Michael Nagler

[Please note this call is on Sunday, unlike our usual Saturday slot. Also, it marks the launch of a deeper collective inquiry with the"Gandhi Today" Pod. Learn more & join here.]

"I'm going to take you out of politics," the Indian spiritual teacher told the young Berkeley professor in 1966, "and when I put you back in, you'll be much more effective." Michael Nagler—a Brooklyn-born scholar of Homer swept up in the Free Speech Movement—was shocked but intrigued. He took the advice. Over five decades since, this former classics professor has become one of the world's foremost Gandhian scholars, co-founding UC Berkeley's Peace and Conflict Studies Program, authoring the American Book Award-winning The Search for a Nonviolent Future, and at 83, directing an award-winning documentary on nonviolence.

Alongside his teaching career at Berkeley Nagler enthusiastically took to passage meditation 𑁋 slowly repeating a scriptural text with as much concentration as you can muster, returning to it every time the mind wanders 𑁋 which he practices to this day.  While he had long been intrigued by Gandhi, no accurate picture of whom was readily available in his early years, it was only after taking to meditation that he began to grasp the significance of Gandhi, and revere him.

This inner work shaped the Peace and Conflict Studies Program Nagler co-founded at Berkeley, now one of the largest in North America. Over 20,000 students have passed through it. For fifteen years, he also taught a seminar called "Why Are We Here? Great Writing on the Meaning of Life." His teaching distilled to one core insight: Whether we submit to violence or return it, we only multiply it. The real choice appears when we refuse both—and instead confront violence with a third way, what Andrew Young called “a way out of no way.”. 

Beyond the classroom, Nagler co-founded the Metta Center for Nonviolence in 1981 and helped nominate the "Frontier Gandhi"—Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan—for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2007, his work earned him the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award for promoting Gandhian values outside India, joining honorees like Desmond Tutu. His book The Search for a Nonviolent Future moved one reader to quit his defense job the day after finishing it.

Now in his late eighties, Nagler continues breaking ground. His 2020 documentary The Third Harmony weaves interviews with civil rights leader Bernard Lafayette, political scientist Erica Chenoweth, and neuroscientists to articulate a "new story" of human nature—one where cooperation, not competition, is our deepest truth. "Nonviolence is the only way to move the heart," he teaches. "It is the only method that could bring about a great paradigm shift without creating a violent backlash."

Join us in conversation with this scholar-practitioner who has spent half a century proving that the most effective activism begins with transforming oneself.