The University of California, Berkeley, long celebrated for the broad ideological range of its faculty, announced the launch of the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy, a rigorously nonpartisan academic center dedicated to civil discourse, the full spectrum of political perspectives, and the solemn stewardship of democratic institutions.

The institute will be anchored in Berkeley’s political science department, a faculty that boasts the distinguished emerita professor Angela Davis, a self-described communist who narrowly escaped conviction as an accessory to murder in connection with the 1970 Marin County courthouse shooting.

Chancellor Rich Lyons has secured the perfect founding director in Speaker Pelosi, whose own contributions to civil discourse include publicly tearing up the President’s State of the Union address on the floor of the House, creating a lasting image of her respect for the institution. Pelosi will co-teach a course on Congress, having personally demonstrated how to muscle legislation through the chamber before its contents were known, famously advising colleagues that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Among the institute’s four pillars is a commitment to “overcoming challenges to society, the economy, and the planet,” including climate change, a cause Pelosi has championed at a personal expenditure exceeding $700,000 in private jet travel. The institute will also address wealth inequality, a subject on which Pelosi brings formidable credentials, her net worth having increased by half a billion dollars during her forty years in Congress via brilliant stock trades that outperformed the S&P 500 by 148 percentage points.

Pelosi’s husband Paul, whose commitment to the rule of law is equally distinguished, is expected to deliver a guest lecture or two on the subject of integrity in public life.