Special Screenings

The Last Class

Saturday, August 16, 2025 | 4:30pm

Little Theatre 1 (240 East Ave.)
Doors open at 4:00pm

Sunday, August 17, 2025 | 12:00pm

Little Theatre 1 (240 East Ave.)
Doors open at 11:30pm

Regular ticket prices
Tickets available online in advance, at our box office during open hours, or at the door (if available).

American political economist and professor Robert Reich worked under presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, served as Secretary of Labor in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, and as a member of President Barack Obama’s economic transition advisory board. Reich is known for his work on economic inequality and as a champion of public education and American democracy. The Last Class is a nuanced and deeply personal portrait of Reich as he reflects on a period of immense transformation, personally and globally. It is also a love letter to education. The former Secretary of Labor might be famous for his public service, best-selling books, and viral social media posts, but he always considered teaching his true calling. Now, after over 40 years and an extraordinary 40,000 students, Reich is preparing for his last class.

Over the course of the film, Reich confronts the impending finality, and his own aging, with increasing candor, introspection, and, ultimately, emotion. He displays a rawness of feeling he has never shared publicly before. Drawing on his lifetime in politics, he uses his class, “Wealth and Poverty,” to offer us all a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society. One thousand students fill the biggest lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, the last class to receive Reich’s wisdom and exhortations not to accept that the world has to stay the way it is.