Robert Birgeneau : Living the California Dream

Robert Birgeneau : Living the California Dream

July 11, 2006
Article published in The Guardian, UK
    

Like many of Berkeley's students, its chancellor is a working-class boy made good, writes John Crace


Photograph: Martin Godwin

Robert Birgeneau has come to town mob-handed. He might be in London primarily to discuss matters of university governance with head honchos from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton and Yale, but the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, can't pass up the chance of tapping up some expat alumni for donations. So he's brought along a couple of his vice-chancellors as added muscle.
" Berkeley is in a strange position," he says. "We are one of the few US public universities to have an international reputation on a par with the private ones of the Ivy League. But it's a tough financial balancing act. Princeton has endowments of $1m per undergraduate student, while Harvard has almost double that. It's hard to compete, especially when the private universities can charge the full cost of $33,000 tuition fees per year. We charge $7,500, and have to make up the difference through state funding and private donations."

Neither is the balancing act entirely financial. Much as Birgeneau wants to be hanging out in the research premier leagues - and with 10 Nobel prize winners on staff, Berkeley isn't exactly lagging behind - he's also mindful of the university's commitment to widening participation. "We have always had a fantastic record on accepting students from less well-off backgrounds; 35% of our students come from poor families and 60% have one or more parent who was born outside the US, and I wouldn't want to do anything to compromise this."

Nothing about Berkeley is quite as straightforward as it seems. To most Brits, the university is famous as the epicentre of west coast liberalism, the campus where the anti-Vietnam protests of the late 60s were born. "We're actually a fairly broad church here," Birgeneau says. "We've got the law professor John Yoo, who has been a prime advocate of the US government's torture policy, and the biggest student club on campus is the Republican."

Birgeneau is too much of a diplomat to admit to any disappointment at this; rather he mentions it in the spirit of live and let live. For whatever anyone might say about Berkeley, most people rub along fairly well together. It may be the social science and humanities students that make the most noise on and off the campus, but the university's academic reputation is grounded firmly in the sciences - a point Birgeneau believes gets missed both home and abroad.

"In his recent book The World is Flat," he says, "Tom Friedman argued that the US was losing its technological advantage to India and China. This seemed a peculiarly east-coast, Ivy League view. Science graduates from Harvard and MIT may be unable to resist the huge salaries on offer from Wall Street investment banks or top law firms, but our graduates have a strong tradition of going on to continue their scientific work. I am extremely confident about the future of the technology industry in California."

For many, though, the biggest enigma about Berkeley is Birgeneau himself. No one doubts his academic credentials but, with no disrespect to the University of Toronto, where Birgeneau previously served as principal, it's hardly on a par with a top US university. So how, in a country where the elite institutions have parochialism as their guiding principle, did this softly spoken Canadian wind up taking charge two years ago of one of the US's premier higher education establishments?

Handling large egos

Birgeneau sidesteps this question neatly by talking up his skills. "When you've run advanced scientific research, you get used to dealing with handling large egos," he laughs.

"Persuading the top specialists in a variety of different fields to collaborate, while making each one feel that he or she is the most important member of the team, is a delicate art. It makes handling the competing demands of various faculty heads seem quite straightforward."

He also reckons that he's got a strong track record in talent-spotting. He recruited Lisa Randall, who is now one of the world's pre-eminent theoretical physicists, when he was at MIT and she was a relative unknown.

But for all his academic prowess and management skills, you suspect it was Birgeneau's personal qualities that really swung it. He might have been raised in Canada and spent his entire life on the east coast, but Birgeneau has lived the Berkeley dream.

"I was brought up by my mother in a working-class area of Toronto," he says, "and I was the first member of the family to complete high school. My older brother dropped out in 10th grade and my sister dropped out in 11th. Probably the only reason I didn't was that the local priest noticed my potential and paid for me to go to the private school on the other side of town.

"It got me a great education, but it was not easy, as all the other kids came from a different background. One was the son of the vice-president of Ford, and another's father ran his own insurance company. I was always very careful not to let anyone else know where I lived. I will never forget the look of horror on a friend's face when he came round uninvited to drop off some class notes; he never spoke to me again, until I became principal of Toronto University. We're now quite good friends again."

You can't imagine many people forgiving such behaviour, but Birgeneau insists that letting go of resentment is the only option. "So many of the students here at Berkeley are angry when they arrive," he says. "They are angry that their lives have been so tough, and that they have had to struggle so hard just to make it this far. And I can understand their frustration.

"But in a recent speech I told them they would never achieve anything until they got rid of their anger. Only then would they appreciate that they were, in fact, the lucky ones. Their experiences had primed them for success in a way that those who had had it easy would never understand. When I finished talking, I got a standing ovation. It was one of the most emotional days of my time here so far."

At his private school in Toronto, Birgeneau developed into a classics buff - "I used to read the Iliad in the original Homeric Greek" - and won a scholarship to study classics at Toronto University. To the lasting annoyance of his teachers, who told him anyone could do maths and science but very few could do Latin and Greek, he abandoned his course on day one and switched to maths instead. Birgeneau is still somewhat at a loss to explain his Damascene conversion, though it might well have been a bit of private class warfare. "I was always told that maths and science were for the working classes," he laughs.

Whatever the case, the working-class boy made good. "I was always aware that I wasn't one of those students whose brains were hotwired for maths," he says. "But then there are probably only about 1 in 10,000 undergraduates who are, and they usually end up living a monastic existence. So I was just happy to be one of the very good ones and, by the time I finished my undergraduate studies, I was yearning for some practical applications of what I had learned."

Blue-skies projects

This made postgraduate work in physics a foregone conclusion, and after brief stints at Yale and Oxford, Birgeneau ended up doing research for Bell Laboratories. "The late 60s were a fantastic time to be working there," he says, "as it was the period before telecoms were deregulated and Bell held an absolute monopoly. This meant they were adventurous in their research, and we were allowed to work on all sorts of blue-skies projects, many of which - such as light-emitting diodes and optical fibres - have become mainstream in their application.

But, he adds, "the downside was that it became a lesson in hubris. Each day, a group of us would meet up for tea and discuss everything from politics to our research.

"At the end of the first six months, I felt completely out of my depth. I told my wife there must be something wrong with the education I had got at Yale and Oxford because, at both institutions, I had always considered myself to be one of the brightest students, while at Bell I recognised that I was very definitely in the bottom 50%."

In fact, Birgeneau was working with 10 people who went on to become Nobel laureates and a further seven - himself included - who became heads of leading academic institutions. As it's not much fun being one of the dimmer kids on the block, when MIT offered him a teaching post, it was hard to turn it down. From there, it was just a short trip north back to Toronto to run the university at which he had once studied.

Like most chancellors and vice-chancellors, Birgeneau lives and breathes the political dramas of managing what is essentially an academic business. He is trying to steer a proposal through the California state legislature that would ensure matched state funding for any endowment.

"It's a nightmare," he sighs. "You can't suggest using Berkeley as a pilot scheme, because every politician has to take care of the votes in their own backyard. So it's got to be a state-wide scheme. It's going to take a lot of negotiating, but I'm confident we'll get there in the end."

Somehow you don't doubt it. For all his charm, Birgeneau is clearly a man who is used to getting what he wants. Even his own lab.

While some academics are only too happy to abandon their studies when they become top management, Birgeneau still hankers after his own research projects and has even persuaded Berkeley to provide him with a lab. Indeed, he gets far more animated talking about physics - especially when he's explaining how he once proved that ice can't melt in two dimensions - than he does when discussing Berkeley's hierarchy.

So, is this late burst of scientific endeavour a final bid for a Nobel prize?

"It's far too late for that now," he smiles. "This is purely for scientific interest."

And if he had to choose between getting the Nobel prize and being the chancellor of Berkeley?

"The Nobel prize," he replies without a flicker of hesitation.

Curriculum vitae

Name: Robert Birgeneau
Age: 64
Job: Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley
Likes: Films with existential angst
Dislikes: Classical ballet
Married: with four children