On the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
Charter Day, April 24, 1998

By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor,
University of California, Berkeley

Today we celebrate the anniversary of the chartering of the University of California on March 23, 1868. However honored and grateful and humbled I am to be standing here as the eighth Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley -- and I am enormously honored, genuinely grateful, and profoundly humbled -- this occasion is more than anything an opportunity to celebrate the founding of this great University in all of its blue and gold glory. It is difficult for us, removed from that event by 130 years of history, to appreciate fully the boldness and the vision that it took to build a university on this distant shore of the American continent, just twenty years after California's frontier existence was forever shattered by the discovery of gold. Not everyone shared that optimistic vision of the future of California held by our founders. One disappointed seeker of fortune wrote, in 1855, for the benefit of those considering coming to California:

No rain falls between the first of April and the middle of November, in consequence of which the earth becomes so dry and hard that nothing will grow.... On the other hand, from the first of December to the last of March it rains, as a general thing, so copiously and incessantly, that all out-door avocations must be suspended.... the average general surface of the country (California) is incapable of sustaining a dense population. He proceeded to describe the natural calamities he had witnessed: earthquake, fire, flood, and mud.

But those early builders, with a vision that extended beyond whatever an El Nino may have brought to California in their time, chartered a university that anticipated the great future of California. It was to balance carefully the practical disciplines of agriculture, mining, and the mechanical arts, qualifying it for federal land-grant status, with the letters and sciences that characterized the older eastern universities. They chartered a university that was, as President Daniel Coit Gilman said in his inaugural of 1872, a "University of this State....It is 'of the people and for the people' not in any low or unworthy sense, but in the highest and noblest relations to their intellectual and moral being."

A burning drive for excellence in all that it undertakes has been the sustaining continuity distinguishing the history of the University of California from the time of Gilman to the present. The vigilant keepers of that flame have been the faculty. Measured by whatever standard one wishes to apply, by whatever national survey one wishes to make reference, the preeminence of Berkeley is sustained by its faculty. The supporters of this University can be enormously proud of its faculty. During the past decade, it has prevailed despite circumstances that would destablilize any university, including dramatic cuts in state funding that necessitated widespread early retirements of senior faculty and staff. Under the vigorous leadership of Chancellor Tien and with the recovery of California's economy, however, Berkeley is again thriving. The appointment of young new faculty has brought vitality and new direction to academic programs. Providing our faculty with the means to excel must be -- and will be -- the determined passion of this administration as it has been of all those that have preceded it.

In reviewing the history of the University, I am particularly drawn to the inaugural of Benjamin Ide Wheeler simply because, with his inauguration in 1899, the University was then, as we are today, poised on the threshold of a new century. Wheeler was a visionary who anticipated the close linkages between Berkeley and Asia that have developed in the 20th century. These bonds will be ever more important in what has been predicted by some to be the Pacific Century.

Wheeler defined his task as representing the needs and the aspirations of the University community to its external supporters, on the one hand, and conveying the external perspectives to the faculty, students, and the staff of the University on the other. He described his role as "mediating between the divergent ideals of the supporting constituency and those of university life." The role, he acknowledged, posed the danger of being misunderstood by both sides. Reading the mail that I receive weekly would be sufficient to convince anyone that working to satisfy the conflicting demands of our various constituencies has not become any easier since Wheeler's day.

Because this is a rare moment when representatives of those various constituencies are gathered, this day offers an appropriate opportunity to speak frankly about the challenges the Berkeley campus faces as we are about to cross the threshold into a new century. Is our vision as bold and compelling as the vision of those who founded this great University? Are we as willing as they were to risk "undertaking things new and unforeseen?" Do we, to use Robert Gordon Sproul's inaugural words of 1930, "regard ourselves still as the founders rather than as the descendants?"

The early years of the University of California witnessed remarkable growth and development. Yet they do not compare with what we have faced and will face in the future. In the past decade, we have witnessed an explosion of information and communication technology. Whole new fields of inquiry have come into existence. Donald Kennedy has reminded us of what he calls the "implacable law of the economics of knowledge" first observed by the German physicist Max Planck. It is that each increase in knowledge costs more than the last; we tackle the easier problems first and we build upon the knowledge gained in the process. But each incremental increase costs more because it requires more sophisticated equipment and a larger investment. These increased costs put heavy stress on both the research and the teaching activities of universities at a time when government funding, both federal and state, is in decline.

When Chancellor Heyman was inaugurated in 1981, he observed that State support for Berkeley had dropped to fifty percent of the operating budget. Today, it stands at thirty-four percent. Consequently, our research infrastructure has deteriorated. Our laboratories are, in many cases, too old to meet the needs of modern research. The capital funds we receive from the State are available only for the seismic retrofitting of buildings, not for renovating the work spaces within them. And we now know that the seismic retrofitting of the Berkeley campus alone will cost nearly $1 billion in current dollars.

Renewing our research infrastructure must be our highest priority if we are to sustain our preeminence as a research university into the twenty-first century. This will require capital expenditures by the State, by the University, and by our supportive donors.

Central to the research foundation of the campus is the Library. In his inaugural address, ninety-nine years ago, President Wheeler paid special attention to the importance of the Library. He said:

Among the demands for the internal development of the University, none rank in my estimation with those of the library. If the best men (the faculty in those days were all men!) are to be brought here and kept here, we must be able to assure them first of all that the library will afford them the means to keep their learning abreast of the times, and that their coming to California shall not mean the suicide of creative scholarship.

That is clearly as true today as a century ago.

Since my arrival, no issue related to research and teaching support has been brought to my attention more repeatedly and more emphatically than that of the Library. Ravaged by inflation for library materials -- inflation that is three times the consumer price index during the past decade -- and grappling with managerial problems resulting from budget and staff reductions, our Library has fallen seriously behind where it needs to be. We cannot allow this to continue. We must catch up. A Blue Ribbon Task Force has just completed its review and recommendations for the Library. To begin the rebuilding of the Library, we will invest a total of $5.5 million of new permanent money in the Library over the next three years with the objective of bringing the collections budget to parity with peer institutions.

We will also be investing substantially more to improve the ability of departments to support the teaching and basic needs of faculty. Talking about telephones and travel and photocopying budgets doesn't create a stirring vision of the future, but these are also fundamental to our mission.

Investing money is essential to sustain the research environment of the campus, but it is also vital that we make certain that the administration of the campus be fully responsive to the needs of the faculty and staff who work here. I hear a recurrent criticism of what is described as the "unnecessary and burdensome bureaucracy." Now, bureaucracy is three things: it is people, it is policies, and it is process. This criticism should not be interpreted as directed largely at people. We have a wonderfully dedicated, loyal, intelligent, and hard-working staff. But our policies are often too restrictive and our processes are too complicated. We need to review all aspects of how we conduct our business, with the aim of streamlining decision-making and assuring that our processes are truly aimed at providing speedy, efficient, and friendly services to everyone -- students, faculty, and staff. We must make certain that the same ethos of excellence that marks our teaching and research permeates all of our operations.

The future research capacity of this University, which we take so easily for granted, is neither inevitable nor assured. But it must be. Because the future vitality of our economy, our society, and our culture in an information age depends on it.

The dimensions of the known world are expanding dramatically and rapidly, generating new knowledge and new certainty to our understanding of the physical world. Yet, we should avoid being seduced into believing that only knowledge and learning produced by science is useful or practical or worth learning. We must also appreciate the importance of re-interpreting, of reapplying knowledge that has been known for a long time. As we are awed by greater certitude about the physical world, we ought also to be challenged by an appreciation of what can be called the "arts of uncertainty." I have always liked the German term for the humanities, Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of the spirit, because of its focus on spirit and its reminder that there are still many things about the human spirit that are unknowable, vague, unpredictable, immeasurable, unanswerable.

Professional education has always been and will always be central to our mission, and we will explore new ways to strengthen our professional schools. But to those who argue that students should learn only what is practical and useful, we will respond emphatically that nothing is more practical and useful than a refined and educated mind. Nothing is more practical than critical thinking, nothing more useful than a mind that can grasp the genuine complexity of difficult human problems and avoid the lure of simplistic explanations. Nothing is more useful than understanding the moral dilemmas that confront the human condition. And nothing is more needed by our country than citizens who understand the fundamental ecology of a just society -- that you have to give back as much as you take from it. The education we provide our students must therefore aim at their full education, at the development of their civic sensibilities as well as their technical expertise or professional skills.

Our education must derive from the recognition that few problems, few issues, and few discoveries are any longer, if they ever were, the province of a single discipline. Amidst greater specialization must also come greater reintegration. That reintegration is taking place in virtually every corner of the campus with the initiatives underway in bio-engineering, neuroscience, and material science to name but a few new examples; it is also evident in the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the newly proposed Center for the Arts.

At the very outset of this great University, President Gilman foresaw it would be funded from a mixture of public and private support. One cannot walk across this beautiful campus without being made aware of the early contributions of Charles Franklin Doe, or Mrs. Peder Sather, or Elizabeth Joselyn Boalt, or, above all, Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Private support has always been necessary to lift Berkeley into the front rank of American universities. And that has never been more true than today, when the generosity of a new generation of donors -- names such as Haas and Goldman and Moore -- has lifted us as State support has slipped. Our alumni and friends have responded magnificently to the campaign launched by Chancellor Tien to raise $1.1 billion, the largest campaign of any public university without a medical school.

Many have worried that an increasing reliance on private philanthropy will change the fundamental character of Berkeley. But the fundamental mission of this university, stated in the charter we celebrate today, to be a "public trust," a university as Gilman said, "of the people and for the people" of California cannot change.

The greater challenge to our public mission does not come from our becoming more a privately funded University, but from the rapidly changing demographics of California and the nation. In a few years, just after the turn of the century, California will have no majority population. If nothing changes in the composition of our student body from that which we are likely to enroll in our freshmen class of 1998, it becomes clear how unrepresentative our student body will be of the population of California. If nothing changes, almost half of California's population will provide only about six percent of our student body.

It is not our mandate to mirror precisely the population of California, but how are we to sustain public support if we do not better represent the impressive diversity that distinguishes this state? More significant, however, is the compelling educational, moral, and public obligation we have to make certain that we are accessible to students of all ethnic backgrounds and experiences. It is this obligation that will require us to reassert the historic land-grant mission of this University. Originally aimed at directing research to improve the condition of a rural, agriculturally based society, we now must redirect this educational ethic of service to society to improve the lives of people in today's urban America as well as the rural regions of our states. And there is no greater need in our cities than to improve the educational opportunities of America's children.

We at Berkeley must marshal our intellectual and imaginative resources to renew and rebuild public education in California. We must bring the research capacity we enjoy to collaborate with our colleagues in secondary and elementary schools so that we can improve the education of every young person in our State. We must encourage more of our students to become involved in the schools, to consider teaching careers, and we need to develop the means to help the teachers already in the profession, struggling mightily against difficult odds, to help youngsters succeed. This should be seen by faculty in all disciplines, not merely in the Graduate School of Education, as a task vital to our future.

Only if we do this can we continue to lay claim to being a public university, fulfilling completely the public obligations given us as a "public trust" by our charter. Only if we do this can we realize as an institution what I have called the "ecology of a just society," giving back what we take from it.

I have spoken primarily about what I perceive to be the agenda for the University as it prepares for the next century. But there is a difference between an agenda as an organizing principle and a core value that binds us together and that gives a transcendent meaning to our endeavors. How should we characterize the core value that defines what we are as an institution?

There are many values, of course, that we share. But I believe there is one overarching value to which we should renew our commitment, for it is a value that emanates from all of the pages of our history. It is the determination to build a community of learners that transforms the lives of all who come in contact with it.

I was struck by the advice offered me by Clark Kerr, Berkeley's first Chancellor and one of the towering figures in the history of higher education in America. Recently, Kerr observed that, "The campus has been slowly disintegrating as a human community. It is much bigger, more fractionated in knowledge, much more externally oriented." "Make sure," he advised, that "the campus is a vibrant human community." This is an important message.

I do not believe it is possible to create community. Rather, community is something that happens. It happens when people speak to one another and listen to one another in an effort to discern the truth and to discover themselves in the process. It happens only in an environment of freedom and openness. Community happens only in an atmosphere of honesty and tolerance. Community happens when people care about one another and when they are willing to take responsibility for themselves as well as for each other. Community happens with education, as Hannah Arendt said so eloquently:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token to save it from the ruin which, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing the common world.

Renewing the common world must be our ultimate goal. In the final analysis, what we are as a University is not determined by rankings or prizes, important as they may be. What we are as a University will be determined by how we enhance and transform the lives of all of the people -- those who become a part of this University that we cherish and the many more whom we, as a public institution, also serve. Today, as we celebrate Charter Day, 1998, let us dedicate ourselves to the further building of a University at this hallowed place that will enable our children to inherit and renew the common world and to undertake things new and unforeseen by us as they prepare for leadership in the twenty-first century.

Thank you.