Allan Gotlieb Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Robert Holmgren

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Background

Professor Gotlieb, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Take us back in time. The year is 1947. Why does a 19-year-old Canadian named Allan Gotlieb come to Cal to study?

Well, I think I was just a typical North American. I was restless. I was going to school in Winnipeg, at university. It was after the war. The college was very crowded. And I had a friend, and the friend moved to California. Winnipeg is the coldest major city in the world. If you want to challenge that, I'll defend it: colder than Moscow or Leningrad. My friend and his family moved to California and he went to Berkeley, and he said, "Gee, this is a great place. Hey, come on down and we can room together." He was my best friend, so I came down. But he had left by that time! He rolled on. So there I was, in a place where I didn't know a single soul, and to this day, I don't know why I came. It was just the sun, I guess, and the spirit of adventure.

Did you plan to major in history when you came?

Not really. Somebody put a calendar in my hand which, even in those days, was very thick. And somebody said, "Walk in that direction," and gave the name of a professor who was my advisor. He was a very nice man. He said, "What do you want to do here?" And I said, "I'm not sure." "All right, what are you interested in?" And I said, "Well, I'm interested in political science, I'm interested in history, I'm interested in anthropology." And he said, "Well, we have a very good history department." I opened up the book and it had a professor teaching Islamic history and a professor teaching Byzantine history. And I said, "My God, this is right out of the Arabian Nights, this is what I'm looking for." So I took those courses.

So you focused on those histories. You were drawn into the intellectual excitement of Berkeley at that time, in historical studies?

When one looks back on one's life, one notices the operation of chance. It's very hard for me to explain why I came here, and the next two years for me were probably the most fascinating of my life, intellectually. I remember them as unique and really quite astonishing. There was a professor who was teaching Byzantine history, and what I knew about Byzantine history was absolute and total -- there were no holes in my lack of knowledge. Byzantium always fascinated me because it was so foreign. I remembered reading a book that said that the Byzantine Empire was unique in that it took 1300 years for it to fall. So I went to Professor Ernst Kantorowicz's classes and I walked into Europe. I walked into the destination point of one of the great intellectual migrations of all time: Berkeley was the recipient of Hitler's mad policies. And more of the great and distinguished scholars of Germany, most of them Jewish refugees who were expelled or who managed to get out, came to Berkeley. Kantorowicz was a key member of that circle. The next two years he had about 20 graduate students. I plunged deeper and deeper into iconography and all of the elements of the field. His approach was completely interdisciplinary. Painting and music, religion, every aspect of life was part of his attempt to recreate and to understand these societies. Stretching back from the time of the fall of Rome to early Medieval times was the era that I specialized in. Almost everybody I knew in that little group became distinguished professors or pursued very unusual paths in their lives.

What did you take from this experience that impacted your later career in public service? Or was this just a journey through the life of the mind?

Looking back on it, I think that I would give it the highest accolade, namely that it was a journey through the life of the mind. But it did leave me with an impression of the United States -- with an impression of a country that has the extraordinary capacity to exploit, and to utilize, and to bring together the best brains. What I saw at Berkeley was in the Department of History, but this was happening in the sciences and other departments. Berkeley was at the point of beginning to capture most of the Nobel Prizes in the world. What I saw there was an emancipated environment, open, totally without prejudice, without hierarchy, without status, a frontier which required only one passport, and that was brains. Indeed, this group was a very happy group of people. They came out of structured societies and the enjoyment of freedom is what I recall so much. And those qualities of America are, assuredly, its greatest.

Did you remark at one time the irony, and perhaps a tragic one, that Kantorowicz resigned his professorship a few years after you were here for refusal to take the Levering Act Oath, the so-called "Loyalty Oath"? Another side of America perhaps. Perhaps not unique to America. Did that draw you into what was, in one sense, an internal American matter? How did that strike you?

It wasn't part of it when I was here because this controversy, the California oath controversy, which was a reaction to the "red scare" in Washington, came later. Needless to say, I was astonished that it happened. I was also astonished that one of the leaders of the movement to refuse to sign the oath was Kantorowicz, because certainly his past career would not have suggested that he was in the front edge of the fight. He was not a libertarian. But indeed, the fact that he was willing -- after his long sojourn of persecution and running away from the Nazis, trying to get work in England where he did not succeed, and in the East where he did not succeed, and finding California so hospitable, with a community like Wolfgang Panofsky and Leonardo Olschki and many others who lived in the hills where he settled, and where he acquired a lovely, small house -- to be willing to give all that up and to be willing to move out again in order to fight for a principle, represented for me another element of my education, even though it was after I left. That is a rather heroic attitude toward basic principles. Needless to say, I was personally very disappointed that the university decided to go that route, and I think that it did have the effect of dispersing the group that I had lived with and worked with. Kantorowicz went over to Princeton and many of the others left with him or left independently. That is an example, I think, of the tremendous unpredictability, and of the political surges that can take place in your country. But it does not derogate, in my mind, from my general opinion of this university. These people acted out of principle, but the university did not persecute them, and would not have persecuted them. The university made itself a home to these scholars, and continued to do so after they left. And, I think, has since that time evolved even further -- very, very far. One can well discuss what are the limits of freedom, but extraordinarily far in accepting alternative or different or challenging or rejectionist views of society. It has almost become the hallmark of this institution.

Coming back 30 years later, what is most striking as you look at the campus today, in comparison to those years?

What I recall is that there were two Berkeleys when I was here. There was the Berkeley which was the undergraduate school of beautiful California. And I remember, everywhere I went, a kind of homogeneous group of healthy, young people. Very homogeneous, almost like out of an Andy Hardy movie of the '30s, I mean, everybody kind of looked the same. I looked like the foreigner, which I was. And it was very much a classic case of your typical, essentially small-town American campus. Superimposed on this were these extraordinary graduate schools which have grown up in physics and science and history, and which, within a decade, brought Berkeley up to the very forefront, up to the top rung of universities in this country and the world. What I see now at this university is that the sense of homogeneity that had existed is completely gone. I mean, this a multiracial society and you can't step out the door without realizing that a Protestant white enclave, which it was then, has become something like a huge city, consisting of dozens and dozens of crossroads. And everybody seems to be crossing down those roads. It's as if you are pulling people out of every nook and cranny of the world. The diversity is astonishing. The diversity of backgrounds, the diversity of race, the diversity of lifestyles, the diversity of opinions, the diversity of your gastronomy. I didn't realize when I came here that Berkeley was now the center of the world for the counter-culture -- "counter" meaning the food that you can get at the counters here!

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