| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Robert Berdahl Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Thanks for being with us, Chancellor Berdahl.
My pleasure.
Did you grow up in a small town or a large city?
I suppose it would be a medium sized city. Sioux Falls is the largest town in South Dakota. It had 50,000 - 60,000 people when I grew up in it; it has about 120,000 people today. So it's sort of a small city.
Looking back now, how did that setting shape you?
That's hard to say. My father had grown up on a farm in South Dakota, in a very little farming community that was overwhelmingly Norwegian and a very close society. He was the only member of his family to break out of that, to go to college, to marry outside of that community. And so, in some sense, I was still tied to those roots but in a transition out of them, and I suppose that small city provided that kind of transition phase.
Were there any educators in your family?
Well, my mother was a school teacher originally and my father had gone to the university, had then actually come to Berkeley to graduate school in 1922 for a year, studying economics. Then his home town was developing a new consolidated school district, and since he was the only kid who had gone away to college, he was invited back to be superintendent of schools in this little town. He went back for what was a substantial increase in income over his TA salary of about $370 per year here at Berkeley, and then discovered that he really didn't like doing that. So he only did it for a couple of years and then went into business later, worked for the federal government, and ended up working for an insurance company the last years of his life.
Looking back, what was the most important influence your parents had on you in shaping your values?
My father put a very high premium on truth telling. I can remember a lot of instances, one in particular, when I had skidded with the car and bent a wheel and I didn't want to admit it. He knew I'd done it and I got a bit of a lesson in the importance of telling the truth. It was a lot easier, ultimately, to tell the truth than not to. There was a very heavy emphasis on being straightforward, and I think that Midwestern values, at least in those days, were pretty wholesome. It was a neighborhood where people looked after each other and cared for each other. And I think all those values were rooted in that community and the sense of community that existed there.
That's a theme that we'll talk about in a few minutes, that you actually pick up in your role as chancellor. What about any teachers in the period when you were still young that you recall, or mentors, other people who shaped your thinking and your style?
I did a lot of interscholastic debate when I was in high school, and some in college, and I think a lot of the peer group that was involved in that were good students, they were people and kids who worked hard. We worked very hard in debate, we were the state champions a couple of years when I was in high school. And that was a very good activity that I think, first of all taught me how to use libraries, and I think that the teachers and the coaches that we had in those debate programs were very influential in shaping values on argumentation, on building a case for or against a particular issue, on thinking through what the implications of a particular issue might be. And so I think I would say that that was the single most valuable learning experience that I had in school.
You did your undergraduate work where?
At Augustana College, which was the small college in Sioux Falls. A Lutheran college. I couldn't really afford to go away from home to school. And so I lived at home and went to school.
And you wound up majoring in?
History.
You just fell into it?
I don't know. We probably fall into the things that we're good at, and I enjoyed it. I was reasonably good at it. Originally I thought I would go to seminary. Then I thought I'd go to law school. And in my senior year my advisor, a fellow named Dick Solberg, one of the two most influential professors in my undergraduate years, asked me if I had thought about graduate school and offered to recommend me for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which were given out wholesale in those days. And I was fortunate enough to get one, and went off to graduate school thinking that I'd get a masters and then go to law school. And I just got hooked.
In this undergraduate and high school period, are there any books that stand out that really affected you?
I'm too old to be able to remember very much about specific books, but I studied mostly American history. I was fascinated by the Civil War, read probably all of those Bruce Catton books, learned a lot about narrative history from that sort of thing. But I don't remember any particular book.
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