berkeley was aligning itself with Ms. Pelosi’s politics, pointing to a University of California system policy that describes “political indoctrination” as “misuse of the classroom.”
Although many in academia have been skeptical of the centers that have sprouted on campuses, Dr. Lyons said he was not necessarily bothered by how they were working elsewhere.
“I think as long as interrogation is not being quashed — and that’s important, and I haven’t seen it sort of quashed as a function of those institutes — then I think that a thousand flowers bloom, and some bloom a little more on one side of the patch than the other,” he said.
The Trump administration has signaled which side it sees Berkeley on, and the Justice Department and Department of Education have pursued investigations into antisemitism accusations and campus protests. But the government has not sued Berkeley as it has Harvard or the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Lyons did not respond directly when asked if he worried that the arrangement with Ms. Pelosi might provoke Mr. Trump. Instead, he reiterated that the institute would be nonpartisan.
In Washington, Ms. Pelosi said she was certain Republican leaders would be invited to speak at the institute. But, though she barely mentioned the president’s name over about half an hour, she suggested that Mr. Trump might not be among them.
She said she anticipated that the institute would host “people who are patriotic, who share the vision of our founders, honor their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, and believe in the diversity of America as our strength and our power.”
She lowered her voice. Some people, she hinted, would not meet those criteria.
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